Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 10:22:52 -0800
From: rmt@well.com (Randy Tinkerman)
To: sarfatti@well.com
From last week's
Fig Tree Productions with Salem Productions
Ted Kotcheff, directing
Wm Immerman, Exec prod
Christian von Bentheim, Prod
John Briley, Script
Based on the book:
It was 1978. I had recently written a black comedy called Hitler's Last Weapon. It was about a Werner Erhard type guy who is the reincarnation of Hitler and becomes the first psychic dictator of the United States. This was not so far fetched then. Werner was riding high and Sixty Minutes had not yet accused him of allegedly sexually abusing his daughter and beating his wife [1] which, in his defense, I strongly doubt as being true. My old boy Cornell chum, Lee Myers, had paid Steve Hill to make a twenty minute radio program of the script with British actor Eric Bauersfeld narrating. The program became a minor cult classic on public radio and is still played late at night.
One day I was sitting on the terrace of the Savoy Tivoli on Grant Avenue in North Beach. I believe, but I am not certain, that Leila Minturn Dwight introduced me to a handsome young man of about nineteen that she said was her distant cousin from Munich. The young man, Eric Hanfstaengl, was here for the summer and soon became a regular part of my circle of Caffe cronies. I'm not sure I got the first name right. I did not pay too much attention to him as I was more interested in meeting women and I have avoided parental roles. I did invite him to a party given by bon-vivant Norwood Pratt [2]. The young Hanfstaengl came in lederhosen and sang Tyrolean songs. In the course of casual conversations he had indicated that his grandfather Ernst Franz Sedgwick-Hanfstaengl (a.k.a. Putzi) had played an important role in history. He was never specific. I did not realize then that his grandfather had been the Victor Borge of The Third Reich personally beloved by Adolph Hitler. I did not know then that the young man's father sat on Hitler's lap many times and called him "Uncle Dolph". I did not know that the young Hanfstaengl's grandfather was depicted in Syberberg's Our Hitler which I had seen. The end of summer came. Young Hanfstaengl's wife-to-be came, she was the daughter of the publisher of Der Stern. The two innocent children went back to Munich and I hope are living happily ever after.
Putzi's book Unheard Witness [3] is dedicated to his friend Oswald Spengler. Like many of the Sedgwicks [4], Putzi has a gift for writing. Here are a few tantalizing short literary bytes from his table of contents:
My schooldays with Himmler's father - Sedgwick, Heine and Hanfstaengl forbears - Harvard and Theodore Roosevelt ... The American military attache speaks of Hitler-Introduction to an agitator ... Introducing Hitler to society ... Wagner on an upright piano ... Plan for a putsch ... Hitler's attempted suicide.Hitler's attempted suicide in 1923 - here hangs a tale in which the inaction of Putzi's wife, Fr. Helene Niemeyer Hanfstaengl, could have prevented World War Two and the development of the atomic bomb by my Cornell physics professors who were at Los Alamos. In fact, what happened in this universe, was that she stopped Hitler from shooting himself in the head, at the very last moment, by knocking the gun out of his hand just as the police were about to enter.
If the many worlds interpretation of quantum reality is correct, then, at that dramatic moment the universe split into two parallel universes. In the universe next door the Holocaust never happened and neither did the State of Israel. Carlo Suares speaking from the occult cabalistic perspective said that Hitler was God's Instrument for the Restoration of Israel. I do not think it was worth the price.
