The sixth chapter examines German intellectual understandings of chemical warfare technologies. Several of the most influential interwar intellectuals were veterans of World War I, having experienced gas attacks and used gas masks during their wartime service. Revealing the salience of poison gas in the interwar imagination, this chapter explores the numerous literary, artistic, and cinematic works that attempted to grapple with the individual soldier’s relationship to chemical weapons. Indeed, the continued contact with relentlessly changing and often dangerous technology such as poison gas and the gas mask exemplified the mental uncertainty and political instability of early twentieth-century Germany. As part of a larger debate surrounding militarized technology, arguments over the controllability of poison gas and the viability of gas discipline most clearly played out in the writings of Ernst Jünger and joint projects of Walter Benjamin and Dora Sophie Kellner. These three thinkers constructed highly theoretical visions of aerial warfare technologies that neatly represented two of the major political commitments in the continuing debate over Germany’s potential rearmament and the use of poison gas.

In what would prove to be his last interview, Bolaño named for Monica Maristain the books that had marked his life. Alongside works in Spanish, English, French, and Latin, he also named Franz Kafka’s novels, the Aphorisms of Lichtenberg, and the Tractatus by Wittgenstein. This troika can be supplemented with Russian authors mentioned repeatedly in works and essays, for example Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This chapter enumerates and analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s deep and persistent engagement with German and Russian literatures, and tries to make sense of a fundamental difference in the two repertoires: most of the Russian authors mentioned or alluded to in Bolaño’s work are recognized names in world literature read and appreciated by non-specialists, whereas his chosen German authors range from immortals such as J. W. von Goethe to long-forgotten names like Heinrich Lersch and Max Barthel. It is no surprise that these two literary traditions join in dialectical fashion in Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666, where a German, Hans Reiter, derives literary inspiration from the diary of a Russian Jew, Boris Abramovich Ansky. The two literatures struggle with each other as do the two armies to cognitively map the evils of the 20th century.

Chapter 11 covers the period from the DNVP’s resignation from the first Luther cabinet in October 1925 to its reentry into the national government in January 1927. In particular, this chapter examines the deteriorating situation in the German countryside and increased pressure from organized agriculture for the DNVP to rejoin the national government in order to protect the domestic market against agricultural imports from abroad. Industry, too, had become frustrated with the DNVP’s absence in the national government and intensified its pressure on the party for a reassessment of its coalition strategy. But the patriotic Right – and particularly the Stahlhelm, which had fallen more and more under the influence of Theodor Duesterberg and the militantly anti-Weimar elements on its right wing – strongly resisted any move that might presage the DNVP’s return to the government. Shocked by the impressive showing of middle-class splinter parties in the Saxon state elections in late October 1926, the DNVP responded to overtures from the DVP and Center to explore the possibility of reorganizing the government and entered into negotiations that ended with its entry into the fourth Marx cabinet in January 1927.