In this SNLC from right after Kurt Vonnegut's death, I mentioned that in the main text that while I had visited the city of that diary's title, I wrote in the tip jar that I had not yet read KV's Slaughterhouse-Five, where the firebombing of Dresden 65 years ago today formed part of the novel's setting. Self remedied that literary deficiency (very) recently. I also happen to have a copy (ordered in the most accidental, loserly way, natch) of KV's Armageddon in Retrospect, where one essay is a non-fiction reminiscence about Dresden. So what follows are some random ramblings about the novel, with a bunch of related links (natch) with other perspectives on the firebombing. With that....
Besides seeing the 1972 film, one of my pre-actual read memories related to Slaughterhouse-Five was a passage from Otto Friedrich's biography of Glenn Gould (who supervised the J.S. Bach selections for the 1972 film), as follows:
"Slaughterhouse-Five might have been - should have been - Vonnegut's best and most important novel, for the disaster at Dresden was central to both his own experiences and his view of the world. As a war prisoner, Vonnegut himself had survived the most concentrated destruction of the entire war because he had been confined in an underground slaughterhouse. As a German-American, he was all too well qualified to see the ironies in the carnage. Perhaps because of that, Vonnegut avoided any real confrontation with his experience, first by not writing about it for many years, or rather by writing and then throwing away what he had written.....
Vonnegut finally solved his problem only by framing his half-suppressed recollections within the familiar amiabilities of his science-fiction fantasies, of magical flights to the planet Tralfamadore. If Billy Pilgrim's space travels were fantasy, then so was the bombing of Dresden, or if the space travel was symbolic, then so too was Dresden. Either way, we all escape the realities of the firestorm that killed more than 135,000 people in a single night."
Citation: Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations. Random House (New York), 1989, pp. 261-262.
Vonnegut admitted himself in the first chapter of the novel that he was not up to the challenge of capturing the full horror of what he saw in mere words, with a reference to Lot's wife:
"This one is a failure, and it had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt."
Citation: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, Laurel paperback edition (1991 printing), p. 22
Reading it, and given the novel's reputation, it is surprising perhaps to see how little treatment the destruction of Dresden receives in the book, in terms of page numbers, if nothing else. It's understandable, in retrospect, since as KV also wrote in the first chapter:
"When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen....
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then - not enough of them to make a book, anyway."
Citation: Ibid., p. 2
Vonnegut actually did address the firebombing of Dresden more directly many years later in print, in the posthumously published collection Armageddon in Retrospect, specifically in the essay "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets":
"In February, 1945, Dresden, Germany, was destroyed, and with it over one hundred thousand human beings. I was there....
I was among a group of one hundred and fifty infantry privates, captured in the Bulge breakthrough and put to work in Dresden. Dresden, we were told, was the only major city to have escaped bombing so far. That was in January, 1945. She owed her good fortune to her unwarlike countenance: hospitals, breweries, food-processing plants, surgical supply houses, ceramics, musical instrument factories, and the like."
Citation: Kurt Vonnegut, "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets", from Armageddon in Retrospect, G.P. Putnam's Sons, p. 35 (2008)
Looking back, what is perhaps more noteworthy about Slaughterhouse-Five is the harsh portrait it gives, to the point of caricature, of some very unsympathetic US soldiers who were fellow prisoners of Billy Pilgrim. For those who know the novel, I'm referring, for one, to Roland Weary, a sadist who thinks that the medieval instrument known as the "iron maiden" is cool, and who continually harangues Billy Pilgrim while claiming that he keeps saving his life again and again. Weary slowly loses it, and finally dies as a POW, blaming Billy Pilgrim for his death, infecting the whole other group of prisoners with that "extreme prejudice". One other nutjob, Paul Lazzaro, promises to Roland Weary that he'll get revenge on Billy Pilgrim for "causing" Weary's death, even though any rationale or justification for Weary's tirade against Billy Pilgrim is flimsy at best.
Lazzaro is, to put it kindly, a vicious, sadistic, psychopathic bully who thinks nothing of getting his revenge on a dog who bit him, once, by taking a steak and a clock spring, cutting up the clock spring into sharp metal shards, and embedding them in the steak, which he then subsequently feeds to the dog. As you can guess, if you didn't already know, he enjoys watching the dog suffer and expire subsequently. Extending that way of thinking to people:
"Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he said."
Citation: Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 140
You'll note that he says that he could "have anybody in the world killed", not that he would pull the trigger himself. In short, he's also, in a sense, a chickenhawk, a casually violent moral coward who gleefully revels in speaking so lightly about murder. Or, to transplant an anachronistic political term in a bit of literary retroactiveness, Paul Lazzaro is a teabagger, taken to the extreme.
One must remember that Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969, during the Vietnam War, even though there is even less reference to Vietnam in the novel than Dresden. That is perhaps more remarkable given how unsympathetic the portraits of Roland Weary and Paul Lazzaro, hardly sterling examples of "our troops" (as in "support", ya know). In fact, in that context, one could say that Slaughterhouse-Five is not so much "about Dresden" than about the callousness in war towards human life, exemplified from "on high" by the bombs dropped from the planes, and "on the ground" in the form of Lazzaro, especially.
Speaking of loathsome people, one unfortunate artifact of the novel, in hindsight, is that it cites David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden in passing. At the time of its publication around 1963-1964, Irving's book codified the conventional wisdom of the destruction of Dresden as a grotesque overreaction of the Allies against a city of no military value. Vonnegut could not have known at the time, of course, that David Irving would later achieve notoriety as a honey-tongued anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and his research would be called into question, as noted in a review of Frederick Taylor's book Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 by Neal Ascherson in The Observer:
"How many died? Irving produced a contemporary document reporting 202,400 registered dead and predicting that another 250,000 would be found. Taylor shows that Irving's copy had been faked by the Nazis, who had simply added a nought to each total. His own estimate is between 25,000 and 40,000, almost all civilians and refugees."
