Dresden, Once Beautiful
October 2024
“Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.”
Kurt Vonnegut
I too have been trying to write about the terrific bombing of Dresden and the impact my father’s story had, and still has, on me. Maybe that’s the magic of fiction in that a writer like Kurt Vonnegut could get to it without worrying about a fact-filled historical account. Instead, he told of it through a story. That story was the famous novel, Slaughterhouse Five.
“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his.”
Vonnegut could not recall enough to write a whole book on it, yet it was something he wanted to do soon after he returned from the war. He used humor – some witty and some crude – to deal with a significant “something” inside him. It was not until 1969 when he was finally able to write about this “something;” it was still haunting him.
My dad wanted to talk about it too, but just could not figure out how to do so. I felt the same way after listening to his perspective on Dresden. Like Vonnegut, and many other POWs, my father watched American and British bombers blast this beautiful city on that February day in 1945 when an estimated 25,000 people were killed by the firebombing. My father also observed subsequent bombings from closer up. His presentation of this event was scant in its description but when he would tell me his brief tale (which took about twenty seconds), I was left with the same feeling that I have now as I write this. My father was a “proud Yank” who believed with all his heart that his war was a righteous one. I agree. I also know that he saw an unbelievable amount of death and carnage, and lived with the vivid remembrance of the smell of that death for the rest of his years.
Seeing the skies glow over Dresden from his POW camp 38 kilometers away, and later from a closer proximity, had a big impact on my father. It was the smell of death that most troubled him. I knew this from his words and simply from the air that surrounded us both when he mentioned Dresden to me. Always the same description, “we saw the whole thing it was devastating.”
And my dad’s story about Dresden was always the one thing that made me pause and move on from “hero-worship” to the realization that this was not easy for him to take. He could not fit it into a tidy story and it bothered him. It bothered me when I was a young boy. Today, it bothers me even more and it fascinates me too. Maybe it helped me to see that life is messy and beautiful at the same time. It can even be a noble venture but punctuated by horrible realities. The death of tens of thousands of citizens in Dresden is an example. An example? That is the problem. It is not a point to be made but personal on a scale too large to grasp.
Like Vonnegut, my father thought a great deal about Dresden; more than he let on. It was central to his understanding of a war he fought with pride yet would never wish on me or any other person.
Vonnegut and my dad were very different but they would have liked each other. While he was no “choir boy,” my dad was not one to put up with some of the crudities of the novelist. He would have seen through them though and noticed another soul who was trying to make sense of such a huge event; one that, on a temporal basis, should have been nothing more than a line or two in the many moments of a long life.
I created this blog to help with the publishing of my book and to share, with each of you, personal stories from the war. Dresden’s numbers make it seem to be anything but personal. It is emblematic of the tragedy of modern times. A beautiful, ancient city that was horrifically dismantled by modern machines who never saw the enemy they were killing. Big numbers and no faces, just devastation. People still argue about whether it was justified or not, but my dad had a very personal perspective. He saw it and smelled it. He was just not very good at describing it. His secret friend, Kurt, was inside the city and for him it was so intense and personal that it transcended the war. It almost hollowed him out with the intimate and grotesque details of the deaths of individuals. People. Still, to bring it home for the reader and for himself Kurt shared a paradoxical and ridiculous tale. The story was of Edgar Derby, the man who stole the teapot. Vonnegut tells us of a conversation he had with a friend as he contemplated the writing of Slaughterhouse Five.
“I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby. The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad.”
After visiting Dresden again in 1967, and seeing the city rebuilt, he further commented. “There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.”
Maybe my dad was more eloquent than I realized. He knew there was little he could say or write to express Dresden. No one would understand, so he just told me, “…it was devastating.” It took Kurt an entire bestselling novel to say the same thing. I cannot explain why this part of my father’s odyssey across Europe is so unsettling and powerful within me. I can only tell you that it is.
“So it goes.”