Imaginary Worlds - Slaughterhouse at Fifty

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

50 years ago this month, Kurt Vonnegut introduced Billy Pilgrim and the aliens who gave him time traveling powers in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Many critics were baffled as to why Vonnegut used sci-fi tropes to explore the horrors of World War II. But the novel was deeply personal to him. Vonnegut experts Marc Leeds, William Rodney Allen and Julia Whitehead connect the dots from the author’s real traumas to the fantastical adventures of Billy Pilgrim. And professor Philip Beidler explains why the novel speaks to him as a Vietnam veteran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. I would like you to meet somebody. My uncle, Mike Alexander. He was my grandmother's little

brother. My older sister, I always did everything she said. I'd get dressed to go out on a date or something. She'd sit and look at me and shake her head. That's all she did. I'd go back in my room and get redressed. My uncle Mike died in 2014, and I miss him all the time. I miss his sense of humor, his Boston accent. He just sounded like somebody from another era. In fact, his life intersected with important moments in history.

Like he actually worked on political campaigns with Jack and Ted Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a charming guy. And we have one friend of ours who said, I used to say, yeah, the hell with the Kennedys. The old man was a bootlegger and everything else. And he said, then he met Jack Kennedy. Next thing you do, he was on his back saying, Jack, what do you want me to do for you? What do you want me to do for you? I recorded Mike in 2009 because at that point he was 91 years old, and I felt like I had to capture for posterity these stories that we've been hearing all our lives. But the big story I wanted to get was Mike's service in World War II.

He flew as a bombardier alongside the Royal Air Force. He actually made friends for life over in England. After the war, he was part of the occupation of Germany. And as a Jew, he was very proud of the fact that he helped liberate concentration camps. He also attended the Nuremberg trials. His home office was full of old black and white pictures and a collection of Nazi beer mugs, which he got in Berlin in 1945. To me, they were his victory trophies. But he never told me much about his actual service as a bombardier. Now, this was the same crew that destroyed the city of Dresden, which was as close

to a non-military city as you could get in the Third Reich. Even the Germans didn't think it would be bombed. And the reason why it was so devastating was that they could find it, because there's a picture up there where I did the briefing. I didn't go on the raid, but all I did was send them due east until they hit the river. Then I'd go south, and you'll find Dresden. Gorgeous city, and they just completely demolished it. Mike was always upbeat, laughing at his own jokes. But I heard a different side of him that day, a part of him that he had suppressed for over 60 years. And I should warn you that the description of war in this episode is going to be intense and sometimes graphic.

Germany only had two seaports, Bremen and Hamburg. Otherwise, Germany is landlocked. So we went after those two because that's where their supplies came in from the east and so forth. And Hamburg was the biggest raid we had before the atomic bomb. 55,000 civilians killed, which is a terrible feeling. We had never thought of it, but that day we did because the whole city was, everything was on fire, and the Hamburg raid, they call the famous Hamburg firewall, where people were running into the water while they were burning. And we came back, and the flight surgeon, for the first time, took about 10 bombardiers

into another room and said, how do you guys feel? Nobody said anything. Finally, one guy said, well, I understand they were burning people down there and they were killing people already in their flight suit. He said, yeah, they've already killed about four million people. But that didn't justify the way that you feel. So that was part of the silence that vomiteers kept. It was even to this day. It was terrible. But you did it.

And then you forgot it. I had never heard Mike break down like that before, but he recovered quickly. He was back to the same old Uncle Mike in just a minute, telling more incredibly entertaining stories. And Mike has been on my mind lately, because this month is the 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking novel about World War II, Slaughterhouse-Five. And the novel was based on the real-life experience of the author, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed. He was a prisoner of war, and amazingly he survived because the Germans had put the American POWs in a slaughterhouse underground. Now remember, the Nazis did not

think Dresden would be bombed, and they had no idea that they had just put the American POWs in what was probably the best bunker in the entire city. The main character of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, has the same experience as Vonnegut, except aliens have given Billy Pilgrim the power to jump back and forth in time, so he can relive any moment of his life from birth to death. The problem is Billy can't control his time traveling. Here's Kurt Vonnegut from the early 1970s reading the novel. In this scene, Billy is trying to watch a movie about World War II,

but time keeps running backwards. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this. American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground.

And those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was inflamed. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds,

a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Today we are taking stock of Slaughterhouse-Five, looking at what the novel has to say to us now, not just about war, but about the forces that define our lives and how much we can control our own fate. That is all after the break. That is all after the break.

