The firebombing of Dresden took place between February 13th and 15th 1945. Initially the U.S. press gave the massacre no coverage. Initial German propaganda claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths. The first serious history of the event claimed 135,000 innocents were killed over the two nights of sustained Allied bombing. Wikipedia places the number at 25,000, but as a poet friend of mine once told me when I expressed outrage at what I thought to be the numbers killed in the Second Iraq War, “it's relative! No one should have died in Iraq.” It is really hard to imagine anyone needing to die in Dresden either, but, for the sake of clarity, let's say between 25,000 and 100,000 did; and Kurt Vonnegut lived through the massacre, huddled with a group of prisoners of war in an old slaughterhouse beneath the city. Slaughterhouse Five reflects Vonnegut’s frustration and attempts at honestly depicting the horrors he experienced.
Many of the victims of the bombing were refugees escaping the advance of the Soviet Army, which was moving swiftly towards Dresden from the east. At least some of the victims were displaced citizens from the agricultural regions to the east of Dresden. (Others were Allied soldiers, many were women and children). This is one reason for the discrepancy between various analyses of the event. There is simply no way to know how much of the city was populated by civilian residents and how many of the people there were refugees from places east of Dresden. The destructive nature of the event is perhaps best characterized by subsequent public ignorance. According to Vonnegut, the massacre made the Guinness Book of World Records.
As Vonnegut tells it, after the bombing, his group was forced to go from building to building and to dig through the debris bringing out corpses, most of which were discovered in basements and cellars, to be burned in pyres. It is not a story of heroism or valor but rather one of absurdity, arbitrariness, trauma, and death.
The story’s protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, and he is based on a real soldier Vonnegut met in Dresden who died, literally, of shell shock. In the novel, Pilgrim is an overly passive man whose father was particularly hard on him, and who, after living through World War II and being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward where he read the books of a specific science-fiction writer, experiences—or imagines—being transported to another planet, called Tralfamadore. There, reality is understood differently. On Tralfamadore time does not exist. Everything happens at once. Free will does not exist. And, thus, it is easy to project onto Billy Pilgrim a deep trauma that he can only cope with by imagining a fantastical world and reality completely “other” than the one we understand as our own. Pilgrim re-experiences Dresden again and again, and yet again.
The first section of the book describes Vonnegut, years after events, searching for the form within which to tell his story. He goes to the house of someone who lived through the bombing with him and there his buddy’s wife, a woman named Mary O’Hare, tells him disdainfully that she hopes he does not make the story a heroic one, with tough guys doing courageous things. After all, she says, it is a story of very young and naive people living the horrors of war. Inspired by O’Hare, and in a realistic style, Vonnegut begins his own story—his own search for answers to what the experience of surviving Dresden means to him—only to then tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, an ordinary guy raised in an ordinary town and then drafted into a war he has no ability to survive much less comprehend, who is so traumatized by life he imagines himself abducted and taken to another planet.
Harold Bloom writes, in his analysis of the book,
“Tralfamadore is uncovered as quite likely a fantasy creation of a shell-shocked soldier—something like a compensatory sexual fantasy—because Vonnegut has presented the story as told by a strong, credible narrator from Billy’s point of view, the Tralfamadore story is not so easy to explain away: it has taken hold of the reader’s imagination, and in a sense has become real. By leading readers to believe, even temporarily, that the imaginary can be real, Vonnegut strengthens the possibility that readers can be helped to see that the real can be the result of a particular variety of imagination, the result of the ways we think and daydream. Mary O’Hare, the moral spirit of the book, has asserted in chapter 1: “she thought that wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.” (11)
Of course today the murder of civilians in 'acts of defense against terrorism' has become common. In Israel, just yesterday, the IDF, the most notorious and egregious actor in the ongoing flare ups in the Middle East, obliterated a fifteen story apartment building filled with families, children, grandparents etc. What happened in Dresden has become almost quotidian in places like Gaza, and I suppose Syria, over the last decade or so. What was Vonnegut’s answer to the ongoing trauma of war on the human psyche? I think Bloom sums it up well:
"By leading readers to believe, even temporarily, that the imaginary can be real, Vonnegut strengthens the possibility that readers can be helped to see that the real can be the result of a particular variety of imagination, the result of the ways we think and daydream.”
As a final note of comparison: I think what I have witnessed this last year, with Covid, has been a massive experiment in belief, originally premised on a social contract which involved closing society for two weeks in order to save the health care system. Two weeks became permanent, at some level, and now the implicit imaginary holds us all individually responsible for the spread of respiratory viruses: the individual becomes, in our newly imagined scenario, a walking vector of danger and disease. I wonder what Vonnegut would make of my comparison.
Slaughterhouse Five, ultimately, is the story of a man, Billy Pilgrim, who takes his experience reading science fiction (we could substitute here the ways the media spreads fear of terrorism, or fear of a respiratory virus) and he makes that experience his reality. It is about the many ways, as Bloom puts it, “the imaginary can be real.”
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