Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 1: Seekers of the Grail

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 1: Slothrop in Nordhausen, Introductions to Major Duane Marvy, Oberst Enzian, Geli Tripping, and Vaslav Tchitcherine

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The Ice Saints have blown their frozen breath across Germany. While they were once “saintly or even Christian,” now “they are short on charity” (281). It is mid-May, a week or so after V-E Day, and the land, along with its gods and magics, is changing. Some is growing better with the vegetation beginning to return and the tanks no longer ravaging the hillsides. But with this fantasy of peace arising, the Ice Saints are as well, and all that which they touch is being repurposed. Germany is the canvas for the world — one on which humanity’s raison d’être can be rewritten.

Slothrop — again under the alias of Ian Scuffling, dressed as a war correspondent — arrives in Nordhausen, his shoes stolen and red tulip left in place. Nordhausen has recently been overrun by the Soviets (2.8) and is a place where They are worried about Slothrop entering, for he has knowledge that the West does not want the Soviets to get ahold of. He has arrived by train, having spoken to “an African, the first one he ever met in his life,” (281) and a man named Major Duane Marvy.

The toys in this land have lost their innocence — dolls made with human hair, eyes used for currency, wheeled apes staring demonically into Slothrop’s scared gaze. Childhood has lost its innocence here — it is destined to become an old concept, still spoken of as the snow will be when it no longer falls but not known in the ancient sense. Childhood will be equated with the bestiary instead of the fantasy. It will call to mind the nostalgia for lost loves and will vaporize from one’s arms once the believer gets too close. It will summon the vampire rather than repel it.

Before Slothrop arrived in Nordhausen, he was on a train where he had had plenty of time to go over the documents on Imipolex G and Laszlo Jamf that Mario Schweitar acquired for him. These documents are what led him to this village, the Imipolex G papers specifically pointing to a customer named Franz Pökler. It’s been some time since we’ve seen Franz (1.18 and 1.19), so as a reminder, Franz was married to Leni Pökler, their daughter being Ilse. Leni had left Franz for Peter Sachsa, the dead man whom Carroll Evertyr, the medium for Psi-section, communed with. Franz was left by Leni because of their disparate interests: he assisted in the perfection of the V-2 rocket while she was an activist in the leftist and feminist movements, taking Ilse with her as they left (1.19). And now, as Slothrop looks over the Imipolex G documents, it seems that Franz was taken in 1944 to the Mittelwerke in Nordhausen, the factory run by the SS which used slave labor to build V-2 rockets. Since Slothrop is in Nordhausen, he may as well pay the Mittelwerke a visit (though we won’t see that visit for a chapter).

Slothrop is not only discovering facts about Jamf, Pökler, and other men associated with the creation of the bomb, but he also begins to learn about his own past. “Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston, Massachusetts,” also known to Slothrop as Uncle Lyle, got involved with a man named Hugo Stinnes, a German industrialist who, post-WWI, built his own wealth on necessary utilities and proceeded to multiply his wealth through his ability “to buy into just about everything else” (284). Stinnes was partially the cause of the massive inflation that occurred in the Weimar Republic (to the point that one trillion German marks was equivalent to a single US dollar), and Mr. Bland found great interest in this sort of wealth accumulation to the point that he, through Slothrop Paper Company, “negotiated contracts” to assist the “Weimar Republic” (285) of which Stinnes was manipulating to make his wealth.

This is not just some weird aspect of Slothrop’s complex family history though, for it also, like the rocket itself, calls to mind the moments of his infantile conditioning. The document on Bland — or the name Bland itself — reminds him of “a smell from before his conscious memory begins, […] not a smell to be found out in the world,” but one found “in a room, while he lay helpless” (285). What could this smell be, and how is Slothrop’s family involved in his conditioning?

Well, according to these documents, when he sensed Stinnes empire about to crash, Bland “began to sell off his interests in the Stinnes operations,” (286) one of these sales being run by Laszlo Jamf. This interest had to do with a Schwarzknabe (Blackchild) and a Schwarzvater (Blackfather) — otherwise known as Tyrone and Broderick Slothrop. Tyrone discovers that his father, Broderick, was a part of this deal, selling Tyrone to Jamf for experimental research in order for Tyrone Slothrop to outrace his own socioeconomic locale and attend Harvard University for free. Jamf did not only work for himself though, for as we saw in the document Slothrop received from Bounce’s computer (2.7), Jamf himself was tied up with Psychochemie AG who was a part of IG Farben, meaning Slothrop was sold, possibly unknowingly, to IG Farben itself — the notorious chemical weapons manufacturer. And since it was “cross-filed for both the IG and for Psychochemie [AG],” (250) the smell itself, which Slothrop associates with his conditioning, the rocket, and his erections, must be Imipolex G, the same plastic polymer which makes up the S-Gerät that has been placed inside the 00000 rocket. Slothrop has thus been conditioned to have sexual responses to weapons of death, which through his conditioning has sent him on an Arthurian quest to discover the origins of his past.

