POW muses over Vonnegut in Dresden

This is a wonderful interview by a German journalist, possibly the last to talk to Kurt Vonnegut:



Local vet recalls his POW days with the late Kurt Vonnegut
2007-05-03
By Daniel Sturm
Athens NEWS Contributor

When Kurt Vonnegut called my home on Feb. 23, I was thrilled. It was so exciting to hear the famous writer's voice on the phone that I didn't mind so much that he was calling to cancel a sit-down interview I'd suggested, to discuss his experiences in Dresden during WW II, and current views on war. As a captive POW, Vonnegut had survived the 1945 firebombing in an underground meatpacking cellar known as "Schlachthof 5." His experiences are memorialized in his best-selling 1969 novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five," and the film by the same name.

The 84-year old Vonnegut was frank but polite in his refusal of the interview. "I am [*******] sick and tired of talking about war," he said. "I don't know what else to say about all these [*******] wars. I'm afraid I have nothing new to add to what I've already said."

Vonnegut passed away a few weeks later.

For a special issue of a journal I am editing on the topic of war, my plan had been to ask the novelist to revisit the scene of Dresden's destruction (where an estimated 75,000 civilians died within 14 hours), and to compare it to the Bush administration's "shock and awe" attack of Iraq and, more recently, to Israel's cluster bombing of southern Lebanon. A German colleague offered to contribute a companion piece on the evolution of Dresden's peace movement in the wake of 9/11.

When I heard of Vonnegut's death, on April 11, after he had suffered brain injuries from a fall several weeks earlier, I realized that I may have been the last journalist to speak with him. Joel Bleifuss, his last editor at In These Times, had also been unsuccessful at persuading Vonnegut to put something more on paper. "He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say," Bleifuss said. "He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life."

Last week, I sat down with OU professor emeritus of history Gifford Doxsee, who'd experienced the firebombing of Dresden with Vonnegut. Doxsee had gotten to know this "tall and slender" man as the interpreter of his group of POWs, and had witnessed how Vonnegut was psychologically tortured after calling one Nazi guard a "swine." During the interview, Doxsee shed light on the real "Schlachthof 5" and shared his memories of the great American writer, Kurt Vonnegut.

STURM: When did you last talk to Kurt Vonnegut?

DOXSEE: In September 1997, he gave a lecture at Ohio Wesleyan University, which I attended with my wife. Somebody in the audience asked him, "Mr. Vonnegut, as a writer, what is your judgment of the impact of the computer on our society?" And Kurt said, "If I were a stock broker advising clients, I would advise to buy stocks in companies that manufacture laxatives, because the computer is making us so sedentary." Who but Kurt Vonnegut would say it this way? He saw the world differently from the way most of his contemporaries did. After the lecture we chatted briefly. But Kurt had an assistant, you might call a bodyguard, who allowed him to talk with us for about five minutes and then spirited him away.

STURM: Could you describe the circumstances under which you got to know Vonnegut?

DOXSEE: After we were captured in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, we walked for a couple of days and then were put in box cars for eight and a half days, until we got to STALAG ("Stammlager") IV B, which is just outside of the village of Muhlberg, about 35 miles Northwest of Dresden, right on the Elbe River. There, we were processed as POWs. A section of the camp was occupied by British non-commissioned officers. We were there barely two weeks, and I did not know Kurt. And then 150 of us were shipped off, even though Kurt talked about 100 in "Slaughterhouse-Five." When we got to Dresden, where Kurt was named the interpreter, that's when I first became aware of him. In the first months before the bombing of Dresden, our group of 150 was divided into about 10 teams of roughly 15 each. Most of us went to the factories to provide labor. In "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt talked about the malt factory where people produced malt syrup for pregnant women. Kurt and I were in the same detail there, in the Koenigs-Malzfabrik. Little by little, we got to know each other better.

STURM: When you first learned of his passing, could you describe what went through your mind?

DOXSEE: A feeling that we had come to the end of an era. He epitomized for many others the experience we had in Dresden. Not only because of his novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five," but also because of his role while we were there. When we arrived in Dresden, we were welcomed by an English-speaking German captain, who said to us that our guards would not know English. He selected Kurt to be our first interpreter. Not only was Kurt tall and slender in those days, so that he stood taller than the rest of us, and was therefore visible, but as an interpreter he became the best-known person in our group for the first month of our time in Dresden.

