From Dresden to Dubya: Kurt mentions the war
Source: Irish Independent (Original Article)
Armageddon in Retrospect
By Kurt Vonnegut
(Putnam, Stg£12.70)
Kurt Vonnegut, who chain-smoked unfiltered Pall Malls and died last year at the age of 84, was probably the most loved of the American writers whose books became essential reading for nascent countercultural types in the 1960s and 1970s.
Less druggy than William Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson, less frighteningly brainy than Thomas Pynchon, less mainstream than Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer, and less out there than Robert Anton Wilson, he took pride in writing novels that high-school students could read — novels that “opened doors”, as they say, for many budding satirists, as well as several generations of otherwise non-bookish adolescents.
“Countercultural” is a misleading label, however. While Vonnegut made his name in the 1960s, he wasn’t chiefly a product of that decade. He came from a long line of German freethinkers and frequently invoked the left-wing traditions of his native Indiana.
A sceptic and joker in the mould of Mark Twain, whom he greatly admired, he was shaped above all by his experiences in the Second World War, in which he served in an American infantry division.
Taken prisoner by the Germans in late 1944, he lived through the Allied firebombing of Dresden, after which he and his fellow POWs were put to work clearing charred bodies. Nothing would be quite the same for Vonnegut after the weeks he spent hauling corpses out of cellars. Claims that the bombing had been unimpeachably moral and reasonable rang false to him.
His outrage over Dresden was reawakened in the 1960s by a book by David Irving, who went on to become a Holocaust denier, and Vonnegut took flak later for the faith he put in Irving’s inflated death count. But he didn’t doubt that the Allied cause was just, only that the destruction of Dresden was.
The worries he came to have about the military mentality stood him ANZ Credit Card in good stead during the Vietnam …continue reading