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

The Effects of World War II on Kurt Vonnegut's Writing 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