Gravity's Rainbow

In May 1945, the war in Germany is over. Slothrop is in Germany, traveling with the displaced refugees to an underground rocket facility named Mittelwerke in Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, where he plans to research more about the S-Gerät 11/00000. While riding a train, he reads the file on Laszlo Jamf that he acquired in Zurich—and he discovers that his own father, Broderick Slothrop, allowed Jamf to experiment on his young son in exchange for a scholarship at Harvard University. Slothrop, just a boy at that time, was codenamed Schwarzknabe (German for “black baby”) while his father was nicknamed Schwartzvater (German for “black father”). Slothrop vaguely recollects a strange, forbidden room where “something was done to him” (214). He remembers a strange smell and is convinced it is Imipolex G.

Feeling overwhelmed by the information, Slothrop leaves the carriage and climbs up onto the roof of the boxcar. Major Duane Marvy, who is already on the roof, complains about the Black German men who were riding on the train, and he hurls racial slurs at them. These men are Herero rocket technicians from former German colonies in Africa; one of them appears and, after wrestling with Marvy, throws him from the train. The man introduces himself as Oberst Enzian, the leader of the Schwarzkommando.

When the train reaches Nordhausen, Slothrop seeks out Geli Tripping, a woman who calls herself a witch. They spend the night together, though their romantic incursions are interrupted by the hooting of Geli’s owl and the possibility that her boyfriend Tchitcherine (an officer with the Soviet intelligence services) might return at any moment. Slothrop asks Geli about the S-Gerät 11/00000; she tells him only that the S stands for schwarz (the German word for black). Slothrop imagines Tchitcherine killing him for sleeping with Geli. When Slothrop leaves Geli the next day, she gives him a pair of Tchitcherine’s boots to replace his stolen shoes.

Slothrop (still maintaining the alias of Ian Scuffling) hitches a ride with an American officer and travels to Mittelwerke, an underground rocket factory inside an abandoned salt mine. Now that the war is over, the facility has become a tourist attraction—but all the tourists are intelligence agents, military officers, or government officials who search for any leftover information about the German rocket program. Tour guides show people around the facility, including the attached concentration camp named Dora that supplied the factory with slave labor. The tour also includes an exhibition about the future of space exploration. Mittelwerke’s parabolic tunnel entrance was designed by a protégé of the chief Nazi architect, Albert Speer. The factory’s lopsided, ladder-shaped design is replete with symbolic allusions, containing references to Nazism and calculus. Slothrop walks through the factory tunnels, and at one point, he must cross a large space via a cable hooked to an overhead hoist. He falls from the zip wire but is caught by a strap tied to his heel, which then carries him into a party. The party is being thrown for Major Marvy, whom Slothrop last saw being thrown from a train by Enzian. Marvy and his friends recognize Slothrop (though they believe that he is a British war correspondent) and chase him through the factory tunnels. The elaborate chase scene involves traps, trains, a dark room, and the warhead of an abandoned rocket. Slothrop meets a man named Professor Glimpf who helps him escape from the factory in a stolen Mercedes. Glimpf takes Slothrop to his friend’s house, high in the Harz Mountains. The friend is a Nazi scientist and an expert in guidance systems.

In the Harz Mountains, Enzian and a group of “Zone-Hereros” live in abandoned mine shafts. They are the Schwarzkommando, and they joke about how their abandoned mines are like the homes of aardvarks, animals that have a special connection to Herero mythology. Enzian and the Schwarzkommando have an unmentioned project that seems to involve constructing a V2 rocket.

Enzian’s father was a Russian sailor who did not marry Enzian’s mother. She raised him alone, taking him on a pilgrimage—a long trek through the desert to escape the German military that was trying to exterminate the Herero people. Many of the Herero died during the trek, and Enzian, who woke up among dead bodies, was found by the white Germans and raised in a “white-occupied world” (242). Now, Enzian plans to travel to Hamburg. He thinks about the time he spent with Weissmann (Blicero) and ponders the unknown whereabout of that abusive man. Andreas, one of the other Schwarzkommando members, is worried that the Russians have set a trap. Enzian tells him to “stop worrying about Tchitcherine” (245), Enzian’s Russian half-brother—and the boyfriend of Geli Tripping, the witch whom Slothrop romanced in Nordhausen.

