The Birthday of Eternity

Kurt Vonnegut, died April 11, 2007

While a prisoner of war in Germany in 1945, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February, which destroyed most of the city. Calculations of the death-toll have varied widely; figures have ranged from 35,000 through 100,000, and up to half a million.

Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In the book, he recalled that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Vonnegut wrote, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."

After Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1969, Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.  “The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote.  (His mother had committed suicide on Mother's Day in 1944, when he was home on leave from the army.)

With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor, until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U.S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office.

 Though he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to effect change. "During the Vietnam War," he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

With his columns for In These Times, he began an attack on the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War.  "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In These Times quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."  In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PPs.'"

In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country.

That year, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian.  During the course of the interview, Nason asked Vonnegut for his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied, "I regard them as very brave people."  When pressed further Vonnegut said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your Race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum et pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"] from Horace's Odes.)   Nason took offense at Vonnegut's comments and characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." 

Vonnegut's son, Mark, responded to the article by writing an editorial to the Boston Globe in which he explained the reasons behind his father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."

A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone stated, " ... it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so ignorant.' "

Photograph of Vonnegut taken by his daughter

Vonnegut was interviewed in August 2006 on the national weekly public radio program The Infinite Mind, from inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. The program made broadcast history as the first to be taped inside a virtual world, and it was the author's last face-to-face sit-down interview. The host was John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio as the program was taped.

Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, weeks after falling down a flight of stairs in his home in Manhattan, New York, and suffering massive head trauma.

The author's Web site, updated after his death, displayed a simple black-and-white image of a bird cage -- a symbolic element in his writing -- empty with an open door. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007," the page read.

In accord with Vonnegut's wishes, a brief memorial service attended by family and close friends was held on Saturday, April 21, 2007 at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. An impromptu jazz group played traditional New Orleans music and guests sang along on "I'll Fly Away," "Down by the Riverside," and "Amazing Grace."

Prior to the service, dirt from his garden was deposited at The New York Public Library, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, Times Square, and three places in Central Park -- the statue of Balto, the Avenue of Literature, and the Dairy Building.
His burial arrangements and grave, if any, are not public knowledge.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and Museum was created as a memorial to the author; it opened in January 2011 in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana.  The museum features object from Vonnegut’s life, including the author’s Purple Heart medal awarded to him during World War II, the author’s Smith-Corona typewriter, an unopened box of the author’s Pall Mall cigarettes discovered by his children behind a bookcase following the author’s death,  a series of rejection letters sent to the author by magazines, and a complete replica of his writing studio.  The library’s art gallery displays art by Vonnegut, two drawings by Vonnegut fan and "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer, and work by local artists. A small reading room with a selection of books by Vonnegut sits in the corner of the library.

Morley Safer's Farewell Sketch: "And so he went" at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

To  Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”