Kurt Vonnegut
Mattatoio n.5 o La crociata dei bambini

Shortly before dying, my father said to me: “You know? You've never written a story with a villain.”
I told him that this was one of the things I learned at university after the war.

With sincere mortification, I confess this was my first encounter with Kurt Vonnegut, and it happened only a few days ago.

But anyway.

So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. It is the story of Billy Pilgrim; an American private in World War II. Billy is still a kid, he's clumsy, naive, defenseless even from himself, he seems more like a ridiculous tourist than a military. He's evidently out of place, but also out of space; Billy travels through time and space. And the night his daughter got married was also the night he was first abducted by aliens and taken to the distant planet Tralfamadore, where he was exhibited in a museum as a representation of the human species.

But in fact, we are also in Dresden. We are mainly in Dresden. Dresden before, after, and during one of the most tragic and controversial episodes of our small contemporary history of small human beings, who occasionally do not give up on the game of massacring each other.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a fantastical story, a science fiction tale whose nonsensical, mocking, and satirical plot is only the layer that covers the grotesque brutality of the horrors of war. Perhaps the only acceptable one.

What can one say in the face of a heinous bombing that caused tens of thousands of deaths, inhabitants of a city that had never been touched by the war, where there were no military bases and which held no strategic importance? What can one say that is acceptable which even remotely approaches a reconstruction of sense? It would perhaps be easier to fall prey to aphasia. Or report cold, incomprehensible numbers of deaths. Murdered and piled up dead who were once men and women. And children. Kurt knew all these things better than any jerk who is now here to tell him how brilliant he was. These things he knew. He knew.

Kurt Vonnegut, an American of four generations but of German origin, captured by the Nazis, was in Dresden in those days. Hidden in a cave, dug under a slaughterhouse.

And for this, I will not be yet another poor fool to write once again that this is a masterpiece and one of the most grandiose and, paradoxically, rationally as well as humanly, acceptable antiwar novels ever written. I will only say that I read and closed the book with this bigger thought in mind; that we should be infinitely grateful to him and his testimony. For having still managed to smile while treading the lunar soil of a city reduced to rubble and having proven to still have a sincere humanity towards these small yet ridiculous, pretentious, miserable human beings.

Only once finished, two days ago, I realized that it has been exactly ten years since Vonnegut passed away.
But sometimes he returns still.
So it goes.