In early May, Slothrop and Geli climb to the top of the Brocken, a mountain in the Harz, a famous gathering place for witches at this time of the year. Remembering the Schwarzkommando group he met after the Mittelwerke factory, Slothrop mentions that he believes the Schwarzkommando are somehow associated with Tchitcherine, but Geli insists the two sides loathe each other. Descending from the mountain, they meet Russian and American soldiers and hear that Marvy and his men are still searching for Slothrop, so Geli suggests he escape with her friend Schnorp to Berlin. Slothrop boards a hot air balloon piloted by Schnorp, used for smuggling custard pies into Germany. Marvy chases them in an airplane, but Slothrop uses the pies and a ballast bag to knock the pursuing plane from the air. Slothrop and Schnorp fly away into the sunset.

In the summer, Tchitcherine travels to the Zone on a “private, obsessive” mission that involves a rocket. He also wants to kill his half-brother, Enzian, and to build a “little State” in the Zone. Tchitcherine remembers his youth in the Soviet Union. He enlisted in the Red Army and was sent to Kyrgyzstan, where he worked with colleagues on a literacy program that spread written alphabets to the most remote people of the Soviet Union, often in contentious circumstances. At this time, rumors spread that Tchitcherine’s affair with a Moscow woman has essentially resulted in his forced exile from Kyrgyzstan, while other rumors link him to an opioid salesman. Tchitcherine blames Enzian for his exile; he spent many years researching his half-brother’s life. In 1904, Tchitcherine’s father traveled to an African port when he was in the Russian Navy, where he fathered Enzian and then continued his journey to take part in the Russo-Japanese war. Tchitcherine believes that if he can find the loathsome Enzian, he can also locate and eradicate the Schwarzkommando.

Tchitcherine wanders into the desert of Kyrgyzstan to find the local equivalent of the Northern Lights. While wandering, he enters into a dreamlike haze. Back in Germany in 1945, the rocket that Tchitcherine wants to find is supposedly hidden inside the “summer Zone.”

After a week in Berlin, Slothrop thinks of Enzian, whose fellow Schwarzkommando troops wore uniforms emblazoned with the letters K, E, Z, V, and H; these letters correspond to “the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car” (270). Slothrop remembers talking with Enzian, discussing the Schwarzkommando and the Hereros, as well as the V2 rockets’ fragile insides. Enzian claimed to have also been searching for the S-Gerät 11/00000 but that Tchitcherine and Marvy have allied to stop him.

Slothrop meets a German drug dealer named Säure who, along with two women, is in the process of stealing a collection of “Wagnerian opera costumes” (274). Säure gives Slothrop a horned helmet, a green cape, buckskin pants, and some marijuana. After taking the horns from the helmet, Slothrop dresses in the clothes and calls himself Raketemensch (a German word for Rocketman). Slothrop, Säure, and the two women wander around Berlin, high on marijuana, as the buildings seem to change into giant monsters. They’re searching for a friend, an American Navy seaman named Bodine who claims to have six kilograms of “pure, top-grade Nepalese hashish” (277) in Potsdam; however, he cannot access the stash, because the city is overrun by the security teams of world leaders gathered in the city for a peace conference. Säure volunteers Slothrop to collect the drugs in exchange for one million counterfeit German marks, telling Slothrop that “no job is too tough for Rocketman” (278).

Slothrop prepares to travel to Potsdam, where Bodine’s drugs are stashed beneath a bush outside a villa in a rich neighborhood. As he and Säure exit Berlin, Slothrop does not recognize the face of President Truman on the propaganda posters. He did not know that President Roosevelt died recently, and he mourns the loss. Suddenly, everything around him seems unreal, as though it is part of a simulation or a movie set. He is further disturbed by the news that Tchitcherine is also “in Potsdam right now” (282); Säure suggests that Slothrop get false documents from his associate, Max Schlepzig. They steal a boat and paddle all night along the canal to Potsdam. When they arrive in the city, they discover that the villa where the drugs are hidden is being used as a temporary headquarters by the American diplomatic delegation. Slothrop retrieves the drugs while dressed in his Rocketman costume. As he reaches under the bush, he makes eye contact with Hollywood actor Mickey Rooney. He feels like he should say something, but his speech fails him “in a drastic way” (286). Slothrop tries to sneak away, but someone grabs him and whispers in his ear that they have followed him “all the way” (287).

