H
Haagsche Bosch
104; Bosch is Dutch for "woods"; The main park (with its thick sheltering trees) in the Hague from which most of the A-4s that fell on London in the initial months of rocket attack were launched. The attacks began at 6:43 p.m., September 8, 1944.
Hafenstrasse
692; in Greifswald
Haftung, G.M.B.
496; German: "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung" "GmbH" = limited liability company" -- still in use today (1997) [provided by Evan Corcoran]; "ulcerous impresario" aboard Gnahb's boat
Hague, The
151; aka s'Gravenhage, Holland's seat of government (the capital is Amsterdam); location of Royal Dutch Shell, 240; [MAP]
Haig, Sir Douglas (1861-1928)
79; Field marshal of the British Expeditionary Force in World War I; led the attack at Passchendaele; See also Passchendaele
Hall, Jon (1915-1979)
Born Charles Felix Locher in Fresno, California, Hall starred a series of six Technicolor adventure films with Maria Montez: Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), Cobra Woman (1944), Gypsy Wildcat (1944), and Sudan (1945).
Halliburton, Richard (1900-1939)
266; An American traveler, adventurer, and author. Best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, he was headline news for most of his brief career. His final and fatal adventure, an attempt to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, made him legendary.
Hallinger, Herr
405; had an inn on the Oie off Peenemünde
Hand of Providence/God
"the powdery wipe of Nothing's hand" 24; 25; on Constant Slothrop's tombstone, 26-27; "the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud" 29; Invisible Hand, 30; "unconscious hands of London" 130; "mano morto" ("dead hand") 132; "a tiny hand comes out and gives Slothrop the tiny finger" 199; "white hands that move too quickly to be seen" 203; "playing against the invisible House" 205; "the hand of a terrible croupier" 209; "giving Slothrop the finger" 461; illustrated, 566; "the loud guillotine of Flanders run. . .by no visible hands" 616; "consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon" 652; "A-ha-hand" 692; "Hand of Glory" 750; "There is a Hand" 760; See also Puritans; The Game of Chess
Handbuch
"you hit town, here in the heart of downtown Peenemünde [...] hauling your [...] copy of the Handbuch" 452
190; Slothrop wears a hand-painted Wormwood Scrubs tie with a topless (at least) woman on it. In Inherent Vice, Mickey Wolfmann has a collection of hand-painted ties with pictures of his lovers nude in submissive positions.
Hanna, Mark (1837-1904)
664; American businessman and politician who, after the Civil War, went very successfully into the iron and coal business with his father. He entered politics in order to protect business interests and backed Republican candidates for president, including Garfield and McKinley. Became a senator from Ohio in 1897; "nickel magnate" who said: "You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything." 664-65
Hannomag Storm
485; According to McGovern, on March 16, 1945 Wernher von Braun's "young civilian driver" dozed off and "drove their compact car, a Hannomag Storm" off the autobahn, seriously injuring the driver and breaking von Braun's arm (p.94); wrecked auto Thanatz & Gretel come upon in the Heath
Hannover
550; Industrial and commercial capital city of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) in Germany
Happyville
644-46; where Mr. Information and Skippy go, instead of to Pain City; 655
Harley Street
170; 171;
Harriman, William Averell (1891-1986)
Prominent in the National Recovery Administration in 1934, he was F.D. Roosevelt's special war-aid representative in Britain in 1941, ambassador to the USSR in 1943 and to Britain in 1946; "Harrimans and Whitneys" 28; "Harriman and Weinberg" 581
Harrods
31; department store in London; [Harrod's Website]
Hart, Dorothy
381; competing for Miss Rheingold 1946
Harvard
63-65; 193; 286; elite Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachussetts (19 references,
Harvey Nicholls
94; upscale clothier in Knightsbridge, London
Harz, the
100; Mountain range in central Germany famous for ancient spiritual rituals and for canaries; 237; 289; 313; 328; 727 [MAP] [Image]
Hawasch
455; aerodynamics person on S-gerät project; In Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr Mabuse, der Spieler, Hawasch is the snaggle-toothed rotund forger who works under the city.
Havel
364; in Neubabelsberg, where Potsdam Conference was held in 1945;
Hawaii
"Slothrop's Hawaiian shirt" 186, 201; "'That "Hawaii I" You know anything about that?'" 207; "The Schwarzkommando use the 50 cm band--the one the Rocket's Hawaii II guidance operated on." 325; See also Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island
heat, the
570; American slang for "police"
Heini of Berlin
296; "famous military couturier" who designed the Raumwaffe ("space-force") spacesuit
Heinkels
407; "dropping iron models of the Rocket from 20,000 feet"
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation, stated by German theoretial physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) in 1925, posits that the more precise the measurements are for an electron's position, the less precise they are for its momentum. More generally, any measurement of a system must disturb the system under investigation, with a resulting lack of precision; "a dilemma built into Nature" to which the "analgesia and addiction" problem is likened; "we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity" 348; "Often the sting was bigger than the model itself--the very need to measure interfered with the observations" 452; "by the time you get any summary, the whole thing will have changed. We could shorten them for you as much as you like, but you'd be losing so much resolution it wouldn't be worth it" 541; See also Things That Can Happen in European Politics
Helgoland
Helgoland is a small island off of Cuxhaven. The red and white mentioned on page 652 refers to the contrast between the red clay of the cliffs rising from the white sand beaches; 450; 602; "that red-and-white Napolean pastry tipped in the sea" where Byron the Bulb stays "for a while at a hotel between the Hengst and the Mönch" 652; [Website (in German)]
heliotrope
18; a reddish-purple color; 145
Helm, Brigitte (1908-96)
393-94; German actress who played the robot in Metropolis. Read her biography here.
Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961)
292; American novelist and short-story writer
Hengst and the Mönch
652; German: "stallion, stud" and "monk"; these are the names of two large rocks on the southern tip of Helgoland, many of which have such fanciful names (according to Baedeker)
Henry
632; the name of a dead friend of a plasterer Mexico sees on his way to Twelfth House
Henry V
169; Gwenhidwy "descended directly from the Welshman in"
Henryk the Hare
730; Schwarzkommando traveling with Enzian; called "the Hare" because "he can never get messages right"
74; Ex-colonials from the Südwest (South-West Africa) living in Germany; "your dark, secret children" 75; "Ndjambi Karunga" = god or fucking, 100; 153; in exile in Germany for 2 generations, 315; "Last pocket of pre-Christian oneness" 321; "the village built like a mandala" 321; Gondwanaland, 321; 1904 Herero Rebellion, 361; Ovatjimba (aardvark) people, 403; almost wiped out by Germans in 1904, 452; washing-blue "abortifacient" 519; St. Pauli (washing-blue connection), 525; "An Introduction to Modern Herero" 536; "we had been passed over by von Trotha's army so that we would find the Aggregat" 563; 657; "built in mandalic form like a Herero village" 725
Heresy Question
538; "already a pebble in the shoe of the [Double-Agent Convention]"
Hermann and Wieselsberger
Dr. Rudolph Hermann worked at Peenemünde doing wind-tunnel research. Wieselsberger was his assistant; "look out into the country of the barbarians through [their] tiny window" 452
Hernández
386; Argentinian poet who wrote Martín Fierro; "Seven years later, Hernández wrote a Return of Martín Fierro, in which the Gaucho sells out" 387;
Herod, Antipas (22 BC - c.40 AD)
135; Palestinian ruler in Roman times who was in Jerusalem during Passover when Jesus was sent before him by Pilate for examination. He also had Jesus' cousin, John the Baptist, executed for, among other things, condemning Herod's marriage to his half-brother's wife. See also Judeo-Christian
Hesse, Hermann (1877 - 1962)
Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter, best known for the novels The Glass Bead Game, Steppenwolf, and Siddhartha, among others. "One of these German mystics who grew up reading" 403; Wikipedia entry
heterocyclic rings
250; Heterocyclic compounds are organic compounds that contain a ring structure containing atoms in addition to carbon, such as sulfur, oxygen or nitrogen, as part of the ring. They may be either simple aromatic rings or non-aromatic rings. Some examples are pyridine (C5H5N), pyrimidine (C4H4N2) and dioxane (C4H8O2). The suffix '-cyclic' implies a ring structure, while 'hetero' refers to an atom other than carbon, as above. Heterocyclic chemistry is the chemistry branch dealing exclusively with synthesis, properties and applications of heterocycles especially vital to drug design. [From Wikipedia]
Hexes-Stadt
718; German: "Witch City"
Hick's Garage
744; in Mingeborough, MA
Hilbert-Spaess, Sammy
217; double agent with "scombroid face [...] quick as a fire-control dish antenna and even less mercy"; at Double Agent Convention, with "pouched and Levantine eyes" 540; [Hilbert Space: "A multidimensional space in which the proper (eigen) functions of wave mechanics are represented by orthogonal unit vectors" - from The Penguin Dictionary of Physics]
Hilde
506; one of Haftung's chorus girls, whom Otto fancies
Himmel and Holle
567; German: "Heaven und Hell"
Himmler-Spielsaal
German: Spielsaal = "gaming room"; Heinrich Himmler (1900-45) was the leader of the SS from 1929-45. He greatly expanded the power and reach of the SS after Hitler came to power in 1933; gaming room at the Casino Hermann Goering, 194; 202; 205; Slothrop surprises Katje, 208; "You'll remember the Himmler-Spielsaal, and the skirt I was wearing" 225; 285
Hinduism
"face as blue as Krishna" 276
Hippocratic temperament
75; Hippocrates (?c.460-377 or 359 BC) (the "father of medicine") categorized people into different temperaments (phlegmatic, humid, bilious, melancholic), each of which described a constellation of tendencies and required a unique approach to the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Hiroshima
480; "a city on Honshu, the Inland Sea" in Japan, where Ensign Morituri & family live; "Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere? Really--somewhere in the East" 642; "MB DRO ROSHI" 693
Hirsch, Richard
156-58; old friend of Leni's about whom she dreams (?) and fantasizes marrying
Hispano-Suiza
181; luxury automobile made by the Spanish firm of the same name; auto in which Erdmann was taken to The Castle, 486; car priest uses to search for Byron, 653
history
"Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware--perhaps--that in his play [Mexico] wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. [...] Will Postwar be nothing but 'events,' newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?" 56; "daffy about that history" 65; "historied" 71; "[War] provides the raw material to be recorded into history" 105; "Our history is an aggregate of last moments" 149; secular, 167; "is not woven by innocent hands" 277; "winter anxieties about the End of History" 277; "the multitudes passed over by God and History" 297; "when there is no more History" 303; "History and Geopolitics move them surely into confrontation" 342; "The historical moment" 388; "some dialectic is still operating in History" 540; "by the time you get any summary, the whole thing will have changed" 540-41; "he has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth's mind" 589; rock's perspective ("Sentient Rocksters"), 612-13; "historical structure" 624; "prehistoric wastes. . .transmuted to the very substance of History" 639; "Pensiero is an agent of History" 643; Karmic Hammer, 644; predestined shape of, 701; "Theory of History" 704; "historied hands" 718; centrifugal, 737; See also Time
Hitler, Adolph
32; 116; 135; 151; 309; 349; "Hitler-head stamps" 373; "accept Hitler on the basis of Demian metaphysics" 403; "easily tickled by what the Germans call Schadenfreude" 526; Hitler Youth pet show, 556; unions and, 571; 630
Hod, Pappy
715; Bodine listening to him "tell disaster jokes, really funny ones"; "Hod [the sephiroth] is watery and logical" 748; [Pappy's also in V., yes]
Holmes, Sherlock
14; "a ~ London Evening"
holy shit
"Holy shit it's moving — an octopus?" 186; "'Holy shit.' This is the kind of sunset you hardly see anymore, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of" 214; "There are dozens of them, and each contains a deep, golden custard pie, which will fetch a fantastic price in Berlin. 'Wow,' cries Slothrop, 'holy shit. Surely I hallucinate'" 333; "Rocketman, holy shit, it really is. What's happening, ol' buddy?" 598; See also excrement
Home Service programme
134 The domestic arm of the BBC, as opposed to the World Service
Hooker, Thomas
22; "I know there is wilde love and joy enough in the world as there are wilde Thyme, and other herbs; but we would have garden love, and garden joy, of Gods owne planting."
Hoover, Herbert (d.1964)
31st president of the United States, from 1929 to 1933, and head of the Food Administration during WWII; "something to do with shack towns or vacuum cleaners ["Hoover" is a longtime brand of vacuum cleaners]" 374; "'He came over here and fed you people, when you were starving!" 565; picture of, on piano in the Tracys' home, 582; "Chiclitz declaiming on the virtues of" 611; Byron's Guerrilla Strike Force "gonna get [him] right in the face" 649;
Hoover, J. Edgar
"guardroom pinups of" 709
Höpmann
451; shipfitter on the Toiletship who, with Kreuss (as the Scatotechnic Snipes), routed the waste lines into the ventilation system, and transferred to icebreaker duty, "erected vaguely turd-shaped monoliths of ice and snow all across the Arctic"; See also Kreuss
Hopper
256; U.S. MP in Nice outside Slothrop's door
Hörlein, Dr. Heinrich
631; Sasuly: In 1908 he was in charge of the IG Bayer laboratories and, in 1909, "obtained a patent on a brick-red dye, the first of a series of new sulfonomide dyes. Bear in mind that the Bayer men customarily tried out new compounds both as dyes and as drugs." (pp.30-31)
Horrible Disasters in German Naval History
450; pictures of in officers' latrines on Toiletship
Hotel Nimbus
257; "in an obscure street in the Niederdorf or cabaret section of Zürich" where Slothrop stays
How I Came to Love the People
547
Humility, the
299; "this drifting Humility" 610; "the vast Humility sleepless, dying, in pain tonight across the Zone" 731;
humor
"winejelly" incident (aka "Disgusting English Candy Drill"), 116; "show us your papers!" 442; Hopmann's and Kreuss' prank on Toiletship, 451; "Super Animals In My Crack" 466; orgy on Anubis, 467; Frau Gnahb's criticisms, 497; Springer's Sodium Amytal-induced outbursts, 512, 514 and 746; "How I Came to Love the People" 547; pinball machines run amuck, 583-84; Miss Muller-Hochleben, 633; "I say. . ." 634; "helicopter!" 683; "Ass Backwards" 683; "It's an old saying among my people" 709; Kazoo Quartet, 711-12; discharge dumplings, u.s.w., 715; bad pun, 746
Hund-Stadt
614; German: "Dog-City"; village in Mecklenburg [MAP] taken over by army dogs after the war
Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin
93;
Hupla, Apprentice
300; Ölsch's apprentice at Mittelwerke
Hydra-Phänomen
German: "Hydra-phenomenon"; Hydra was the mythical snake which Hercules had to kill as one of his twelve labors. As soon as he cut off one of its heads, two shot up in its place; how Slothrop's plucking-of-self would be classified "were it not for the complete absence of hostility" 712