STURM: So Vonnegut worked as an interpreter throughout the entire time?

DOXSEE: The thing that led to Kurt's dismissal from his role as interpreter was that, one day, the guards decided that the tables and chairs needed to be scrubbed down with hot water and soap, and they assigned five of the soldiers to do this. The German guard who was in charge of this detail noticed that one of the five was not working as hard as the other four. Now, bear in mind, we were not getting Red Cross food packets. We were slowly starving. This soldier had diarrhea and very little energy. So he was making an effort, but he wasn't doing very much. The guard warned him, "You have to work harder, you are not doing your share." Vonnegut had to interpret this. But he also said to the guard, "The guy is sick; take it easy." The guard wouldn't pay attention, and he finally struck the prisoner. At which point Kurt lost his patience, and under his breath said, "You dirty swine." The German word "Schwein," and the English word "swine," sound just the same. So the guard knew what Vonnegut said. He marched off to his superior and said, "Kurt Vonnegut has insulted the honor of the German army." He must be punished. He was dismissed from being interpreter and went back into the ranks. Very soon after that we had the bombing.

STURM: Was Vonnegut punished?

DOXSEE: I think he was tortured psychologically more than any of the rest of us. One 16-year old Hitler Youth kid that we nicknamed "Junior" took it upon himself to punish Kurt for having used the word "swine." After the firebombing, when we had to clean up rubble, we were usually given two blocks of rubble to clean. "Junior" would come out there on the work place with a bayonet attached to his rifle, with the scabbard removed, and would follow Kurt around from morning until night, literally taunting him. "You lazy American, you don't know how to work," he said. "We Germans know how to work. I will teach you." And he would jam him in the rear end with the point of his bayonet. My sense was he was taunting Vonnegut, hoping that Kurt would strike back. I think that Kurt would have paid with his life. He realized that, and so he developed an iron discipline not to respond. He went through this kind of psychological torture for a month. I know from the conversation we had in 1945 that he was furious at "Junior" (Doxsee visited Vonnegut in August of 1945, during his 75-day convalescence furlough in Indianapolis).

STURM: Vonnegut thought of naming his last book "The 51st state." He explained this during one of his last interviews: "That would be the state of denial which we are all living in now, because the game is all over. We have irrevocably ruined the planet as a life-support system." Instead he chose as a title, "The Man Without a Country." Do you share his criticism of technology?

DOXSEE: I guess I am on the fence in this matter. I learned my livelihood in education, as a teacher and a professor. And I have to feel that education has an important role in the lives of people. One aspect of education is the advancement of science technology. So I guess I don't entirely agree with him on this.

STURM: Vonnegut was slated to become a chemist. WW II made him a pacifist. Do you think that his experiences in Dresden may have turned him against technology?

DOXSEE: Very likely. He studied chemistry at Cornell University, but he never went back to Cornell after the war. He went to Chicago to study anthropology and became much more a humanist than a scientist. His scientific training made it possible for him to write science fiction. I should tell you a little bit more about Billy Pilgrim, who is the epitome of the anti-soldier. It's Vonnegut's way of thumbing his nose at the military by having the main character an anti-hero. I wondered from the time that "Slaughterhouse Five" was published in 1969, until the 1990s, whether Billy Pilgrim was a figment of Kurt Vonnegut's invention or whether he was based on one of our fellow POWs. And finally, in the 1990s, Kurt told the world who his role model was: Edward Reginald Crone. He was a student at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, when I was a freshman at Hobart. So I knew Crone before we were in the military. We ended up in the same division. And finally we ended up in Dresden. Crone died of malnutrition before the war ended, at a hospital in Dresden. He was planning to become an Episcopal priest.

STURM: Was Vonnegut's portrayal of Billy Pilgram, aka Edward Crone, realistic?

DOXSEE: It was exaggerated for the purpose of the book. Crone wasn't quite as disorganized as Billy Pilgrim was. But the fact that he let himself starve to death, and died before the war ended, is an indication that he wasn't entirely rational. Most of us saved our food and managed to survive.

STURM: Describe the firebombing of Dresden, on Feb. 13, 1945, as you experienced it.

