Portrait of a Veteran
The Effects of World War II on Kurt Vonnegut's Writing
Anthony Boyer
February 13, 1945: Dresden, Germany. War is raging across
Europe. In a deep underground meat locker beneath
Schlacthof-Funf, Slaughterhouse Five, 100 American prisoners and
their six German guards feel the Earth move as Royal Air Force
bombers lay wreckage to the city above. They can only hear the
mass terror as the greatest slaughter in European history takes
place, killing an estimated 135,000 civilians and destroying
cathedrals, museums, parks, and even the zoo. In the morning,
after the carnage has ended, the prisoners are put to work
excavating bombed-out buildings to search for the dead. One of
those Americans was none other than Private Kurt Vonnegut,
Junior.
Vonnegut's experiences in World War II were to haunt him
the rest of his life, and were to feature prominently within his
writing. Two of his novels, Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five,
take place almost entirely within Hitler's Germany. The latter is
perhaps Vonnegut's most autobiographical work to date, the action
occurring in and around Slaughterhouse Five, the very hellhole in
which he toiled for his captors. The former is no doubt less
autobiographical, but the main character certainly has many
things in common with his creator: an American artist within Nazi
Germany, doing what he felt was necessary to stay alive and to
further his work.
Mother Night, ironically, was not brought about as much
by Vonnegut's exposure to the Nazis in Dresden, but more from his
impressions and experiences in the mid-West during the Thirties,
when American Nazis were rampant in Indianapolis and his own aunt
encountered the new race laws of the German Germans, but it no
doubt drew heavily upon his experiences at the hands of Nazi
captors and his time spent in their land.
Even in the stories that do not actively portray the
second World War, Vonnegut is greatly influenced by it, and it
appears often throughout his stories. In The Sirens of Titan,
"the novel's first three chapters describe life on Earth as it
was between World War II and the Third Great Depression.
Ironically enough in this example, the author mentions another
major force in his life. Vonnegut was raised during the Great
Depression, which is what forced him out of private school and
established his feeling "uneasy about prosperity and associating
with members of (his) parents' class." Another example of
a character influenced by the war would be in God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater, when Eliot Rosewater is mentioned as having
"distinguished himself in the Infantry during World War II."
Between these two extremes, books directly about World
War II and books in which it is merely mentioned as having
influenced a character's life, are a whole series of other novels
and plays - those in which Vonnegut borrows characters directly
from the war. In these stories, the characters are no longer
involved in the global conflict, but instead have been, in their
past, directly involved and influenced by it. A perfect example
is Cat's Cradle's Doctor Schlichter von Koenigswald, a former
member of the S.S. that served at Auschwitz and was serving his
time in the Hospital of Hope and Mercy to atone for is sins.
So between these three tiers of writing about the war,
Vonnegut has inflicted nearly every one of his works with hints
of the war through which he suffered. Aside from using characters
from the war that claimed so many years of his life, Kurt
Vonnegut is also able to infuse ideas and philosophies from his
days in the U.S. Army and as a Prisoner of War into his writing.
In his introduction to the 1966 reprinting of Mother Night,
Vonnegut writes "If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would
have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around,
leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my
virtuous insides. So it goes." In this, he seems to be saying
that artists, like soldiers and many others, are to a degree
victims of circumstance. Through years of seeing honest, everyday
German people that had been turned into killing machines
essentially for where they lived, he began to accept the notion
that people are born unto beliefs, and that beliefs are born unto
people. This philosophy appears in much of his writing, such as
when he hints that all of the San Lorenzans in Cat's Cradle are
Bokononists, and that all Bokononists, as far as can be
discerned, are San Lorenzans.
Another example of an idea that was usurped from
Vonnegut's experiences in the war seems to be a caution against
unchecked science, or as Doctor Breed calls it in Cat's Cradle,
"pure research." As World War II ended, the people of the world
saw some of the most terrifying effects that science could have.
For the first time in history possibly since Ancient Greece, the
value of science was being questioned. People were not so sure
anymore that science was always such a good thing, and Vonnegut
seems to be one of the leading questioners.
In his most blatant and earliest attempt at portraying
the potential evil in technology, Player Piano, Vonnegut draws
heavily on Norbert Wiener's treatise on the social impact the
computer may have on mankind, The Human Use of Human Beings, and
joins Wiener in a careful look at the potential evil impact that
could be brought on by the union of man and machine, unless the
former could continue to control the latter. In fact, even the
name of Vonnegut's novel is derived from a tale in Wiener's
paper, in which a prominent American engineer buys an expensive
player piano to satisfy his interest in the piano mechanism, but
has no sense of the instrument's means of producing music.
Another philosophy that Vonnegut "borrowed" from his
wartime experiences was that of the military's need to destroy.
This idea was, to Vonnegut, a direct result of his experiences in
the bombing of Dresden, which he claimed to have had no
militaristic value. Throughout his writing, the killing of
thousands for petty or meaningless gains has had a great impact.
In The Sirens of Titan, he writes of the Army of Mars, whose only
"military success was the capture of a meat market in Basel,
Switzerland, by seventeen parachute Ski Marines," which seems to
be a satire of the United States Army, and countless other
armies', seeming need to conquer for the sake of conquering.
Again, in Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut writes of the numerous times
that countries had conquered San Lorenzo, only to willingly let
it go whenever any other country chose to claim it. Through this
method, Vonnegut shows his contempt for countries' need for
territory and the struggles it can cause.
Through the use of philosophies and ideas, characters,
and entire settings, Kurt Vonnegut makes his experiences as
a soldier and a prisoner in the Germany of World War II an
important part of his writing, as it is no doubt an important
part of his life. He is able to take the attitudes and feelings
of himself and of the general population during and following the
war, and to use them to spin fabulous yarns warning against the
dangers of militarism and excessive scientific zeal, without
detracting from his own story. There is no doubt that World War
II played a crucial role in the development of his writing, and
that is proof that at least some good can be salvaged from Man's
mistakes.
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Last modified: March 11, 2002