Word: dresdeners
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Kurt Vonnegut, even at his best, is a middleman, but Slaughterhouse-Five is his best by far. He gets rage and desperation into his science-fiction time-space games; for once he deals with an incident of historical importance which he lived through, the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1944 by Allied troops. Because the acrid smell of flesh burning in the biggest civilian massacre of World War II has not left his nostrils. Vonnegut, who was transferred to the non-industrial cultural center as a POW, admits in his introduction that he's compelled for once to do more...
Vonnegut, being a middleman, can't get very far with ideas. He doesn't link up Dresden with any inherent political or social conflicts it symbolizes, implying instead a state of moral squalor necessary for such a catastrophe to have taken place. And his vision is only that of Bill Pilgrim, a stupid if sweethearted protagonist, bumbling between the Ilium upper-middle-class of Vonnegut's present, the Dresden holocaust, and the planet Tralfamadore, where he cavorts with a nubile Hollywood starlet in a fantasy-world designed to protect him from being fatally bound to his depressing earthliness...
...Lola was what the Victorians called "a superb piece." She had skin like a Dresden shepherdess, hair like a black velvet shawl, eyes that flashed and flickered like sapphires in firelight. When a man got her Irish up, she cut him across the face with a riding whip. She once fired a pistol at a disappointing lover. What Lola wanted, Lola...
...Petersburg, Lola got a "private audience" with the Czar, who gave her 1,000 rubles for services rendered. In Dresden, she got Liszt, the great lover of the age, and so wore him out that one night he locked her in a hotel room and fled, leaving a substantial sum to pay for the furniture he knew she would break. In Paris, she got culture and a taste for liberal politics in the company of Balzac, Lamartine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and especially Dumas père. She found the great love of her life, however, with a talented radical...
...Vonnegut, liberal quantities of whimsy are poured through the plot like so many doses of barium. The viewer is supposed to have a sense of the spiritual crisis brought on by Billy's experience in the Dresden bombing. Having found solace with Montana, he announces, "If we're going to survive, it's necessary to concentrate on the good moments and forget the bad." Shortly afterward, his baby is born, the universe rejoices, the firmament lights up with fireworks. As a resolution of plot and a reconciliation of historical horror, this amounts to a cosmic lollipop...