The entirety of the article Embers: Will a prideful city finally Confront its past? drives home the notion that the bombing of Dresden is not easy for anyone to digest.
After a seemingly insurmountable period directly after the attack, the people of Dresden and the surrounding areas are working, arguing, laboring over conflicting ideas on how to repair the mind of the city. Even the task of rebuilding the structure of the city that was obliterated is controversial.
"Do we acknowledge the destruction, or do our best to pretend like the city is as it was February 12, 1945?"
While reading this article I was constantly reminded of how Vonnegut has written a book about this very event, from the point of view of the future, but that mostly has detail of the before and after, not during the bombing. Many people in Dresden insist that the best way to cope with this horror of the past is to go back even further than the bombing, to before, as it lay an idyllic city for many. One explanation is simply that Vonnegut is making a comment on how difficult it is to discuss the bombing, but he also may have used this as a way of explaining the resulting trauma of the bombing. We definitely talked about this in class, where many ideas of the strangeness of the composition of the story were shared.
The feelings of many people in Dresden, to forget the event completely, seem to be mirrored in Vonnegut's book. Although he wants to tell the story, the book is mostly him seemingly avoiding telling it. As Mr. Mitchell illustrated for us in class, Billy must be so grandly far removed from the event of February 13, 1945, to even consider sharing it. Its horrible for him to think about otherwise, it seems. This initially seemed to me like Vonnegut describing the mental trauma of going through such an ordeal, but after reading The New Yorker article, it may even be a mirror of Dresden today.
The city is full of people who want to forget and people who want to open up the wound to heal it. A book that's goal is to tell the story, and yet wants to avoid it, seems like a compromise between these two opinions. I have no idea if Vonnegut was very aware of Dresden's politics at the time he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, but if he did, this would be a very crafty way of insinuating the divide being experienced.
We didn't get a chance to really dig into this article in class, unfortunately, but a point I'd like to make, as we transition into _Kindred_, is that I think Americans can relate to this ambivalent question of how to honor and commemorate history that we're all (or most of us) extremely uncomfortable with. We have our own Holocaust on these shores, and there are similar debates about the merits of "looking back" versus "moving forward." How do we do justice to the foundational fact of slavery as the root of our economic system and our nation's prosperity? How to "make amends"? Or do we just whitewash it, pretend it never happened, or pretend its effects are strictly limited to the past? Or can the past effectively be "erased" from the landscape, as in Dresden? What are the consequences of doing so?
ReplyDelete(The recent high-profile Hollywood depictions of slavery are worth considering in this context--historical films are maybe more our classic form of historical monument than traditional markings on the landscape. Have we come somewhere importantly *new* since, say, _Gone with the Wind_?)