Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Big Brother wasn't watching...

According to the Huffington Post, J.D. Salinger didn't have an FBI file. I guess there was no need.

Kaufering

This appears to be the concentration camp that Salinger witnessed the "liberation" of, I use that term loosely since there were so few survivors. It was a subsidiary camp of the Dachau labor camp.

I think seeing this puts a new spin not just on "For Esme" but also on "Bananafish", thinking about the bananafish in terms not just of material consumerism, but of consuming in people, the way the SS used Jewish labor, like cogs in the machine.