The following night, Squalidozzi and his Argentinian anarchists ride a stolen submarine into Potsdam via the canal. A German film director and smuggler named Gerhard von Göll rides with them, having promised to make a film for the anarchists about their national hero, Martin Fierro. The Argentinians consider Fierro to be “an anarchist saint” (289), and his story is famously told in an epic poem in which he conquers the frontier and lives with the Native peoples. Onboard the submarine, Squalidozzi and Von Göll discuss the potential for a sequel; the second poem about Martin Fierro describes how he “sells out” and returns to Christian society. Von Göll has recently filmed psychological propaganda for the British intelligence services involving Schwarzkommando troops. He believes that his film of the Schwarzkommando has played a pivotal role in the Schwarzkommando becoming real, and now he wants “to sow in the Zone seeds of reality” (290) by creating new films that may also become real. Elsewhere, the United States navy vessel on which Bodine is serving detects the submarine using sonar. The submarine fires a torpedo at the ship. Onboard, Bodine has drugged the men with another of Laszlo Jamf’s inventions named Oneirine, which slows their perception of time. This means that the course of the torpedo and the ship “intersect in space but not time” (291-92).

Tchitcherine is driven around Germany by “a teenage Kazakh dope fiend” (292). As he rides in the car, he reads through the interrogation transcripts in which Slothrop describes his anxieties about race and “Black-words.” Tchitcherine is puzzled that an intelligence operative like Slothrop never seems to report to anyone. He speculates as to whether Slothrop is searching for the S-Gerät 11/00000 and assumes that Slothrop will meet Enzian at some point. When the driver praises the quality of the drugs obtained from Slothrop, both men cackle “insanely.”

Still dressed in his Rocketman outfit and still holding most of the hashish, Slothrop feels overwhelmed by the drugs in his system and falls asleep again. He dreams about his father Broderick and, when he wakes, finds himself on an old movie set. He meets Margherita Erdmann, who starred in many “vaguely pornographic horror movies” (295) directed by Von Göll. She tells Slothrop that the set was built for Alpdrücken (the German word for nightmares), a Von Göll production in which she starred with Max Schlepzig. According to Margherita, Schlepzig may be the father of Bianca, her daughter. Slothrop points out that his false documents bear the name Max Schlepzig, and Margherita believes that the documents are genuine, which means that Schlepzig must be dead. She believes that she has met Slothrop for a reason: “They’ve been busy” (296), and They must want him to be in this place at this time. In Alpdrücken, Margherita played the role of a lesbian who is beaten to death, and she asks Slothrop to help her reenact her final scene on the abandoned film set. Slothrop is excited by the prospect. He and Margherita have sex, each of them thinking of someone else. She thinks about Schlepzig, and he thinks about Katje. As they have sex, Margherita shouts her daughter’s name.

Franz Pökler watched Alpdrücken many years ago. He believes that Margherita’s performance inspired him to go home to his wife Leni and conceive their daughter Ilse. Now, Pökler remembers his regular meetings with Ilse at a children’s resort in Germany. Leni used to criticize his role in the rocket program because the Nazis were using him “to kill people” (300). During those early years of rocket research, he worked alongside his friend, Kurt Mondaugen, who spent time in the German colonies. There, Mondaugen met Weissman (Blicero) and Enzian. Pökler and 90 other researchers were sent to Peenemünde in 1937 to continue their research. During this time, Pökler became increasingly suspicious about Weissmann and felt as though he were being deliberately tortured. Each year, he was given leave to visit the children’s resort with Ilse. The visits were short and unsatisfying; each year, she seemed so different that Pökler wondered whether this Ilse was “a different child” (313). In 1939, just before the war, he spent two weeks with Ilse at the children’s resort. During their stay, she tried to seduce him, and Pökler wonders whether They suspected that he wanted to sleep with his daughter. Despite the horrific nature of his incestuous thoughts, he was somewhat proud that They considered him important enough to blackmail in this fashion.

