Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade

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Schlachthof 5 or Der Kinderkreuzzug , English original title Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, is a 1969 novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007).

It is strongly autobiographical and has the air raids on Dresden in February 1945, which Vonnegut experienced himself as a prisoner of war of the Germans; the title refers to the municipal cattle and slaughterhouse , in whose cellar Vonnegut survived the firestorm that left the city in ruins with around 100 other prisoners of war and forced laborers . The novel combines realistic depictions of the war with black humor , science fiction elements such as flying saucers or time travel and is one of the main works of American literary postmodernism , not least because of its pronounced metafictionality .

action

The disoriented and sick American soldier Billy Pilgrim is being held as a prisoner of war in a makeshift prison in the basement of a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden . For Billy, for some inexplicable reason, "time goes out of control" and he visits different parts of his life at random - including his death. He meets aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who kidnap him and exhibit them together with an earthly woman in a Tralfamadorian zoo. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions , the fourth of which is time. You have seen every moment of your life; unable to decide, not to change their fate, but they can pass the time in any possible moment of their life they wish.

During the novel, Billy jumps back and forth in time, reliving various events in his life. This gives him a constant feeling of stage fright , as he never knows which part of his life will come next. He spends some time on Tralfamadore, during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II , before being captured, he wades through deep snow as if stunned. He lived married in America after the war until he was murdered on Earth many years later. At the time of his assassination, Billy embraced the Tralfamadorian fatalism that gives him his personal peace. He had spread this philosophy to millions of people, which made him the most famous person on earth.

Billy's fatalism seems to be based in reality (at least in Billy's reality) in the well-known serenity prayer that hung framed in his office, "among the things that Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, present and future". A Tralfamadorian justifies this fatalism with his experience: “I have visited thirty-one inhabited planets in space and studied the reports of another hundred. Only on earth is there any talk of free will. "

The book traces a number of events in Vonnegut's life, including the death of his wife, his capture by the Wehrmacht in World War II and the bombing of Dresden, which forms the frame of reference for the book.

Literary technique

The novel uses certain phrases repeatedly. For example, the phrase “so it goes”, when death and transience are mentioned (be it people, animals or the air bubbles in champagne), serves to trivialize mortality, making it routine, a macabre drama , or he quotes “ roses and mustard gas ” to describe the disgusting smell of decay on a corpse or a plume of alcohol.

Vonnegut developed two groundbreaking literary techniques: the use of the refrain ( chorus ) and the coordinating analogy ( plant-connect ). The former was later taken up by the author Chuck Palahniuk in his minimalist novellas. Vonnegut used the “This is how it works” refrain as a succinct transition to another topic, as an advertisement or a little change.

The coordinating analogies can best be explained with an example. Vonnegut uses the expression “radium dial” on the one hand in a figurative sense to describe the face of a Russian in the prison camp, on the other hand (very specifically) to describe his father's clock, which shows him in the darkness of a cave ( Carlsbad Caverns ) protected. This emphasizes the connection between the two people. The Russian's face reminded him that the inmates of the camp were human, and so the moment of remembrance (or recognition) is full of hope for him, as he saw Father's watch as a bastion of security and familiarity in a strange place.

Another literary technique by Vonnegut is metafiction . The first chapter of the book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but introduces how Vonnegut came to write Schlachthof 5 . Vonnegut apologizes for the fact that the novel is "so short, confused and shrill", which he explains with the fact that "there is nothing clever to say about a bloodbath". The first sentence of Chapter 1 claims, “All of this more or less happened”, and in the midst of Billy Pilgrim's war experience Vonnegut himself appears briefly, followed by the narrator's note: “This was me. This was my person. This was the author of this book ”.

controversy

Because of its realistic and repeated description of cursing American soldiers and certain explicit sexual content, Slaughterhouse 5 was a prohibited work in US literature and was frequently banned from schools , libraries, and curricula . Vonnegut's books have been censored by the United States Supreme Court , where his works are the subject of the Island Trees School District v. Pico 457 US 853 (1982).

Above all, at the time of publication, a scene depicting the crucifixion of Christ received a lot of criticism from American church associations.

The reporting aspect

Vonnegut compared the bombed Dresden with the surface of the moon. He obtained the victim statistics from the book The Destruction of Dresden by the publicist David Irving, who later appeared as a history revisionist and Holocaust denier . The information there of 135,000 dead has since been corrected downwards. The commission of historians commissioned by the Lord Mayor of Dresden in 2004 assumes a maximum of 25,000 victims of the February air raids.

