Nazism in Vonnegut

I think one of the ways that Vonnegut chooses to subvert the typical war novel is in his warping of the war rhetoric, and the us-versus-them mentality. This is particularly noticeable in this book, at least to me, because it’s set during World War II. If ever there was a war where you could use the us-versus-the-inhuman-evil-enemy rhetoric to inspire readers, I feel like it’s World War II. Even now, Nazism still gets used as the basis for our conception of what “evil” is – it’s why Nazi iconography appears so often in fictional villains and villainous empires.

But Vonnegut goes totally the opposite route. First, his descriptions of German soldiers never fit our notion of what a Nazi soldier should be – they never spout Nazi rhetoric, or even refer to the Hitler or his mission at all. Whether you think about the old, broken down men who capture Billy and Weary, or the reserve soldiers terrified by the idea of having to guard American infantrymen (who they associate with “real” soldiers) – the German soldiers in Slaughterhouse Five bear no resemblance to the fanatical villains we’ve come to picture the Nazis as. Just like the Americans, they are just playthings caught up by enormous forces they don’t understand, pitted against people who they would otherwise have no problem with.

Vonnegut makes this a little more explicit with the character Howard Campbell (who I think is entirely fictional, but I’m starting to lose my grasp on what reality means, so I won’t swear to it). Howard Campbell is the only character who isn’t “caught up by” or forced into the war – he is actively supporting and promoting the Nazis. It’s also one of the only sections of the book where the words “Nazi” and “swastika” are used. But this character, the only character who seems to have willingly taken a side in this war, is an American character.

Campbell’s description is super unsettling – we discussed in class how uncomfortable the average reader is when faced with the American and Nazi imagery combined in his outfit. The ten gallon hat, the stars and swastika parading together across his boots, the red, white, and blue uniform – it feels really wrong.

It feels wrong because Americans (i.e. we) are so conditioned to regard Nazism as the ultimate evil – and as far away from American as we can get. After all, we fought each other in the war. Campbell is a perversion of that. And I think that’s important, when considering how Vonnegut subverts a war story. The only time in the whole book that he really discusses Nazism and ideology (an easy time to introduce the war-story, us-versus-them, mindset), he instead introduces a character who blends these two opposing ideologies in a very icky way. He’s continuing to blur the lines between who we should be fighting – and as a result, making us question why on earth we’re fighting each other at all. American planes are bombing American prisoners-of-war, the English have more in common with their German captors than their American comrades, and the only real villain of the story is an explicit mix of both sides of the war. “Enemy” and “ally” aren’t homogenous terms, and Vonnegut’s novel makes that really clear.

(As a side-note, another part of Billy’s experience that undermines the war rhetoric is the portrayal of his trauma at the party. His entire life, he’s been jumping around / reliving the war, and it has never bothered him. But at the party, the barbershop quartet really does trigger a memory of the war within him that he had suppressed, something he didn’t expect to grapple with again. And it isn’t being bombed. It’s not being transported across Europe and watching men around him die. It isn’t any of the pain or the suffering he saw. Billy’s “great big secret,” the memory he has suppressed, is that of his guards staring out at the ruins of Dresden.

The guards are German. They’re Nazis. And for Billy, watching these – Nazis – staring out at the ruins of their city and their families and their lives, watching their inability to even form words – that is the moment that is still affecting Billy in his comfortable life, years later. The suffering of his enemies.)

I don’t know. I found that really interesting. Billy’s sympathies, and I think Vonnegut’s too, are very hard to pin down throughout Slaughterhouse Five. Do you see other moments where you think Vonnegut is purposely blurring the traditional WWII narrative?