Franzen, Pynchon, Politik

[rich]

There was an interesting program on Deutsche Welle a few months ago
that a showed a young German boy and girl visiting Namibia and
spending a fair amount of time with families of present-day Hereros.
It was all rather nice but it did strike me odd that there was no
mention whatsoever or no context given about what happened down there
all those years ago.

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 9:28 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
...snipped
>
> In his novels V and GR, Thomas Pynchon artistically exploited the sad
> history of the Hereros.
> But these people are not dead and gone! Actually they make a claim for
> reparations against the
> German government regarding the genocide of 1904. When Joschka "Arschloch"
> Fischer was first
> confronted with it, he didn't say a single word and simply walked away. Up
> to now no German politician has ever said or done anything about it. So let
> me ask:
>
> Why doesn't Pynchon use his cultural and social capital to really go for the
> Herero's fair claim?
>