Word: dresdener
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SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, this agonizing, outrageous, funny, profoundly rueful fable tries to say something about the timeless nature of human cruelty and self-protective indifference...
...traveling abroad and emigrating. Artistic and political expression bloomed, and the country pulsed with hope and excitement. But Czechoslovakia's new ebullience frightened the Soviet and other East Bloc leaders, who feared that their own people would demand similar reforms. At a Warsaw Pact summit meeting in Dresden in March 1968, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht reportedly waved his arms ominously over the other Party leaders, warning: "We will all soon be in danger, if not swept out of office." Soviet tanks, of course, averted that eventuality and ended Dubček's stirring, if perhaps hopelessly Utopian...
...reinforce the universality of his appraisal of war of its associated deaths, Vonnegut tosses in people and places from all his other books. Howard W. Campbell, the Nazi was criminal and star of Mother Night, visits this book's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in Dresden to deliver one of the best passages in the book, a critique of the American fightingman. Eliot Roseater, of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater fame, shares a mental hospital ward and his favorite author with Pilgrim. Ilium, N.Y., hometown of Cat's Cradle and Player Piano, makes its third appearance in that role. And, finally, various...
...transition--to, for example, move us philosophically from event to event in our existence. When someone's existence terminates in the book (and just about everyone who is introduced dies for us, too), Vonnegut says, "So it goes." A hundred and thirty-five thousand (135,000) residents of Dresden die in one sentence, so it goes...
...earthlings think, but an unmoving phenomenon like a mountain range, continually visible to the Tralfamadorians from one end to the other. Since he has become unstuck in time, like the flying-saucer people, Billy, too, experiences many times over the events of his life, repeatedly returning to recollections of Dresden, and the great fire that followed. No one of these occurrences seems more unusual to Billy than any of the others. As the narrator says resignedly, repeatedly, "So it goes...