Mother Night

When most people think of Kurt Vonnegut, the novels Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle immediately come to mind. It's a shame that more people aren't familiar with Mother Night, a novel in which Vonnegut explores the nature of moral ambiguity and what high-minded ideals we sacrifice on the altar

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of war. It's a skillful blend of Vonnegut's trademark dark humor and philosophical musings about human morality as observed through the lens of war. To put it simply, this is some good stuff.

Sitting in an Israeli jail and writing his memoirs, Howard Campbell awaits trial for war crimes as a Nazi in World War II. As Howard himself says, "I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination" (1). And this is the root of Howard's problem: he has no true identity. As he ruminates on his past, we see how the apolitical Howard was drawn into events that eclipsed the simple life he longed to live as an artist writing plays for his muse and wife, the lovely Helga.

Howard's situation is a unique one. An American who moved to Germany as a child and seamlessly assimilated into German culture prior to any rumblings of war, Howard makes the perfect candidate for an American spy. However, to remain above suspicion, Howard must align himself with the Nazi cause by pretending to be a Nazi propagandist, eventually becoming the voice of the Reich through his radio broadcasts. Through a series of coughs, sneezes, and sniffs, Howard sends coded information out to the Americans at the same time he spews vile invective against the Jewish people.

So what's the problem? He was a good guy, right? That's how it would normally be perceived, but as Vonnegut cautions, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" (v). Maintaining this dual identity weighs heavily upon Howard in the years after the war which robbed him of everything: his family, his friends, his art, and his Helga. Howard excelled as a propagandist--so good, in fact, his father-in-law tells him that Howard, not Hitler and not Goebbels, convinced him to become a Nazi. Howard's American handler even claims Campbell "was one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived" (188). Knowing that it was his words and his voice that convinced so many to hate in the name of God is a guilt that Howard can never alleviate, especially given that his communications with the Americans never took the form of words. He never knew what information he was passing on to the Americans, nor what, if any, good came from it. In the end, he can never be certain if the good he did outweighed (or at least balanced out) the evil his words inspired in the hearts of men. The question is, do pure motivations absolve heinous outcomes? As Howard's past begins to catch up with him, he must confront these questions and try to determine who Howard Campbell has become in the shadow of war.

I think what is most intriguing about the novel is that Howard Campbell is the ultimate unreliable narrator. A man who is skilled with words and at shaping the perceptions of others, it's important to remember that, in this metafiction, it is Howard Campbell writing his own life's story. Even in the end we cannot be certain whether or not we come to know the real Howard Campbell as the resulting narrative may be Campbell's masterwork of propaganda--rewriting his own history with an eye to posterity. Howard Campbell may be a fiction created by the man himself, a constantly shifting personality recreating himself to fit the times in which he lives. After all, we become what we pretend to be.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder

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It was in Madrid, in 1997. I was sixteen, and more homesick than I have ever been in my life. I had been living in Spain for a summer, and had lost all perspective on absence and eventual return. "Home" no longer even seemed real to me, although now I would snap up a summer in sunny Spain without a

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backward glance, secure in the knowledge (and maybe I shouldn't be) that Portland would be here when I got back. But back then I was miserable as only a sixteen-year-old can be. And I was in a transitional part of the trip (transitions have never been my strong point) between the segment where I was living with my host family in Galicia, and the segment where my parents and I would be doing tourist stuff around the rest of the country. I was staying in the dorms at the Universidad de Madrid with all the other kids in my program, most of whom were just there because they could score legal alcohol. So they were staying up all night drinking - and singing, and puking - very loudly, in the rooms above and to the side of me.

I was so exhausted from acute homesickness, forced sleep deprivation and general teen angst that I broke down in tears one afternoon, sitting against a tree in the Retiro. A kind old Spanish man saw me crying, came over and tried to find out what was wrong, but I didn't have the word for "to miss" in Spanish. In my agitated state most of my Spanish seemed to desert me, actually, so the conversation went something like:

Him: "What's wrong? Don't cry!"
Me: "Nothing, it's fine."
Him: "Then why are you crying?"
Me: "Don't worry about it."
Him: "Do you need any help?"
Me: "Um...I don't have any parents!"
Him: "You are an orphan? Do you have a place to stay?"
Me: "No, I don't need a place to stay, I just - they're in America!"
Him: "And they left you here?"

