Pynchon's names: Karl Bopp

[Mark Kohut]

I say Always Possible and with TRP even more so. (By that I am sorta referring to  David Grossman's remark in an essay I read last evening in which he gives examples of readers who tell him they can see the influence of so-and-so whom he had never read but then does and says They were right. ) 

Sent from my iPad

> On Sep 7, 2014, at 5:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> Recently I came across a bibliographical reference that reads as follows:
> 
> Bopp, Karl R.: Hjalmar Schacht: Central Banker. University of Missouri Studies, 1939.
> 
> (The author later joined the Philadelphia Fed where he established the data processing department.
> http://www.federalreservehistory.org/People/DetailView/205)
> 
> When I read the name Karl Bopp, the Pynchon bell in my brain rang and I remembered a passage from Vineland (p. 221):
> 
> "Pale blue unmarked little planes appeared, on days of VFR unlimited nearly invisible against the sky, flown by a private vigilante squadron of student antidrug activists, retired military pilots, government advisers in civvies, off-duty deputies and troopers, all working under contract to CAMP and being led by the notorious Karl Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe officer and subsequently useful American citizen. During these weeks of surveillance, helicopter and plane crews were beginning to assemble each morning in a plasterboard ready room out in the flats below Vineland, near the airport, waiting for Kommandant Bopp to appear in the full regalia of his old profession and announce Der Tag."
> 
> Already during my first read in early 1990 this passage attracted my attention because of the obvious parallels to Gravity's Rainbow. And since the last two words mean The Day in German, one may think of Against the Day, too.  What interests me here, however, is the name Karl Bopp itself. One reason for Pynchon to chose it was probably the Cartoon like sound it makes when you pronounce the name aloud. But perhaps there's more to it, and in this context the study by Karl R. Bopp from 1939 might have been an inspiration for Pynchon. Like Karl Bopp (the character from Vineland), Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht has a German-American history. His parents had lived in the US for for several years, and Schacht himself, during his economic education and career, met people like J.P. Morgan or John Foster Dulles and got integrated into the network of international banking. Which was, of course, very helpful when he joined the NSDAP in the early 1930s and then organized the financial dimension of their rise and early years in power.  By hinting at Schacht via the name Bopp, Pynchon evokes the international economic context of the rise of Nazism, as it seems to me.
> 
> Is this possible?
>  
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