I WAS ALONE at the end of the line: the Number 10 had taken me to the Messering, not far from the city centre. Squat mansard roofs huddled over the road, handsome and—like so much else in Dresden—with the look of the old newly rebuilt. It was July: you could have fried an egg on their bright terracotta tiles.
The tram had dropped me on a bridge. Beneath it, where it looked as though a river should pass, there were open green fields. Apparently at one time the locals had called this place Ostra-Insel, a mix of Slavic and Germanic for “Island Island”. It was not, in fact, an island. Never had been. But it felt lonely enough to deserve the name, thrust by a sharp bend in the river away from the rest of the city.
Over the green fields, shimmering in the heat, I could make out the spires and domes that had made Dresden famous—for a while, all it was famous for. Once upon a time it was “The Florence on the Elbe”. It’s beautiful again these days, and there had been a carnival atmosphere in its reconstructed streets. Cold German pilsner will never taste better than in thirty-degree heat, so Dresdeners were making good use of the weather; I couldn't seem to take three steps without finding an overflowing stein thrust into my hand.
But I had an appointment to keep.
I made the journey to Ostra-Insel and made it alone. Apparently you can book tours to take you out there, but I was feeling selfish: it felt right to have this moment to myself. Fifteen minutes from the clamour and crowds of Neustadt station and nothing moved but the trees. The only sound was the rattle of the tram as it disappeared behind me, returning to the city. Or, no. Something else: somewhere nearby birds were talking.
I needed to find a street sign. I needed to see where I was and see it written out. I already knew, of course: I was on Schlachthofstraße. Slaughterhouse Street.
It was from this spot over seventy years ago that Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a young American POW captured near the end of World War Two, had emerged from an underground meat locker. When he had marched down into its depths, Dresden was a baroque jewel box sitting proud on the river; when he came up a few hours later, the city was a smoldering lunar wasteland. Nothing was left.
Since then, “Dresden” has been a by-word for total destruction. I remember learning in school how the British and Americans had reduced the city to ruins at the end of the war, how thousands upon thousands had been burned alive in the firestorm. The young Private Vonnegut had seen it all; in the days after the bombing, he was even put to work plucking the dead out of the rubble. He described it as only he could, as “a fancy thing to see, a startling thing.”
Being a budding writer, he realised all that excitement would make good fodder for a novel; it took him twenty years longer than expected to write it, but eventually he finished. When he did, he named his little book after the make-shift shelter that had kept him from being incinerated: Slaughterhouse-Five. And to his surprise, it became a modern classic.
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A COPY of Slaughterhouse-Five found its way into my hands when I was in high school and—as tends to happen to all sensitive, bookish teenagers—I instantly fell in love. I couldn’t get enough of Vonnegut’s grim humour, his fierce morals. Billy Pilgrim, the meek optometrist who becomes “unstuck in time”, was the perfect hero for a meek high-schooler who felt unstuck himself.
It wasn’t long before I had passages memorised by heart, and in times of need one reassuring sentence or another would float through my thoughts. “I urge you please to notice when you are happy,” Vonnegut writes, “and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” It’s advice I tried to live by.
I had always had the vague notion throughout high school that one day I would make a pilgrimage to Dresden and Slaughterhouse Five. Nothing came of it. But then I went to university, graduated, and decided to move to Prague, one of Dresden’s neighbours in the heart of Europe. It was that most Vonnegutian of all happy accidents: that is to say, fate. Striking out on my own, finally stumbling toward something like adulthood, what better time to go pay homage to the writer of my youth?
By some cosmic coincidence I was 22 at the time of my visit, the same age as Vonnegut when he pulled himself out of the meat locker in 1945. It had been years since I had first picked up his novel; I liked to imagine I wasn’t the same person. In many ways I wasn’t, and I had Vonnegut to thank for that. But I also wasn’t a teenager anymore, and as I jumped off the tram at Ostra-Insel I knew my blind teenaged devotion to the writer had already started to wane.
I still loved Vonnegut. But the more I read about Slaughterhouse-Five, the more he lost his authority. The novel starts with a knock-out sentence—“All this happened, more or less”—but I was discovering that, while it was great literature, it was downright bad history.
No one could ever deny the horror of what Vonnegut witnessed in Dresden, but his book is full of the kind of hearsay that thrives in the fog of war. The rumour that the Nazis made soap from the bodies of their Jewish victims was a popular one in the 1940s, for example, but has long been debunked as myth. (And a dangerous myth, as Jochaim Neander points out: if Holocaust deniers can prove that piece of Nazi cruelty is fake, then it allows them to "cast doubt on the very existence of the Holocaust itself.")