DOXSEE: The two British raids were at night. One was around 10 p.m. and the other one at around 2 a.m. Both of those times the guards got us up and made us walk a hundred yards or so, to another building, also in the slaughterhouse compound. It had what Vonnegut called a "meat locker." This was a refrigerated room two stories below ground. That's where we went as a kind of air-raid shelter. When the bombing came, we could feel the ground shake, and the plaster from the ceiling fell on us. So we knew this was very serious. During the first raid the bombs didn't seem to be as close as the second raid. After the second raid, the guards got us above ground. The building that we had been in had been hit by incendiary bombs and was burning. The guards were afraid that we would die of asphyxiation. So they got us above ground as soon as they could. We saw a city on fire all around. A terrifying sight.

STURM: Vonnegut wrote that after the firebombing there were too many corpses to bury. So instead, the Nazis sent in guys with flamethrowers. Did you have to do this yourself?

DOXSEE: We had to carry corpses out of the cellars. The most vivid memory was when we went to the Central Railroad Station where there were probably hundreds of people who had children. By the time we were assigned to carry these corpses out, they had been there for long enough that they were decomposing. When we tried to pull them by their arms, we'd be holding limbs in our hands. This was an existentialist experience. The German carriers carried them to the funeral parlors.

STURM: Can you describe a scene from the book that resonated with your own experience?

DOXSEE: One of the things I learned in talking with other survivors has been how different our memories are. But the one event that everybody remembered was the execution by the SS of one of the POWs. In Vonnegut's novel, it's Edgar Derby, for stealing a teapot. In reality, there was no Edgar Derby and there was no teapot. But there was a POW in our group by the name of Michael Palaia, from Philadelphia. The guards, who were sympathetic, let it be known that if we found food in the basements we could eat it. If we found anything valuable, like silverware or jewelry, we were to tell the guards. We were warned not to take anything out of the cellars, because that was defined as looting. And looting by international law was punishable by death. Michael Palaia found a jar of unopened string beans. He would have gotten away with it, except there was an unexpected inspection by the SS just as he was climbing over the rubble. And one of the SS soldiers saw what looked suspicious and found a jar of string beans. So Michael was a marked man. The next morning at roll call he was called out of formation and taken away. Several days later, four of our other POWs were called out, and when they came back in the evening, shaken, they had had to dig the grave and bury Michael.

STURM: What did you learn in Dresden?

DOXSEE: The fragility of civilization. After I got out of the army I got a job as a messenger boy for the New York Times. Every night at 2:30 a.m. I walked alone from Times Square, down 7th Avenue to Penn Station. Eleven blocks. New York was a safe city then. When I looked at those skyscrapers in 1945, I said to myself, "I wonder if New York will ever be subjected to the destruction of Dresden?" It happened. So, the lesson from my time in Dresden was that the line between civilization and chaos is a very fine line, indeed.

STURM: Vonnegut said that there wasn't much in Dresden worth bombing, according to U.S. intelligence. In his view, burning the whole place down wasn't an exercise in military intelligence, but was "religious. It was Wagnerian. It was theatrical." What's your analysis?

DOXSEE: Anything that would have shortened the war by even one day was worth it. My view is that if something like this had happened in 1938, it would have created a moral outrage throughout the world. But when you have a war like WW II, people become hardened, little by little, until eventually things that would have been unthinkable before the war are just accepted as commonplace.

STURM: In 1973, Vonnegut said that there was "a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place, because I don't remember. And I looked up several of my war buddies and they didn't remember either. They didn't want to talk about it." Did you also draw a blank?

DOXSEE: I am not sure to what extent he was telling the whole truth, or whether he was exaggerating. While I was visiting my parents in my convalescence furlough, in the summer of 1945, I decided one day to jot down some of my memories from Dresden. My mother came in the room and casually asked me what I was doing. When I told her, she became very emotionally upset. Now my mother was a very tranquil lady. I don't think I saw her upset more than half a dozen times in all the years that we lived together. She said, "Don't write this. This is behind you, get on with your life." I realized that she had suffered more psychologically than I had. She had gotten a telegram from the War Department on Jan. 12, 1945, that I was missing in action. My mother went through three entire months not knowing whether I was dead or alive. It was very hard on her. So in deference to her wishes, I never put anything on paper until 1981, five years after she died. A copy of this essay is in the archives of the Alden Library (http://ohiomemory.org).

