After traveling from Pale Fire's Wordsmith to Pnin's Waindell, trying in vain to understand the relations between their German and Russian Departments, I felt a renewed shock when I read Dr. Hagen's words (the Head of the German Department and Pnin's "staunch protector"), about Buchenwald and Weimar. As the narrator points out, Dr Hagen is "the gentlest of souls alive." and how good Dr. Hagen is the reader can judge for himself.** 

Not only the Germans fell under the narrator's scrutiny but the President of Waindell College, too, with his not very amusing alienation. Anyway, it's clear  that, at the time Pnin and Pale Fire were written, both Germany and Russia were "torture houses." 

 

Excerpts: "Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin [...]because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget — because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and [...] being too weak to work[ .]she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the beautifully wooded Grosser Ettersberg, as the region is resoundingly called. It is an hour's stroll from Weimar, where walked Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland, the inimitable Kotzebue and others. 'Aber warum — but why — ' Dr Hagen, the gentlest of souls alive, would wail, 'why had one to put that horrid camp so near!' for indeed, it was near — only five miles from the cultural heart of Germany — 'that nation of universities,' as the President of Waindell College, renowned for his use of the mot juste, had so elegantly phrased it when reviewing the European situation in a recent Commencement speech, along with the compliment he paid another torture house, 'Russia — the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men'."