The Stanisław Lem of the USA: How the 100-year-old US writer Kurt Vonnegut found his audience free press

Literaturt.

Thanks to the science fiction thriller “Schlachthof 5”, Kurt Vonnegut suddenly became world famous in 1969. Brilliantly filmed by George Roy Hill, the bestseller deals with the artist’s experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II in Germany, where he survived the bombing of Dresden in the basement of a large butcher’s shop. Although the author has published more than ten novels, he is primarily considered a master of the short story. The short stories he sold to newspapers and magazines made him enough money to support his family.
Vonnegut’s burlesque lyrics revolve around “faults in the space-time continuum” or robots preparing to “do a second time exactly what has already been done in the past decade, for better or for worse.” . Die-hard Vonnegut fans love his whimsical scenes about “cosmic sore muscles in the tendons of fate” or about a universe suddenly suffering a “crisis of self-confidence”.
The Stanisław Lem of the USA deliberately distorted everything into the absurd and comical. According to the critic Dale Peck, he was the “mad uncle, the old wimp full of wit and wisdom and a fair dose of idiocy”. He liked to hide behind his alter ego named Kilgor Trout, who, in one of his stories, believes that a mad scientist implanted a miniature wireless sensor in every inhabitant of the earth. A vision that seems incredibly realistic today in view of the model of the transparent human being.
Eccentric stories about quirky characters form the foundation of Vonnegut’s telegram-like and lapidary fables. They are written from the point of view of the ironic and cynic who rarely mince his words. He gruffly spoke freely from the liver. The master parodist mockingly saw himself as an addict who couldn’t get enough of “making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with pencils on bleached and smoothed cellulose, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers and about eight punctuation marks”. Because of this frenzied passion, he counted himself among the “Knallis”, who wrote rhythmic texts on paper without “fussy” afterwards “fixing” what they had written down.
Naturally and with bilious humor, Vonnegut railed against the nuclear industry and those physicists who knowingly sold themselves to them. It was not only in this context that he often betrayed himself as an enemy of progress. He stubbornly described browsing as a “spiritual adventure” and got angry that his grandchildren only read – if at all – on the computer screen.
Undeterred, he continued to hack away at a mechanical typewriter in the age of digitization. For him, fax machines, answering machines, copiers and mobile phones embodied “garbage”, which he consistently refused to use until his death in April 2007. In a nostalgic mood, he recalled the 1960s when he taught “how to be sociable with ink on paper” during his creative writing classes, because that era had finally passed.