The Dresden bombing is a recurrent theme in the writings of the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ). Vonnegut served in the army during World War II. Captured during the Ardennes Offensive, he was a prisoner of war in Dresden before and during the bombing. He alludes to it in several of his novels, most significantly in Mother Night (1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Mother Night focuses on Howard Campbell, a German American living in prewar Germany who is recruited as an American spy. He spends the war years pretending to be a loyal Nazi, but in the process the pretense becomes a reality. In the introduction to Mother Night, Vonnegut offers this description of the bombing: "There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling. . . . And then hundreds of thousands of incendiaries were scattered like seeds on freshly turned loam."

Vonnegut's most sustained treatment of the bombing is in Slaughterhouse Five, a satiric but serious view of humankind's addiction to war. The subtitle of the novel, The Children's Crusade, alludes to the 13th-century religious movement in which children were enlisted in an attempt to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims. The implication is that all wars are children's crusades--manifestations of the immaturity of the human species.

The novel opens with a description of Vonnegut's return to Dresden as a middle-aged man, still trying to come to terms with his earlier experience there. This serves as an introduction to the story of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist living in upstate New York, who is suddenly kidnapped by aliens, the Tralfamidorians. They bring Billy back to their planet and place him in a zoo, where he mates with another kidnapped human, a sexy movie star named Montana Wildcat. Eventually Billy returns to Earth to spread the gospel according to the Tralfamidorians, one of whose principles is that after death we go on living in some other form. In a flashback we see Billy, like his creator, a prisoner of war in Dresden. During the bombing, he and the other prisoners are locked in a cellar under a slaughterhouse and survive unharmed. In the aftermath they are assigned the task of carrying out dead bodies from the ruins. The descriptions of the removal of the bodies are particularly gruesome reminders of the insanity that war engenders, underscored here by the fate of one prisoner who is tried and executed for stealing a teapot from the ruins. The novel ends with the war's end: "And then one morning [the prisoners] got up to discover that the door was unlocked. World War Two in Europe was over." The quiet tone of the conclusion suggests that Vonnegut's long internal struggle to tell the story of Dresden has finally ended here, with it a personal peace, an acceptance of that "over which we have no control."

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