To Kurt Vonnegut Jr., born in Indianapolis on a day like today, one hundred twenty-four years ago, glory arrived late — almost half a century into his life — and in a strange way. It came at the end of a sequence of paradoxes that led to the 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. Let us proceed step by step.
The early novels of Vonnegut Jr.—The Pianist (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959)—, whose Spanish translations we also owe to the invaluable labor of the Bruguera publishing house, burned Vonnegut Jr.’s name into the same roster as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. He was, in fact, one of the most gifted authors of that 1950s generation, which its most devoted readers have come to call the Silver Age of the genre. Yet, endowed with a proverbial sharpness for sarcasm and social satire, the human condition in extreme situations was always one of his main characteristics. If anything, this set him apart from the rest of his brilliant contemporaries.
And, in the following decade, that keen and ironic humanitarianism placed him near Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22 (1961). In addition to belonging to the same demographic cohort, they shared that air of satirical critique of the system, which drew the attention of those glorious youth dissent of the era, the counterculture and that Berkeley spirit that rose across American campuses from coast to coast. Ken Kesey, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), was the emblematic author of those days when Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin offered science fiction with social critique and substantial questions about reality. Richard Brautigan brought a poetic and strange tone, very much in keeping with the era’s spirit. And Thomas Pynchon, though more elusive, also captured the paranoia and absurdity of the system. Neither Heller nor Vonnegut fell under those banners of their colleagues, but they were not far away either. In fact, the rebellious youths who read hippie authors formed the core of his readers.
Those were the days of unyielding pacifism. Unlike our times, of packaged pacifism, doubtful and naive, in the days when Vonnegut Jr. published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the urgent demand was that the U.S. government stop sending young conscripts to die in Southeast Asia. What the government promotes today at the dictate of the far left is something else.
In any case, both Vonnegut and Heller were veterans of bombardments, pillars on which much of their satires about past wars—the Second World War—were projected onto the war then being fought in Vietnam. The author of Slaughterhouse-Five—and this is the first of his paradoxes—suffered firsthand one of the war’s worst bombings: Dresden…
December 1944 was underway, the German surrender was only a matter of time. Kurt Vonnegut served as a soldier, and scout in the 106th Infantry Division of the United States Army. During the Battle of the Ardennes —the last major offensive of the Wehrmacht— although it proved to be its final strategic disaster, the future writer’s unit was cornered and Vonnegut was captured by German troops after becoming isolated behind enemy lines.
Captured by the enemy, he was transported to a camp in Frankfurt and later sent to Dresden, in early 1945. Having filled the occupied territories with concentration camps, and even worse, with extermination, the Germans no longer had room to imprison the new American prisoners of war. Faced with such occupancy of the prisons, they decided to lodge them in a disused slaughterhouse known in the city as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). If the first paradox was that a young soldier suffered one of the deadliest bombings carried out against civilians, the second was that the slaughterhouse —an altar of death, of beasts, but of death after all, as its name indicates— saved his life. Confined the captives and their guards in the basement, excavated deep into the rock of the workshop’s nave, this protected them both from the demolition bombs and from the devastating firestorm that followed, on the surface.
Among the English population, this was thought to be the response to the Blitz of the Luftwaffe, which, in November 1940, had razed Coventry. One way or another, on February 13 the British Royal Air Force launched a first wave with its Lancaster squadrons, hours later the American planes arrived. They used nighttime tactical bombings: first they dropped high-explosive bombs to wreck roofs and windows, and immediately after incendiaries.
Still, the devastation that hitherto had been known as the Florence on the Elbe, for its rich museum and architectural heritage, was total. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 22,000 townspeople died in those attacks, though thousands of bodies were reduced to ashes and there are those who raise the toll to 100,000. The operators who filmed that apocalypse were among the first to fall. In fact, the films usually shown to report Dresden’s destruction were, in truth, taken in Berlin or Hamburg.
“Corpses, corpses and more corpses everywhere. Some black as coal; others, they seemed to be asleep — said a Mrs. Margaret Freyer, roaming the streets of that hell in search of her fiancé’s remains, in a testimony collected by Sven Lindqvist in his History of Bombings (Turner, Madrid, 2002)—. Women with aprons, women with children in their arms, men sitting on trams, as if dozing. From the rubble protruded arms, legs and heads…”
That is the hell to which politics inevitably leads us. Paradoxically — and this is the third — Vonnegut was saved from friendly fire by the enemy’s prison — the slaughterhouse. It was a defining moment, no doubt. After the captives were forced to clear debris and search for bodies once the planes had departed, the author, who would have turned 124 today, witnessed with his own eyes —on April 11, 2007, the earth swallowed him— how “human bodies passed into that semiliquid state in which dust returns to dust.”
It was when his captors forced him to help dig out debris and search for corpses. What he saw then seemed to him “the face of the Moon”.
Two decades later, Vonnegut attempted to exorcise that hell again, naturally overwhelming him since then, by writing Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim, his stand-in in those pages, suffers from post-traumatic stress: he believes that aliens abducted him (the Tralfamadorians), who perceive time without past or future, all in one block. A note on which the sharpest criticism saw a metaphor for the mind unable to escape traumatic memory. “So it goes,” the author writes in the novel each time he reports a death, and thus History is written.