Politics vs Art

[Monte Davis]

Hyper-technically, the Auschwitz complex --  almost 50 camps in all and
hybrid,as you say -- was originally  a concentration camp (Auschwitz I) for
Polish political prisoners, added the Auschwitz II-Birkenau cluster as
prison then extermination camp for Jews and Gypsies, then added Auschwitz
III-Monowitz as slave labor camp for IG Farben's synthtic-rubber factory..
which is why Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and a skilled chemist, survived at
Monowitz rather than dying at Birkenau. Mixed priorities...

Why not follow up on your sense that P's "systems...markets" message "can't
really digest the insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology"? Why not
question yout implicit premise that systems and markets are by their nature
sane and rational? Recall my earlier point on Blackett's "you can't run a
war on gusts of emotion": that  the German V-weapon campaign and the US-UK
city-bombing campaign *were not rational uses of economic and military
resources,* no matter how much technology and organization went into them.
They were supposed to be answers to "how do we win the war?", but in fact
were answers to "how do we HURT THE ENEMY?" They were highly organized,
rationally implemented gusts of emotion. Likewise, all those trains taking
Jews to the death camps could have more profitably been supplying the
Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front -- except that the felt threat from the Jews
was beyond or beneath rationality, deeper and darker than that from the Red
Army.

Remember how Prof.-Dr, Jamf prizes the bold, lion-like ionic bond *seizing*
electrons over the wimpy sharing of the covalent bond (Viking 577)?
Remember "a conspiracy of human beings and techniques" crying like a
vampire "I need my night's blood, my funding, my funding, ahh"(521)?

Rather than saying Pynchon *couldn't* deal with the Holocaust directly
because he'd chosen an approach based on the primacy of rational systems,
markets, cost/benefit calculations, etc... consider the possibility that
he's questioning how rational they really are. The peculiar horror of the
Holocaust, after all, was not mass murder -- Rwanda or Cambodia or the
partition of India will do for that -- but the *juxtaposition* of mass
murder with an "advanced" European nation's highly organized, systematic
implementation. You propose that people using technology and rationality to
do insane things poses a problem for Pynchon in GR; I think it's at the
heart of the book.

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 9:42 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> one of the major misconceptions about the Holocaust and mass murder is
> that most people think only of Auschwitz which technically was not a death
> camp say like Treblinka was. Dora was not a death camp either--they were
> work camps in essence, horrible in any case. still broadly speaking we can
> include such camps as part of the Holocaust if our definitions expand on a
> broader definition of extermination in its myriad forms (gas, labor, rape,
> etc). So, yes Pynchon does address that in Dora.
>
> The missing bit from GR which I think Pynchon cant adequately utilize
> directly w/r/t to the Holocaust is that there was no logical reason for
> such mass murder from an economic point of view beyond appropriating space.
> If you build up your message as Pynchon does about Them and systems and
> repressions and markets and link them all up, it cant really digest the
> insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology which underpinned much of its
> actions in the East.
>
> i guess what I'm saying is hybrid camps like Auschwitz or outright labor
> camps like Dora where there was an economic benefit for Germany or
> perceived to be (many projects were failures) are easier to explain than
> outright death mills like Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. maybe that's one reason
> for Pynchon's 'aloofness' on the subject
>
> just my two cents
>
> rich
>
> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:32 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> But WHERE does GR "depict the Holocaust?"
>>
>> David Morris
>>
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>
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