Usually I just enjoy listening in since I'm only a Pound amateur

However, I must take issue with some of what Jonathan Gill says here about
concentration camps, Germany and so on. Perhaps the problem is only one of
wording, but if it is not, we have a serious lapse of understanding.

First: Nazi concentration camps were not death-camps. The first
concentration camp was set up in 1933, the first death-camp, almost a decade
later. Concentration camps (KZ's) were extremely harsh, brutal and so on,
but large numbers of people could and did survive long periods of
incarceration. Sentences to KZ's ranged between three months to indefinite.
For example, a Reich law punished public display of sympathy for a Jew with
up to six months in a KZ.

Second: the first victims in the KZ's  were not Jews but communists,
socialists, conservatives, labour leaders, some religious leaders and anyone
else deemed to be politically anti-Nazi.

Third: the first large-scale round-up of Jews did not ocurr until Crystal
Night in Nov. 1938 with an estimated 30,000 Jews being taken into custody
and most sent
to various concentration camps.

Fourth: availability of news in the U.S. and Britain should not be confused
with such avialability in the Reich or its allies. Furthermore, passing on
such news, or
unpatriotic 'rumours' as the Reich called them, was punishable by KZ
because sich actions were regarded as akin to sabotage and/or treason. The
same may be said about being in possession of or passing on Allied
pamphlets. Most people didn't pick them up, or simply glanced at them as
they walked by.

Why one would expect Pound or anyone else to believe such pamphlets - or
trust the word of Italian anti-fascist partisans - puzzles me. Who believes
the enemy in time of war?

Could the Holocaust have been a surprise to Pound? Certainly, as it was to
many other Europeans, Germans included: they may have heard such rumours or
even read the pamphlets, but to discover such criminal madness was actually
real could - and did in fact - genuinely surprise many. It's all so obvious
only in hindsight.

As the son one of the 300,000 odd German-Jewish marriages in Germany from
that era, I have a certain vested interest in accuracy and fairness to all
sides in this issue. Things were not as simple, clear or straight-forward as
many seem to think.

Best wishes,

Ian Kluge








----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan P. Gill" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 9:41 AM
Subject: pound in purgatory


> Dear Poundians:
>
> I've just finished Leon Surette's latest work, Pound in Purgatory, and
> I hope that it isn't too presumptuous of me to think that a few comments
> might get some discussion going.
>
> As I might have predicted, this work is now essential reading for anyone
> interested in the intellectual context in which Pound developed--it would
> take an expert on Pound's mysticism to confront Pound's economics! The
> book is amazingly erudite and yet quite readable, especially when it comes
> to economic theory--clearly it will be the final word on Pound's
> relationship to European economic traditions.
>
> I do, however, think that the book shortchanges the extent to which Pound
> was influenced by American ideas about money.  This may be because Leon
> focuses on the post-World War I period.  But Pound was, contrary to what
> Leon says, quite engaged with economics via Populism and his father's work
> much, much earlier.
>
> The same is true, I think, as regards Pound's anti-semitism, which Leon
> sees as a phenomenon of the 1930s and after.  If we think about Pound's
> anti-semitism not as an intellectual phenomenon, as Leon does, but rather
> as a form of passionate or even religious folly that reflects an
> engagement with both real Jews and an imaginary "Jew," then we must be
> interested in the 1890s.
>
> And one last thing: the notion that the Nazi genocide of the Jews came as
> a surprise to Pound in 1945, which Leon promotes, simply doesn't hold up.
> Detailed, accurate, and reliable reports of concentration camps were
> available in mainstream American newspapers and radio reports throughout
> the 1930s, and news of genocide came as early as 1941 in Yiddish
> newspapers in America and then later that year in the New York Times.
> The BBC reported in June of 1942 that 700,000 Jews had been murdered by
> the Nazis, and news of systematic extermination was available in all of
> the major American newspapers and wire services, as well as on the floor
> of Congress.  In 1944, American, British, and Swiss newspapers offered
> details of gas chambers at Auschwitz.  The news was also spread via
> leaflets dropped in Italy by Allied planes.  Even if Pound discounted all
> of this as Allied propaganda, we ought to remember that spreading this
> news was one of the major activities of Italy's anti-fascist underground,
> a movement that Pound was in touch with for much of the war.
>
> Apologies for the length of these remarks, but Leon's book, for which I
> waited far too long to read, deserves detailed attention by the best minds
> we've got on this list--and some thorough discussion here.
>
> Jonathan Gill
> Columbia University
>