BTZ42: p. 85: Jamf, Darmstadt, Universities, V-2s

[Smoke Teff]

I did not know that, about Zwitter.

In the past, I've heard some people on this list quietly lament that one of the ways the book is dated--that is, one way the book seems to NOT transcend the awareness of its day--is in its use of homosexuality to signify evil. 

Do you think the Zwitter name is something along those lines? TRP using something sexual or gendered in a way that might offend a more or less standard liberal politics in 2016? Does that matter?

(But then of course the moments of this I can think of are so outweighed by other moments in which omnivorous, pan-directional, deviant, boundless sexuality (polymorphous genital perversity, as Brown might have it) is something celebratory, human, alive, the sexual-sensuous cup runneth-ing way over.) 

> On Jun 8, 2016, at 2:57 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> > "He knows now for sure that Zwitter the mad Nazi scientist is one of them ... <
> 
> For those who don't know this:
> 
> "Zwitter" is the German word for hermaphrodite.
> 
> 
>> On 07.06.2016 21:03, Smoke Teff wrote:
>> Searching the text for other mentions of Darmstadt, the next one I find comes on p. 313-4 when Slothrop, being chased through the Mittelwerke by Marvy et al, gets help from "an elderly man in a tweed suit, with white, water-buffalo mustaches." This is Glimpf.
>> 
>> I have to say I've always had Jamf in my head in the episode with Glimpf. If for no other reason than the sonic similarities in their names. But cf this shit: "He introduces himself as Glimpf, Professor of Mathematics of the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, Scientific Advisor to the Allied Military Government." A pretty prestigious post. Slothrop's first instinct is to think, "I am in the hands of a raving maniac." 
>> 
>> Attempting to get their pursuers' attention, Glimpf advises Slothrop to "say something provocative." Slothrop comes up with three insults (though only shouts two of them). 
>> 
>> Back on p. 85, we find that traces of Jamf's presence have found their way into--presumably--the early 30s slang of Cambridge, Mass, as the chapter opens with three entries in Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults. 
>> 
>> Hey, did Jamf ever extinguish that Infant Tyrone's old conditioned hardon response? Still fleeing Marvy on p. 316, Glimpf (I think) launches the phosphorus flare. "Slothrop feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember--never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture fo the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment, the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves it's important...please...look at us...but it's already too late, it's only wind, only g loads, and the blood of his eyes has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory, to brushings of gold and a network of edges to the broken rock...and the hand that lifted him away sets him back in the Mittelwerke--" 
>> 
>> Glimpf has a friend--or an acquaintance about whom he has mixed feelings--named Zwitter, from the T.H. in Munich (where Pökler studied under Jamf). 
>> 
>> p. 319: "Who are these people? What's happened to the apples in old Glimpf's cheeks? What's a Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence at Garmisch, with his lab intact?"
>> 
>> And then that episode closes with this number:
>> 
>> OH...thur's...
>> Nazis in the woodwork,
>> Fascists in the walls,
>> Little Japs with bucktooth grins
>> A-gonna grab yew bah th' balls.
>> Whin this war is over,
>> How happy Ah will be,
>> Gearin' up fer thim Rooskies
>> And Go-round Number Three....
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> By p. 337 Slothrop isn't so affectionate for Glimpf anymore: "He knows now for sure that Zwitter the mad Nazi scientist is one of them. And that kindly old Professor Glimpf was only waiting down int he Mittelwerke to pick up Slotherop if he showed. Jesus."
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 1:16 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Can't not mention that Liebig and Kekulé were both born in Darmstadt. 
>>> 
>>>> On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Actually I've got this wrong, Pökler is studying with Jamf in Munich, not Berlin. 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 1:06 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> But before then, in the 1910s/20s, post-WWI, pre-WWII, Jamf is working at Darmstadt on behavioral psychology. He does some visiting research at Harvard, funded by "a slender grant from the National Research Council (under a continuing NRC program of psychological study which had begun during the World War, when methods were needed for selecting officers and classifying draftees)" (p. 85) lest we think it is only in Germany that academia's hands are operated by, in service of Their interests. He works with one Infant Tyrone. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> By the early 1930s (probably much earlier than that), he is back in Germany. The 1934 advertising brochure (p. 73) locates him in Berlin. He's working for IG in 1939. He's "on the board of directors of the Grössli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924." 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Would his later corporate, chemical interests preclude him continuing to be affiliated with the university in Darmstadt? Wouldn't imagine so, at least not necessarily. Wikipedia sort of clumsily says, "a need for a separate industry based research educational institution was felt in early 1930s." In 1971 this new institution will achieve some independence as the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. So this school is connected not only to military interests but to the exact sort of corporate ones that Jamf himself is in the middle of in the 1930s. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> This, of course, is all due to the insight of "Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, his dream of 1865, the great Dream that revolutionized chemistry and made the IG possible." (p. 417). GR-induced thought: yes, 1865 would be about the time... The text goes on "So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, everyone, everything must be exactly in place in the pattern." Let's hold onto that maxim. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> What was it that would inspire the "fateful change of field" Kekulé makes "into chemistry from architecture" (85)? Hearing a lecture from Justus von Liebig, the father of organic chemistry, and also the first link Pynchon mentions in the "direct chain" of organic chemists that leads to Jamf: "Liebig to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to Herbert Ganister to Laszlo Jamf" (164). Go look around a history of what Liebig worked on--seems almost innocent in comparison to what comes after Kekulé's discovery of the benzene ring. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Weisenburger identifies the episode that line comes from as occurring in 1929-30, where Franz Pökler is said to have Jamf as a professor. So he's definitely still teaching--though maybe not still at Darmstadt, as Leni/Franz are in Berlin here--after his move into organic chemistry, synthetics, the private sector.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> What biographical/career info about Jamf is known? 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> He's working at Darmstadt in 1920, visiting Harvard, one of the oldest institutions and symbols                                                 of power/influence in the New World. This is early in his career, "before he phased into organic chemistry," but if he's visiting Harvard he's gotta be fairly accomplished. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> As much as (inextricable from) the corporate bleedthrough between these two states who were just at war and soon would be again, universities/the academy are an avenue that permeates the membrane of national borders. Even during the War, nations' taste for scientists, even the other side's scientists, and their insight, intensifies. Information knows no border (nor ethics, and neither do we in pursuit of it). The Word. The supposedly apolitical act of inquiry. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> But this is all during Wartime. In Peacetime, in 1920, scientists don't need to be kidnapped, smuggled. Jamf travels freely to Harvard, works on the National Research Council's dime, in fact.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> This might be immaterial, but in clicking around, I find two plausible universities Jamf might have been based out of in Darmstadt:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 1) The Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 2) The Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule Darmstadt) 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Both of them seem to be very important/notable in                                                 their own right and seem to have played a big part in the growth and character of the city. Except that, in reading about them, you see that they are really kindred--HD and TUD were originally integrated under the TUD name from that institution's founding in 1877 (it was elevated from a polytechnic school to a university by Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, the year his father died and he inherited his father's title/influence). (Here is a link to the family crest--it has a wheel, a key, six- and eight-pointed stars, a few...sphinxes?, one with a dagger).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The university's name is an amalgam of the two that eventually split: Technische Hochschule zu Darmstadt. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> There is some debate about whether the town is big enough to sustain a university. The matter persists until the school becomes THE FIRST SCHOOL IN THE WORLD to endow a chair in the hot new field of Ee-lectrical Engineering. Which business is about to be booming. The university expands rapidly. In the wake of the industrial revolution, and before WWI, we see that                                                 corporate and military interests are driving the academy. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Wikipedia has it: "During the two decades before the World War I, all disciplines of the university underwent diversification and expansion. New disciplines such as Paper Making and Cellulose Chemistry were introduced, and as early as 1913 a Chair of Aeronautics and Flight Mechanics was set up." 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> And further: "Intense discussions were held on the aim of extending the curriculum beyond the purely                                                   technical education in order to prepare the engineer for his leading role in society. A concrete step in this direction was taken in 1924, when the 'General Faculty', which until then had combined all the non-technical subjects, was divided into a Department of Mathematics and Natural Science and a Department of Cultural Studies and Political Science. Moreover, the measures taken to provide students with knowledge outside their own narrow field of study included the upgrading of Economics and the creation of professorships in Political Science, History of Technology and Sociology."
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> This reminds me of the the source for WvB's epigraph. Also of the notion (do Weber and Brown both mention this?) of the division of labor as a sort of original sin (my words) of the culture. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Zoom out for a few notes about Darmstadt. It's "first city in Germany to force Jewish shops to close in early 1933" (wik.). Also one of the earliest sites of US firebombing on Sep. 11, '44. Your classic used-to-be-a-beautiful-city                                                    thing. Wikipedia puts it better than I could: "20,000 dwellings and one chemical works destroyed and industrial production reduced."
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I guess this is where G-5 comes in? Of the aftermath of the city's (and thus most of the university's) destruction, Wikipedia says: "The electrical engineering department remained continuously functional, doing work under contract with the U.S. Army to build components of the V-2 guidance system. 'But we have to be careful how we word this production order because we don't want the Russians to know that we are cranking up the V-2 system.'"
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> This quote comes from an oral interview given by Helmut Kuerschner, a summary of which can be found here. Says Helmut: "WORKED ON GUIDANCE AND CONTROL COMPONENTS, PARTICULARLY ACCELEROMETER, FOR V-2                                                   GUIDED MISSILE PROJECT AT PEENEMUNDE, GERMANY."
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Helmut is offered a job by the government. Eventually relocates to the United States where he works "on the early missile program (later to become NASA) for the U.S. military with other German scientists under Werner Von Braun" (says his wife's obituary). They spend the rest of their days living in the American southwest. 
> 
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