The parallel between Putzi's relation to Hitler and mine to Werner is interesting, but Putzi, a member of the high and mighty ruling class, had a lot more fun and lived much higher on the hog. Putzi writes:
The log-chest in the corner of the fireplace in my library is still covered with the traveling rug I lent to Hitler when he was a prisoner in Landsberg ... It was to my house in Munich ... that he came for his first meal after release from jail and where, nearly a decade later, he celebrated with Eva Braun the year of his triumph. Mine was the first Munich family of standing into which he was introduced in the days of his insignificance. ... I tried to impregnate him with some of the norms and ideas of civilized existence, only to be thwarted by the ignorant fanatics who were his closest cronies. I fought a running and losing battle against Rosenberg [5] and his hazy race mystique ....People have said I was Hitler's court jester. Certainly I used to tell him jokes, but only to get him into the sort of mood in which I hoped he would see reason. I was the only man who could hammer out Tristan and the Meistersinger to his satisfaction ... My mother was born a Sedgwick-Heine. My maternal grandmother came from the well-known New England family and was a cousin of the General John Sedgwick who fell at Spotsylvania Court House in the Civil War and whose statue stands at West Point. My grandfather was another Civil War general, William Heine. In the funeral cortege of Abraham Lincoln he was one of the Generals who carried the coffin. My mother ... could remember Lincoln's funeral clearly ... The Hanfstaengls ... For three generations ... were privy councilors to the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ...in 1905 I was sent to Harvard ... I made friends with ... T.S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, Hendrik von Loon, Hans von Kaltenborn, Robert Benchley and John Reed... President Theodore Roosevelt ... had heard of my prowess through his son and invited me to Washington in the winter of 1908 ... I ... took over the Hanfstaengl branch on Fifth Avenue. It was a delightful combination of business and pleasure. The famous names who visited me were ... Pierpont Morgan, Toscanini, Henry Ford, Caruso, Santos-Dumont [6], Charlie Chaplin, Paderewski ... I took most of my meals at the Harvard Club, where I made friends with the young Franklin D. Roosevelt.Putzi finally fled Hitler in 1938 in fear of Goebbels's jealousy of Hitler's fondness for him. Putzi's distant cousin FDR was embarrassed by Putzi's presence in Washington and sent him to an obscure Army post in Texas. Sam Rayburn pressured FDR into accepting the Pentagon design for the new war office as part of the Putzi deal. FDR wanted another design.
Francis Ford Coppola distributed Syberberg's film Our Hitler. Putzi is a major character in that film. I did not realize the connection until years later. I saw Our Hitler around the same time that I met Putzi's grandson in North Beach.
My connection to the Sedgwick karma thickens because two years later in 1981, Leila Dwight introduced me to her aunt, Suky Sedgwick, who was Edie Sedgwick's baby sister. I fell in love with Suky's magical qualities [7] and we became lovers. I did not know about Edie and the tragic suicides [8] in Suky's family, nor was I consciously aware of the connection to young Hanfstaengl.
The Sedgwicks seem to have an Orphic connection to Hades as might have been imagined by Edgar Allen Poe. John P. Marquand, Jr., a Sedgwick himself writes:
Have you ever seen the old graveyard up there in Stockbridge? In one corner is the family's burial place: it's called the Sedgwick Pie ... In the center Judge Theodore Sedgwick is buried ... his tombstone, a high rising obelsik ... The legend is that on Judgment Day when they arise and face the Judge, they will have to see no one but Sedgwicks ... He was a political ally of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington ...Minturn had always been very much involved in the traditions of the Pie .. Kennedy knew all about the Sedgwick Pie, and Minturn wondered after having watched the ... Kennedy funeral - the casket on the horse drawn cart ... if perhaps Mrs. Kennedy hadn't 'borrowed' the idea from us ... He stocked up on simple coffins ... got into them and 'tested' them ...pp.3-9 EDIE
Suky can be charming brilliant and sexy. She loves to give dinner parties to the music of Ella Fitzgerald [9] and Louis Armstrong. She plays classical piano and is a great Italian cook.
Like the Henry Jamesian American Princess abroad that she was, she had married an Italian count and was fluent in Italian as well as French. She had spend years in Africa as well as in Italy. I met her on the rebound from her husband Fabrizio Corsi. At the time I did not know that I could also have claimed Italian Nobility because of the Sarfatti Crest on a wall of the Synagogue in Venice given by the Doge.
Suky's bedroom contained a leather-bound set of the autographed works of Rudyard Kipling that she inherited from her De Forest grandmother. Her grandmother nursed Kipling to health after a severe illness at their Long Island estate. British Parliament opened with "God Save Kipling." and they sent a letter of thanks to Suky's grandparents.