And so on an so forth. He was plainly a nice old man who was touched by my totally out-of-proportion public display of grief, but unfortunately his kindness only made my crying worse. Everything made it worse, actually. The attention of one of the more sympathetic kids in my program, the worried glances of the administrators, the friendly Spaniards and their persistence in mistaking me for a Portuguese girl rather than an American - nothing helped until I wandered into a bookstore with a little English-language section, and bought myself Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night.

It's hard to explain why a darkly funny novel about an American who pretends too well to be a Nazi would succeed where peers, elders and Madrileños had failed. Partially, it was just the familiar voice, the colloquial American English that I was missing in the air around me. Partially it was the good, old-fashioned reminder that things could be a lot worse: I could be reviled by my entire country for my role as a propagandist in the service of a cause I detested, my only friends - ironically - wannabe neo-fascists trying ineptly to recreate Hitler's regime. Everyone I admired could want to kick my teeth in in righteous anger, and I could be beset by sycophantic bigots who wouldn't even let me hear my own thoughts. By comparison a bunch of drunk high-schoolers in a European capital don't seem so bad.

Undeniably, the humor helped - the author's ear for the ridiculous and true, and his unbeatable comic timing. But I think the single most helpful and calming - yet sobering - aspect of Vonnegut's prose on my overactive teenage brain was his knack of describing human society - adult society, complex society - as if to a child, thereby exposing how inexcusably ludicrous our behavior comes to be, and the way in which all of our excuses and the stories we tell ourselves only serve to make our behavior more preposterous, rather than less, as we like to think. In many ways it's a dark vision of the world, but looked at in another way it's a valuable tool, incredibly useful whenever one's lack of perspective spirals out of control. Reading Mother Night on those hot evenings in Madrid, while adolescent numbskulls partied above me, Vonnegut's prose began to force my brain to break the situation into its components: humans, lots of humans, doing their best (often not very good) and acting silly. Some humans like to drink fermented barley-water until they are so dehydrated that their heads feel like exploding - they do this night after night. Some humans feel bored at home and lonely anywhere else. So it goes.

I think that, as my friend Ariel suggested, we are more in need of such perspective now than I ever was as a grim sixteen-year-old. I feel grateful to Kurt Vonnegut for, among so many other things, showing me a hint at how to achieve it.

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In preparation for a workshop on teaching Kurt Vonnegut next week, I'm rereading some of Kurt's more popular works. I haven't read "Mother Night" in about five years so it was fun revisiting it. Per usual Vonnegut inserts lots of dark comedy and zany writing into his novels. This novel follows an

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American, Nazi war criminal, Howard J. Campbell as he recounts his life, the war, and his time in Israel cell awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. It's not such a cut and dry case however, is Howard really guilty? He was a very convincing and cut-throat Nazi propagandist but he was also an American undercover spy, does one negate the other? What defines a man? Vonnegut dives deep into the human psyche to show how mulch-faceted we all are. Not everything is black or white.

Vonnegut's prose is beautiful and witty and as always warms my soul a little. Like all of his other works this is a must read!

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Mother Night is written as the confessions of one Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man held in prison in Israel in 1961 and soon to be on trial for having been a propagandist for the Nazis during WWII. He recounts his life before the war, when he was a playwright, during the war, when he hobnobbed with

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Nazi party officials and authored their vile messages, and after the war, when he escaped to America and lived in New York City for 15 years before being discovered. It may sound like a simple story and a subject that has been covered countless times, but Vonnegut both infuses this story with humanity as well as makes such dark observations about mankind at large that it’s a brilliant read.

One of the strengths of the novel comes from its honest portrayal of the layers of evil, from the Nazis who architected the Final Solution, to those in Germany who went along with the program and were complicit, to white supremacists in America and other countries before and after the war, to the Americans who unnecessarily fire bombed Dresden when the Germans were defeated, and to those who learned nothing from the war and doom humanity to a cycle of repetition.

