Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

German-American writer Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84.  Nice obituaries at The New York Times and Die Presse. Slaughterhouse-Five (Schlachthof 5) remains one of the most important books for me (along with Catch-22)  coming of age during the Vietnam War. Slaughterhouse-Five helped to crystallize my youthful opposition to that war and opened my eyes to some of the historical truths of "The Good War".  For most Americans, this was the first time Americans learned something about the realities of the Allied firebombing of German civilians. Oliver Lubrich included excerpts of Slaughterhouse-Five in his book about foreign observers of the Allied bombing campaign in Germany: Berichte aus der Abwurfzone.

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five.

It took Vonnegut 25 years to distill his experience of surviving the firebombing of Dresden into his great novel. He hoped that Vietnam would be the last disasterous war for America, but that was not meant to be. In his last book, which came out just last year, he wrote about the America’s latest self-inflicted military debacle:

"I have never smoked anything but Pall Malls since I was 11 years old. On the package for several years now, they promised to kill me, but I’m still alive. I’m 84 years old….The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the face of the earth were named Bush, Dick, and Colin."  Kurt Vonnegut – A Man Without a Country. 

And so it goes…