Vonnegut mentions candles and soap at several points in the novel, which were made by the Germans from the body fat of murdered Jews and so-called " gypsies " and which were used by prisoners of war and soldiers. The idea for this came from the doctor Rudolf Spanner , who developed a process for making soap from human bodies, which, according to witnesses, was used on the corpses of concentration camp prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp and from the Danzig hospital during the Nuremberg trials .

Adaptations

Memorial wall at Slaughterhouse 5 at the original location of the novel, today: Messe Dresden (artist / architect, photo: Ruairí O'Brien)

In 1972 the novel was made into a film by director George Roy Hill . Slaughterhouse 5 (Slaughterhouse-Five) received the jury's award at the Cannes Film Festival that same year and won the Saturn Award for best science fiction film in 1973 .

A stage version by Nicolas Stemann premiered on June 10, 2005 in the Schauspielhaus Hannover. In 1996 the material was processed by the composer Hans-Jürgen von Bose as a commission from the Bavarian State Opera for the opera Schlachthof 5 , which was premiered in Munich in 1996.

In 2012, the Irish architect and artist Ruairí O'Brien created a memorial wall for the fabric, exhibited at the location of the novel, in the cellar of the former cattle and slaughterhouse in Dresden (today Messe Dresden).

The Norwegian rock band Madrugada was partly influenced by Vonnegut: The 2002 album “Grit” includes the song “come back Billy Pilgrim”; The live CD released in 2005 is also called “Live at Tralfamadore”, which leaves room for interpretation.

expenditure

  • Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Delacorte Press, New York, NY 1969, ISBN 0-385-31208-3 (American first edition).
  • Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade. Translated by Kurt Wagenseil . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-455-07955-5 (German first edition).
  • Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade (= rororo. Vol. 1524). Translated by Kurt Wagenseil. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1972, ISBN 3-499-11524-7 (paperback edition).
  • Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade. Translated by Kurt Wagenseil. Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1976, OCLC 56543780 ( GDR edition).
  • Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade (= rororo. Bd. 25313). Translated by Kurt Wagenseil. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 2010, ISBN 978-3-499-25313-3 (new edition).
  • Audio book: Schlachthof 5. Read by Jan Josef Liefers . Production RBB 2004. The Audio Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89813-397-4 .
  • Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade. A compulsory dance with death. Translated from American English by Gregor Hens . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-455-40555-2 (new translation).

literature

  • Harold Bloom (Ed.): Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations). Chelsea House, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-60413-585-5 .
  • Peter Freese : The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (= American Studies. Vol. 174). Winter, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8253-5551-7 .
  • Jerome Klinkowitz: Slaughterhouse-Five: Reforming the Novel and the World (= Twayne's Masterwork Studies. Vol. 37). Twayne, Boston 1990, ISBN 0-8057-9410-7 .
  • Dominik Kuppels: War and "black humor". Postmodern narrative methods with Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-five) and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's rainbow) (= Edition Wissenschaft. Series Anglistik. Vol. 16). Tectum, Marburg 1997, ISBN 3-89608-786-X .
  • Stefan T. Pinternagel : Kurt Vonnegut jr. and the science fiction - Kilgore Trout, Tralfamadore and Bokononism. Shayol, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-926126-49-3 .
  • Ann Rigney: All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden. In: History and Theory. Vol. 48, H. 2, 2009, ISSN  0018-2656 , pp. 5-24.

Remarks

  1. ↑ The motif of the German production of soap from the bones of murdered people is very often used by Romain Gary , e. B. in Der Tanz des Dschinghis Cohn (not in the German translation), in Pour Sganarelle, 1965, and in memory with wings , (French first 1980). This is indicated by a tombstone in Nice, where Gary lived for a long time. And according to the historian Joachim Neander , the announcement to a prisoner that he would be processed into soap was a common topos that the guards used against their victims as a vulgar, aggressive death threat (see “Soap made from Jewish fat” - the history of the effects of one urban legend . In: Fabula . Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung - Journal of Folktale Studies - Revue d'Etudes sur le Conte Populaire. Vol. 46, No. 3–4, 2005, pp. 241–256).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Declaration by the Dresden Historical Commission to determine the number of victims of the air raids on the city of Dresden on 13/14. February 1945. Published by the city of Dresden. Dresden, October 1, 2008, p. 2, column 1. In: dresden.de, accessed on September 2, 2016 (PDF; 126 kB). See Dresden at the time of National Socialism .
  2. ^ Soap made from human remains . In: Nizkor . Retrieved December 29, 2006.
  3. ↑ Slaughterhouse-Five memorial wall. In: messe-dresden.de, accessed on August 31, 2016.
  4. ↑ The Slaughterhouse 5 memorial wall inaugurated at the Dresden Exhibition Center. ( Memento from February 12, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) In: dresden-fernsehen.de. February 13, 2013, accessed September 1, 2016.