Vonnegut, the Hofbräuhaus, and me.

The Hofbräuhaus beer will forever be in my mind.

The thing I admire about Vonnegut is the fact that he told it like he saw it. He didn't swathe his narrative with romantic dribble. He was entirely over the top all the time. He could be annoying in his pessimism, but there was always a hint that despite everything: his suicidal bent to kill himself like his mother, (except through cigarettes), and his distrust of everyone's intentions, he wanted wrongs to be righted, and sought to dissolve the pretentious myths and outright lies of the world with his acidic pen. 

I remember the first time I read Vonnegut. I hadn't gotten thirty pages into the book, and Vonnegut, in one of many asides, mentioned the size of the penis's of the men in the novel.  Why would anyone do this? Why was it relevant to the story? At first I thought Vonnegut was a pervert. He was prone to doing crude drawings in his novels to make his points. He drew assholes and other human anatomy to make his obtuse points. Don't get me wrong, I mostly like the writings of Vonnegut. He did what few writers of his time had done: telling the truth, and doing it in a droll way.  Some consider Vonnegut to be shallow, and sometimes he was, but when he was serious he was like a winter storm descending on Indianapolis. Some of his novels do nothing for me. I have my two favorites: Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions. 

I love the characters of Billy Pilgrim and Kilgore Trout. Plainly, they are Vonnegut's alter-ego. I bought the DVD of Slaughterhouse Five. I never tire of watching it. Vonnegut was at his best in this novel, and his most honest and vulnerable. WWII scarred him; as it scars soldiers now. But Vonnegut's scars were on the inside, and those are the hardest scars to heal. Slaughterhouse Five didn't come out until 1969. It took him twenty-five years to tell the story of his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. Some memories are easier to leave in a bunker in Dresden than bring out into the light. Clearly Billy Pilgrim was Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I understood the idea of coming unstuck in time. I think Vonnegut sat at his typewriter one day and had flashbacks to his experience, and the story demanded to be told. It had to be told or Vonnegut would never be right.

I did not understand this concept exactly until 1973. I had gone to Germany to visit my brother in the town of Augsburg in Bavaria. I had never been overseas; I was fresh out of high school. Augsburg was a town with roots in the Middle Ages, full of Gothic style churches, a bastion of Catholicism. My brother was a teacher in a German high school, and fluent in German. His friends told me he had no American accent. He was married to a very bubbly woman from Oregon, who I liked very much. But my brother had baggage from the Vietnam war festering in his soul. I was not aware of this fact; people are excellent in hiding their true feelings. I first learned of my brother's problem when we went to Munich, to the

 Hofbräuhaus beer hall. This bastion of beer has been in existence since 1592, and is located at the intersection of Münz Bräuhaus and Orlando am Platzl Streets in downtown München.

I had never drank a heavy beer before, so my brother ordered a large stein of their famous dark brown beer. Not knowing any better, I finished the stein in under five minutes. With a dizzy gait and my brother egging me on, I went in search of adventure. My brother said I should go try to pick up a woman. I had never tried to pick up a woman before. The only women I had known were teenagers. In the Hofbräuhaus the women were thirty years old and up. After milling around for ten minutes I came to a section that had a wooden rail around it. The people on the other side of the rail were having a grand time. I waved to a woman who was easily forty years old. Before I lowered my arm I felt a sharp jab in my back. I turned and saw a short man, one of the two Hofbräuhaus guards, gesturing for me to move on. So I moved on, feeling stupid for drinking the beer and for waving at a random old woman. When I got back to the table I found a disturbing scene. My brother had a young man pinned to the table's bench, and was shouting obscenities at the young man, calling him a Viet Cong. A Viet Cong? The war had been over for several years. What was going on?

After a moment my brother let the man get up, and later, when we were leaving, he apologized to the man on the front steps of the Hofbräuhaus. Vonnegut would have understood what had happened, but I didn't at the time. I thought my brother had lost his mind. That was my first experience with what war does to human beings' minds and souls. My brother's marriage did not last, and it took twenty years for my brother to find himself again. He remarried and had two nice children, and his first wife moved to Arizona. So it goes.

I am going back to Germany in 2012, one way or another. I have unfinished business there. My mother's father took a diary from a dead German soldier on a battlefield in Belgium. It lay untranslated until 2006. I had the diary translated by a native of Germany, who taught German at a nearby university. The diary tells the story of a young man in love with a girl, an artist and musician, who was caught up in the pageantry of war, and leaves college to go to the front. Once he arrives he realizes the mistake he has made. The narrative ends a few months before the end of the war. It is not clear if the man died or he simply lost the diary. My brother owns the diary, and will not give it up. I had him make a copy of it however; I'm going to the town where this German came from, which is, ironically, west of Dresden,  and slightly southwest of Berlin.


There are things each person must do to set things right to make peace with the past. I believe I am doing the right thing. I am becoming unstuck in time. I have to go back to where it all happened, like Vonnegut, and resolve it. I don't know what I'll find when I get there, and this is the way all journeys begin. And I have a feeling if I told Vonnegut this story he would say something witty and poignant and maybe he would do a line drawing that showed a German WWI helmet with a dove sitting on it.

God bless you Billy Pilgrim. Say hi to the Tralfamadorians for me.