(Note: I've not read Taylor's book. All citations referring to it are taken from related articles and reviews. Maybe one day I'll read it.)
Furthermore, Dresden was not quite so innocent of the Nazi taint or the overall Third Reich war effort as the "conventional wisdom" says. In their respective reviews of Taylor's book, Michael Burleigh in The Guardian and Ascherson point this out:
Burleigh: "[Taylor] convincingly rebuts - one hesitates to write 'demolishes' - the legend that Dresden was purely a cultural centre, since even the (neighbouring) Meissen porcelain manufacturers had been converted to produce military teletypers. In fact, Dresden had considerable light industrial facilities that had been covertly transformed from making cigarettes or squeezable toothpaste into producing such precision military equipment as bomb-sights, fuses and radios, as well as vast quantities of bullets."
Ascherson: "Was Dresden an 'innocent' city, without war industries or military importance? It was not. The city's peacetime luxury industries had been converted to high-technology war production, especially in optics and electronics. The railway directorate in Dresden controlled traffic throughout south-eastern Germany and Bohemia, and an average of 28 troop or military trains passed through the main station daily."
In his New York Times review, Gabriel Schoenfeld touches on another aspect:
"To begin with, though a great many innocent civilians perished in the firestorm, the city itself had hardly been a model of innocence. Rather, it was a Nazified redoubt; the bulk of its citizens passionately supported Hitler's war of aggression. Those who did not actively persecute the small Jewish community within their midst quietly stood by while it was physically eliminated."
You can read a portion of the first chapter of Taylor's book here. I had heard vaguely about this book, in the manner of what Paul Oestreicher wrote in The Guardian
"I had been led to believe that the author had set out to vindicate the RAF for the mass killing of German civilians, as exemplified by the Dresden firestorm that, in one night of horror, incinerated between 25,000 and 40,000 people. However, this well-written, scholarly account does nothing of the kind. It tells a terrible story from the British and German perspectives. Taylor makes no judgment, military or moral. He leaves that to the reader."
Ascherson further states in his review:
"As Taylor dismantles more myths, he becomes increasingly appalled by the truth which remains. This is a rigorous book, written by a man who does not deny his own feelings."
Taylor spoke more recently about how the myths about Dresden persist in this interview with Der Spiegel:
"SPIEGEL ONLINE: For neo-Nazis in Germany, the Dresden bombing anniversary has become the central day of protest. Why is that?
Taylor: The neo-Nazis use the anniversary in two ways. First, as a straight propaganda bludgeon against the victors of World War II, an exemple of the Allies' allegedly criminal conduct of the war against Germany. Second, more subtly, as a tool to relativize Adolf Hitler's Holocaust. They refer to a 'bomb holocaust' of the Allies against the civilian inhabitants of German cities, wildly inflating the figures involved and, of course, underplaying the number of Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals and political prisoners, and other millions of victims of the real Holocaust. It is this two-fold advantage of the Dresden anniversary protests that is especially attractive to the neo-Nazis and their associates. Plus, many otherwise respectable people in Dresden and elsewhere, many of whom grew up with the post-war myths, continue to believe in the inflated casualty figures and in the criminality of the Allied bombing campaign."
BTW, cwkraus4clark has this diary today about a neo-Nazi rally in Dresden, in keeping with Taylor's point. It also is worth mentioning that Vonnegut himself alluded to the mass murder of so many "undesirables" in the Third Reich that Taylor summarized above, in the context of candles and soap that the German guards allowed British prisoners to have:
"Only the candles and soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State."
Citation: Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 96
So even though Vonnegut, with hindsight, got it wrong about the number of dead in the destruction of Dresden and how "anti-Nazi" and "non-military" the city was during WWII, it doesn't take away the fact that he was there on that terrible day and saw things that none of us should wish to see. His disquiet at the death inflicted from on high that day remained with him for the rest of his life:
"There can be no doubt that the Allies fought on the side of right and the Germans and the Japanese on the side of wrong. World War II was fought for near-Holy motives. But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous. That the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem....
....I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the World's generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on Earth."
Citation: Vonnegut, "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets", pp. 44-45
Towards the end of the Spiegel interview, Taylor more dispassionately summarizes:
Taylor: "The question therefore is not whether Dresden contained legitimate bombing targets, but whether the method and intensity of the February 1945 bombing was justifiable.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think it was justifiable?
Taylor: Personally, though I can trace the logic of it, I have serious doubts. It is a ghastly example of how war depletes the moral reserves even of democratic nations."
At the very end of the interview, Taylor cites the German journalist Götz Bergander, who was also in Dresden the day of the firebombing, age 18. 60 years later, he spoke to Luke Harding in The Guardian:
"Bergander, who lives in Berlin, told The Observer he believed the destruction of Dresden was 'a mistake with terrible consequences'. But he added: 'To understand it you have to understand the motivation of the other side. In many ways the raid was routine.'"
One wonders if Bergander and Vonnegut ever met. So it goes.....
So, in a total emotional 180 disconnect from what you just read (or skipped), this weekend marks Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras weekend celebrations, and the start of Chinese New Year tomorrow (not to mention the start of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, although for obvious reasons, things there aren't as upbeat as they could be). The usual SNLC protocol follows, for those so inclined, namely your loser stories for the week below. With the 3 occasions so noted, plenty of opportunity for tie-ins ;) .....