From: chuck@ztivax.UUCP (Charles Watland)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Germany to commemorate launch of first Nazi rocket despite protests
Date: 1 Oct 92 10:56:40 GMT
Organization: Siemens AG, Munich, W-Germany

schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de (Joachim Schrod) writes:
> In article <1992Sep28.070606.7492@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>, lbs@tkmhp2.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de (Lech Borkowski) writes:
> > In article <0105013A.enngk8@aeglos.hanse.de> osg@aeglos.hanse.de (Oliver Giessler) writes:
> > >
> > >They want to celebrate
> > >the first start of an modern kind rocket. Wich represents the
> > >roots of the american and russian rocket programm (btw build up
> > >mainly by german scientist)
> > >
> > 
> >  Touchy point of national pride? :-)
> > How about celebrating the anniversary of Tsiolkovsky's
> > birth instead?
> 
> Perhaps only a hint, how both the US and the USSR government did not
> bother about the (Nazi) background of the scientists they used to
> push their space programs?
>     After all, for them there was probably no difference in working
> for the Nazi military, or for the US resp. USSR military. Which tells
> something about the moral of scientists. Dr. Faust is still alive...
> 
> --
> Joachim


I disagree with your implication concerning the morality of 
scientists.  But, from memory, here is a poem about Dr. Faust:
(the last paragraph is interesting).  I forget the name of the
man who wrote it (I think he was from Italy).  

He was born in Deutschland, as you would suspect
And majored in magic from Cracow in fifteen five.
His portrates show a brow highened by science
the eye is indirect
As of bent light upon a croocked soul.
And that he bargined with the price of shame
For pleasures intellectually foul
Is known by every court that lists his name.

His frequent dissappearences are put down
To visits in the regions of the damned
And to the periodic deaths he shammed.
But unregenerate and in doctor's gown
He would turn up to lecture at the fair
And do a minor merical for a fee.
Many a life he wispered up the stair
To teach the black art of anatomy.

He was a deaf to angles as an oak
When, in the fall of fifteen ninety four
He went to London and crashed through the floor
In mach damnation of the playgoing folk.
Weekending with the scientific crowd 
He met Sir Frances Bacon and helped him draft
"The Colors of Good and Evil" and read aloud
An obsean sermon at which no one laughed.

He toured the conteninent for a hundred years
And subsidized among the peasantry 
The puppet play, his tragic history.
With a white glove he boxed the devile's ears
And with a black his own.  Tired of this
He published penny poems about his sins
In which he placed the heavy emphasis 
On a white glove, which, for a penny wins.

Sometime before the hemorage of the Kings of France 
he grew respectable an taught.
Quite suddenly everything he thought 
seemed to grow Scholars beards and angles wings.
It was the overthrow, on reasons thrown he sat
with the fair Pyrgine on his knees
and called all universities his own 
As plausable a figure as you please.

Then its back to Germany as the sage's sage
To teach comparative science to the young.
Who came from every land in a great throng
and knew they herd the master of the age when
for a secret formula he paid 
the devil another fragment of his soul
the Scholars wept and several even prayed
that Satan would restore him to them whole.

Backwardly tolerant, Faustes was expelled
from the third reich in ninteen thirty nine.
His exit caused the breaching of the Rine
Except for which the fronteer might of held.
Five years unknown to enemy and friend he hid
Appearing on the 5th to pose 
in an American desert at war's end, where, at his back, 
a dome of atoms rose.



Chuck Watland (I didn't write this - just remembered it)