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NY Times, March 21, 2019
From Dresden on the 50th Anniversary of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’
By Malcolm Jack
DRESDEN, Germany — Last month, 74 years to the day since the bombers
came, the late winter sky was gray as German tour guide Danilo Hommel
called a halt before a short, dark green door in a large
terracotta-roofed building that today forms part of an events and
conference complex. One among several structures like it are laid out in
neat rows in a bend of Germany’s River Elbe, two miles from Dresden’s
historically reconstructed center.
Anonymous except for a plaque by its side reading “Schlachthof 5,” and
underneath, in English, “Slaughterhouse Five,” it was an exit-way
through which the tall, lean 22-year-old prisoner of war Kurt Vonnegut
Jr. may have had to stoop to emerge into a scene that would cast a
shadow over the rest of his life. In February 1945, after sheltering in
a deep underground meat locker in the abattoir-turned-P.O.W. camp, he
and other American soldiers captured at the Battle of the Bulge, before
being shipped eastward by train, were confronted by a smoldering
hellscape where the Saxon capital had stood, its baroque architecture
until now pristinely untouched by the wrecking hand of war.
Claiming around 25,000 lives late in World War II, the Allied
firebombing raids on Dresden whipped up an inferno so fierce it sucked
the oxygen from all but the most subterranean of shelters and destroyed
practically everything that would burn. Vonnegut would later compare the
sound of bombs stomping across the earth overhead to the footsteps of
giants. Put to work by his German captors disinterring corpses from the
rubble, he would one day write with characteristic black comedy that the
hideous task resembled “a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.”
After his liberation by the Russians and eventual return to the United
States, the newspaper reporter, teacher and struggling novelist spent
more than two decades privately processing and grappling with his
Dresden memories, scrapping countless drafts as he attempted to knit his
experiences into a story. It was only after summoning the outlandish
sci-fi contrivance of making his protagonist Billy Pilgrim become
“unstuck in time” — ricocheting through the past, present and future
simultaneously and traveling into outer space in pursuit of perspective
— that Vonnegut felt satisfied to turn in an almost implausibly slim
manuscript for “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Published 50 years ago this month, the book became his first best-seller
and made 47-year-old Vonnegut a star. Weird, wise, moral, profane and
profoundly human, it remains a countercultural classic and one of the
most enduring antiwar novels of all time. Not to mention a salvational
act of self-therapy by a man who likely suffered from what would today
be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
For a book about surviving a massacre, “Slaughterhouse-Five” makes you
laugh an unreasonable amount. Not least through the repetition of three
short words that have inspired a thousand bad tattoos: “So it goes.”
Those words are “one of his clues to us that he had PTSD,” said Julia
Whitehead, the founder and head of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library,
over the phone from Vonnegut’s native city, Indianapolis. “He’s trying
to figure out, ‘O.K., did something really horrible just happen? How am
I going to deal with that?’”
From a bottle of champagne that’s lost its fizz to entire “corpse
mines” in the lunar landscape of flattened Dresden and a fellow prisoner
shot for scavenging a teapot, “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book steeped in
expiry, such that the author can only seem to summon a cry-laughing
refrain every time another endpoint is reached. “So it goes” tolls
bright and solemn 106 times throughout the book, cunningly conveying
fatalism, stoicism, acceptance and stubborn continuity each time. “It
was his way of coping,” Whitehead said. “And it’s kind of teaching us to
keep going, when these things happen in our lives … to stop and say,
‘This is what it is, and I will keep going.’”
Vonnegut has said he based the novel’s protagonist, Pilgrim — the sweet
but hapless Army chaplain’s assistant and future millionaire optometrist
— on his comrade, Edward R. Crone Jr., who died on April 11, 1945, soon
before the war’s end.
In 1969, when the novel was published, PTSD was a concept as alien as
the four-dimensional beings who kidnap Pilgrim to the planet
Tralfamadore. While the condition is widely known today, the term only
entered medical doctrine after 1980. Whether he knew it or not, Vonnegut
was improvising a self-help manual for psychic pain at a time when many
young Americans needed it most.
Vonnegut’s daughter Nanette remembers him and her “mother watching the
news and him just losing his temper,” she said, recalling her parents
watching TV dispatches from Vietnam when she was a teenager in the late
1960s. He would be “pointing at the screen saying, ‘The liars.’”
“He saw the numbers, how many dead,” she added, “that these kids were
being conned, and sent to their deaths. And I do think probably it set a
fire under him to have his say.”
Vonnegut was driven into his study time and again to fight his own
internal battle, and at last complete a novel inextricably intertwined
with the preservation of his soul. Nanette, who is a writer and artist
herself, grew up intrigued by her father’s creative struggle. In
language worthy of her father, she wrote in a 2012 essay that it was
like “living with an elephant for 15 years that was trying to give birth
to something twice its size.”
“I had a short time up until I was 14, 15, and I was witness to the
writer at work,” she reflected, speaking from her home in Northampton,
Mass. “The labor of it, and the up and down of it. It was like a manic
thing. When there was a good day of writing and he nailed it, you could
tell. And other days it was like, just, you know, so hard.”
The Vonnegut children — six from his first marriage and a daughter,
Lily, from his second — have complicated relationships with
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” the vessel that whisked their father away to
fame. Yet when Nanette reread it recently, “It just blew my mind,” she
said. “It is a magical thing that he pulled off. I’m so proud of him
that he delivered it. It’s a gift to the world.”
Nanette has happy memories of her father, even if she is certain that he
suffered from PTSD, the symptoms of which — flashbacks, sleeplessness,
dissociative episodes and sudden, inexplicable surges of emotion — he
drew so vividly in Billy Pilgrim. “He was writing to save his own life,”
Nanette said, “and in doing it I think he has saved a lot of lives.”
Over the course of 10 head-spinningly nonlinear chapters, Vonnegut’s
darkest memories from Dresden refract through the prism of a brilliant
and unconventional mind, like light filtered through a warped
stained-glass window, scattering colorfully and unpredictably. The pain
becomes wild, hilarious, beautiful.
His moving through time “seems to me a conspicuously therapeutic
response to Dresden,” said Sidney Offit, an author who was good friends
with Vonnegut later in life. “Because when you’re moving through time
you’re trying to put it into a perspective,” Offit added. “And he was
doing it through the individual details of one life. It obviously had an
extraordinary appeal to readers.”
Offit, who is 90, recalled that Vonnegut, his former tennis and lunch
buddy, often confided in him about his wartime trauma. Yet it was always
with the same sense of irony and mischievousness as in his writing.
“It’s a way of coping, humor,” Offit said.
The art installation by the artist Ruairi O’Brien depicting scenes and
quotations from “Slaughterhouse-Five.”CreditSean Gallup/Getty Images
Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, gone but destined to never be
forgotten. His fame continued with books such as “Breakfast of
Champions,” “Galápagos” and “Hocus Pocus.” The Tralfamadorians in
“Slaughterhouse-Five” see lives laid out like strings of spaghetti,
every second occurring side by side and always for eternity; by their
philosophy death is but a “bad condition” in one’s final moment. In that
clever disruption of logic lies perhaps the author’s most enduring
masterstroke, a trick that in the mind’s eye has the power to pull bombs
back up into the bellies of Lancasters and B-17s, return fat to the
bones of starving P.O.W.s and let lives senselessly deleted be suddenly
restored.
“It’s a genius device,” Offit said of his friend’s elastic contortions
of time. “It has almost a spiritual or religious theme,” he laughed,
“because it’s suggesting life everlasting. The future, the past, the
present all blend. And none of them seem to have a real ending.”
With the bright sandstone structure of the stunning Church of Our Lady
at its heart — leveled in 1945, left in ruins for decades, then rebuilt
between 1994 and 2005 — the city of Dresden in late 2019 presented its
own blend of the future, past and present. In the former slaughterhouse
district, Hommel’s Kurt Vonnegut-themed tour of the city concluded with
a descent into the bowels of Schlachthof 5. On a wall in the basement
cloakroom — where hooks for coats and not animal carcasses hung from the
ceiling — a light-box storytelling mural by artist Ruairi O’Brien
depicted scenes and quotations from “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Surprisingly
it’s the city’s only real monument to the novel.
As for the deep concrete meat locker where a young intelligence scout
sheltered from the footsteps of giants? Filled in and built over during
renovations years ago, it was gone. Returned to the earth, like so many
former citizens of Dresden and everywhere. Vanished in that moment, and
yet, if you think about it the Tralfamadorian way, still there
forevermore in plenty of others past. So it goes.
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