Talk:Marathon Man

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Marathon Man article.
Please sign and date your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~). Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Ask questions, get answers. This is not a forum for general discussion about the article's subject.	Be polite Assume good faith No personal attacks Be welcoming	Article policies No original research Neutral point of view Verifiability

	Literature Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
Stub	This article has been rated as Stub-Class.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

[edit] Mengele is speculation?

It seems pretty clear to me that Christian Szell is based on the real-life Josef Mengele. Szell was a doctor who ran experiments at Auschwitz. The real-life Mengele was a doctor who ran experiments at Auschwitz. Szell moved to Paraguay after the war. The real-life Mengele moved to Paraguay after the war, and Simon Wiesenthal had been claiming it since 1967 (Wiesenthal, Simon. The Murderers Among Us. Saturday Evening Post. 3/11/1967. Vol. 240 Issue 5. p38-53, 13p).

Mengele and Szell are mentioned together in the book as the "twin angels" of Auschwitz. The real-life Mengele was indeed known as the Angel of Death, most likely as a play on his name. "Angel" in German is "Engel." Szell is called "der weisser Engel."

Several commentators make such a connection. e.g.:

• Christopher P. Toumey in The Moral Character of Mad Scientists: A Cultural Critique of Science (Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 17, No. 4. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 411-437)
• Victoria Allison in White Evil: Peronist Argentina in the US Popular Imagination Since 1955 (American Studies International 42 no1 4-48 F 2004)
• Pico Iyer in Searches the Mengele Mystery (Time, Monday, Jun. 24, 1985)
• Wiesenthal's Last Hunt (Time, Monday, Sep. 26, 1977)
• (Google News has several possible hits, as well, but they're all subscription-only)

All of this together leads to the conclusion that the Szell character was inspired, at least in part, by Josef Mengele. So unless you can give me a good reason to ignore Time Magazine and peer-reviewed journals, it's going back in. superluser_tc 2007 August 17, 06:54 (UTC)

Oop! It was actually Paraguay in the book superluser_tc 2007 August 17, 07:06 (UTC)