The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, which is Vonnegut's hometown, is doing a lot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Slaughterhouse-Five. Julia Whitehead is the founder of the museum, and she says they're giving away 86,000 copies of the book to high school students across Indiana. I am so excited about that for us. That's a big, bold, audacious thing to claim we're going to give away 86,000 books. But, you know, I think we can do it. It requires people to donate $5 for a copy of the book. We're working with Penguin Random House to make that, you know, possible for students. So that'll take us, we think, all year to be able to pull that off. Now today, Slaughterhouse-Five is a pretty typical reading

assignment for high school students. But when the book first came out, it was really controversial. In fact, when Julia first started the Vonnegut Museum and Library, she discovered that the book was banned from a high school in the town of Republic, Missouri. The school board hadn't even read the book when someone had recommended to them that they ban it. So we immediately went to work. We received donations of 150 copies of the book, which we sent out to students at Republic High School. You know, we made national news, international news for giving that book away. The school district objected to the sexual content and profanity in the book.

But Phil Beidler, who's a professor of literature at the University of Alabama, says there is another reason why the book has always been controversial. Vonnegut is challenging the notion that World War II should be seen as the, quote, good war. The phrase comes from Studs Terkel, who interviewed people who had gone through it, and thinking of World War II as the good war, of a war that had to be fought, and of a war in which Americans did heroic things. Now, Slaughterhouse-Five came out at the height of the Vietnam War. In fact, it was the first novel that Phil read when he returned from his service in Vietnam. And of course, that's how Slaughterhouse-Five spoke to me.

I saw a lot of what they called in those days collateral damage. And the My Lai massacre had eventually made its way into the news by now. So the connections are there. And as a Vietnam vet, Phil understood that the book was about not just the cost of war in terms of casualties, but also in terms of PTSD and survivor's guilt. In fact, that's one of the reasons why the book still speaks to him today. I still have nightmares after 50 years. On the other hand, I've spent my own life wondering why I was spared. I mean, I don't have any big noble reason. I've just, you know, I try to live every day because it's a day, and then it's a day that I've been given. Now, back in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five

was also polarizing because Vonnegut had taken this really important subject, the bombing of Dresden, and told it in the context of what was considered lowbrow science fiction tropes, aliens in time travel. And these aliens, who are called Tralfamadorians, look like green toilet plungers with hands instead of heads. They put Billy Pilgrim on display in an intergalactic zoo, and they watch him mate with a porn star from Earth called Montana Wild Hack. Again, here's Vonnegut reading from the novel. The Tralfamadorians had no voice boxes. They communicated telepathically. They were able to talk to Billy by means of a computer and a sort of electric organ which made every earthling speech sound.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim, said the loudspeaker. Any questions? Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last, why me? That is a very earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us, for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Now, I love this novel, partly because Vonnegut's writing is so sparse and funny when talking about things that are outrageous in every sense of the word. But when I first read it, even I couldn't figure out why he needed the aliens and time travel. I mean, not that I'm against aliens and time travel. I mean, I'm a big Doctor Who fan. But why was that the secret ingredient that finally allowed him to write about the worst experience of his life? To get answers, I met up with Mark

Leeds. He wrote a book called The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. Actually, when Mark first started working on that book in the 1980s, he contacted Vonnegut to get his approval, and he wasn't sure if this famous author was going to write him back. He wrote me back in less than a week and said, I don't know why anybody would want to spend that much time on my work, but if you have that kind of time, go right ahead. And they became friends for the next 20 years until Vonnegut died. Mark's apartment in Lower Manhattan is full of Vonnegut memorabilia. There are framed caricatures of Vonnegut on the walls. That day he was wearing a Vonnegut t-shirt

under a Vonnegut sweatshirt. He even had a little green doll of the aliens in the book, the Tralfamadorians. You have a knitted Tralfamadorian. Oh my god, this is so cute. I found it on Etsy. So why do you think they took on this shape here,

this idea of the hand that looks like a plunger with an eyeball in the middle? I never directly asked him, so I could only guess on this one. And my sense is that as the old son of a hardware salesman and grandson of a hardware salesman, that he knew that this is the handyman special. This is what does everything. You clean out your pipes. And you just gesture towards your head.

Yes. I think that you use it almost like a Q-tip and go to the other side of your ears and clean out your brains. And he has one purpose. He unclogs things. And Vonnegut had a lot of mental crap to unclog. And it wasn't just his wartime experiences. His whole life was marked by tragedy. He grew up with parents who were the toast of Indianapolis.

Rodney Allen is another scholar of Vonnegut's work, and he says that Vonnegut's mother came from a very wealthy family of German brewers. His father's side ran a successful chain of hardware stores, and Vonnegut's father was a major architect. First came Prohibition, which made a considerable dent in the fortune of the brewers. And then, of course, came the Depression. And the first thing to go during the Depression is the architectural profession because nobody's building anything. They were definitely living on a much more modest scale.

