Review

Notes

• Introduction
  • “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
• Ch 4
  • “‘You are the only man I ever heard of,’ Mengel said to me this morning, ‘who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in other ways.’”
    • TB: Squaring w/ my people-inherently-good thing. Should probably condition good-at-birth and then address that when they get lost, they still want to be good. But they find other lost people who create different meanings for the word ‘good’ that are within their power.
• Ch 9
  • “It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t ssay, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived. They were people. Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. To be frank—I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause.”
• Ch 13
  • “Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it. God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.”
• Ch 18
  • “Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,” he said. “I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.” He took my hand. “You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.”
    • TB: Chilling. Remember the moral. Wonder if any of these loudmouth podcasters have read this.
• Ch 21
  • “An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz’s late wife—boys that young, and yet with men’s uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.”
• Ch 28
  • Kraft, oblivious to me in my leopard skin, fired again. He was using a Luger as big as a siege howitzer. It was chambered and bored for mere twenty-two’s however, making anti-climatic peewee bangs. Kraft fired again and a sandbag two feet to the left of the target’s head bled sand.
• Ch 29
  • “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
• Ch 39
  • Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. (p) Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. (p) The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in mose cases. (p) The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information— (…) That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia.
• Ch 43
  • “There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.” “It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

Review

Wow! Another certified Vonnegut classic. I have yet to read one that I haven’t liked. When I was debating what book to read next (choices were this and South and West by Didion), unanimous support for this across two Discord servers. One friend said this is their all time favorite Vonnegut.

Vonnegut is one of my all time favorite authors. I read Slaughterhouse-Five once a year (very white-bread, I know, sue me), and I have the big Library of America set that I’m working through. I love his voice and his pleading for us to be better. To listen to our better angels. Slaughterhouse-Five comes nearly ten years after this work, but there is a lot of it in here.

"An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz's late wife---boys that young, and yet with men's uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own."

Hard not to think about Slaughterhouse-Five, the Children’s Crusade.

There’s also just a lot about what Vonnegut says right up front as the moral: be careful what you pretend to be, because that’s what you become. Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to ye. Put it another way, Leo McGarry says on the West Wing, fake it til ya make it. It’s the flip side of that same coin. I love it.

It is of course frustratingly prescient because we humans make the same mistakes on a schedule that’d make a stationmaster jealous.

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell---keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in mose cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information---

That is how the Nazi’s took a functioning republic into one of the deadliest totalitarian regimes in history. It took about 53 for Hitler to end democracy in the Weimar Republic, apparently. He gained power in January 1933. Dachau opened in March.

The willful filing off of gear teeth. A valuation of ignorance. A valuation of national pride over all else. A revulsion to immigration, civil liberties, hope, and love.

It is hard to read this book and not feel a little depressed about where we are in 2025, 64 years later. As hard as it is, I basically refuse to be a pessimist. I don’t know how or why I have that resistance in me. But I still believe that this world can be better today than it was yesterday, and tomorrow, today, and so on. Not all better, and some days maybe not net-better. But I think and hope it is a cumulative thing. And if I don’t believe that, then I don’t know what the point of it is. So, I will choose to believe it.