V-2 -Chapter 9 - Anti-Oedipus

[Tyler Wilson]

>> rich wrote:
>> I wonder if we are treading on thin ice here when we extrapolate Pynchon's artistic license in shadowing the Herero genocide with the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma. It almost implies an inherent predilection in the German character for mass extermination
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> David Morris wrote:
> I think in both instances the Germans are meant not to represent nationality, but modernity.
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[ Someone on the pynchonwiki wrote: ]
… but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony; in V., Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.
At the same time, this part of the novel is a haunting indictment of Western colonialism and racism; later, in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon would emphasize this latter aspect, acknowledging the facile identification made between the Herero genocide and the Nazi Holocaust in his earlier novel as "superficial". In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3), 
*** Pynchon wrote,***
"…When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration."

http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=V.