Post-reflection on my Panel Presentation
For those of you in 8th hour, during my Panel Presentation I revealed the fact that the number of deaths in the fire-bombing of Dresden was not 135,000, but between 22,700 and 25,000. The Nazis initially knew that it was in that range, but exaggerated the number to make it look worse than it is, until historian David Irving used the number 135,000 in his book The Destruction of Dresden (1963), which Vonnegut used as his source. After Slaughterhouse-five was published, the death toll was later proved to be much lower.
During my panel presentation, the class came to a consensus that even though the number of deaths were significantly lower, Dresden was still an important event, even when I showed some contradictory statements in Slaughterhouse-five (worse than Hiroshima, greatest massacre in European History), which the article also agrees.
However, when I read this fact two days before, I really couldn't believe that the number of deaths was significantly lower at first. I initially thought of the opposite, that Dresden should matter as much since the number of deaths is 15-20% of what is said in Slaughterhouse-five. It was reasonable in my mind to discredit Slaughterhouse-five now since the fact that there weren't as many deaths as before, making this event in history not important therefore discredit the book.
After reading the article, I realized that even though Vonnegut unintentionally gave false information, we still learn something about Dresden, that firebombing an entire city is a horrible thing to do, and that whenever we are at war again, we should be weary of doing the same thing.
During my panel presentation, the class came to a consensus that even though the number of deaths were significantly lower, Dresden was still an important event, even when I showed some contradictory statements in Slaughterhouse-five (worse than Hiroshima, greatest massacre in European History), which the article also agrees.
However, when I read this fact two days before, I really couldn't believe that the number of deaths was significantly lower at first. I initially thought of the opposite, that Dresden should matter as much since the number of deaths is 15-20% of what is said in Slaughterhouse-five. It was reasonable in my mind to discredit Slaughterhouse-five now since the fact that there weren't as many deaths as before, making this event in history not important therefore discredit the book.
After reading the article, I realized that even though Vonnegut unintentionally gave false information, we still learn something about Dresden, that firebombing an entire city is a horrible thing to do, and that whenever we are at war again, we should be weary of doing the same thing.
I agree that the number of people killed at the bombing doesn't lessen the tragedy or lesson that we get from it. Like how in history class right now we learned about the terrible things done on both sides of different wars and the crazy high death tolls of civilians as well as soldiers, and that whether someone lost 2% or 12% of their population it is terrible and can teach us to not do the same thing again.
ReplyDeleteWithin the context of Slaughterhouse-Five I don't think it matters a whole lot that the novel got the death toll wrong. Vonnegut is trying to get his anti-war message across and he succeeds using Dresden to show his points. Vonnegut effectively gets the reader to question the American government's narrative of World War II and the Vietnam War, and shows the utter lack of glory and horror of war. However, I wonder at what point it becomes important to fix this misconception of the fate of around 110,000 people.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the inaccuracy of the number of people killed doesn't hurt the book's message about how horrible war is. I do think it has bad repercussions in the real world though. The article we read for Friday talked about how Dresden has had difficulty acknowledging its nazi past and the popularity of slaughterhouse 5 hasn't helped that. Using an accurate number probably wouldn't have hurt the message of the book and would have helped Vonnegut's goal of making people understand the atrocity of war outside of the book.
ReplyDeleteNice post! I definitely agree with you. But, the thing is that Slaughterhouse Five is meant to be an anti-war novel. It kind of makes sense that there would be some false statistics published. The bigger death toll kind of emphasizes the reason why we should not go to war. But, I still think that we should take all of the things that Vonnegut says with a grain of salt. If he published false info about the death toll, he may have published other false things. We should always be careful about what we read and make sure the info we get is relatively accurate.
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