The Living Hitler
Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2025 2:40 pm
Douglas Mercer
January 26 2025
Anyone who has read the novels of Thomas Pynchon knows that they are full of “nazis” of some sort or other; he has a psychopathic psychiatrist named Hilarius, he has strange doings at Peenemunde, the Herman Goering Casino, a Jewish Real Estate Tycoon and possible mafia leader who is guarded zealously by the Aryan Brotherhood; and in Vineland at a bar in Eureka someone says this is just a country bar, and another character, referencing all the Mercedes in the parking lot, says then that country must be Germany. Indicating that this might be more than just gratuitous ballast in Bleeding Edge he has a character who is obsessed with Hitler, specifically the specific cologne (4711) he wore or is said to have worn.
This scent of Hitler is traced by the character, and is somehow or other connected to the cologne worn by Joseph Kennedy; it is of course all very zany and “Pynchonesque”, arcane, erudite, or just plain silly, depending on the eye of the beholder—convoluted and perhaps but a red hearing or just one more shaggy dog story, or a very wild goose chase or pointless scavenger hunt. But it is well to remember that Joseph Kennedy was in tune with Hitler’s world view and it was Joseph Kennedy’s son, John, who wrote the following after touring Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Mountains The Eagles Nest, a passage in his only known diary which scholars have spent much trouble to contextualize to mean there was absolutely no sympathy for Hitler whatsoever being expressed:
"Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made. Hitler had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him."
And some seventy years later Pynchon has his Hitler obsessed character boarding a flight to Munich from JFK. When the book’s narrator learns that the Hitler obsessive is heading to get to the bottom of Hitler’s scent, that he is on the track of the trace of that scent, like a feral blood hound, it is said that she hears a Wagnerian Brass section blare down the corridors of her memory. As he begins to board the final and fatal flight the Hitler fanatic says "this could be it, you know, the lost connection, the first step back across that dark sillage, across all the time and chaos, to the Living Hitler……"
At this a character stops short, as if at the grandeur of the statement and says: wait, you never called him that before, as if a truth has for the first time been revealed, a secret uttered, a mysterious secret that before he was unable to say, this sacred truth, but now that he is on his way to his holy pilgrimage to Munich all must be revealed, that Adolf Hitler is alive. It is of course Pynchon who instructs us that everything is connected with everything and who in the book equates the Jews with Absolute Zero, and pointedly says a Jew Is A Clue. Perhaps we should listen carefully, perhaps some secret rite is being enacted from a remote culture as the door slams shut forever.
Notes:
Sillage (pronounced as "see-yazh") is a term used in perfumery to describe the scent trail left by a fragrance wearer. It comes from the French word for wake, similar to the trail left by a boat splitting the waves in water or the vapor trail of an airplane in the sky.
January 26 2025
Anyone who has read the novels of Thomas Pynchon knows that they are full of “nazis” of some sort or other; he has a psychopathic psychiatrist named Hilarius, he has strange doings at Peenemunde, the Herman Goering Casino, a Jewish Real Estate Tycoon and possible mafia leader who is guarded zealously by the Aryan Brotherhood; and in Vineland at a bar in Eureka someone says this is just a country bar, and another character, referencing all the Mercedes in the parking lot, says then that country must be Germany. Indicating that this might be more than just gratuitous ballast in Bleeding Edge he has a character who is obsessed with Hitler, specifically the specific cologne (4711) he wore or is said to have worn.
This scent of Hitler is traced by the character, and is somehow or other connected to the cologne worn by Joseph Kennedy; it is of course all very zany and “Pynchonesque”, arcane, erudite, or just plain silly, depending on the eye of the beholder—convoluted and perhaps but a red hearing or just one more shaggy dog story, or a very wild goose chase or pointless scavenger hunt. But it is well to remember that Joseph Kennedy was in tune with Hitler’s world view and it was Joseph Kennedy’s son, John, who wrote the following after touring Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Mountains The Eagles Nest, a passage in his only known diary which scholars have spent much trouble to contextualize to mean there was absolutely no sympathy for Hitler whatsoever being expressed:
"Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made. Hitler had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him."
And some seventy years later Pynchon has his Hitler obsessed character boarding a flight to Munich from JFK. When the book’s narrator learns that the Hitler obsessive is heading to get to the bottom of Hitler’s scent, that he is on the track of the trace of that scent, like a feral blood hound, it is said that she hears a Wagnerian Brass section blare down the corridors of her memory. As he begins to board the final and fatal flight the Hitler fanatic says "this could be it, you know, the lost connection, the first step back across that dark sillage, across all the time and chaos, to the Living Hitler……"
At this a character stops short, as if at the grandeur of the statement and says: wait, you never called him that before, as if a truth has for the first time been revealed, a secret uttered, a mysterious secret that before he was unable to say, this sacred truth, but now that he is on his way to his holy pilgrimage to Munich all must be revealed, that Adolf Hitler is alive. It is of course Pynchon who instructs us that everything is connected with everything and who in the book equates the Jews with Absolute Zero, and pointedly says a Jew Is A Clue. Perhaps we should listen carefully, perhaps some secret rite is being enacted from a remote culture as the door slams shut forever.
Notes:
Sillage (pronounced as "see-yazh") is a term used in perfumery to describe the scent trail left by a fragrance wearer. It comes from the French word for wake, similar to the trail left by a boat splitting the waves in water or the vapor trail of an airplane in the sky.
