CHAPTER 8

Working for the Nazis

Once conditioned at the Casino Hermann Goering, Slothrop seems so well synced to the rocket that They can set him quasi-free in the Zone to see what he turns up, his colonized mind posing little threat to the system. His case represents the extent to which domination in Gravity’s Rainbow depends on institutions that condition subjects’ behaviors in ways simulating self-control and masking the Manchurian Candidate–style mind control that it actually entails. Slothrop embodies the workings of such powers on the Allied side. Others, on the Axis side, make equally compelling cases. For example, the engineer Franz Pökler, a garden variety Nazi, realizes only belatedly how he willingly gave himself over to domination. Long before that, Pynchon has provided us with a telling character sketch so that we might follow the process, although he reveals none of the behaviorist conditioning that was applied to Slothrop. With Pökler, what does the job is a much more ordinary, cultural, and smartly managed ideological manipulation and coercion.

We first meet Pökler through his wife, Leni, a taking-it-to-the-streets Communist Party activist. In this flashback to the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), with Nazism ascendant, she decides to leave her dreary "Piscean husband, swimming his seas of fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism—Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that." 1 Knowing all "about the German male at puberty," Leni understands his love for her as little more than a romantic desire to be released from a typical German future determined by a middle-class family ideology—Bürgerlichkeit—destined to destroy all his youthful ideals: "Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and believed she would carry him on her back, away to a place where Destiny couldn’t reach." 2 Leni refuses to play that role, which is both physical and virtual, knowing Franz will better satisfy that kind of hyper-romantic desire in the Technik of rocketry, increasingly a German army item of interest: "Let him look for flight out at the Raketenflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the military and the cartels." Thanatz captures the same sense when, in a dialogue with Slothrop, he sexualizes the rocket’s ascent: "cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky, my friend. Oh, so phallic." 3 If Pökler embodies the German male’s wish to rise in that metamorphosed sexual sense above the boring role set for him by society,

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