Most surprising of all, however, is the fact that Vonnegut claims 135,000 people died in the bombing of Dresden, that it was “the greatest massacre in European history”. The problem: they didn’t and it wasn’t. It had taken me a quick Google search to find out that 25,000 people died—a horrific number, but certainly not an outlier in terms of the Allied bombing campaign. So why, I asked myself, did Vonnegut write 135,000 and not 25,000? How could he make such a mistake?
Following the trail had led me to a depressing discovery.
WHEN VONNEGUT came back to the States, he found half an inch about Dresden in the newspaper: he concluded that in the grand, bloody scheme of the war, maybe he hadn’t seen much after all. But then in 1963 a man called David Irving published The Destruction of Dresden, a purported history of the bombing which claimed 135,000 people had perished—perhaps even 250,000—and which described it as “the biggest single massacre in European history.” With the nascent conflict in Vietnam heating up and anti-war sentiment on the rise, Irving’s book caught the public imagination. Dresden was suddenly a cause célèbre. Vonnegut realized, as he said later, “By God, I saw something after all!”
However, Irving wasn’t the historian he claimed to be. Unbeknownst to Vonnegut, he had intentionally skewed the historical record and passed off rumour as fact. Only later in his career, as his claims became more indefensible, did his bias become obvious: Irving was in fact a vicious antisemite and Holocaust denier. His book on Dresden is now seen as an early attempt to create a false moral equivalence between Allied conduct in the war and German treatment of the Jews.
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I was already aware of Irving when I made my pilgrimage to Dresden—and aware of how marbled throughout Slaughterhouse-Five his influence was. (He’s name-checked in the novel, and one character quotes extensively from The Destruction of Dresden.) I was aware too that Vonnegut had never once tried to distance himself from this dubious source; on the contrary, he had continued to repeat Irving’s lies long after the would-be historian had been branded a falsifier of history by the British courts. In other words, Vonnegut had continued to repeat the lies long after he should have known better.
Right up to his death, the author was still parroting Irving and calling Dresden the single greatest massacre in European history—all while having to come up with unconvincing semantic contortions to justify why that was so. (He was certainly aware of Auschwitz, he would say, “but a massacre is something that happens suddenly.”) Given that Irving almost certainly thought up the phrase as a way to diminish Jewish suffering in the war, Vonnegut’s decision to repeat it uncritically is inexcusable.
Of course, I’ve never thought for a second Vonnegut himself shared any of Irving’s prejudices, nor was he was the only one to swallow the lies whole. (For one, The New York Times originally reviewed Irving’s account of the bombing as “harrowing—and true.”) Thankfully Vonnegut’s unwitting use of the fake death toll is always to play up the madness of war rather than play down the horror of the gas chambers.
But still, how does a fan reconcile the fact that their favourite author made their reputation in large part off the back of lies told by a Holocaust denier? And what's more, still clung to those lies when all the information was there to prove they were just that?
These are questions that leave a bitter taste in the mouth of any Vonnegut die-hard—although standing on Ostra-Insel, sweating under the hot July sun, that bitterness tasted oddly apt. It tasted adult. I could almost feel smug, full of the mature knowledge that things weren’t black and white, that Vonnegut was an imperfect man who had written an imperfect book, but a book still worth reading and loving anyway. Simple either/or judgements were childish, I told myself. And after all, hadn’t I come to Dresden to put away childish things?
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE stopped being a slaughterhouse long ago. Today it’s an events complex and conference centre. There were no events on when I turned up, which explained the eerie silence about the place. Everything was locked up behind barriers and fences. In the middle of the complex I could see a dilapidated tower, which Dresdeners had given the wonderful name of Schweinedom: in English, “Pig Dome”. I hopped the fence and went to have a look.
I had never made a pilgrimage before and wasn’t entirely sure what was expected of me. There was nothing much to see in the old slaughterhouse, no special memorial to the writer where I could kneel or rest a hand. The best I could manage, I decided, was simply to exist for a few minutes where Vonnegut had existed and see if I could imagine away the decades.
I walked around, did a lot of standing and thinking. Before long, it was time to go.
Later that day I went to the Augustus Garten, a sprawling beer garden on the banks of the Elbe. It had an incredible view of the new old town: the stately Semperoper, the domed Frauenkirche. Almost all the landmarks gutted in 1945 have now been rebuilt. Dresden must once again look something like it did when it mesmerized the young private from Indianapolis.
It made for a pretty end to the day. The sun was going down and it wasn't so hot anymore. The next day I would be on a train to Prague, starting a new chapter. I sat on the terrace of the Augustus Garten with my beer and admired the city shimmering in the water of the river. I said to myself, "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."
Click on the photographs taken from other sources to find a link to the original. All other photographs are copyright of 14 Degrees East.