Word: dresdener
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...occasion for these and other reflections is an agonizing, funny, profoundly rueful attempt by Vonnegut to handle in fable form his own memories of the strategically unnecessary Allied air raid on Dresden that killed 135,000 people. The book's narrator, like Vonnegut, lived through the raid as a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse. Like Vonnegut, too, he has spent more than 20 years trying to mark out the limits of its metaphoric meaning in a book...
EVERY war leaves to history its particular symbols of destruction-Verdun in the first World War; Coventry, Stalingrad and Dresden in the second. In Viet Nam, the enduring symbol is likely to be Hué, once the imperial capital and long the fountainhead of the country's intellectual and artistic tradition. A year ago, during the Communists' Tet offensive, Hué was battered as was no other city in Viet Nam. It took 26 days of house-to-house, block-to-block fighting to drive out a tenacious 6,000-man invading Communist force. The U.S. Marines...
...spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden-which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming...
...being kept in Dresden the day allied bombers came over with a huge incendiary bomb attack that started a fire storm which killed 135,000 people. Vonnegut survived because he was in a cool meatlocker under a slaughterhouse. It all provides the base for his war book; it also is probably the basis of a lot of his other thoughts...
...crackled the news that a column of Russian troops was moving from the Polish city of Cracow toward the Czechoslovak border, and Western military attachés and diplomats were suddenly forbidden to travel outside the capital. Another Soviet force was reported heading from Dresden in East Germany toward Czechoslovakia, whose swift-paced "democratization" has lately alarmed Moscow and hard-lining members of the Eastern bloc...