Written in 1966, 21 years after Vonnegut had survived the Dresden bombing by hiding under a slaughterhouse, he admits in the introduction that if had been a German he probably would have ended up a Nazi. He doesn’t pretend that it’s some “other” country or group of people in the world that are the sole source of racism or violence. At the same time, through Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the people he condemns most are those who live in a state of cognitive dissonance by doing evil and yet thinking of themselves as good. The character writes, “Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones [an American white supremacist]. I knew it. God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.”

One of the wrinkles is that Campbell was actually being used by the Americans to send spy messages, without having any idea as to what they are. A part of me resisted this component of the character, as I wanted him to be simply a stand-in for people in a country who “go along” with things they know are wrong. It does add a further shade of gray, however, and made me think that so many people just end up being puppets to those who would use them, when they would have just as happily led a simple life with the one they love. It never apologizes for him, but at the same time, through hate groups he encounters in America, Vonnegut points out the homegrown brand of fascist elements in America, which was certainly prescient.

The only off note in the book to me was the attitude of Dr. Epstein towards the Holocaust, after having “spent his childhood” in Auschwitz. It was just inconceivable to me that these words would come out of his mouth: “They [the Nazis and the war] belong to a period of insanity that should be forgotten as quickly as possible.”

Overall though, a great book, and I considered a higher rating.

Quotes:
From the introduction:
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

On America, this one certainly brought to mind 1/6/21:
“The Iron Guardsmen of the White Sons of the American Constitution [a hate group looking remarkably similar to the Proud Boys and their ilk] are going to get an impressive lecture on the illegality in this country of private armies, murder, mayhem, riots, treason, and the violent overthrow of the government.”

On authoritarians, bringing to mind Trump, Putin, et al:
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. … The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.”

On evil:
“’There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,’ I said, ‘but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on his side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It’s that part of an imbecile,’ I said, ‘that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.’”

On nations and war:
“Those imaginary lines [national boundaries] are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”
“You’ve changed so,” she said.
“People should be changed by world wars,” I said, “else what are world wars for?”

On people:
“All people are insane,” he said. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

And this one:
“I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it.”

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The Basics

Howard W. Campbell Jr. is a loyal Nazi. But he’s also an American spy. But he’s responsible for the deaths of millions. But he saved millions of lives. And he can’t decide what holds more of an impact. Or if he cares.

My Thoughts

Vonnegut himself states in the introduction that Mother

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Night has a clear moral and it’s one of his only books he could say that about definitively. I think that’s true, and the moral he gives it (we are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be) is very true of the story, but I also believe this book says about ten or twelve other things really well. Everything from the sorts of thoughts we’ve heard spoken aloud many times over, like war benefits no one and good people die on both sides. To perspectives on hate speech that have a unique resonance here, particularly when it’s stated that blind faith isn’t necessarily good.

All of this seems particularly important in the world of literature when you consider two things: this was first published in 1961, and it’s still relevant today. That’s no small feat. Before true bitterness had set in toward war, before people began to consider the lives of the people they went to war against, Vonnegut was writing about it. He was writing about someone with things to lose, hard choices to make, maybe even possessing a questionable moral center and yet he was likeable. He wasn’t writing about a war that was muddied and gray. He was writing about a war that appeared perfectly black-and-white and revealing shades of gray that leave you feeling almost shaken.

Even now, this is dangerous ground to tread. Making your protagonist a Nazi, the people helping him white supremacists and Soviet spies. He pushed the envelope in fascinating ways, crossed all kind of lines, and the results are nothing short of fantastically entertaining. Because like most of Vonnegut’s books, it’s funny, it’s sad, it has a lot to say, and it does all of it very well.

Final Rating

5/5

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Vonnegut is at his best with this novel, in which a thick gray fog is allowed to settle on everything we believe we see in black and white.