Suky was my Reluctant Muse. She was my Eurydice, my Desdemona, my Cressida, my Kundry, my Salome, my Cleopatra, my Morgana La Fey, my Carmen. Was Orphee a tenor? Yes, in Gluck's opera.
Andy Warhol's film Ciao! Manhattan stars Edie. The plot involves a UFO contactee in a relation to Edie which precognizes my future relation to Suky. I did not see the Warhol film until my romance with Suky was over - for then, at least...
Suky's grandfather Henry Dwight Sedgwick wrote a prophetic essay "House of Sorrow" [10] in 1908 in which he says that the future creates the past. His imagery is almost identical with that of Sir Fred Hoyle's [11] in his recent book The Intelligent Universe. I believe that the quantum force of destiny, or the Ghost of Henry Dwight Sedgwick, has guided me to Suky. I would not have known about Henry Dwight were it not for Suky.
I relate a Jungian synchronicity. I was attending a meeting of the AAAS at the Hilton Hotel in 1980. A man walked up to me noticed my name tag "Sarfatti" and said "Are you related to Margherita Sarfatti?" [12] "Yes, distantly.", I replied. "I have traced your family tree back a thousand years to Rashi de Troyes. My name is David Padwa." Padwa told me a little about the great French Rabbi. He claimed that one of Rashi's daughters went to Spain and that her descendants formed our Italian branch [13] after the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492. He said we were distant cousins. He gave me his card. He was from Santa Fe, New Mexico. I mentioned the incident to beat poet, Gregory Corso. Corso said. "Oh yeah, Padwa! I knew him in the Village. He's a smart guy who made a lot of money from Xerox. He went with Ram Dass to India. He's mentioned in the book Be Here Now as the rich American in the Land Rover. He's a real heavy with the Dalai Lama. He brought the Dalai Lama to America." About a month goes by. Dave Masetti, editor of North Beach Magazine back then hands me a letter from Padwa. I open it. Padwa writes that a strange thing happened to him right after he met me. He had been looking for the autobiography of George Gamow's My World Line for six months. It was out of print. Mathematician Stan Ulam had told Padwa to read it. Padwa leaves me at the Hilton after the conversation about Rashi wanders over to North Beach and discovers My World Line on a shelf in Discovery Bookstore. He then goes to Ferlinghetti's City Light's Bookstore and sees a copy of North Beach Magazine with my picture on the cover. In the picture I am holding a copy of Gamow's My World Line in front of a large poster of Einstein. Here is the picture which I finally found from John Shaw in North Beach on Jan 11 1997. It is from Jan 1980 issue of North Beach Magazine.
I reproduce the following information for the record.
SARFATTI-GRASSINI, MARGHERITA ... A mistress, confidante, and biographer of Mussolini, Sarfatti was a highly influential figure in the cultural and artistic policies of the Fascist regime ... from a comfortable Venetian-Jewish family ... A woman of acute intelligence and sophistication, while still in her teens she became a militant activist in the Italian Socialist Party ... and in the feminist movement along with such major Socialist women as Angelica Balabanoff, Anna Kuliscioff, and Clara Zetkin ... She ... married a Socialist lawyer, Cesare Sarfatti, and both became close friends and supporters of Mussolini ... Their son Roberto (1900-18) who was killed in the war, was later an object of Fascist veneration ... In the years during the struggle for power Sarfatti and Mussolini became intimate friends, and she exercised an increasing influence on him. ... she was dubbed the 'dictator of the figurative arts.' Sarfatti was one of the most avid admirers of twentieth-century modernism ... her political influence enabled her to .... sponsor painters, sculptors and architects ... In 1925- 26 Sarfatti was instrumental in founding the Novecento art group in Milan. ... by 1934 their intimate relationship had ended .... The final break came in 1938 with the passage of the Fascist anti-Semitic laws ... In 1939 she left Italy on a passport provided for her on Mussolini's instructions...- Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy, P.V. Cannistrano (Greenwood)
Mussolini's grand daughter is active in politics. She is the niece of Sophia Loren.