And his mother never could accept this. She never could stop spending, never admit that things had changed. And she eventually ended up dead of an overdose on Mother's Day because she just couldn't face the new realities. So he said he learned a bone-deep sadness from his parents. And there was more to come. In the 1950s, Vonnegut's sister died of cancer, and her husband, literally a day later, died in a commuter train accident. Vonnegut and his wife took custody of their children, and he already had three kids of his own. So Kurt, who had quit his steady job with General Electric essentially as a PR man years before that, now had, you know, seven people depending completely on him. So he had to write for money. Writing for money meant writing high concept sci-fi novels

like Cat's Cradle and Player Piano and writing for sci-fi magazines. He did write non-sci-fi books like Mother Night, which is about a German-American spy who's so deep undercover, he ends up inadvertently helping the Nazis. But Vonnegut had a chip on his shoulder because he felt like the critics were not giving him full respect. In fact, he once said, quote, I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file drawer labeled science fiction, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. So for years and years after the war, he struggled trying to figure out how to write about Dresden. And at first, he did not want to use science fiction. But every time he tried telling the story of how he survived the bombing, it didn't feel like a story. It just felt like

madness. And to understand why he eventually turns to science fiction, we need to delve deeper into what happened to him in 1945. Phil Beidler says Vonnegut was not supposed to be in combat. Right away, the Army had tagged him as a nerd, a potentially very useful nerd. Vonnegut was given an assignment in what they called ASTP, Advanced Service Training Platoons. They were sort of arbitrary units of smart kids that were being kept out of the infantry so they could be used as code breakers or, you know, in various kinds of technical occupations. And when the Battle of the Bulge happened, we had no reserves left. And so anybody in the ASTP

was simply thrown into combat. And particularly in this area where the 106th Division, a very weak division, was posted. And it was supposed to be a rest area. And that's where the 106th Division, a very weak division, was posted. And it was supposed to be a rest area. And that's where the Germans came in through the Ardennes. And just gazillions of Americans were taken prisoner. Then they get put on a train, and they're just packed in. They can't even all lie down to sleep. Again, Rodney Allen. They were without water for two days.

Their big Christmas present on Christmas Day in the boxcars was water. And then the train was strafed by American fighter planes, and 50 to 70 American prisoners were killed. Finally, they learned that their destination would be Dresden, which was known then as the Florence of the Elba River. Once they discovered this is Dresden, everybody's just euphoric. They said, man, we've made it. We're going to live. The war's almost over. Dresden's not a military city.

They were whooping it up, you know. And then, you know, a week or so later, the bombs fall and the city's destroyed. Now, as I said earlier, Vonnegut survived the bombing because the POWs were kept in an underground slaughterhouse, slaughterhouse number five. So in a weird way, the Germans saved their lives. And there were other levels of irony for Vonnegut. Now, he was a German-American at a time when German-Americans were actually a very prominent ethnic group alongside Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans. And it was because of World War I and World War II, German-Americans started anglicizing their names and stopped having German pride parades. And Mark Leid says that process was still ongoing in 1945. anything else, is valued as an American soldier because he can speak a little bit of German,

gets captured, is beaten up for speaking some German at a turn at times, saved by Germans, and then bombed by Americans. This idea of hyphenated identity, a German American. What does that mean? Mother Night is the book where we question identity. He even says in that book, if I had been born in Germany, I might have been leaving boots sticking out of snow banks belonging to Poles and Jews. By happenstance, he was born here.

But there were plenty of people who, by happenstance, were born there to have to bear the guilt for whatever they did. The thing that I think was even more stunning over the long term and turned Vonnegut into a strong voice talking about the absurdity of war was that what he and his fellow prisoners were set to doing by the Germans who had survived was to pick up the remnants of the corpses and pile them up in piles and put fuel on them and burn them to try to prevent the spread of disease.

And they would sometimes individually pick up these ghastly, you know, charred bodies and walk, lug them over to a pile and toss them for weeks. It defies description, really. Now, there was a guy in Vonnegut's unit who was named Ed Crone, but everyone called him Joe. And Vonnegut later said that Joe Crone was the inspiration for the main character of Slaughterhouse-Five. In fact, Vonnegut said, quote, Joe is deeply religious and kind and childlike. The war was utterly incomprehensible to him, as it should have been. He was a young man who had been an Eagle Scout. He wanted to be a chaplain.

The story of Joe Krohn always haunted Julia Whitehead. He was a young man who, you know, really had a heart of gold and was trying to do good things in the world. When he got into war, the chaos of war, the cruelty, he just didn't want to be part of this cruel world anymore. And even his fellow soldiers were sometimes cruel to him because they saw him as weak, too nice.

