A great man died yesterday, a man who was the most courageous novelist of his generation. And he was a great American who was perhaps the last German-American humanist left in this country.
Before anyone else suspected, Kurt Vonngut knew our country was on the wrong road just before the end , during and just after World War II. He thought the bombing of Dresden was immoral but the attacks in Japan, using a new atomic bomb were beyond comprehension.
I have a strange connection with Kurt Vonnegut. His father dated my grandmother. My father's family is from Indianapolis, my grandmother's family the Undversaws, were a very old German family in that city. When I read Vonnegut, his accent and his way thinking are immediately familar to me. The Germans who came over in the 1850's or so were escaping a war culture that the Kaiser in Germany had planted. These immigrants wanted to farm and live in a free society. My grandmother told me once that her grandfather thought that the best thing was for blacks and whites to intermarry in this country and then we would have a fair society. Their family had been part of the Undeground Railroad. They were socialist-thinking people who loved their families and their animals. They spoke English in public and privately admonished their children in German at home (I was a witness to this a few times).
German culture has a humanist side that is more intense than English culture has - this is obvious in music, literature and political writing. Goethe, Beethoven and Marx come from the same thought process. Vonnegut melded this German intensity so beautifully with a Scots-Irish accent like Mark Twain did for his hero, like Huck Finn. So we have lost our Mark Twain, the one who reminded us of the failure of our national morals in a humorous way, and who was so darkly right.
And so it goes.
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