... homesickness Friedrich Kittler Heinrich von Kleist Thomas Pynchon Friedrich Schiller V2 rocket war Heimödil , the Old High German word from which heimat originates, simply meant estate or property. 1 The Greeks would have said oikos , maybe even ousia . According to behavioral science’s...

... on this scorched earth.” 1 At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow , a final news flash from PNS Los Angeles reaches you, the reader of the novel. Seconds before the first or last V2 explodes over LA, a “Managerial Volkswagen” takes you on a trip along the Santa Monica Freeway, “the freeway of freaks...

... on the greatest technology transfer of all: German rocket technology—the V2—has to cross the ocean. Which prompts the question: Why were the Germans rocket pioneers? Kittler is fully aware of the great dilemma that has haunted Prussian and later German military planners for centuries. Germany has neither...

..., eyes, and artillery, but to radar systems and rocket batteries. Electronic weapons dissolve the century-old union of light and electricity; they have the power to operate in the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum—that is, automatically. The V2, a self-guided weapon, has replaced...

... “black box” does not appear, rather the German coinage, “Schwarzgerät.” Pynchon's typically divergent narrative strands are threaded together in part through the hunt by various protagonists for the “Schwarzgerät,” which is revealed to be a key secret component of the German V2 rocket. 19...