Vonnegut's source for his 135,000 figure was The Destruction of Dresden by David Irving. Vonnegut did not know at the time that this source was far from an accurate history. It is now widely known that David Irving is a holocaust denier and deliberately misrepresented history in order to downplay Nazi atrocities and exaggerate allied ones. In writing this "history," Irving used a falsified document created as Nazi propaganda as his main source, and it was from this document that he got his number of 135,000. It is a shame that Vonnegut was influenced by such a terribly inaccurate historical source.
In All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden by Ann Rigney, the article we discuss in our panel presentation, the author argues that Irving's book had a greater impact on Vonnegut and Slaughter House Five than just the number it gave. In the opening pages of his book, Vonnegut writes "It wasn’t a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima." This comparison to Hiroshima apparently stems directly from Irving's book, and, through the popularity of Slaughter House Five has been brought into the popular perception of these two bombings. Vonnegut's unintentional propagation of these misleading figures and arguments are very misfortunate and in the eyes of some take away from the powerful anti-war message of this book. I think that just because Vonnegut got his numbers wrong and (mistakenly) said that one WWII bombing was worse than another does not reduce the power of this book's message. His denunciation of war in general is completely unaffected by the details about which bombing in war claimed more lives.
This is a very interesting find that I'm surprised to hear about, and it also makes the point of Dresden's significance to Billy and Vonnegut a little stranger. If far fewer people succumbed to the bombing, as well as the fact that there was only one bomb dropped on Hiroshima, why do they still treat it like it was the end of the world as they knew it? I totally get the feeling of having everything around you destroyed and being in the mindset that there could not be anything worse than what you went through. That said, the significance of Dresden is undercut a little. (of course, Billy Pilgrim doesn't place much significance on anything) Or was Vonnegut simply making these numbers up? Who knows. But yeah, this was an intriguing post. Good job!
ReplyDeleteDarn it Irving! At it with the misinformation, letting Vonnegut make some bad comparisons! Saying that Dresden is worse than Hiroshima is a controversial and jaw-dropping sort of statement, so it's too bad that his words have been immortalized if they're not factual. But isn't the death count still in some heavy contention? I've seen some even bigger estimates, but I suppose those are less common and could stem from the same faulty sources. I did agree with you in class though, the numbers aren't the point. The large scale ridiculous amount of atrocity and death is the point.
ReplyDeleteStill I feel that by using Irving's book as a source, Vonnegut may have compromised the integrity of his argument for some readers. While the point of the novel still stands to get across the awfulness of war, Slaughterhouse-Five opens it up to being argued against when a simple fact it relies upon is completely wrong. I think that the "so it goes" does manage to get across the point of how the war was perceived and how people didn't know about the bombing of Dresden as much as the atomic bombings. It also calls into question the novel's bias through the moral equivalence of the tragedies of war.
ReplyDeleteI think that this unfortunate source definitely discredits Vonnegut to some extent. However, I also think that an unbiased reader can get past how this source skews Vonnegut's narrative. It does somewhat take away from the story to know that the 135,000 figure is incorrect, but I think that this book is with out a doubt still valuable for the unique image it paints of what WWII was like for POWs in Germany and eventually Dresden.
DeleteI would agree, after all Vonnegut doesn't really claim that his book is totally factual either. I think that the little green men and flying saucers kind of tip us of to possible "interpretations" of the bombing of Dresden and war itself. It's clear that the point of this novel is not to tell the story exactly how it happened, because that's impossible. As panel presentations in our class pointed out, in writing his book Vonnegut encountered many contradictory recollections of the event from the POWs who endured it. He still uses fact and fiction to make a point, and make us think about how we view different perspectives of history, specifically WWII and Dresden.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting point you have raised. I completely accepted the 135000 number that Vonnegut presented without doing any research at all. Vonnegut claims that his book isn't entirely factual so this might be something Vonnegut totally made up.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if the fact that the numbers were not accurate changed how I read the book. To me, numbers are just numbers. I had commented earlier that I wouldn't know the difference between such large numbers. Like, I wouldn't really know the difference if 100,000 people died or if 200,000 people died. Once, you get to such large numbers, the numbers are distinguishable. Another point can be made that heinous acts aren't just identified by the number of people killed. Take the Holocaust as an example. It doesn't matter if 1 million people died or 6 million people died, what the Nazis did was still probably the most heinous act in all of history.
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