The novel's anti-hero, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., served the Americans as a spy by adopting the role of a high-ranking Nazi official charged with promulgating

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anti-American propaganda. Throughout the novel he tells us of the pragmatism that kept him alive during the war and after it: to himself he ascribes neither guilt, nor a sense of loss, nor a loathing of death, nor heartbroken rage, nor a unlovability, nor a sense of the cruelty of God (pp. 231-232). He steals, lies, deceives, schemes, and somehow even when caught manages to purchase freedom by one means or another. His world is not black and white, but gray, a full-blown cloud of obscuring mist. In order to perform the greatest acts of espionage, he was forced to author and deliver the most hateful of anti-Semitic screed. Which outweighs the other, the sinner or the saint? Impelled by whatever situation he finds himself in, our hero eventually loses all sense of black or white and opts for suicide over freedom when freedom might lend him another opportunity to pick sides.

The book's most compelling passage, to me, came on page 233 and following, in which Campbell explains the way in which his colleagues (standing in for all of us) are able to cope with themselves:

"I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which may be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random...The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined...The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -- That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony --That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase -- That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers --That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia..."

This passage stands in stark contrast to the totality of Jonthan Kozol's The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home, which I read immediately before picking up Vonnegut. This last book offers a world of stark blacks and whites, in which action of an incontrovertible nature is demanded of the reader, should she not wish to bear the label "hypocrite." Vonnegut, on the other hand, leaves us wondering how in the hell hypocrisy can be defined in the first place.

Like all of his best books, Vonnegut's Mother Night asks more questions than it answers.

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Kurt Vonnegut rejects suspense. I'm okay with that. His books are good practice for being an old man resigned to the insignificance of one human life on a grand scale and the insignificance of all else on a local scale. I'm okay with that, too.

Mother Night is about Howard Campbell, Jr, a man who delivers Nazi propaganda as a US spy. It is about that, and it is about so much more than that. Vonnegut gives us a few morals in the introduction. He says, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He also

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offers, "When you're dead you're dead, and "Make love when you can. It's good for you." I think an even clearer moral for this story, unstated by Vonnegut, is this, "Don't try to make sense or look for a purpose in the world. It is absurd." Sounds uplifting!

To be honest, I did like it. I could not help but feel for these characters, and Vonnegut really put them through the ringer. Every time the story would start to feel stable, Vonnegut would uproot them with another plot twist, and I was left to think about what he was trying to say about he randomness of the world.

Another thought that I had while reading this book was, "Are we responsible for our actions, or are we all capable of anything depending on circumstances?" This leads to another question, "Can man be good or evil?" I don't have any clear answer to either question, and I don't think this book attempts to answer either one. The questions are merely posed, and I think that is one of the things that makes this a great book.

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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Howard W. Campbell Jr., the narrator of Vonnegut’s brilliant 1966 novel, pretends to be a Nazi — or as he puts it at the outset of his so-called confessions, “I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a

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nationless person by inclination.” In Campbell’s version of his life story, he became a writer and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda out of expediency — his father-in-law was the chief of police in Berlin; Campbell and his German wife wanted to remain in Germany even after the war began in 1939; joining the Nazi cause was the easiest way to do that. His broadcasts were notoriously vile, filled with hatred and venom toward Jewish people and anyone else who did not conform to the Aryan ideal.

And that for me was the most upsetting thing about this story — that someone could spew such hatred, knowing it would have the most terrible consequences for its targets, without actually feeling strongly one way or the other about the truth of what he said and wrote. The hateful propaganda was a writing exercise, a way for Campbell to keep his creative juices flowing for when the war would end and he could resume his playwriting career. To freely disperse such hate without believing in it — is that not more horrific than the mad ravings of the true believer?

I’ve seen a number of references to this book recently as a sort of foretelling of the current political situation in the United States. As I began reading I expected to find that Campbell represented the people who stormed the US Capitol and tried to overthrow the government, but after reading it I’ve changed my mind. Campbell is the spitting image of every politician, from the very top down to state and local levels, who cynically perpetuated lies and conspiracy theories that they knew to be false, in order to rile up that mob and incite the insurrection. In the end, which is worse?

That's the question that's going to keep me up nights.

I had hoped, as a (propaganda) broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate

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