STURM: From his youth, Vonnegut has the memory of being a prisoner in Nazi Germany, and witnessing the Dresden massacre. At the time of his death, suicide bombers, terrorism and torture are now much more in the news than peace negotiations and diplomacy. That must have been bitter for him.

DOXSEE: I think he had a cynical side to his personality from a very young age, and it probably increased as time went on. I see the world in a more optimistic way. I had two great overseas adventures. The first one was WW II. The second one was teaching in Beirut, Lebanon. The impact of teaching overseas caused me to see the United States in an entirely different way. I came home in 1955 skeptical, recognizing that the American people were fed a certain interpretation of world affairs, which put U.S. interests first, without necessarily making this obvious. The rest of the world was sort of trimmed off. We would go to great lengths to save one American life abroad, but if we killed thousands of others, it didn't matter because they were not Americans. Ever since the 1950s, I have had a certain amount of skepticism about anything our political leaders tell us. Not that they necessarily lie. But they only tell us one part of the story.

STURM: Do you think there might be another World War brewing?

DOXSEE: The lesson I think I've learned from the study of history is that there can be very unexpected developments. There's a saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. The timing of the coming of Moses, Jesus or Muhammad could be interpreted as the Lord sending a prophet at a time of darkness. It's just possible that somebody completely unexpected could emerge as a spiritual or philosophical leader, who would be successful in bringing about a transformation of attitudes. I don't know. I recognize all the reasons why Vonnegut felt less optimistic. They are all valid reasons. But there have been unexpected blessings in the past, and maybe there will be unexpected blessings in our time.

STURM: In March of 2006, Vonnegut gave his last public speech at Ohio State University. Two thousand students attended his lecture, and about as many were turned away. Vonnegut had this to say: "The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected." What's your analysis?

DOXSEE: I've learned that it's very important to be discreet. One can say only what one thinks in a private conversation. One has to be very careful when speaking in public, because there are certain no-nos, in terms of our values. This country has demonized Hitler. It was justifiable during the war. After the war, the demonization has continued. There are very valid reasons for this. But one of the interesting aspects for me is the question, what role did the United States play in bringing Hitler to power? If Hitler would not have come to power, we would probably never have had WW II. Nobody asks. It is just an assumption that the United States was totally blameless. But I think we had a high level of responsibility.

During the 1920s, when we experienced prosperity in this country, it was our bankers who were lending huge amounts of money to the German bankers -- short-term loans, which meant high interest rates. And the Germans were now repaying this, and every three months they were borrowing more, to keep up with the interest. If our leaders in Washington had understood the reality of the economics more thoroughly, we could have modified our policies, and either eliminated the Depression or at least diminished its impact. Forty percent of the Germans were unemployed. Hitler came along and said, "I will give you jobs."

STURM: You have seen war and its effects. Do you see a solution to the current spiral of violence in Iraq?

DOXSEE: I have been very critical of the Bush administration from day one. The administration has given a whole series of explanations as to why we needed to invade Iraq. To me, it seems that they are not telling the whole story. I think that there are several powerful reasons that have not been shared with the American public, for political reasons: The Saudis wanted an American army when Saddam Hussein was threatening them. But when he was driven out of Kuwait, the danger was passed, and from then on the Saudis wanted our army out. But our government did not want to remove its troops from the Middle East. So the question became, if U.S. troops left Saudi Arabia, where should they go? Iraq became a viable substitute.

STURM: In his last book, "A Man Without a Country," Vonnegut wrote that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." What's your take?

DOXSEE: He may have exaggerated a bit. My view is if you start with Abraham Lincoln's phrase at the end of the Gettysburg Address, that we have a government of the people, by the people and for the people, what I see today is we have a government of the Halliburtons, by the Halliburtons and for the Halliburtons. I'm using the word "Halliburton" as a generic term to talk about all the huge corporations who have profited so much from the war in Iraq. We haven't helped the Iraqis at all. They are far worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein, except that they have more freedom to say things. But they also have a civil war going on.

Editor's note: Daniel Sturm is a German journalist who covers underreported social and political topics in the United States and Europe. For four years, Sturm lived in Leipzig near Dresden, before relocating to the U.S. in 2002. Some of his work can be read at www.sturmstories.com.