.... Spanos: his experiences as an American POW during the Dresden firebombing, his introduction of Martin Heidegger’s destructive/projective hermeneutics into the American academy in the 1970s, and his translation of these personal and scholarly commitments into pedagogical theory and practice. After...

...Daniel T. O’Hara Spanos’s memoir of his World War II experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war near Dresden at the time of its firebombing by the Allies provides the basis for a reading of his entire career and its legacy, this article argues. The ontological and existential dimensions...

... Moby-Dick: 1851–1857, are forthcoming. He has recently completed two memoirs, Persephone’s Pomegranate (about his relation- ship to Greece) and Infernal Journey: A World War II Memoir (about his experience as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden). While a visiting scholar...

...-­of-­placeness with his lived experience as a prisoner of war in a Dresden labor camp during the 1945 firebombing. Like the migrants Said hailed as the vanguard of the postimperial age, Spanos situated his critical witness in between the empire the United States had become and the home- land from which...

... to this pro- cess. To maintain non-everydayness­ in everyday life, the government con- tinually evokes memories of particular disasters, such as the civilian experi- ence of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo, the Battle of Okinawa, and the repatriation from...

..., and, finally, his direct experience of the firebombing of Dres- den. Through his recitation of these moments, Spanos tells how he bore witness to the consequences of a technological and administrative relation to Being spawned by reason’s apocalyptic excesses. He raises the follow- ing question: Is human...

... of being a prisoner of war in a German POW camp during the Allied firebombing of Dresden trau- matically overwrites Spanos’s already dislocated experience as a twenty-­ year-­old first-generation­ Greek American growing up working class in post-­Depression New England. Tracing the psychic...

..., and so forth). And, not least, having been taken prisoner of war during the last desperate German assault against the Ameri- can army at St. Vith in Belgium (the action that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge), I had also borne appalled witness to the Allied Air Force’s gratuitous firebombing...

..., as both were prisoners of war in Dresden that infamous night. For Spanos, Vonnegut’s inability to deal with the brutal dimensions of the Allied attack precipitates his oblique and ineffective plot, missing the opportunity to disclose firebombing’s raison d’être. In contrast, the German writer W. G...