Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 11.1: Grandeur through Extermination

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 11.1: Pökler Sees Alpdrücken, Pökler Waits at the Zwölfkinder, Pökler and Weissmann, Mondaugen in Südwest, Moving to Peenemünde, Ilse's First Appearance

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Recap of Pökler’s Story So Far:

Franz Pökler was first seen (1.18 & 1.19) as Leni Pökler’s husband and father of Ilse. We did learn a brief few hints of Franz’s past long, long ago — namely, he was a one-time student of Laszlo Jamf before falling on hard times post WWI, and he had a childhood that haunted his thoughts. But the majority of what we learned was after he had married Leni. As Leni, a feminist revolutionary and textbook Marxist, would often go out to protests, Franz would chastise her due to his fear that she may get hurt during these given the high political tensions at the time in the Weimar Republic. While she went about trying to enact this change, Franz held certain odd jobs such as working in a paint factory or hanging up movie posters around the city (one of which was for a film starring Max Schlepzig¹). Though one day as he was out walking, he stumbled across a failed V-2 rocket test which an old friend, Kurt Mondaugen, was a part of. Mondaugen was recently returned from Südwest Africa. Franz, entranced with the idea that he could truly do something meaningful — despite that meaning stemming from creating a weapon of mass destruction — decided to hop on board the perfection of the V-2. This is why Leni left him, escaping to a dormitory with other revolutionaries, eventually going to Peter Sachsa (the man she was having an affair with²) for food, accidentally stumbling across him conducting the seance for a group of Nazis, calling from the dead one Walter Rathenau. We also briefly learned, when Slothrop read the documents (acquired for him by Mario Schweitar in Zürich) on the train on which he met Enzian and Marvy (3.1), that Franz was a customer who at som point purchased Imipolex G.

Pökler’s Story

Bianca’s³ conception led to Ilse’s conception. Another ‘mapping onto’. There have been many. All respectively, Slothrop to Schlepzig to Franz Pökler, Katje to Erdmann to Leni Pökler, Gottfried to Bianca to Ilse, the sacrificed to the homeless children of the modern day to the shadow-children. It is all connected. Franz Pökler had seen von Göll’s Alpdrücken in theaters during the German depression those years before the war. He left with a deep-seated lust to enact on Leni what Schlepzig enacted on Erdmann in the film. Therefore, Pökler believes that the scene of rape and torture which led to Bianca’s conception ‘within’ Alpdrücken — the nightmare film — also led to Ilse’s conception. The film acts as a conduit for the nightmare that the future generation would be born into and born out of.

But Pökler’s true story begins far after Ilse’s conception, after the events of his discovery of Mondaugen and the V-2, after Leni leaving him and Sachsa’s death. We begin with him here (around the time where Slothrop has been released from Tchitcherine’s grasp — 3.10), at the end of the timeline of his story (at least within this chapter), lying under a giant Ferris wheel, in a park known as Zwölfkinder, waiting for Ilse to return again⁴. It seems this waiting has happened many times before. We will see him here in the present remembering the moments that led from then (post Leni’s leaving) to now (him waiting by the Wheel: the frame story). He waits among plaster and crystal figures — even one of Hansel, Gretel, and the Witch, a reminder of Gottfried, Katje, and Blicero — with his pet pig, Frieda. This Zwölfkinder is a place that once had memories which can call out to many children and parents, asking, “Did you ever” and “Did you hold” — bringing back certain smells and sounds, the feeling in your gut “as you swung around the Wheel,” (398) emotions of love and wonder, even fright and jealousy. Childhood must end for each and every person, leaving us with that sense of longing for our past, though in the times that Pökler lives, possibly even because of him, childhood has ended as a whole.

He had always held onto Ilse being a child, even long past when that still held truth. There was no room for him, feelings of guilt coming to the fore, to believe anything otherwise. Knowing he had helped create that Rocket which destroyed so many lives, that which fueled the War, he knew he was directly responsible for this genocide of childhood itself. So, he pictured her, able to protect him with the knowledge that no matter when she left and returned, she would always remain the same. He knew, as we will see, that this hope was lost. She was his symbol for the world of the past that he helped destroy — that he needed to hold onto in order to maintain his sense of sanity. But he would watch as she left, fearing for her safety in these dangerous streets the same way he feared for Leni when she once went out to her protests, calling for a Marxist revolution (1.19). It seems that he knows he was wrong in his work — that he realizes the acts he committed led to the highest form of mortal sin, an awakening of something that had never before made its presence known on Earth. So, he is haunted now by these scenes of protest, people willing to put themselves in not merely uncomfortable positions, but positions that risk their very lives, to enact change. He sees them moving on paths that were not pre-set by Them, exiting their autobahn before they were meant to, and the only path he can see for himself is to shrink down to the size of an ant, wander in the stone cracks which will protect him from steel-toed boots, “running the streets of Ant City” (399).

And the guilt pervaded his dreams as well, dreaming of the rocket which he helped create. These dreams caused him to picture not the rocket itself, but that which it would destroy: city blocks which held things he needed, “a street he knew,” (400) homes and rooms in which people lived and created histories for themselves. He pictured that, when he was creating the rocket, he was moving “to switch on a light” — to brighten the world with science and progress — when in reality, “the room had really been lit to begin with, and he had just turned everything out, everything. . . .” (400). He truly believed in the A4 — the V-2 — certain that he was not, as Leni stated, being used to kill people. Instead, he sought far reaching horizons in which the development of this rocket could mean travelling to space, conquering alien lands as those in power always had. She saw past this insanity — this excuse. Whether or not his purported goal would be achieved (which it would by those same scientists, soon to be granted exoneration of their crimes), people would be killed in the meantime. No, Leni was not without her faults, but what she longed for was the bettering of the world, and Pökler could not see past his own desire for grandeur, believing that the rocket would be used for good and that the only reason it was being developed as a weapon in the first place was because certain agencies did not “want to risk capital or manpower on developing anything as fantastic as a [space] rocket” (400).

