called
Slaughterhouse-Five,
which is about a British and American response to that Holocaust, which was the firebombing of Dresden—as witnessed by the young American Infantry Private First Class I used to be. We both have German last names. So does the man who invited me here, Dr. Dichter. So do most of the famous pioneers in your profession. It would not surprise me if a plurality of us here, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not have ancestors who were citizens of the German or Austro-Hungarian Empire, which gave us so much great music and science and painting and theater, and whose remnants gave us a nightmare from which, in my opinion, there can never be an awakening.
“The Holocaust explains almost everything about why Elie Wiesel writes what he writes and is what he is. The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am. I am sure you are miles ahead of me in thinking of a thousand clinical reasons for this being true. I didn’t give a damn about Dresden. I didn’t know anybody there. I certainly hadn’t had any good times there before they burned it down. I had seen some Dresden china back home in Indianapolis, but I thought then and still think now that it’s mostly kitsch. There is another wonderful gift from German-speaking people, along with psychoanalysis and
The Magic Flute
: that priceless word
kitsch.
“And Dresden china isn’t made in Dresden anyway. It’s made in Meissen. That’s the town they should have burned down.
“I am only joking, of course. I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations, which is one reason two good women so far have been very sorry on occasion to have married me. Every great city is a world treasure, not a national treasure. So the destruction of any one of them is a planetary catastrophe.
“Before I was a soldier I was a journalist, and that’s what I was in Dresden—a voyeur of strangers’ miseries. I was outside the event. Elie Wiesel, seeing what he saw—and he was just a boy, and I was a young man—was the event itself. The fire-bombing of Dresden was quick, was surgical, as the military scientists like to say, fitting the Aristotelian ideal for a tragedy, taking place in less than twenty-four hours. The Holocaust ground on and on and on and on. The Germans wanted to keep me alive, on the theory that they might be able to trade me and my captured comrades for some of their own someday. The Germans, aided and abetted, of course, by like-minded Austrians and Hungarians and Slovaks and French and Ukrainians and Romanians and Bulgarians and so on, wanted Elie Wiesel and everyone he had ever known, and everyone remotely like him, to die, as his father would die, of malnutrition, overwork, despair, or cyanide.
“Elie Wiesel tried to keep his father alive. And failed. My own father, and most of the rest of my friends and loved ones, were safe and sound in Indianapolis. The proper prescription for the fatal depression which killed Elie Wiesel’s father would have been food and rest and tender loving care rather than lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.
“I hold a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Students of that branch of poetry are taught to seek explanations for human comfort or discomfort—wars, wounds, spectacular diseases, and natural disasters aside—in culture, society, and history. And I have just named the villains in my books, which are never individuals. The villains again: culture, society, and history—none of them strikingly housebroken by lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.
“Like most writers, I have at home the beginnings of many books which would not allow themselves to be written. About twenty years ago, a doctor prescribed Ritalin for me, to see if that wouldn’t help me get over such humps. I realized right away that Ritalin was dehydrated concentrate of pure paranoia, and threw it away. But the book I was trying to make
Krista Lakes, Mel Finefrock