Mother Night: A Novel
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Book Reviews of Mother Night: A Novel
Book Review: Memoirs of an Accidental Nazi
Summary: 5 Stars
Kurt Vonnegut was a brilliant satirist, and much of this book is hilariously funny. Yet it has also something important to say about the moral questions raised by World War Two. Published in 1961 (Vonnegut's third novel), this anticipates his more famous war novel SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE by eight years, but it is no less unconventional in its view of the issues. Towards the end of his introduction to the 1966 edition, Vonnegut writes: "If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes." This is offensive, certainly -- but because it is flippant or because it is true? I can imagine few other authors who would have had the courage to say this; but I also know that although, with the self-canonization of hindsight, we might like to portray ourselves as heroic resisters, the reality in most cases would probably have been quite different.
The book is presented as the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., written in an Israeli jail while awaiting trial for war crimes. Living in Germany during the interwar years, Campbell achieved some success as a playwright, mainly vehicles for his actress wife Helga. [He also kept a journal, entitled MEMOIRS OF A MONOGAMOUS CASANOVA, in which he told of his "conquests of all the hundreds of women my wife, my Helga, had been." In this, at least, he was a romantic.] Just before war breaks out, he is recruited by an American spy master to offer his services to the Nazi hierarchy as a propagandist. So he spends the war making daily broadcasts whose content is virulently racist, but whose pattern of hesitations and speech mannerisms contains coded information for his own people. He is all too successful. At the end of the war, his father-in-law, now the chief of police in Berlin, says to him: "I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, come not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler -- but from you. You alone kept me for concluding that Germany had gone insane." He succeeds so well that although the American authorities save him from hanging and enable him to go to ground in Greenwich Village, they can make no public acknowledgement of such a vilified figure.
Campbell describes the next fifteen years as a purgatory worse than hell. But most of the novel focuses on the events that bring this to an end, as his address becomes known both to Israeli agents and to a neo-fascist group determined to exalt him as a hero. Although hilariously over the top, Vonnegut's satire of these American racial and religious extremists strikes quite a few targets even today. But Vonnegut uses the extremism to contrast with the much more reasonable morality growing within Campbell himself. Facing down a freelance assassin determined to rid the world of Evil, he says: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, 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."
No, Vonnegut is not a Nazi, and though writing with humor, he does not condone. But he condemns extremism on ALL sides, and sees human beings as a lot closer together than their ideologies might proclaim them.
Book Review: A nation of two
Summary: 4 Stars
One of the many wonderful angles of this book is the way Vonnegut is able to raise questions worth answering. One that's been talked about quite a bit is whether or not people can serve evil and still be considered good, even to themselves. As the narrator, Howard W. Campbell Jr. raises this question quite often by being ruthlessly honest with himself concerning his vitriolic radio addresses and other actions, and how they might have impacted the genocide that was occurring around him. In this way, Campbell seems to me a pretty reliable narrator, earning our trust by not trying to shift blame for his actions as an American agent. But I think Vonnegut also means for us to question some of Campbell's other actions that set up his future misery. In particular, Campbell seemed to be guilty of too much "uncritical love," the term he gave the love that his wife, Helga, showed him.Campbell doesn't detail much of his thought process or how he wrangled with his decision to become a spy. Major Wirtanen, his recruiter, thinks he should because Campbell loves good, hates evil and believes in romance. That's true, but Campbell also says the best reason of all was that he would "have an opportunity for some pretty grand acting. I would fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out." And that's it. Next thing you know, he's a spy. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of introspection there, just uncritical love for himself and his own acting ability, finally getting to act out his own play instead of just writing it.