I think Kurt always remembered that this beautiful soul, this very, you know, beautiful person just couldn't put up with, you know, the cruelty, the harshness of this world. Joe Krohn died of a hunger strike in Dresden. But he wasn't making any demands, which makes it especially sad. He just did not want to be part of all of this anymore. Joe Krohn was overwhelmed with anguish. But in the novel, the character of Billy Pilgrim is emotionally numb. And he survives the war. He becomes an optometrist. It's a very mundane life in the suburbs with a wife and kids that don't understand him. Now, Vonnegut's attitude towards the war was somewhere in the middle. I mean, he was just as upset and horrified as Joe Krohn was. But Vonnegut had developed a gallows sense of humor from a young

age that he used as a coping mechanism. And Mark says it's not a big leap to go from that kind of absurdist humor to imagining a character like Joe Krohn getting plucked out of this world by aliens and being given weird, uncontrollable time-traveling powers. given weird, uncontrollable time-traveling powers. I don't think that Kurt set out to do anything other than for himself to make sense of his war experience in a way, because it was so ridiculously unbelievable to live through, that to describe it would really be pornographic in a certain demented way. So he had to find a way to make it palatable. And the only way to understand it is in this scattered science fiction motif

so that we could accept the irrationality of everything that's going on. And how can you really talk about this rationally? This makes no sense at all. Hence, you need science fiction. Hence, you need science fiction so we can, in Coleridge's terms, have a willing suspension of disbelief. And the Trafalgar Medorians are an interesting contrast to the insanity of war. They have a very calm kind of God's eye view of the universe that goes along with their credo, so it goes, which they say after anyone dies. And Vonnegut is kind of a character

in the novel. I mean, he's narrating it by saying he was there alongside Billy Pilgrim in Dresden. And as the narrator Vonnegut says, so it goes, after every single death that he mentions, Vonnegut says, so it goes, after every single death that he mentions. Phil actually kept count. It's used 106 times. Wow. And it's just a matter-of-fact thing, so it does. Well, here's another victim. Sometimes they're American, sometimes they're Germans. The Tralfamadorians don't experience time linearly. They can see the whole universe from beginning to end. And Billy learns that the universe will end when a Tralfamadorian pilot experiments with a new type of rocket fuel that is just as combustible as the Big Bang. And the Tralfamadorians, when Billy pilgrims, when they just say,

well, you know, that's it, so it goes. In the future, we know how the universe it. So it goes in the future. We know how the universe ends. One of our pilots is experimenting with a new rocket fuel. He presses the wrong button and the whole universe disappears. But, you know, we know that there's no way you can do that about it. It just is. Billy says, but you got to stop him.

You got to somehow, you know, be there and not have him press the wrong button. And they just laughed. They said, no, that can't be done. That's the way it is. And he said, but what about free will? And the Tralfamadorians laugh and they say, you know, we've been to so many planets and seen so many life forms, but only on Earth is there any talk of free will. I think the question that Vonnegut is wrestling with is what makes you a survivor? I mean, a lot of it is luck, although it feels kind of cruel to say that. And that's something he explores thoroughly in the novel. But I think he's wondering if there's something more, something in your attitude.

After a traumatic experience, how do you keep on living? How do you keep choosing life? That's the part of the novel that really resonates with Mark Leeds. In fact, he says reading Vonnegut gives him a sense of clarity. I now also am on the other side of death, if you will. Six years ago, I was in a coma. For me, everything is a plus now. And not just a plus, it is in fact awesome in the true sense of awe. The fact that I'm alive, the fact that I'm able to be with the one I love, that my children are doing well, that I'm able to have this conversation with you is all a bonus.

At the same time, I suffer PTSD from all of the medical procedures. And I now read Kurt with a different lens. That's why Slaughterhouse-Five was also the perfect book for Phil Beidler to read when he got back from the Vietnam War. Vonnegut just spoke to us, and he was thought of as kind of like everybody's Dutch uncle, and every so often his statements would be extremely facile. But then in Mother Night he would say things like,

we are always what we imagine ourselves to be, and so we must always be careful about what we imagine ourselves to be. We're not who we really are. We are who we imagine ourselves to be, and we better be damn careful about that. And if we're not, well, so it goes. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Phil Beidler, Mark Leeds, Rodney Allen, and Julie Whitehead. Now, the Vonnegut Museum and Library has a lot

more stuff planned to celebrate the novel's 50th anniversary, including a discussion with Solomon Rushdie in April. You can learn more at VonnegutLibrary.org. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emelinski and Imagine World's Pod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. world's podcast org you