Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom by Luc Herman & Steven Weisenburger

Author:Luc Herman & Steven Weisenburger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The Logic of the Camp

To think about Nazism and the representation of the masses in Gravity’s Rainbow requires swapping in a wide-angle lens. Novels are the great art form of the modern individual, and especially of an individual character’s mentality in relation to others’. And our analysis to this point has focused on the particular thoughts and tropes defining the mentalities of the dominators and the dominated during fascism’s peak years in Pynchon’s fictionalized presentation of history. Yet this novel does not forget the greater view, the masses of people World War II touched: the tens of millions killed, the civilian populations uprooted and compelled to live in stateless and rightsless conditions, the millions consigned before and during the war to slave labor or the ovens in the ss network of Konzentrationslager.

On its very first page Gravity’s Rainbow figures the plight of displaced, orphaned, traumatized souls en masse, the “second sheep” fleeing the rocket blitz raining death down upon London: “drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about amongst the rest of the things to be carried out.”1 That phrase referring to children “stacked about” with other “things” haunts the text. Instantly it recalls a shared history constituted by a multitude of news stories, photos, and film footage of emaciated prisoners stacked in liberated concentration camps like Buchenwald and Auschwitz—and Dora, the camp in central Germany where tens of thousands of slave laborers helped build Germany’s v-2 weapons. Pökler, when he wanders through Dora in the spring of 1945, sees the living-dead slave laborers “stacked ten to a straw mattress.”2 In this way and many others, Gravity’s Rainbow evokes Holocaust history. As the narration represents persons and masses, the work in rocket development facilities and that done by camp laborers threatened with extermination, how does this novel reckon such horrors and the West’s accommodation to them?

Take Wernher von Braun, his voice being the first in Gravity’s Rainbow. In 1960 the former German rocketeer was fifteen years down the road from his surrender to the U.S. Army and the head of aerospace operations at the army’s Redstone Arsenal (since June 1961, part of the Marshall Space Flight Center) in Huntsville, Alabama. There in 1960 he oversaw the work of just under four thousand employees. What little spare time he had, von Braun was using to collaborate on the script for I Aim at the Stars (1960), a Columbia Pictures film about his adventuresome life. It was supposed to be a block-buster, capitalizing on von Braun’s rising fame and a keen nationwide interest in “the space race.” Biographer Michael J. Neufeld remarks that by the late fifties von Braun was “never more famous.” The protagonist of numerous journalistic stories about rockets, he wrote popular articles on space exploration for Collier’s and starred in Disney TV programs—a photogenic, dashing, aristocratic genius. To tell this life on the big screen, Columbia

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