Also, there's the uncritical love he returns to Helga. Although Vonnegut closes his introduction by saying, "make love when you can. It's good for you," he seemed to show through his portrayal of the romance between Campbell and Helga (and later Campbell and Resi) that uncritical love, while it can be intensely gratifying, can lead to trouble later on. Campbell notes how "mindlessly" the two clung to each other, and the scant evidence he provides of the relationship outside of the bedroom seems to back that up. He says that the two only heard "the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats." Helga actually believed everything Campbell said on the radio -- and this actually made Campbell happy. He had no problem with his wife seeing him as a Jew-baiting Nazi, even though he was completely different on the inside. If he had told Helga that he was a spy, perhaps she would've been able to keep him grounded when away from his work as an agent, reassuring him that he was only performing a duty, an act, that he really was a different person. Likewise, although he doesn't present any evidence (perhaps because he didn't want to), Helga appeared to be just as patriotic toward the Nazi cause as Campbell pretended to be. Apparently, this didn't bother Campbell either. In reality, neither of the two cared what the other did or said -- they were star-struck lovers, and Campbell's uncritical love of Helga came back to haunt him (for the rest of his life) when she was killed in Crimea. His desperation manifested itself in his easy acceptance of Resi as Helga later on in the book. Campell was so eager to give his love away that he couldn't (or maybe didn't want to) distinguish betweent the sisters. This, too, came back to haunt him through Resi's betrayal and death, making Campbell more despondent -- despondent enough to set up the conclusion of the novel.
Book Review: Post-Modern Morality Tale?
Summary: 5 Stars
Vonnegut begins Mother Night with an introduction stating that this is the only story of his that he knows the moral, which happens to be: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." For an author whose novels often read like a Jacob's Ladder toy, amusing in their seeming lack of logic, it seems odd that he would write a novel with a clear and straightforward moral. However, what Vonnegut accomplishes in Mother Night is to rescue post-modernism from its more nihilistic tendencies, and makes it clear that our unreal selves can sometimes have real consequences.
Mother Night is apparently the diary of Howard W. Campbell Jr., written while he was awaiting a war crime trial in Israel. Of course Vonnegut is using the theme of a found text while claiming he only edited the manuscript. Much like the characters in his books, the authenticity of the novel itself is amorphous.
Through the course of the novel Campbell informs us that he was once a playwright turned Nazi propagandist who transmitted broadcasts espousing the Aryan philosophy across Europe. Similar to Reifenstahl's claims, Campbell states that his own politics are nonexistent, and that he was merely doing his job. In fact, he purposefully makes these broadcasts so over-the-top that no one could possibly see them as anything but ridiculous, but in a world where people like Hitler and Himmler somehow took over an entire country, Campbell's melodramatic broadcasts are viewed as genius. Soon he is contacted by an undercover U.S. agent who he affectionately calls his "Blue Fairy Godmother." This agent forcibly recruit's Campbell as a double agent, and using Campbell's broadcasts the Blue Fairy Godmother is able to transmit secret codes to the allied forces.
Vonnegut states in the book that the reason people are able to commit atrocities and still see themselves as a good person is the modern condition of schizophrenia. This leads to the question of whether or not Campbell is making up the Blue Fairy Godmother. Could the Blue Fairy Godmother be Campbell's own form of schizophrenia?
By the end of the book Campbell turns himself into the Israeli authorities so he can stand trial for war crimes. In a sense, it doesn't really matter whether or not Campbell was a double agent because his actions had very real and harmful consequences regardless. He stoked the coals of the Nazi propaganda machine, and regardless of whether he is guilty under the law, Vonnegut uses Campbell's own admission of guilt to show that he is morally guilty. Whether or not Campbell was a double agent he is guilty of pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer. For a post-modern novel this is a very hard edged morality tale. Oftentimes post-modernism is criticized for moral relativity (interestingly enough, those who I've heard use moral relativity the most are conservative historians who wish to defend historical figures who have done questionable acts, slavery being a prime example). What Vonnegut accomplishes in Mother Night is to make it clear that while the "self" is amorphous and changing, our actual actions have a clear impact on others and cannot be fortified from morality.
Book Review: Nothing is as it seems
Summary: 5 Stars
It is rare that I consider a book unimpeachable--that also has the dubious horror of being anointed as a sacred cow or a platitude in the making. But there is a reason that Vonnegut's work is acknowledged as ageless and incomparable. He really is just that. MOTHER NIGHT is his third book, written in 1961, and the first book written in the first person, which allows the reader to descend deeper and deeper into the protagonist's mind. Vonnegut's past history of surviving the 1945 bombing of Dresden while underground in an abattoir has provided a lot of meat for several of his novels, and this one is a riveting example. This isn't one of Vonnegut's shaggy dog or science fiction stories. It has more of a reality-based feel to it. Every sentence is necessary and carefully wrought. His satire is on full display, but love and humanity are intertwined. His ability to embrace the skeptic with the sentimentalist seems effortless.
