slaughterhouse-five brief biographical and historical context

Slaughterhouse-Five

Brief Biographical and Historical Context

VONNEGUT AND DRESDENA Few Biographical and Historical Details

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) • Writer, satirist, humanist• Philosophical and innovative

works combine sci-fi, black comedy, irony

• Wrote “Deer in the Works” and “Harrison Bergeron”

• Served in U.S. infantry in Europe during WWII

• Captured in December 1944 and sent to Dresden, Germany

• As POW, worked in syrup factory converted from a slaughterhouse

• Eye-witness to the firebombing

The Dresden Firebombing• February 13-14, 1945• 1,300 Allied bombers (U.S.

and Royal Air Force) dropped 3,900 tons of explosives and incendiary devices

• Dresden considered a cultural center in Europe

• “Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any kind” (S5 146)

The Dresden Death Toll• In years after war, estimates as high as 250,000• Vonnegut says 135,000• Recent estimates 25,000-40,000• Many that were killed were women and children since

most of the German men were off fighting elsewhere • As a POW Vonnegut gathered bodies• Vonnegut drew on David Irving’s The Destruction of

Dresden (1963)– At the time Irving was a reputable scholar– Now Irving is known as a right-wing extremist and

Holocaust denier

Dresden Controversy: Was It a War Crime?

• Irving’s book played an important role in supporting war crime argument

• Recent research (Frederick Taylor’s Dresden [2007]) reveals– Dresden was a normally functioning Nazi city with

sites vital to war effort– 25,000-40,000 killed (not 135,000)

• The question remains open

Vonnegut on the Dresden Firebombing

• from Vonnegut's self-interview in the Paris Review, 1977– VONNEGUT: Every day we walked into the city and dug into

basements and shelters to get the corpses out.... The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies.... 130,000 corpses were hidden underground. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.... [O]nly one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second, didn't weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn't free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.

– INTERVIEWER: And who was that? – VONNEGUT: Me. I got three dollars for each person killed.

Imagine that.

18TH-19TH-CENTURY TITLE PAGES

c. 1715

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Samuel Richardson’sPamela (1741)

Slaughterhouse-Five Title Page

• Thinking about these 18th/19th century novels, what do you think Vonnegut’s purpose was in creating his title page?

Goethe (p. 18)• In Chapter One, Vonnegut quotes the German

Romantic Poetic Goethe• Here is a rough translation:– From the steeple of the Frauenkirche (name of church

in Dresden), I saw the sad rubble sown between the beautiful order of the city. The sexton pointed out the design of the architect who had foreseen the need to build a church and steeple that could withstand bombs. The sexton then looked on the ruins on all sides of the church and said in laconic thinking: the enemy did that.

Dresden Frauenkirche

• "Church of Our Lady“• Burned and collapsed

during firebombing• Completely rebuilt

using some of the original bricks (the black spots on the picture)