"Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

'The Waking': copyright 1953 by Theodore Roethke from
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE
printed by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN by David Irving:
From the Introduction by Ira C. Eaker, Lt. Gen. USAF (RET.) and Foreword by Air Marshall Sir
Robert Saundby. Copyright 1963 by William Kimber and Co. Limited. Reprinted by permission of Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc. and William Kimber and Co. Limited.

'Leven Cent Cotton' by Bob Miller and Emma Dermer: Copyright 1928, 1929 by MCA Music, a Division
of MCA Inc. Copyright renewed 1955,1956 and assigned to MCA Music, a division of MCA Inc. Used by
permission.



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for
Mary O’Hare
and
Gerhard Müller




The cattle are lowing,
The Baby awakes,
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes.




One

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew
really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did
threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've
changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot
like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the
ground.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a taxi
driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoner of war.
His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We
asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because