> In an essay years ago someone neatly turned the tables on this remark
> by pointing out that Switzerland also produced the Liberal historian
> Jacob Burckhardt, who invented the Renaissance (in his 1860 book Die
> Kultur der Renaissance in Italien).
I've often wondered if the cuckoo-quote "fella" who Welles-Lyme refers to is Bruckhardt's student, Nietzsche, who had a qualified regard for the Borgias. But I haven't located the source of the paraphrase.
It's interesting that the discussion of The Third Man pops up at the same time as the discussion of the munging of email addresses and identities for the list. As everybody knows the plot of the film revolves around mistaken and forged identities:
the titular Third Man: Harry Lyme/Joseph Harbin; Anna with her forged papers; Holly Martins calls Major Calloway "Callahan"; Martins pronounces "Dr. Winkle" as "Dr. Vinkle"; Anna calls Holly "Harry"; Anna is an actress who first appears in baroque costume; Martins is mistaken for a "real" writer; Martins is mistaken for the murderer of the building superintendant.
Lyme was the "admin" of a network whose nodes and channels were the sewers of Vienna. The film depicts the attempt of the law to establish beyond doubt the identity of Lyme, and to eliminate the profusion of assumed and mistaken identities.
The heart of the matter is that Harry uses pseudonyms to evade the law that seeks to bring him to justice for horrendous crimes, while helping Anna to create a forged identity that allows her to escape the law of a totalitarian regime.