The primary theme is penned in Vonnegut's introduction, written five years after the hardback was released.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
After the editor's note written by the (fictional) editor of this confessional story, we are introduced to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the protagonist and narrator of his story as an American spy and former playwright and poet living in Germany during WW II. He is imprisoned in Israel for war crimes of treason and crimes against humanity; he was so good at his job that no one presently believes his patriotism and service to America. Campbell gave impassioned radio broadcasts, delivering prolific anti-Semitic messages to all of Nazi Germany. His "code" to the Americans was conveyed in mannerisms, emphases, coughs, and verbal stumbles. He became a minor celebrity to the Nazis.
He loved and adored his German wife, Helga; together they were a "nation of two." As a playwright, he understood "lies told for the sake of artistic effect" and that lies, in art, can be "the most beguiling forms of truth." He never told Helga that he was a spy. He was separated from her, and she was presumed dead, and he later emerged in Greenwich Village to attempt to live in anonymity, although he kept his name. Helga--or someone like Helga--re-emerged, also. And a variety of white supremacists found him and wanted to herald him and protect him from harm. Only Vonnegut can combine slapstick with white supremacy and hold your heart in his teeth.
This book had me in thrall from the first to last page. I paced periodically while reading--re-reading sentences, phrases, paragraphs. I was captivated by Vonnegut's ability to turn every truth upside down and every lie inside out. The revelations of truth were in every contradiction and the fullness of humanity in every insanity and evil act. This book will make you question what is right and what is true about the things we think we believe and believe in.
Vonnegut was a prescient writer in his day, and his work is still ahead of its time.
Book Review: A novel about serving evil too openly and good too secretly
Summary: 5 Stars
To the best of my knowledge, there really is no other writer quite like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night appears to be a rather straightforward, albeit quirky, novel at first glance, but as one delves down into the heart of Vonnegut's prose one finds grounds for contemplation of some of life's most serious issues. This novel is the first-hand account of Howard Campbell, Jr., a most remarkable character. Campbell is an American-born citizen who moved to Germany as a child and became the English-speaking radio mouthpiece for Nazi Germany during World War II. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, he has been living an almost invisible life in a New York City attic apartment. He misses his German wife Helga who died in the war, sometimes thinks about his pre-war life as a successful writer of plays and poems, and perhaps just waits for history to find him once again. As we begin the novel, he has been found and is writing this account from a jail cell in Israel, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity. While he is reviled by almost everyone on earth as an American Nazi traitor, the truth is that he was actually an agent working for the American government during the war; this is a truth he cannot prove, though. Thus, in this 1961 novel, the hero is ostensibly a Nazi war criminal.The primary moral of Mother Night, Vonnegut tells us in his introduction, is that "we are what we pretend to be" and should thus be pretty darned careful about what we are pretending to be (a secondary moral being the less enlightening statement "when you're dead, you're dead"). In the eyes of the entire world, Campbell is exactly what he pretended to be during the war, a traitorous Nazi purveyor of propaganda who mocked and demoralized allied troops as well as regular citizens. Internally, Campbell hardly knows what he is anymore; he claims no country, no political values, wanting only to live in a "nation of two" with his beloved wife Helga once again. A series of significant events forces Campbell out of the cocoon of his past fifteen years, and his thoughts and actions along the way provide big juicy morsels of food for thought: taking personal responsibility for one's actions, the harsh truths of war and peace, the sometimes vast differences between truth and fact, individual redemption before self and society, finding direction and a purpose in a world gone mad, etc. Vonnegut's scythe-like dark humor cuts deeper than mere satire, aiming directly at some of the darker sections of the human heart, areas which most individuals too often ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The gallows humor can be quite funny on the surface, but it is in actuality a scalpel which Vonnegut wields to open up the heart and soul of the reader for self-examination. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel.