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269 The German Introject The Penultimate Truth and Lies, Inc.1 (formerly known as The Unteleported Man) form a kind of portal for working through the one history without parallel or alternative. In The Penultimate Truth, it’s all a fair, a show, in love of war: to cut losses on the human side, the Terran population was provided vast mine-like shelters while total nuclear war commenced on Mars. When mankind went underground it was believed “to be for perhaps a year at longest . . . or, as real pessimists had forecast, two years” (102). But it’s been fifteen years at the novel’s start, during which time a new world order of Yance-men rule the Earth from their vast estates. Mankind below must watch the show of ongoing total war, films made in the meantime by Eisenbludt of Moscow. The premier filmmaker , Gottlieb Fischer of West Germany, was “inheritor of UFA, the older Reichs film trust which had in the 1930s been so deeply interwoven with Dr. Goebbels’ office” (62). The simulacrum of the world leader, Talbot Yancy, was also designed by Fischer and made in Germany. When Fischer died on an expedition to Venus, Eisenbludt took over the production of the war films and, on the Western side of simulation, Stanton Brose, Fischer’s student and heir, picked up the reign of power. Fifteen years ago robots (named leadies because they melt under combat conditions) were sent to war. In no time “advanced varieties of leadies . . . led to the realization that the best strategy was to be found summed up in The Mikado. If merely saying that a man had been executed was enough to satisfy everyone, why not merely say it instead of doing it?” (49). The polarization between West and East was maintained for the captive audience in the underworld. Fischer began the new film history in 1982 with two revisionary documentaries made to order for each “side.” 270 The German Introject To alter history you begin with World War II. “Because in 1982, Germany was once again a world power, and most important, a major shareholder in the community of nations titling itself ‘The Western Democracies,’ or more simply, Wes-Dem” (69). What was made all right on the Western front was Germany’s role in two wars of world destruction. The 1982 documentary juxtaposes two moments: in 1919, the continued blockade by the British of Germany, and in 1943, a second devastation visited upon Germany which, concentration camps included, could also be blamed on the Anglo-American sell-out of Germany to the East. FDR, the documentary proves via hidden mike and camera, was a Soviet agent. The second documentary, the B version, which was pitched to an East that existed also only as underworld, presented the USSR and Japan as fighting to save civilization from the secret alliance between Anglo-America and the Germans. The ultimate truth nears revelation at the intersection of plotlines. Nicholas, a tanker, is sent above ground to search for an artiforg for the ailing Chief Mechanic. He reaches the surface near the demesne of Lantano, a new Yance-man and speechwriter for the Yancy sim. Joseph Adams, another speechwriter, meets Lantano at the Megavac through which they ventriloquate the sim. Adams is impressed by Lantano’s ideas and his ability to express them and in particular by his “knowhow as to exactly what the ’vac’s treatment of the copy would result in . . . how it would ultimately emerge as spoken by the sim before the cameras” (55). Adams has organized his life around the Faustian-Freudian apparatus: What entered Megavac 6-V as a mere logos would emerge for the TV lenses and mikes to capture in the guise of a pronouncement, one which nobody in his right mind—especially if encapsulated subsurface for fifteen years—would doubt. . . . The voice which he, like every other Yance-man, had long ago introjected. The super ego, as the prewar intellectuals had called it. (33) Lantano, who through time travel has been around for six hundred years, turns out to have been the extra chosen by film director Fischer as model for the leader sim. Lantano merges with the sim and pronounces declaration of peace on earth. Nicholas obtains the artiforg from the former war zone (the postwar era can only produce mass cultural items that “could not sustain life for even a second” [87]). The ultimate truth lies in the fine print: the policy for controlled release of...

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