World War II

World War II is the defining historical catastrophe of E. L. Doctorow's City of God, a war that functions not merely as a backdrop but as the novel's originating wound and its most persistent moral reference point. It is the event that destroyed the narrator's childhood home of Ulm, transformed his father from a young ensign into a worried, portly man, and killed some thirty million people, each of whom, in the novel's stark accounting, was "a packet of terminal agony" for at least one unendurable moment. The war is the source of the book's central traumas—the Kovno Ghetto, the Holocaust, the murder of Joshua Gruen—and it recurs throughout as a standard against which all subsequent suffering, from the G.I.s in V.A. hospitals to the menace lurking under Vilnius's modernity, is measured. It is the historical wound that the novel's characters, from Pem to Louis Slotin, are forever trying to return to, to understand, or to escape.

The War as Personal and Familial Catastrophe

The war is first registered in the novel through its intimate, domestic consequences. The narrator recalls his childhood in Ulm, a city that "was of course destroyed in the Second World War." Before that destruction, his father and uncle had moved their small electrical business to Munich, where they proposed to manufacture dynamos, arc lamps, transformers, and other electrical devices for use by municipalities. For a while everything went well; the family lived in a suburb in a big house behind a wall, with a garden and trees, and spring evenings were filled with the perfume of apple blossoms, "here where the Nazis would be born." The irony is explicit and devastating: the family's prosperity and peace were built in the very place where the ideology that would destroy them was gestating. The narrator's father, who had been a young ensign in World War I, is later remembered as a "serious portly man sitting in a chair by the radio listening to the news of the Second World War" while simultaneously reading of the war in the evening paper he held out like a field. By 1943, the young ensign of World War One had become the worried portly father sitting in an armchair by the radio, listening to the news of World War Two. The war is thus a generational marker: it is the event that separates the father's youth from his middle age, his optimism from his worry, and it is the event that the narrator, as a child, experiences only indirectly, through the radio and the newspaper, as a distant but omnipresent threat.

The War as Mass Death and Moral Standard

Beyond the personal, the war is rendered as a catastrophe of almost incomprehensible scale. The novel states that "the experience of experience is untransmittable," and that history instructs children finally "not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," as some thirty million were in World War Two, each a packet of terminal agony for at least one unendurable moment. This is the war's most brutal arithmetic: thirty million individual deaths, each one a distinct and unendurable agony. The war is also the standard against which later suffering is measured. In a passage that rejects easy consolation, the novel declares, "Christ or no Christ, and the best we can come up with is compassion. Fuck compassion." This is followed by the acknowledgment that "the Second World War was no picnic," but that the G.I.s, the worst off, who have spent their lives in V.A. hospitals, are the ones who bear its lasting physical and psychological scars. The war is thus not a distant historical event but a living wound that continues to inflict pain on its survivors, a pain that the novel refuses to sentimentalize or resolve.

The War as the Origin of the Novel's Central Traumas

The war is the origin of the novel's central traumas, most notably the Kovno Ghetto and the Holocaust. The narrator's quest to find the ghetto archive, which transforms Pem, is a direct consequence of the war. Pem, who had only the names in Joshua Gruen's notebook, travels to Vilnius, once Vilna, a heavily rebuilt city given World War II and the Soviet taste for high-rises. The war is thus the reason the city's history has been "architecturally erased," though it remains "still there in the buried bones, and in the brains of the children." The war is also the source of the "menace lurking under the town's modernity," the "old historic demons with their sharpened pitchforks riding around in the latest-model cars and taking their business lunches in the fine restaurants." The war is not over; it persists as a living force in the present, shaping the city's streets and the minds of its inhabitants. Pem's quest to recover the archive is a quest to recover the history that the war tried to destroy, and his success is a partial victory over the war's erasure.

The War as a Recurring Point of Return

The war is also a point of return, a moment that characters are drawn back to in their attempts to understand the present. The novel describes a longing to go back to where it started, to where it went wrong, to that point before the history. "Oh migod, what a longing there is. So dangerous. It can kill you." This longing is embodied in the story of Louis Slotin, the young scientist who was testing the bouncing ball by halves, using simple screwdrivers to nudge its two cored hemispheres toward each other on a steel rod. Slotin, a daring fellow and a brilliant biophysicist who had flown for the RAF in the Second World War, was hunched over the apparatus when one of the screwdrivers seemed to jump with a will of its own, knocking the hemispheres together. In his hospital bed, Slotin would remember through his searing agony the intense blue light that had flooded his eyes, and the terrible hiss of transfiguration that replaced the hard sound he expected. The war is thus not only a historical event but a template for understanding other moments of catastrophic transformation, moments when the world changes irreversibly and without warning. Slotin's accident, like the war itself, is a moment of synapse, a precise critical measurement that goes wrong, a point of no return.