Weissmann (Blicero) was “part salesman, part scientist,” (401) a new wave of evil that would emanate from him in this Third Reich outward, like a parasite, into the Fourth — from Germany, alone, to the world itself. He is both creator and distributor, synthesizer and dealer, Nazi officer and modern-day billionaire. Pökler, after finding Mondaugen during the failed rocket test and joining the effort, worked closely alongside Weissmann, putting up a barrier between him and the subconscious knowledge that his raison d'être was nearly as unattainable as Leni’s (though at least hers was rooted in a better, more hospitable world). And she, due to their vast difference in belief, left him. He went insane, crying night after night, drowning his sorrows and questions in beer, until he gave in and became a mere extension of the Rocket. For, though the rocket was not yet complete or functional, it called out like a would-be God, like a being willing itself into existence, taking Pökler under its control.

He left, joining Mondaugen in his quest, going from the city into the forest, “entering a monastic order,” (402) a religion built around the Rocket, one meant to both worship and maintain the existence and necessity of their God.

When Pökler first joined, specialization was not yet a thing in regard to the engineering. The V-2 was in its early stages of development, and none really knew what the correct or intended path forward was. What we do know is that once this path became clear, specialization did occur: each scientist was broken off into his own little sect, unaware of what the others were doing or perfecting, just as those working on the New Turkic Alphabet (3.5). It was yet another partitioning of knowledge where those who created the Rocket (or the NTA) had their own jobs, focusing on small pieces of a puzzle that only they saw. The bigger picture, the creation as a whole, was crafted and planned by a higher order — Them: “it was a corporate intelligence at work […] all equally at the Rocket’s mercy” (402). What Pökler helped on when they did partition off was the propulsion group — those who tried to ensure the rocket would be able to ascend without exploding. Inevitably, one would have to die — become “First blood, first sacrifice” (403) — in order to sanctify the new order behind this Rocket. And so they did: Dr. Wahmke was the first to go, not seeing the destructive potential of uniting man with machine, peroxide and alcohol, sperm and egg, fire and water. He was the first sacrifice to the new God. A God who sought to create man in its own image.

Mondaugen understood much of the spirituality and mysticism surrounding the Rocket. He had returned from one of the War’s — and thus the Rocket’s — precursors. Even preceding the first World War, he was in Südwest Africa with Weissmann a decade and a half following the initial genocide of the Herero people. While here,⁵ there was an uprising which stalled his studies on radio signals, which sent him and those with him to hole up in Foppl’s estate. But Mondaugen did not stay here; he wandered off to stay, for a time, among the Ovatjimba, the same poor Herero tribe which raised Enzian after his mother left him during the initial Südwest genocide. It was here that he found a moment “of great serenity,” thus finding “the informationless state of signal zero” (404). And when they were here (Mondaugen and Weissmann) the latter again met Enzian. While Mondaugen recalls Enzian from their time in Africa, Pökler recalls him from when Enzian arrived in Germany.

In 1937, the rocket project really got going. The engineers — Pökler, Weissmann, and Mondaugen included — moved to Peenemünde to continue the assembly and testing on the rockets.⁶ They turned the land from what it was previously into this demonic site — something which Pökler would look back on and recognize only disaster. And similarly, during these times at Peenemünde, Pökler looked back on his relationship with Leni, pining for those times where his and her love superseded his desire to make something of his name. He would fantasize their reconciliation, waiting in Peenemünde but pining for Berlin. Of course, with his waning feeling toward the Rocket and his desire for the life he had before, the facility began taking off, and possibilities for the rocket’s far-reaching horizons — given the new achievement of a 2000 meter per second exhaust — once thought impossible, became within reach.

After a day of work on the testing and development that was spurred from this milestone, he returned to his cubicle one night, exhausted. But something was different. Fighter jets still made their excursions above, the sea still smelled and sounded the same; however, when he entered, his Ilse — in her first return — was there, waiting for him.

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Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 11.2 — pp. 407-419 (finishing only the first paragraph of page 419, ending with the line, “… and he knew of no way to reverse it. . . .”.

1. The film actor who slept with Greta Erdmann on the set of von Göll’s Alpdrücken, likely conceiving Bianca, Erdmann’s daughter who she is currently looking for in the present day as she speaks with Slothrop.

2. As a reminder, Sachsa is also the now-dead medium/control who communicates with Carroll Eventyr (the living medium who works in Psi-section at The White Visitation) to receive messages from the dead. He was killed in one of the protests that Franz was so worried Leni would die in.

3. It is important to note many of the coming parallels. So, Erdmann/Bianca/Schlepzig must be remembered much as Leni/Ilse/Franz are (with parallels to many other characters ranging from Slothrop/Katje to Katje/Gottfried/Blicero).

4. I will refer to this scene as his ‘present’ whenever we return to his ‘waiting.’

5. See V. (1963) Chapter 9 for a full account of Mondaugen’s story in Südwest Africa. This paragraph gives a summary of those events.

6. They would later move to Nordhausen where this same assembly would occur in the Mittelwerke — using slave labor from the nearby concentration camp — that Slothrop visited in 3.2.