Thanks, Kurt

No one knows how many people perished when waves of British and American planes firebombed Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. Estimates range from the 20,000+ official burials to the 300,000 claimed in Nazi propaganda. Propaganda is distrusted, of course, for good reasons, and official records of burials are of limited usefulness in this case because the firestorm transformed Dresden into a crematorium: The conflagration’s consumption of oxygen was so intense that fleeing people were literally sucked into the flames, which incinerated them to unidentifiable ash.

In 1939 the city had been the home of more than a half million, but in the chaotic displacement of the war’s endgame that number provides few clues. The actual population when the bombing commenced on Feb. 13 may have been much higher, in fact, because Dresden was considered a safe haven, a city with no military targets. It had become a magnet for as many as a quarter-million refugees, and thousands of wounded soldiers had been transported there as well. We know the exact tonnage of bombs dropped, but no one knows how many humans perished.

But we know one who survived, a young American conscript and prisoner of war named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Emerging from underground shelters into the total devastation, the prisoners were ordered to assist in the disposal of bodies, but the gruesome task proved impossible. Flamethrowers were brought in to incinerate mountains of corpses and body parts in the ruins of the elegant old center of culture, whose orchestra Beethoven had once proclaimed, “the best in Europe.”

That experience sat in his guts for more than 20 years before it emerged in a virtuoso fantasia, “Slaughterhouse Five.” In the interim, Vonnegut worked as a journalist and wrote several novels, most of them lightly regarded (if regarded at all) and critically consigned to the then-disreputable “science fiction” genre.

Vonnegut was prepared to chuck his writing career by the mid-1960s – most of his work was out of print, he was in his 40s, and he had a family to support. But then an unexpected call came, offering him a job teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Looking back many years later he called that improbable employment as a life preserver tossed to a drowning man.

Vonnegut arrived in Iowa City anonymously in his dilapidated Volkswagen, and left, two years later, an international cult figure. One of his colleagues became his critical champion. A new agent secured him a three-book contract. And “Cat’s Cradle,” his Hugo Award-nominated 1963 satire about the scientifically caused end of the world -- not by fire but by Ice Nine -- became unofficial required reading on college campuses, particularly for “countercultural” students in the civil rights and anti-war movements.

But more important, Vonnegut’s rejuvenated career dredged Dresden out of his gut. He had traded on fantasy, irony and absurdity in all his works, but in “Slaughterhouse Five,” the extravagant fantasy was propelled by, permeated with and framed by reality – the true but absurd reality he had experienced first-hand in Dresden, refracted through a sardonic lens of whimsical melancholy. Horror with a cynical shrug – not to mention time travel, alien abductions, a meek but well-hung “hero,” a porn star and extraterrestrials shaped like toilet plungers.

“Slaughterhouse Five” was fatalistic irony incarnate, a novel that regarded all human personal or communal pretensions as mere hubris. In the book’s unitary vision of time, Dresden, for all its apparent horrors was not merely just what happened, but just what has always happened, an event whose impact is blunted by its inevitability – like Billy Pilgrm’s murder by Paul Lazzaro, Billy’s abduction to a zoo on Tralfamador with Montana Wildhack, and Poor Old Edgar Derby’s summary assassination for his naïve awe that something of beauty had survived Dresden’s devastation – events resistant to analysis more logical or reasonable or insightful than the pronouncement of the birds, oblivious to human tragedy or moral concepts – poo-tee-weet.

Of course, irony-squared was that the “so it goes” shrug of “Slaugherhouse Five” was not a shrug at all. Vonnegut was a depressive character, haunted by his memories of Dresden, distrustful of science and technology, and pessimistic about the prospects for humanity. His alter ego was Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction writer powerless to affect, or even be heard by, an irredeemably failed species.

My younger son was about 15 years old when I asked him to watch the film adaptation of “Slaughterhouse 5.” I explained to him how it was not only one of the 20th century’s greatest works of English-language fiction – which meant that it was important to me – and a remarkable film adaptation of a novel considered impossible to adapt, but that it had been written in our little town, in a house that in the mid-‘70s I could glimpse through the window of my apartment. (www.flickr.com/photos/toadaway/430842371), as if that was something he should care about. (Probably not true -- he went to Germany to research, on a Guggenheim, after he left Iowa -- but legends have power.)

Having viewed the film, he asked me an insightful question (such a bright boy): “Is that supposed to be a comedy?” Caught off-guard, I responded, “Why, were you laughing?”

His question deepened my appreciation of the artistry of Vonnegut’s whimsical melancholy. Yes, all the superficial signs and triggers tell you that you are experiencing comedy, but where are the jokes? Where are the laughs? Is Edgar Derby’s execution the punch line of a dark-humor joke, or an absurd, infuriating injustice from which we want to avert our eyes – or is there any difference?

Kurt Vonnegut’s final act of artistic magic was to die less than a week before the psychotic slaughter in Blacksburg, VA, -- where we know not only how many people died, but their names and life stories -- as if the purely coincidental recollection of his work was divinely designed to provide perspective.

As everyone in the Land of Blog knows, one of the right wing’s professional self-parodies and voluntary strawmen, Dinesh D’Souza, asserted that atheists are nowhere to be seen at such horrific moments. And he concluded that part of the explanation is that atheists have no answer to the problem of evil.

And, you know, he’s right. The people who step forward at a time of senseless tragedy are those who wish to deny its senselessness – to reinterpret and rationalize the horror in the context of some ultimate plan or process or meaning, to say that the victims have gone to some better place, to reassert the ultimate cosmic justice that all such events call into question. Billy Graham’s son went on Wolf Blitzer’s show to assert that Cho was possessed by demons.

Atheists have no turf to defend. Senseless horror is merely senseless horror, an occasion for shock, grief and compassion. With “Slaughterhouse Five,” the atheist Kurt Vonnegut provided an imaginative, entertaining parody of contextualization.

Vonnegut was a fantasy virtuoso. If faced with the gory truth of the Dresden firebombing – or Cho’s exaggerated, dramatic, bloody, ritual, YouTubish suicide – why NOT a fantasy involving toilet-plunger aliens, who deny humans even the romantic illusion that the fate of the universe is in their hands? Where a Dresden survivor is abducted by those aliens, who accommodate his media-driven sex fantasies so that they can observe his behavior in a glass-domed zoo? Who dies and he has always died, because of a madman’s ridiculous vendetta over a trivial slight in the midst of an historic atrocity?

Of course, “so it goes” and “poo-tee-weet” are not acceptable comments at memorial services, even though they make more sense than the magical gestures enacted and the mystic formulas intoned by “designated authorities” in robes and silly hats. The non-believers are more likely to ask questions than provide answers: Why do the relatively small destructive acts of individuals, close to us in time or space or nationality, shock us and involve us more than machete genocide in Rwanda or the daily horror of Baghdad? (The mass slaughter of the Dresden firebombing was nearly a forgotten incident until Vonnegut reminded the world.) What are the extremities of moral logic under stress that rationalized a personal massacre of nearby strangers for Cho, or the impersonal incineration of thousands in far-away Dresden, or Hiroshima?

Fortunately, though a chance convergence of experience and opportunity, Kurt Vonnegut was there to provide us with the commentary of the birds.