On V. the sign.

[rich]

from 2006

Visiting the Terror Museum in Budapest recently, I noticed one of the
symbols that Hungary;s fascist movement, Arrow Cross was a prominent V--one
of the exhibits had dinner plates with the V symbol emblazoned--a V very
much like font-wise as the one used on the original  edition of V. (I
think)

more: "Party leaders felt that an integral facet of their grip on power was
to make sure that all alternative forms of leadership were removed from the
psyche of the people. To that end the party quickly moved to eliminate and
absorb signs of the removed Austro-Hungarian royal family as their own. One
such symbol was the Royal Property insignia, which looks like a large V
garnered in the form of a wreath. The Arrow Cross party adopted the same
symbol as a sign of a district office and placed the V at the entrance of
all official party buildings. Clearly the goal of such a program was to
take a symbol that was already familiar and revered by the Hungarian people
and tie it to the party, in effect injecting the Arrow Cross party in the
royal families position as absolute leader"

On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 5:01 AM matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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> >
> Libre
> de virus. www.avast.com
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> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>
> 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
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>