I thought the article for last night's reading was exceptionally interesting, even though it made me kind of angry. In particular, the sentence, "There was nothing exceptional about the bombing of Dresden," kind of made me want to stop reading immediately. In a way, I kind of feel like this article moved to discredit Vonnegut's account, to make the bombing of Dresden seem like nothing.
I don't see why we have to belittle the bombing of Dresden, just because it wasn't "exceptional" -- (What does exceptional mean, anyway? What about a bombing makes it "exceptional"?) -- doesn't mean it's not important. Vonnegut says 135,000 people died, a number he got from the author of a bestselling book by David Irving, but I feel like Packer is using the fact that Irving has now been discredited as a Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite to also discredit Vonnegut's book, and I don't really think that's fair. So what if the bombing of Dresden killed only 20-40,000 people instead of 135,000, and how can anyone have the nerve to use "only" in that sentence? 20,000 people is not worthy of an "only."
For one thing, it doesn't matter how many people the bombing killed, and for another, I don't even think the number is important to Vonnegut's argument. Vonnegut could have started using 20,000 in the beginning of the book and I still would have been shocked. Vonnegut is trying to write an anti-war novel, not a Nazi-sympathizer novel. He is, in no way, saying that by bombing Dresden, the Allies are on equal playing field with the Nazis. He's saying that war isn't a battle of good and evil, and he's saying that war gives people an excuse to do morally questionable things no matter what side they're on.
It also says somewhere in there that the Allies were carpet bombing civilians all over Germany -- why not write about those? Well, for a simple answer, it's Vonnegut's experiences, not just a book about bombings on Germany. He's giving it a personal edge, an effective personal edge, which makes me, anyway, see all those other bombings in a new light.
So, I don't know. I kind of feel like this article is unnecessary. I didn't even think of taking Slaughterhouse Five in a Nazi-sympathizer direction until I read this article -- and I think it's kind of horrifying that someone would suggest that. Maybe that's naive of me to say, but I don't really care. I think Vonnegut treats the war in a very realistic light, which is something we don't get very often. He's not tarnishing the "good, angelic" Ally appearance, he's bringing them to a human level, which I think is really important when we talk about war.
3 comments:
I very much agree that comparing Slaughterhouse Five to a Nazi sympathizer novel is a very ridiculous notion. It's very possible that Vonnegut actually thought 135,000 was the death toll. there would be no real reason to exaggerate; an entire town was destroyed and he witnessed it. As we learned in history last year, everyone thought the atomic attack on Hiroshima saved millions of American lives, when really it saved way less than than that, but that didn't come out until much later.
(p.s.: *Dresden):)
Hehe, thanks very much for correcting my spelling! Literally took me 9 tries to spell sympathizer... glad I finally got that one.
I'm not sure Packer is suggesting that Vonnegut be seen as a "Nazi sympathizer" (which would be absurd), but he is showing how tenacious a good piece of propaganda can be. One thing the Goebbels 130,000 figure shows is how slippery the "official" history process can be: the government (in this case, Nazi) releases a figure, it's repeated in a Swiss newspaper, and then the historian gets it from the newspaper and cites it in his "comprehensive" study, and the reader (Vonnegut here, but not ONLY him--the book was initially quite popular and influential) takes it in good faith. Vonnegut isn't "lying," and arguably neither is Irving (although Goebbels is just cooking up a figure out of the air, which is what we'd expect of him).
As far as the bombing not being "exceptional," I took this in a different way than you did: not so much to minimize Dresden but to acknowledge just how widespread and consistent a strategy the deliberate bombing of civilian populations was in this war. In this view, it's not that Dresden is some "dirty little secret" of the Allies; it's representative of one of their main strategies, far MORE widespread than Vonnegut suggests. That's even worse.
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