Word: dresdener
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...Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Pole who was the foreign fighter of his era. What is a terrorist? Amerine asks. Someone who flies planes into buildings, says a cadet. The Japanese did basically that, says Amerine. Someone who kills civilians, says another. The U.S. did that in Dresden, Amerine replies. He is the tireless devil's advocate, forcing cadets into deeper analysis and dense moral ground...
...write what they know—to mine their own lives for inspiration instead of trying to concoct some purely foreign, purely fictional world which they have never experienced. Foer ignores this advice demonstratively. Unconcerned with believability, he says, and unafraid to try to say something new about the Dresden firebombing and the Nazi invasion of Europe, Foer does just about everything in his two books besides show what it’s like to be him. “Everything Is Illuminated,” for instance, takes the form of a correspondence between two writers?...
...have to put that in context. If that proposition had been accepted during the war generally, the Allies would not have bombed Germany, and we would not have made earlier strikes against Japan. Remember, at least 35,000 were killed in one night in Dresden. Our fire bombing of Tokyo [in March 1945] killed 83,000 in a single night. They all were deliberate bombings of civilian areas. MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off, which I think speaks well...
Foer situates the story in a broader history by including chapters narrated by each of Oskar’s paternal grandparents, survivors of the 1945 Dresden bombings. This creates a tension in the novel between a treatment of the terrorism as cataclysmic and unprecedented and an alignment of it with American and world history...
...other hand, Foer makes a welcome effort to contextualize Sept. 11, and what saves Extremely Loud from being a kind of ode to its earth-shattering enormity is his presentation of other tragedies as predecessors. In addition to stories about the American destruction of Dresden, there is a transcript of an interview with a Hiroshima survivor, which Oskar plays for a school project, also reporting on the scientific dimensions of the atom bomb...