Cinematic Auguries of the Third Reich in Gravity's Rainbow

The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond. He put it into the launch scene to heighten suspense. "It is another of my damned 'touches,' " Fritz Lang said. Gravity's Rainbow (p. 753)1 Fritz Lang's movie about a rocket trip to the moon was remembered with fondness and even reverence by the German rocketeers at Peenemiinde during World War II. There being no funds available for the development of rockets for space travel such as they dreamed of, many of these scientists felt themselves to be working on military rockets faute de mieux. Some of them had advised Lang on technical matters during the filming of Die Frau im Mond, and they regarded that movie not as mere childish fantasy, but as pure prophecy. It is not surprising, then, to discover in Ernst Klee and Otto Merk's The Birth of the Missile that the first successfully flown V-2 rocket, launched October 3rd, 1942, bore the emblem "Die Frau im Mond. "2 Franz Pokier, a fictitious member of the staff at Peenemiinde in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity 's Rainbow, greets the movie on its first appearance with something less than total reverence. Seeing it with his wife, "Franz was amused, condescending. He picked at technical points. He knew some of the people who'd worked on the special effects" (p. 159). Yet for all his superiority on this occasion, Pokier is fascinated by movies; in fact he particularly dotes on Fritz Lang movies as long as his favorite actor, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, is in them. While Klein-Rogge was not in Die Frau im Mond, he did appear in a number of Lang's other films during the 1920's, including Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1923-24), and Metropolis (1926). These movies, along with Lang's Der Mude Tod, are all cited in Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler as examples of films that expose "deep psychological dispositions predominant in Germany from 1918 to 1933. . . dispositions which influenced the course of events during that time."3 Kracauer argues that characters like the master criminal Dr. Mabuse, or the mad scientist Rotwang ( in Metropolis), illustrate a growing fascination with or. acceptance of the evil genius or tyrant. The fatalistic plot of Der Mude Tod, on the other hand, manifests a spirit of passivity before "fate" or "destiny." Die Nibelungen also reveals the inexorability of fate, in addition to eliciting horror at the anarchic indulgence of instinct and passion (Kracauer, pp. 81-95 and passim). The sociological and political relevance of these "dispositions" will be evident. When Pynchon makes these particular movies the favorites of the politically apathetic cineaste Franz Pokler, he seems to have Kracauer's theories in the back of his mind. Like many of his fellow rocket technicians, Pokier pays little attention to politics-even when his leftist wife is sent to a concentration camp. Yet Metropolis is described as exactly the world Pokier and evidently quite a few others were dreaming about those days, a Corporate City-state where technology was the source of power, the engineer worked closely with the administrator, the masses labored unseen far underground, and ultimate power lay with a single leader at the top, fatherly and benevolent and just .... (p. 578) The picture fits Nazi Germany, with non-Aryan slave labor at the bottom and a paternal Fuhrer at the top. Smaller versions of Metropolis will flourish under Nazism. Pokier will be one of the engineer-elite in the Raketen Stadt at Peenemunde, whose slave labor comes from Trassenheide; and subsequently in the even more Metropolis-like complex at Nordhausen, whose literally underground factory is worked by slave labor from the Dora camp. Pynchon's most important references to Metropolis and the other Lang movies come when Tyrone Slothrop, the book's protagonist, encounters the derelict Pokier after V-E Day. Slothrop hopes to find out something about the mad scientist who experimented on him in infancy, one Laszlo Jamf, with whom Pokier had studied at the Technische Hochschule in Munich before the war. …