Content area
Full Text
The war behind a writer's words
LOVE, KURT: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945 EDITED BY EDITH VONNEGUT Random House, 240 pp., $35
Most men in uniform never see death. But Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut of Indianapolis was captured at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and shipped to Dresden as slave labor. Decades later, he would describe arriving at "the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd ... Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, 'Oz.'" His POW group was housed in an underground meat locker and told to memorize its street address: Schlacthof Fünf. Slaughterhouse Five.
One month later, Europe's architectural jewel box was gone. In February 1945, the war nearly won, 1,249 Allied planes dropped 4,000 tons of high explosives on the city, destroying 100,000 buildings. Civilian casualties were immense, and are still debated: maybe 25,000, maybe 60,000. To be a victim of firebombing is like being dropped into the sun. Some people instantly suffocate. Others fry, bones and all, shrinking into small, dark brown lumps. Children are vaporized, mostly.
At SS gunpoint, Vonnegut dug Dresden's dead from the rubble, an extreme tutorial in entropy and decay for the Cornell biochemistry major. He was only 22, raised in a prosperous German-speaking family proud of its Old World ties. The funeral pyres of...