A recent (a-hem) review of SlaughterHouse 5

KV's best known work got a mention from one Theodore Dalrymple, the on-line
source is:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_urbanities-dresden.html

(On discussing the modern condition of Dresden, and how historian
David'Irving's 1963 account of the firebombing highlighted the tale ...)

<excerpt>

Irving¹s book was influential, however, precisely because he hid, or had not
yet fully developed, his Nazi sympathies. It achieved its greatest influence
through Slaughterhouse-Five , Kurt Vonnegut¹s famous countercultural antiwar
novel, published six years later, which makes grateful acknowledgment of
Irving¹s book, whose inflated estimate of the death toll of the bombing it
unquestioningly accepts. Vonnegut, an American soldier who was a prisoner of
war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, having been captured during the
land offensive in the west, writes of the war and the bombing itself as if
it took place in no context, as if it were just an arbitrary and absurd
quarrel between rivals, between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with no internal
content or moral meaning‹ a quarrel that nevertheless resulted in one of the
rivals cruelly and thoughtlessly destroying a beautiful city of the other.

But Vonnegut, to whom it did not occur that his subject matter was uniquely
unsuited to facetious, adolescent literary experimentation, was writing an
antiwar tract in the form of a postmodern novel, not a historical
reexamination of the bombing of Dresden or of Germany as a whole. The
problem that has bedeviled any such re-examination is fear that sympathy for
the victims, or regret that so much of aesthetic and cultural value was
destroyed, might be taken as sympathy for Nazism itself.

</excerpt>


So there you go: KV was, in 1969, a facetious literary experimenter catering
for the adolescent market (or was one himself?), who read Irving's book one
day, and thought, hey, neat, what a good idea for a facetious adolescent
novel.

For the record, I should simply state the obvious and say Slaughterhouse 5
will long endure as one of the 20th century landmark novels.

Irving, I suspect, will achieve some literary endurance as a footnote if
it's true that his work provided KV with statistical references (I assume it
would have been the only easily-available such).

As for Mr Dalrymple's literary posterity .....


..... Poo-tee-whit ?


Larry

Spam Survivor schrieb:
 >
 > KV's best known work got a mention from one Theodore Dalrymple, the on-line
 > source is:
 >
<font color=purple> > <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_urbanities-dresden.html</font" target="_blank">http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_urbanities-dresden.html</font</a>>
 >
 > (On discussing the modern condition of Dresden, and how historian
 > David'Irving's 1963 account of the firebombing highlighted the tale ...)
 >
 > <excerpt>
 >
 > Irving¹s book was influential, however, precisely because he hid, or had not
 > yet fully developed, his Nazi sympathies. It achieved its greatest influence
 > through Slaughterhouse-Five , Kurt Vonnegut¹s famous countercultural antiwar
 > novel, published six years later, which makes grateful acknowledgment of
 > Irving¹s book, whose inflated estimate of the death toll of the bombing it
 > unquestioningly accepts. Vonnegut, an American soldier who was a prisoner of
 > war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, having been captured during the
 > land offensive in the west, writes of the war and the bombing itself as if
 > it took place in no context, as if it were just an arbitrary and absurd
 > quarrel between rivals, between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with no internal
 > content or moral meaning‹ a quarrel that nevertheless resulted in one of the
 > rivals cruelly and thoughtlessly destroying a beautiful city of the other.
 >
 > But Vonnegut, to whom it did not occur that his subject matter was uniquely
 > unsuited to facetious, adolescent literary experimentation, was writing an
 > antiwar tract in the form of a postmodern novel, not a historical
 > reexamination of the bombing of Dresden or of Germany as a whole. The
 > problem that has bedeviled any such re-examination is fear that sympathy for
 > the victims, or regret that so much of aesthetic and cultural value was
 > destroyed, might be taken as sympathy for Nazism itself.
 >
 > </excerpt>
 >
 > So there you go: KV was, in 1969, a facetious literary experimenter catering
 > for the adolescent market (or was one himself?), who read Irving's book one
 > day, and thought, hey, neat, what a good idea for a facetious adolescent
 > novel.
 >
 > For the record, I should simply state the obvious and say Slaughterhouse 5
 > will long endure as one of the 20th century landmark novels.
 >
 > Irving, I suspect, will achieve some literary endurance as a footnote if
 > it's true that his work provided KV with statistical references (I assume it
 > would have been the only easily-available such).
 >
 > As for Mr Dalrymple's literary posterity .....
 >
 > .... Poo-tee-whit ?
 >
 > Larry

thank you,

nothing like a good laugh (or a sad one?) in the morning ...

still, there are real nazis around who instrumentalise the dresden
bombing to make some ruckus and further their own agenda:
<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/1-22-2005-64604.asp" target="_blank">http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/1-22-2005-64604.asp</a>
(and these are young nazis, not survivors!)

maybe (hopefully) a time will come when all victims, be they of dresden,
auschwitz, hiroshima, coventry or whereever, can really rest in peace
and not be dug up every few years for reasons like revanchism. this time
has, obviously, not yet come. Slaughterhouse 5 was (is), besides being a
landmark novel, a step in this direction. it's not easy to find more
useful remarks in face of war or massacre than 'poo-tee-weet' or 'so it
goes' ...

georg<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->