Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

First published: 1961

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: 1938-1961

Locale: Nazi Germany, New York City, and Israel

Principal Characters:

• Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the protagonist, a former United States spy in Germany, author of a memoir written in an Israeli prison
• Helga Noth, his German wife, who dies after the war
• Resi Noth, his sister-in-law, who later poses as Helga and lives with him
• Major Frank Wirtanen, who recruits Campbell as a spy and remains his contact; his real name, Harold J. Sparrow, is learned only at the novel’s end
• George Kraft, a painter, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Campbell’s best friend in New York City, and a Soviet spy; his real name is Colonel Iona Potapov
• Lieutenant Bernard B. O’Hare, who arrests Campbell in 1945 as a supposed Nazi and later hounds him in New York

The Novel

Mother Night—the title comes from a speech by Mephistopheles in Faust—is presented as the written memoir or confession of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. It has supposedly been edited by “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” who offers a signed editor’s note concluding that Campbell “served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.” Yet it is evident that Campbell speaks for Vonnegut—as an unpretentious Everyman.

Against his better judgment, Campbell, an American who lived for a dozen years in Germany, agreed to become an intelligence agent for the United States. Throughout the war, pretending to be a Nazi, he insinuated secret messages into his regular radio broadcasts extolling Nazism and anti-Semitism. By the end of the war, Campbell is a world-famous Nazi; only three persons know he actually was a spy. Almost reluctantly, the United States government helps him escape a war-crimes trial by arranging for him to go underground in Manhattan. In 1960, however, after betrayal by his best friend and the death of the woman he loves, he gives himself up to Israeli agents. He writes his memoirs while awaiting trial in Jerusalem. The last chapter is written on the eve of his trial. He has just received a letter from Frank Wirtanen, who had recruited him as a spy, offering to testify in his behalf. Campbell, however, finds the prospect of freedom nauseating and proposes to execute himself that night “for crimes against himself.” One must assume that he does in fact commit suicide, as “editor” Vonnegut refers to him in the past tense.

Vonnegut as author, writing in 1960, had assigned a date of 1961 to Campbell’s manuscript, to lend it maximum contemporaneity with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, then under way in Israel. Eichmann was arrested in 1960 and executed in 1962. It is typical for Vonnegut to construct his novels around events immediately in the news. (Mother Night, as it turned out, was not actually released until 1962.)

The novel, then, is simply Campbell’s autobiographical account; its forty-five rather brief chapters begin in the prison, then more or less alternate in flashback between wartime Germany and the years in Manhattan, with occasional chapters, including the last, returning to the present.

Although this work qualifies as a realistic novel, many of its situations, though fully entertaining, fall short of being believable: the broadcasting charade, for example, in which Campbell does not even know the messages he is transmitting (by clearing his throat, pausing, and the like); the possibility that he would accept his wife’s sister, younger by fifteen or more years, as his wife, even after an absence of a dozen years; and the likelihood that Campbell would commit suicide when he was at least technically innocent. In addition, there is much comic absurdity in this novel—even black humor—which contrasts uncomfortably (some would say) with life in Nazi Germany—and in Auschwitz. For example, there is the White Christian Minuteman, the Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., who proves that “Christ was not a Jew” by analyzing fifty famous paintings of Jesus, not one of which shows “Jewish jaws or teeth.” His followers include Robert Sterling Wilson, “the Black Fuehrer of Harlem,” and an unfrocked Paulist father, Patrick Keeley, patterned on the infamous Father Coughlin.

One finally realizes that the real issue in Mother Night is not so much the psychological veracity of its central characters as their usefulness in demonstrating certain philosophical propositions—or in asking fundamental questions relating to evil, guilt, and forgiveness. The result is a novel didactic in its parts, yet contradictory, not fully resolved, and continuously ironic in tone. Yet it is dead serious in its concern for truth.

The Characters

Like other Vonnegut protagonists, Howard Campbell tends to speak aphoristically. He tells the reader a number of things that are good for the reader to know or emulate. For example, in reply to the supposition that he hates America, Campbell replies, “That would be as silly as loving it. . . . It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me.” Elsewhere he says that “nationalities” do not interest him. He refers to himself as a “stateless person.” Once he draws a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and a United States flag on his window and says, “Hooray, hooray, hooray.” So much for patriotism. In this way Campbell presents one of the more important of Vonnegut’s teachings.