I was at the Rev. Moon Unity of Science Conference on the Absolute at the Fairmont Hotel in 1980. I met Yuval Ne-eman [14] and Max Jammer from Israel. Ne-eman was quite interested in talking about the significance of the name "Sarfatti" to Jewish History. Ne-eman was, of course, talking of Rashi - the first Sarfatti [15]. Ne-eman has published an important paper on the fiber bundle mathematics of the quantum connection beyond space-time.
Samuel Sarfatti was the personal physician to Pope Julius the Second. Samuel was a friend of Michelangelo. He taught anatomy to Michelangelo. Sarfatti used his influence with the Pope to get Michelangelo the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo shows God reaching backwards to Adam. This is the perfect symbol for the root idea of my new physics that the future creates the past. God evolved from man in our future uses time travel to create the universe and man in what physicists now call a "globally self-consistent loop in time".
Part of my new physics message is that synchronicity can be an effect of contact with advanced intelligence able to manipulate the quantum connection in what John Lilly calls "cosmic coincidence control". This is a dangerous idea, but it may be true. It is a scientifically testable idea. Quantum devices can be built base upon it if it is true. In fact, I have published a design for one [16].
I do not mean to imply that every paranoid fantasy by mentally disturbed people should be accepted on face value - but, I suggest, some of the "voices" people hear might be from elsewhere. Each case must be studied individually in a scientific objective way.
I think the extreme relativism of New Age thinking is wrong. True, there are many complementary points of view equally valid within their proper context, but the whole idea of physics is that there are objective absolute "invariant" truths.
I must relate another Jungian synchronicity that just happened. An old Cornell buddy generously gave me a powerful 486 50MHZ computer with lots of RAM for me to run Stephen Wolfram's MATHEMATICA program for my research. I am still learning the intricacies of how to use software in composing this book. Somehow, using the indexing feature of Microsoft Word, I got "Santos Dumont" from the Putzi quote to appear in the style window where it should not be. I had been in Santos Dumont's house in Brasil in 1985 but his name does not usually come up in my work. One of my assistants, David Gladstone, was working on a 286 computer in the same office. He was writing a comparison of my views with Jung's. I quit for the night and picked up Richard Hall's UNINVITED GUESTS, A Documented History Of UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters & Coverups (Aurora, Santa Fe). Sitting in bed, I "randomly" open the book to page 183 and read:
Geometrical UFOs were sighted at least as early as 1904 in a formation that dove, then climbed away, observed by crew members of the U.S.S. Supply, a Navy ship off the U.S. west coast. Unless the Wright Brothers or Santos Dumont suddenly made a miraculous breakthrough in propulsion that has since been lost to aviation history, these could not have been secret devices. Nor could the structured, craft-like objects observed in controlled air lanes and over urban areas for the past 40 years have been secret devices, unless their operators have gone quite mad. ...We cannot rule out the theoretical possibility that they come from some presently unknown realm, such as a parallel universe impinging on our reality in some way; that they are space/time travelers ... or that they are puppets or androids manipulated by some Super intelligence that itself might take a totally non-human form.I am reminded of the final scenes of The Wizard of Oz. I am suggesting, as a working scientific hypothesis to be tested, that Super intelligence has been contacting certain physicists whether they realize it or not. I am one , John Wheeler, Kip Thorne, David Deutsch and others are part of the contactee group.
The parallel "universe next door" idea must be taken more seriously because of a physics paper "Quantum mechanics near closed timelike lines" published by Oxford University's David Deutsch in the November 15, 1991 Physical Review D. Deutsch makes the astounding suggestion that:
One can speculate what might happen if we one day discover or create, a closed timelike world tube large and regular enough to accommodate safely the entire solar system, and we have the means to move the solar system into it. Then we should be in a position to create any number of copies of the solar system. ... and the process would succeed with subjective certainty ... If the effect is typically used ... then it would be very unlikely that any young civilization such as ourselves would yet have observed other intelligent life even if civilizations come into existence quite frequently in the galaxy.(p.3211)
(c) Jack Sarfatti, 1992, 1995
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