Kurt Vonnegut has been my favorite author since high school, when I read the short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House in Mrs. Burdick’s Romance and Realism in Literature class. One short story of his and I was hooked. The next book to make an impact was Slaughterhouse Five, named after the place where Mr. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. While stationed in Germany, Dresden was a place I could not go. It was a city behind the Iron Curtain. During my recent visit, the curtain was lifted at long last.
To get there, we took the train from Berlin to Dresden. It was a new experience for my son, as intercity train travel is not really a thing in the Midwest. It was the first time in 10 days I could relax while traveling instead of white-knuckling it on the autobahn. Tip: It’s worth it to spend the extra 10 Euros per day to upgrade from a compact car.
Of course, after touring Dresden in a Trabant, I will never complain about the trusty compact that took us from Austria to Berlin. The Trabant (affectionately called a Trabi) we had is a two-cylinder, two-cycle engine that gives a whopping 26 horsepower. I have driven lawn mowers with bigger engines. During the time of the DDR if you wanted a Trabant you had to be connected, and you had to have patience as time on the waiting list was measured in years, not months. Our tour guide had mentioned that the average wait was in the neighborhood of 12 years—for a car that Time magazine ranked as one of the worst 50 cars ever built:
This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness (actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany's answer to the VW Beetle — a "people's car," as if the people didn't have enough to worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi. Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!
Having driven one for about three hours, that is an accurate account. The mechanical brakes were terrifying, and it felt akin to driving a mosquito fogger as we left a trail of black smoke everywhere we went. That being said, it was a pretty cool and fun experience.
While cruising around Dresden in a Trabant we learned that the city is still rebuilding from World War II. Our guide told us that the Communists wanted to leave the ruins from the fire bombing as they were to remind people of what the capitalists did to their city during the war.
Dresden was one city where I wish we would have had more time. But the weather did not cooperate—it was dreadfully hot, and then it stormed. It did not help that I could not read the city transit map and got us hopelessly lost at one point, finally resorting to flagging a taxi down to get us back to our hotel.
One of the oddest things in Dresden is the shopping area by the Hauptbanhof. It is a huge shopping mall, rivaling many large American shopping malls in size. Far too big to serve just the population Dresden, it is a tourist attraction. And overlooking this monument to consumerism? A block of Soviet style apartment buildings looming over the shopping plaza.
Dresden is not quite the tourist destination that Berlin or Munich are. It is a much smaller city with far fewer tourists, and almost no tourist traps. It is clear, though, that they are trying to make tourism more of an industry than it is today.
It’s still hard to believe that I have been to Dresden, and that I saw the site of the former Slaughterhouse Five. The slaughterhouses have been torn down, and a sports complex now stands in their place. Of course, this is assuming our tour guide actually showed us the correct site. There are photos of other sites claiming to be Slaughterhouse Five as well, and it is possible no one really knows where Vonnegut was in Dresden. So it goes ...