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[Joseph Tracy]

This argument simply doesn’t hold water. The  word oven/s  to refer to the concentration camp crematoriums has been used since my childhood in the late 50’s and was very common in the 60s. It is still used. Elie Wiesel has several references to the crematoriums and the all consuming finality of their fires:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Yes Pynchon is being indirect, this  chapter is specifically about  Peenemunde, but it is also about the nature of the fires that burn in Fascism, in the disease of power lust, in war, in the pursuit of oblivion.  He is showing how the most exalted language of mystic transformation can inhabit a diseased culture, how our folk tales of survival can be lies. It is still happening and not just in some far distant desert.  
> On Jun 19, 2016, at 4:47 PM, János Székrowing  <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don't think the Oven is a Holocaust reference. As Timothy Snyder says, it is Auschwitz that has been synonymous with the Holocaust since the beginning as opposed to the real point of gravity, that is, the eastern region of present-day Poland (Majdanek etc.). The reason for this is that in Auschwitz there were survivors, among them serious authors, and described what they saw there. Now several of them were Hungarian (the majority of those murdered during the last year came from Hungary), and I've met some survivors too. To cut it short, the main synekdoche for Holocaust was the gas chamber rather than the crematory, which they never called "oven" anyway.
> 
> 2016-06-19 21:57 GMT+02:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:
> Would be an interesting piece of cultural linguistic analysis that's for sure. 
> 
> All I know is in my very parochial Catholic and anti-Semitic world of Appalachia known as Pittsburgh, it was the synecdoche. 
> 
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:16 PM, Richard Romeo <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why ovens became a metaphor for the Holocaust perplexes me since most were already dead before they were placed in them (at least in the death camps)
> Misappropriation of the word that became conventional wisdom over time most likely
> 
> rich
> 
> 
> > On Jun 19, 2016, at 7:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The Oven chapter. And GR is NOT about the Holocaust AT ALL? Don't think that holds up.
> > How does the Hansel & Gretel Story work as depth metaphor and there are other (is another)
> > Great Northern Myth at work.
> >
> > Why a threesome?
> 
> 

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