Ilse continued to visit Pökler each year. She was being kept prisoner in Dora, the concentration camp that supplied slave labor to the Mittelwerke factory. Pökler believed that Weissmann was deliberately holding on to her and releasing her each year as a way to control him. Pökler tried and failed to visit Ilse in the camp. As the war came to a close, Weissmann rounded up a select group of scientists and assigned them to work on a special project of the utmost secrecy: Rocket 00000. Pökler “knew immediately that this was what Weissmann had been saving him for” (323). In the final days of the war, one of the camp guards delivered Pökler a message from Weissmann that explained that “she has been released” (324). Pökler believed that Weissmann was rewarding his work on the 00000. When Pökler visited Dora before the camp was liberated by the Americans, he felt overwhelmed by the filth and the suffering. He saw naked bodies being dragged to crematoriums. He found a woman clinging to her life and cried with her for a while. Before he left, Pökler gave the woman his wedding ring so that she could swap it for food or anything else that she needed.

In a Berlin geographically split between Russian, French, British, and American areas of control, Slothrop and Margherita stay in the Russian sector. Slothrop leaves during the night to take the hashish to Säure. While walking through Berlin, he struggles to sort through his memories and worries that he is “losing his mind” (325). When he finally finds Säure, he is told that the promised counterfeit money is no longer available. Slothrop plans to sell whatever hashish he has left, and he agrees to buy information about the Schwarzgerät from Säure. He falls asleep after having sex with a woman named Trudi. He wakes up the next day to the sound of a “raging debate” about the relative merits of Beethoven versus Rossini between Säure and a composer named Gustav. The apartment is raided by “Berlin police supported by American MPs in an adviser status” (331), and Slothrop runs back to Margherita, who has experienced vivid hallucinations while he was away. They live together a short while, with Slothrop agreeing to Margherita’s requests for increasingly sadomasochistic sex. Slothrop dreams about a poem in three parts. In the poem, a woman has sex with a number of dogs and other animals. Then, she becomes pregnant. Before she gives birth, she asks her husband to row them to the middle of a river. At the end of the poem, she drowns in the river, but “all forms of life fill her womb” (335). Later, Slothrop fishes in the river in Berlin. He cannot stop thinking about the dream.

Horst Achtfaden is a rocket engineer aboard a so-called “Toiletship” in the German Navy. Many other German and American rocket scientists are also aboard, all in states of panic. He has been “picked up by the Schwarzkommando, who for all he knows now constitute a nation of their own” (338). When they interrogate him, he claims not to be completely responsible for the murders caused by the V2 rockets because he only worked on a small part of the project. In contrast, he claims, bureaucrats in Washington and London “killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to” (340). Some of his colleagues have turned to religion and mysticism for comfort. However, Achtfaden is not actually onboard a toiletship: He has been drugged with sodium amytal by the Schwarzkommando group, who want information about the “Schwarzgerät.” Enzian is interrogating him about certain parts of the rockets’ design. Achtfaden tells them to talk to other departments. He is shocked when he gives them the name of his friend, Klaus Närrisch. He feels that he has betrayed his friend.

Slothrop and Margherita take a barge along the canal out of Berlin. They head to Swinemünde, which is both a port city and the site for rocket launches. Now, Slothrop is searching for the Schwarzgerät. At the same time, Margherita plans to find Bianca, who is onboard a ship named Anubis. They pause their journey to rest in a spa town named Bad Karma, and they see the Anubis is also unexpectedly stopping there; they board the ship, though the drunken passengers raise the ladder and force Slothrop to fall into the river. He loses his Rocketman costume and then climbs aboard. A woman named Stefania lends Slothrop a formal evening outfit so that he will fit into the raucous, drug-induced party atmosphere. Stefania reveals that Bianca is rumored to be the product of a scandalous conception: According to the story, Margherita slept with many masked men during the filming of Alpdrücken. The scene was deleted, and Margherita has no idea which of the men is Bianca’s father, even though Margherita is married to a man named Miklos Thanatz, who is also onboard the Anubis. That night, Margherita and her 11- or 12-year-old daughter Bianca perform a song. Then, they perform a theatrical argument that ends with Bianca being spanked by her mother on stage. Aroused by the scene, the audience initiates a “fabulous orgy” on the deck of the boat. Amid rumors of Oneirine (another chemical invented by Laszlo Jamf) being passed around, Slothrop talks to Thanatz. The German claims to have been stationed at the rocket site in the Netherlands that was run by Blicero, whom he found to be a “screaming maniac.”

The next morning, Slothrop wakes up beside Bianca and they have sex. Afterward, Bianca wants him to run away with her and insists that—because she is a child—she knows “how to hide” (352). Slothrop feels disconnected from the world around him and stumbles out of the cabin, feeling pity for Bianca’s sadness. He has a flashback to his childhood. He worries about Them and whether they are trying to make people think in a certain way. To Slothrop, there no longer seems to be any difference between a being and a corresponding image of that being, but he is certain that Bianca “must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay” (354). Slothrop frets over his time spent with Bianca, worrying that he is more like her father than any of the masked men who might actually be biologically related to her.

Slothrop meets a man named Morituri, an ensign in the Imperial Japanese Navy who is also aboard the Anubis but who did not take part in the orgy. He listens to Morituri talk about his past while they sit on the deck. After spending some time at the school that trained kamikaze pilots, Morituri worked for a propaganda ministry. This required that he travel to Germany, where he met Margherita and her then-husband Sigmund. Sigmund and Margherita had come to Bad Karma to deal with her physical and mental health symptoms: She had chronic insomnia, and, as the couple worried she might have Jewish heritage, they sought to escape persecution by coming to the resort town; additionally, Margherita had often been plagued by rumors that she was involved in the murders of Jewish children, and Morituri once saw her try to drown a Jewish boy in the thick, greasy mud baths at the resort. On this occasion, she declared herself to be “the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God” (358). Morituri intervened and allowed the boy to escape, which is the only thing he has ever done that makes him proud. That night, Sigmund and Margherita left Bar Karma. The very next day, World War II began, and “there was no longer any way for children to vanish mysteriously” (359). According to Morituri, Margherita still views herself as the Shekinah (a Hebrew word for God’s presence in the world). He thinks her mind has been corrupted by the belief as well as the radioactive mud and her murder of the children. He also suggests that Margherita must see Slothrop—when he emerged from the river—as “one of those children” (359) she drowned in the mud. Slothrop leaves the deck and finds Stefania, who reveals that Margherita has locked herself in a bathroom. He tries and fails to find Bianca, then tries to convince Margherita to open the door. She refuses, claiming that he is “one of Them” (361) because he appeared to her out of the river.

Margherita has always “had more identities than she knew what to do with” (361). Her name is shortened to Greta or Gretel and, as a film actress, she has played many different roles. On screen, she once played a cowgirl who rode a horse named Snake, and she played an exuberant young party girl named Lotte Lüstig in a film opposite Max Schlepzig. Margherita has also done many strange things in her life, such as the time she visited a graveyard in Berlin at night to talk to a corpse; the dead body told her that “we live very far beneath the black mud” (362). Margherita’s body is also covered in scars from her sadomasochistic sex with Thanatz. Once, she and Thanatz visited a rocket site and traveled down an empty road, but a mysterious voice told them to turn around immediately. They obeyed and turned around to find Blicero “in his final madness” (364), planning something that seemed to involve Gottfried. Later, Margherita accompanied Blicero to a séance in a castle. He spent the evening referring to her as Katje, and she remembers something on the table that might have sounded like S-Gerät. The séance ended with an orgy in which Margherita was told to wear a strange costume made from Imipolex. She returned to the rocket site after the orgy and felt, somehow, that something must have happened in this place. She felt her “own personal silence” (366) waiting for her.