GR translation: Grandeur! Gesellschaft!

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Now I see: "Grandeur" as 'size' which, if used - like here - in 
combination with "Gesellschaft", is to refer to the large-scale social 
system (as opposed to the small-scale "Gemeinschaft"), thus 
"Gesellschaft" in the sense of Tönnies. Yes, this makes sense.


On 23.09.2013 17:22, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
> I first thought so too. But how does this fit to "Grandeur"? Perhaps 
> the meaning of "Gesellschaft!" - do note the exclamation mark - is 
> more like 'social gathering' here. In any case Pynchon will have liked 
> the bilingual alliteration.
>
> On 22.09.2013 07:46, János Széky wrote:
>> I think it is Gesellschaft as opposed to Gemeinschaft as explained 
>> here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft
>>
>> J
>>
>>
>> 2013/9/22 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>>
>>
>>     V442.37-443.9 (P450.7-19)  Twenty minutes later, somewhere in the
>>     American sector, Slothrop is ambling past a cabaret where
>>     blank-faced snowdrops are lounging in front and inside, and a
>>     radio or phonograph somewhere is playing an Irving Berlin medley.
>>     Slothrop goes hunching paranoiacally along the street, here’s “God
>>     Bless America,” a-and “This Is the Army, Mister Jones,” and they
>>     are his country’s versions of the Horst Wessel Song, although it
>>     is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna pull
>>     an Anton Webern on him) to a blinking American lieutenant-colonel,
>>     “A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the
>>     simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again
>>     to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!”
>>            “Teutonic?” sez the colonel. “Dominant? The war’s over,
>>     fella. What kind of talk is that?”
>>
>>     What does Gustav mean by "Gesellschaft" here?
>>
>>
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