In February 1945, a 22-year-old American prisoner of war huddled in an underground meat locker beneath a German slaughterhouse while Allied bombs incinerated Dresden above him. That soldier was Kurt Vonnegut. This episode asks how a man who walked out of those ashes, and then dug bodies from the rubble, became a writer defined by dark humor, pacifism, and a plea for basic decency, starting with a childhood in Indianapolis where WWI-era prejudice led his parents to erase their German heritage and Prohibition and the Depression erased their brewery and architecture fortunes.

We follow the mother's suicide on Mother's Day weekend 1944, capture at the Battle of the Bulge, the return home to anthropology at Chicago and PR work at General Electric that inspired Player Piano, the deaths of his sister and her husband within days in 1958 that double ...