The Effects of World War II on Kurt Vonneguts Writing :: Biography Biographies Essays

The Effects of World fight II on Kurt Vonneguts Writing February 13, 1945 Dresden, Germany. War is raging acrossEurope. In a racy underground meat locker beneathSchlacthof-Funf, Slaughterhouse Five, 100 American prisoners andtheir six German guards feel the Earth move as Royal nisus Forcebombers lay wreckage to the city above. They can only hear themass terror as the greatest slaughter in European history takesplace, cleanup spot an estimated 135,000 civilians and destroyingcathedrals, museums, parks, and even the zoo. In the morning,after the carnage has ended, the prisoners are put to workexcavating bombed-out buildings to search for the dead. One ofthose Americans was none other than Private Kurt Vonnegut,Junior. Vonneguts experiences in World War II were to haunt himthe rest of his life, and were to feature prominently at heart hiswriting. Two of his novels, Mother Night and Slaughterhouse F ive,take place almost entirely within Hitlers Germany. The latter isperhaps Vonneguts most autobiographical work to date, the actionoccurring in and around Slaughterhouse Five, the very hellhole inwhich he toiled for his captors. The former is no doubt lessautobiographical, but the main character certainly has manythings in common with his creator an American artist within NaziGermany, doing what he felt was necessary to stay alive and tofurther his work. Mother Night, ironically, was not brought about as muchby Vonneguts exposure to the Nazis in Dresden, but to a greater extent from hisimpressions and experiences in the mid-West during the Thirties,when American Nazis were rampant in Indianapolis and his own auntencountered the new race laws of the German Germans, but it nodoubt drew intemperately upon his experiences at the hands of Nazicaptors and his time spent in their land. Even in the stories that do not actively portray the