Springtime of Nations

Dave Monroe against.the.dave at gmail.com
Tue Oct 23 14:22:44 CDT 2012


"An irreverent, informative blog about separatist movements, autonomy
struggles, indigenous rights, interethnic conflict, balkanization, and
micronationalism—with maps & flags in every article!"

http://springtimeofnations.blogspot.com/

The Nationalities are on the move.  It is a great frontier-less
streaming out here.  Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by
the Poles and headed for the camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin
regime, others going back home, the eyes of both parties, when they do
meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what’s forced
them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and the Lithuanians trekking north
again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs
too hard to sing talk pointless, Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling
between Berlin and the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks,
Croats and Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars, Vlachs,
Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars stirred and streaming over the surface
of the Imperial cauldron, colliding, shearing alongside for miles,
sliding away, numb, indifferent to all moments but the deepest, the
instability too far below their itchy feet to give shape to, white
wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped
prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland
dust, caravans of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses dying,
families leaving the vehicles beside the roads for others to come live
in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns, trains full of their
own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead, squeezing aside for
army convoys when they come through, White Russians sour with pain on
the way west, Kazakh ex-P/W’s marching east, Wehrmacht veterans from
other parts of old Germany, foreigners to Prussia as any Gypsies,
carrying their old packs, wrapped in the army blankets they kept, pale
green farm worker triangles sewn chest-high on each blouse bobbing,
drifting, at a certain hour of the dusk, like candle flames in
religious procession – supposed to be heading today for Hanover,
supposed to pick potatoes along the way, they’ve been chasing these
nonexistent potato fields now for a month – “Plundered,” a one-time
bugler limps along with a long splinter of railroad tie for a cane,
his instrument, implausibly undented and shiny, swinging from one
shoulder, “stripped by the SS, Bruder, ja, every fucking potato field,
and what for?  Alcohol.  Not to drink, no, alcohol for the rockets.
Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been
drinking.  It’s unbelievable.”  “What, the rockets?”  “No! The SS,
picking potatoes!” looking around for his laugh. (GR, Pt III, p. 610)

http://sweetpassages.tumblr.com/post/31614781421/slothrop-and-the-hordes-of-disillusioned

http://books.google.com/books?id=GGPm4I3BbxAC&pg=PT610#v=onepage&q&f=false



More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list