I have a coffee cup in storage in Berlin. It bears a fetching image of a V-2 rocket and the name of the touristic locale in Germany where I bought it: Peenemünde.
The most brilliant epigraph in the history of literature (I'm making a sweeping claim not out of omniscience but wild enthusiasm) comes at the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.—Wernher Von Braun." When I first read those words, as a college freshman, I took them at face value—as scientific proof (very much in vogue at the time) of the reality of the spiritual realm. I had no idea that Von Braun, developer of the V-2, was Hitler's chief rocket scientist. Still less did I know of his salvation at the hands of American troops, as Berlin fell, or of his subsequent rehabilitation in the United States, where he became Nixon's chief rocket scientist and a member of the nasa team that put the first man on the moon (no wonder Von Braun believed in life after death).
From a short essay by Jeffrey Eugenides in
"Pynchon from A to V."