On V. the sign.

[matthew cissell]

Howdy All,

Not long ago and by complete accident I came across "The Language of the
Third Reich (LTI)" by Victor Klemperer, a jewish philologist who worked in
Dresden and documented the linguistic shift that occurred during the
dictatorship.

In a section called "From the Great Movement Forward" Klemperer writes of
the LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) that "Its entire vocabulary is dominated by
the will to movement and action." (p. 210) At the end of the chapter he
writes: "And finally, ossified into a scientific formula and tirned into a
spell, there was the 'new weapon', the magic letter that could always be
heightened. (...)
   The final paragraph of the chapter starts: "The magic letter takes a
strange revenge: V was originally the secret code used by the illlegal
freedom fighteres in the occupied Netherlands to identify themselves, V
stood for *Vrijheid*, freedom. (...) And then, in the final phases of the
war, V became the abbreviation for *Vergeltung* [vengence], the emblem of
the new weapon whic h would avenge and bring to an end alld the suffering
inflicted on Germany.

Publication information that I have found indicates German publication in
1947 but other info states 1957. However, as far as I can tell the English
translation only became available in 2000. Would TP have had access toa
German edition in California as he planned GR? Hard to see and without
library records there is no way to confirm it.

That said the LTI text should be included in some essay on possible
references for V as a mulitfaceted and polysemic signifier leaping from
signified to signified.

peace
mc otis

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On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 2:06 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://twitter.com/PeterSokolowski/status/1068258206957346817
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>