Culture in Dresden Waurich"). Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" describes the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 seen from a slaughterhouse near the old city of Dresden. Vonnegut was prisoner of war in Dresden during that event. Contemporary novelists who are active in Dresden include Uwe Tellkamp and Ingo Schulze. Both broach up the theme of "Mythos Dresden". Tellkamp is known for his novel "Der Turm" ("The Tower") plotting the life of an academic family in its educated social environment (ivory tower society) of Dresden in the last seven years of former East Germany. Dresden's heterogeneous cityspace strongly influences the lifestyle of the city.
Bombing of Dresden in World War II bombing of Dresden has been used by Holocaust deniers and pro-Nazi polemicists—most notably by the British writer David Irving in his book "The Destruction of Dresden"—in an attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the war crimes committed by the Nazi government and the killing of German civilians by Allied bombing raids. As such, "grossly inflated" casualty figures have been promulgated over the years, many based on a figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty report, "Tagesbefehl" No. 47, that originated with Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. An inquiry conducted at the