We are seeing that Slothrop’s, or the average American’s, class mobility only exists via one route: exploitation, whether of oneself or of another. Given that Slothrop cannot remember the origin of his own exploitation, just as the capitalist world has that origin hidden from its view, this journey is the only means that he has to discover it — though it is already apparent that this exploitation revolves around the symbiotic relationship between profit and violence. However, the masses must be indoctrinated in this symbiotic relationship, for why else would they find themselves okay with mass death and a profit that they will never see. So, like Slothrop, the masses are conditioned, made to focus on their own lusts or pleasures, are told that this profit will soon trickle its way downward and that the group of people being killed really do deserve it for whatever reason is being reiterated this time. Through a dream, Slothrop fears that this process is handed down — that the exploited will, given enough motive and power, become the exploiter. That he himself may one day become Laszlo Jamf.

Slothrop puts down the documents. That’s enough revelation for now. However, when he heads up a ladder, he comes face to face with the representation of American jingoism and bigotry himself — the above-mentioned Major Duane Marvy. Marvy, like Slothrop, is headed to the Mittelwerke. Though he is going “to coordinate with some Project Hermes people from General Electric” (287), which historically is known to be the project in which General Electric assisted the US in moving V2 rockets out of Germany and into the US in order to test and eventually produce American long-range missiles.¹ Marvey, jingoist that he is, was an easy choice to be given the lead on this mission since he is likely the type who believes anything that is done for America is in the world’s best interest — and it helps that he has an army of Marvy’s Mothers at his beck and call.

Marvy, thinking Slothrop is a random Englishman named Ian Scuffling, warns him about the group of Africans aboard the same train as them, just a few cars down. He mentions the recent intel — the same that Pointsman received before his beach vacation (2.8) — about the Schwarzkommando (though Marvy doesn’t mention the name). He knows the same information that Pointsman revealed, but he also knows that this group of African rocket scientists are from the Herero people, the same Südwest Africans who Blicero/Weissmann and the German army committed genocide against, now living in Germany. His theory devolves into a racist tirade both questioning the intelligence of the African people as well as accusing them of plotting revenge by attaining the rockets at the Mittelwerke and using them against the people who wronged them.

Speaking of Blicero in Südwest Africa, one of the Hereros, Oberst Enzian, from the other car is summoned and angered at Marvy’s tirade and throws him off the edge of the train. Enzian was the young Herero child, now grown, who was Blicero’s lover during his time there. It was the boy who Blicero named after the gentian depicted in Rilke’s poem, and who Blicero modeled his new child sex slave, Gottfried, after. With Marvy gone, Slothrop and Enzian are able to speak on their way to Nordhausen and Enzian, who quickly realizes Slothrop is not the English correspondent who he says he is, tells him that in the Zone, “you are free. We all are” (288) — for this is a world being rebuilt from the ground up, currently lawless as They build it according to Their ideal specifications.

We cut back to Slothrop in the present where, at the beginning of the chapter, he had already arrived in Nordhausen with the tulip between his toes. He walks through the Soviet and US occupied city and hears a song of hopeful love coming out of a window, a woman asking her lover to return. She is Geli Tripping, pining for “a Soviet intelligence officer named Tchitcherine” (290). Through the novel, Tchitcherine will play as an alter-ego or counterpart to Slothrop, and their first parallels occurr here with Slothrop’s lying with Geli as she has “a fantasy about Tchitcherine” and as Slothrop wonders if “something about [him] reminds her of Tchitcherine” (291). Tchitcherine’s owl even flies in for a feeding, and Geli mentions that the owl “‘never comes to be fed, unless Tchitcherine’s here” (292). Slothrop feeds it with a Baby Ruth candy bar stashed away in the room. This candy bar is distinctly American, raising Slothrop’s suspicions. Either Geli has been recently visited by other Americans — putting into Slothrop’s mind the idea that someone is still following him — or that the Germans and Americans were never quite as separate during the war as the world believed they were, and that the Americans could have been fueling the rise of this Third Reich.

Geli somehow knows of Slothrop’s quest to find the 00000 rocket. Even though this piques Slothrop’s paranoia once again, he lost Them in Zürich, so this cannot be another plant. And anyways, They never intended him to discover this information about Imipolex G or its housing rocket. Something then has brought these four — Slothrop, Tchitcherine, Enzian, and Major Marvy — to Nordhausen. Geli’s guess that the 00000 rocket is what Slothrop is here for is likely that it is what Tchitcherine is here for — Nordhausen acting as a sort of beacon for those seekers of the rocket, or seekers of the Schwartzgerät (AKA, The Black Device, formerly known to Slothrop only as the S-Gerät). She even knows that it is for sale by “‘A man in Swinemünde’” for “‘Half a million Swiss francs’” (294). Slothrop cannot fathom how she knows all of this, so wonders if she truly is just a witch, and in a world where the boundaries between life and death, reality and the supernatural, are now blurred, maybe she really is.

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Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 2.1 (up to the beginning of the Rocket Limericks)

1. Bullard, John W. (1965-10-15). "History of the Redstone Missile System" (PDF). Army Missile Command. Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama.