Peter Stothard: the bad about Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut will always be thought of first as the author of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which expressed the Sixties’ American generation’s rejection of war as a means of achieving either state policy or human good.

Published in 1969, during the mounting protests against the Vietnam War, it also increased public awareness of the tremendous loss of life that had been caused by the unnecessary bombing of Dresden in February 1945, notwithstanding that this had been eloquently enough described by David Irving in his historical account, The Destruction of Dresden, several years previously (a well researched and dispassionate account from the period before its author turned apologist of Nazism). It is a subject that has been often revisited since and continues to vex consciences to this day.

Vonnegut’s work — though consistently ironical, distanced and even flippant in tone — was haunted by strong feelings about the insanity of the war in which he had participated as an American infantryman, and of the grotesque nature of the cruelty practised upon mankind by itself.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922, in Indianapolis of long settled German immigrant stock. He read chemistry at Cornell and in 1942 was called up into the US Army. After D-Day he served in the campaign in northwest Europe. Here, as a scout to an infantry regiment, he was captured during the German Ardennes counter-offensive in the winter of 1944 and sent as a prisoner of war to apparent safety in the Saxon capital, Dresden.

It was here, from the unusual vantage-point of Slachthof fünf, the subterranean meatlocker which was to give its name to his best-known book, that he witnessed the work of RAF Bomber Command and the US 8th Army Air Force, which almost totally destroyed the city on the night of February 13-14, 1945, leaving a number of dead which has been put by some German authorities as high as 135,000 — though the actual figure is probably nearer 30,000.

After the war Vonnegut continued his studies at Chicago University, worked for some time as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau and did various other odd jobs, including running a diaper-cleaning service and working for General Electric. After publishing a number of short stories with magazines such as Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post, Vonnegut wrote his first novel, Player Piano and gave up his job to write full time. Player Piano (1952), a lengthy and serious look at a future automated world controlled by a handful of company bureaucrats, gave no hint of the ellipsis and compression which were to become Vonnegut’s hallmark.

The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) developed his use of science fiction as a vehicle for satire and it was this, together with his own war experience, that gave Slaughterhouse Five its peculiar impact when it appeared in 1969.

Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout captured in the Ardennes, follows in his author’s footsteps and witnesses the bombing of Dresden. He subsequently returns to the commercially dynamic cultural desert of his home town in Middle America, and is then spirited away by extra terrestrial beings, from whose perspective the monstrosity of human behaviour is obvious.

The book was immensely successful and was translated into a film. It caught the mood of disillusion arising from America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and indeed scepticism over war in general, already given vent in Joseph Heller’s satirical account of US forces in Italy in the Second World War, Catch 22, which had appeared in 1961. But the verbal relish of Catch 22 was completely absent from Slaughterhouse Five. It was as if Vonnegut’s years of meditation on the terrible events he had witnessed had reduced him almost to silence on the subject.

And in truth Vonnegut was, arguably, at his best not here, but in Mother Night, which had appeared in 1961. The protagonist of that book is an American who becomes, apparently, a Nazi propagandist who broadcasts nightly, but is in reality an American spy. He finds himself rejected by the American Government at the end of the war and spends lonely years in hiding in New York before being discovered and then tried for war crimes by the Israelis.

Here Vonnegut’s ability to delineate the physical horrors of war was under better control. The economy of his writing helped to evoke the fearful nature of domestic life in Berlin in the calm before the final Russian assault; the horror of the Allied arrival at the limepits of the concentration camps; and the meaning of the dreadful refrain “Leichenträger zur Wache” (“Corpse carriers to the guardhouse!”), still crooned in remembered fascination by the novel’s New York Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

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