Another of Vonnegut’s lessons requires that Campbell (who was a successful playwright in Germany) admit that if Germany had won, there was every chance that he “would have become a sort of Nazi Edgar Guest, writing a daily [newspaper] column of optimistic doggerel. . . .” While this admission conflicts tentatively with the antipatriotic theme, it serves the equally important idea that most Americans probably would have behaved like most Nazis, placed in the same situation. As the reader comes to identify more closely with Campbell, he is led to the brink of seeking a way possibly to forgive the Nazis—to forgive unspeakable evil. This hope is perhaps thwarted, however, by Campbell’s inability to forgive himself (hence his suicide) for having furthered the cause of anti-Semitism so efficiently as to render his intelligence work insignificant.

Like Campbell, the other characters dramatize certain themes and ideas—though usually one motif dominates. Dr. Abraham Epstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, has only one message: “Forget Auschwitz. . . . I never think about it!” This, too, is a possibly healthy way of dealing with the Holocaust—though it conflicts with the very act of writing Mother Night. Similarly, Bernard B. O’Hare is brought onstage only to teach the reader the wrongness—and the futility—of vengeance.

Another minor character, Heinz Schildknecht, who, the reader is told, is Campbell’s best friend and whose precious motorcycle Campbell steals in the last days of the war, dramatizes but one thing: friendship betrayed. This motif is reinforced later, in New York, by Iona Potapov, alias George Kraft, who in some part of his being is genuinely Campbell’s friend. Yet he betrays Campbell. This more complex character also participates in the general investigation of schizophrenia that the novel undertakes. As a Russian spy, Potapov is insane; as an American spy, Campbell also exhibits schizophrenic traits. Finally, the absurd Nazi dentist Lionel Jones is insane to the degree that he is simply a caricature of a Fascist. His role appears to be to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is so crazy that no one could possibly countenance it. Then, one is forced to ask, how could the Holocaust have occurred? Great evil is a mystery, Vonnegut replies, and he proceeds with caution to seek its source.

The sisters Helga Noth and Resi Noth can almost be treated as one person, since each, in her relationship with Campbell, participates in acting out Campbell’s idea of the “Nation of Two”—the title of a romantic play he never got around to writing but which was to show “how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two.” The implicit idea here, and a most tempting one, is that the best way to deal with gross political evil is to ignore it and retreat into sweet sexual love.

Critical Context

Mother Night is Vonnegut’s third novel, written well before he had attained best-seller status with Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade (1969). The latter is Vonnegut’s most complete statement about Nazi Germany and his survival of the firestorm that destroyed Dresden on February 13, 1945. With the latter novel, Vonnegut achieved his greatest critical success—while Mother Night was at first totally ignored; it was never even reviewed until it was reissued in 1966. For the new edition, Vonnegut wrote an introduction indicating, among other things, that Mother Night is in some sense an anticipation of Slaughterhouse Five. For example, he confesses that if he had been born in Germany, he “probably would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and Gypsies and Poles around. . . .” It is simply not true that the author, given his personal history, would have been a Nazi, but it is the right thing for him to say to help the reader understand that Nazis are human, as Americans are; it is not our duty to despise them for all time. This idea is developed more fully and successfully in Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut also tells his readers in his introduction what the moral of Mother Night is—a typical Vonnegut aphorism that obviously fails to summarize this complex novel, but is well worth quoting: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Bibliography

Boon, Kevin, A. Chaos Theory and the Interpretation of Literary Texts: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Extending the scientific theory of chaos to literary criticism, Boon uses words and phrases such as “strange attractors,” “fractals,” and the “micro/macro connection” to describe certain aspects of Vonnegut’s prose. A somewhat offbeat but astute analysis of Vonnegut’s work.

Broer, Lawrence. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Broer offers an in-depth analysis of individual novels by Vonnegut, including Mother Night. His study gives the reader a unique perspective on the common themes that run throughout Vonnegut’s work.

Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Critical essays present a detailed study of Vonnegut’s various works, including Mother Night. A biographical introduction as well as a selected bibliography make this a valuable resource.

Reed, Peter J., and Mark Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Presenting a series of interviews and critical essays on Vonnegut’s writing, this volume offers a broad variety of opinions and observations from scholars and journalists. A good source of information that helps the reader see more clearly the unique characteristics of individual novels against the wider context of Vonnegut’s work.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991. A revealing look at Vonnegut’s life and state of the world. This collection of Vonnegut’s essays examines both the personal issues and social events that shaped his distinctive writing style as well as his view of modern culture. Vonnegut offers a rare glimpse of his heart in this intimate self-portrait.