April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:45 PM EST Kurt Vonnegut died last night. Gore Vidal asserted that Vonnegut, along with Norman Mailer and Vidal himself, was one of the last living American writers to have served in the Second World War. This is overstated, but it is does seem to be true that Kurt Vonnegut is the only writer to have served in the Second World War who has been read by a lot of my undergraduates. Some of them are assigned him in high school, but a fair number find him on their own. His vision of war, a consistently antiheroic vision, is still alluring to many undergraduates, just as it was when I was an undergraduate in 1969. As it happens, Vonnegut served in my father’s division; two of its infantry regiments, the 422nd and the 423rd, were surrounded at the start of the Battle of the Bulge and surrendered. The third regiment, the 424th, was not surrounded and did not surrender. Vonnegut was very famously a prisoner of war in Dresden when that city was bombed, an experience my undergraduates know about largely because of his novel Slaughterhouse Five. In his autobiography, Vonnegut wrote that “the firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am.” That, too, seems like a probable overstatement. He at least once remarked that “I will say again what I have often said in print and in speeches, that not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on earth clearly benefited, and I am that person; I got about five dollars for each corpse, not counting my fee tonight.” This is, of course, an absurdity. In 2005 Der Spiegel noted, of Victor Klemperer, that “In all likelihood, the bombing of Dresden saved him from being sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers.” This was also Klemperer’s own opinion: A German Christian of Jewish descent, he almost certainly lived because the bombing disrupted the extermination of that city’s last Jews. Gotz Bergander, who also lived through the bombing and also later wrote about it, observed that “it is true that most Germans no longer believed in victory, but they could not imagine unconditional surrender. The shock of Dresden contributed in a fundamental way to a change of heart. This expressed itself at that time in the words: Better an end to terror than terror without end.” So despite ever-mounting assurances that those who have seen war invariably know that there is nothing worse, not everyone who was bombed in Dresden has come to an identical conclusion on that question. Something similar is true about people who served in the 106th Infantry Division, when they ponder the meaning of their experience. A couple of years ago I attended a reunion of a fair number of the survivors of that division. I formed the impression that people who had been taken prisoner were perhaps more likely to express an unheroic and ironical view of war than were those who had been given, by a stroke of fortune, the chance to fight. But this distinction can be overdrawn. Many of the former POWs occasionally exhibited a heroic view of the Second World War, and none of the survivors of the 424th infantry to whom I listened were bereft of some antiheroic and ironical tones. On the other hand, there were some sorts of things I only heard the survivors of the 424th say. Poring over a vast wall map of the eastern edge of the Ardennes, two of them remembered something done by their regiment’s L Company, in which neither of them had served. In the first days of the battle, marked almost entirely by defeat and retreat, that company had at one point defended a position bravely but stupidly attacked by German infantry. There was some terse and incomprehensible conversation about the ground, fields of fire, how L Company had deployed, and where it had set up its machine guns. Then, with cold satisfaction, one of them reminisced that L Company had “stacked ’em up like cordwood.” We are often told that this is the sort of thing said only by people who have never seen war. Thinking back on it, though, I have never heard such a thing said by anyone who had not himself done it, or something very like. In a phrase Vonnegut made famous, so it goes.
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