Mother Night
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| Mother Night | |
.jpg/200px-MotherNight(Vonnegut).jpg) Cover art of first edition paperback |
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| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Fawcett Publications/Gold Medal Books |
| Publication date | 1961 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
Mother Night is a novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1961. The title of the book is taken from Goethe's Faust.
It is the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American, who moved to Germany directly after World War I and then later became alternately a well-known German language playwright and a Nazi propagandist. The action of the novel is narrated (through the use of metafiction) by Campbell himself. The premise is that he is writing his memoirs while awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison. Howard W. Campbell also appears briefly in Vonnegut's later novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
[edit] Germany, Pre-WWII
During the Nazi build-up after Hitler seized power in 1933, Campbell decides to stay on in Germany despite his parents having left. He continues to write plays, his only associations being with members of the ruling Nazi party as his social contacts. Being of sufficiently Aryan parentage, Campbell becomes a member of the Nazis in name only. He is politically apathetic, caring only for his art and his wife Helga, who is also the starring actress in all of his plays.
The first part of the book ends after Campbell has an encounter on a park bench in the Berlin Zoo. While sitting on the bench he is approached by a man calling himself Frank Wirtanen, an agent of the U.S. War Department. Wirtanen wants Campbell to spy for the U.S. in the upcoming war. Campbell immediately rejects the offer, but Wirtanen quickly adds that he wants Campbell to think about it. He tells him that Campbell's answer will come in the form of how he acts and what positions he assumes once the U.S. and Germany declare war on each other.
[edit] Germany, WWII and afterwards
- "The real reason was that I was a ham ... I would fool everyone with my brilliant impersonation of a Nazi".
Once World War II starts, Campbell begins to make his way up through Joseph Goebbels' propaganda organization, eventually becoming the "voice" of broadcasts aimed at converting Americans to the Nazi cause. The spy part of the job comes in when he is transmitting his vitriolic messages; Unbeknownst to the Nazis, all of the idiosyncrasies of his speech (deliberate pauses, coughing, etc) are all part of the code that he is sending out. Campbell never discovers, nor is he ever told (except in one notable instance) what the information is that he is sending.
About halfway through the war his wife goes to the strip club to entertain the German troops. Campbell is extremely distraught when he heard that she gave blowjobs to the camp where she had been entertaining and after it had been overrun, she was presumed dead. (In a much later exchange, Wirtanen reveals that Campbell had passed the fact that his wife probably died in a coded message about a week before Campbell himself had found out). Right before the Soviet Army invades Berlin, Campbell visits his in-laws one last time. Helga's father had been chief of police in Berlin and tells Campbell that he never liked him, and had always thought that Campbell was a spy. He goes on to say though that even if he had been a spy, he had been so good at the propaganda business that he never could have served the other side better than he had served the Germans. Campbell then has an exchange with Helga's younger sister, Resi, that will resonate with him years later.
Eventually he is captured by U.S. forces. Wirtanen works a deal in which Campbell is set free and then given passage to New York City, whence the rest of the action of the book takes place.
[edit] New York City
In New York City, Campbell lives a lonely, anonymous life, sustained only by memories of his wife and an indifferent curiosity about his eventual fate. His only friend is George Kraft, a similarly lonely neighbor — who, through an extraordinary coincidence, also happens to be a Soviet intelligence agent. Through his friendship with Campbell, Kraft tries to get back into the good graces of his Soviet handlers (he had fallen out of favor during the previous years) by tricking Campbell into fleeing to Moscow by publicizing the fact that Campbell had been living in New York since the end of the war.
A white supremacist organization learns of his existence and makes him a cause celebre, inviting him to speak to new recruits as a "true American patriot". The group's leader, a dentist named Lionel Jones, shows up at Campbell's apartment with a surprise: a woman claiming to be Helga, alive and well and professing her undying love. Campbell's will to live returns for the first time in years, and remains even after he finds out that she is not Helga, but rather her younger sister Resi. They plan to escape to Mexico City after attending one of Jones' fascist meetings.
There, Wirtanen makes an appearance to warn Campbell of Kraft's plot, and of Resi's complicity in it. Heartbroken, Campbell decides to go along with it. He confronts Kraft and Resi, the latter swearing her feelings for him are genuine before committing suicide. The FBI then raids the meeting, and takes Campbell into custody. As before, Wirtanen uses his influence to get Campbell set free. Once Campbell returns to his apartment, however, he realizes that he has no real reason to keep living, and decides to turn himself in to the Israelis to stand trial.
[edit] Israel
The book ends as it began, with Campbell sitting in his Israeli jail cell waiting for his trial. Coincidentally, he meets Adolf Eichmann in a short 24 hour stay at a prison in Tel Aviv, and gives him advice on how to write an autobiography. He then is transferred to a different holding cell where he further awaits his trial. At the very end of the book Campbell inserts a letter that he had just received from "Frank Wirtanen." The corroborating evidence that he was indeed an American spy during World War II had finally arrived, and Wirtanen writes that he will testify to Campbell's true loyalties in court. Rather than being relieved, Campbell feels "nauseated" by the idea that he will be saved from death and granted freedom when he is no longer able to take pleasure in anything life has to offer. In the last lines Campbell tells us that he will hang himself not for crimes against humanity, but rather for "crimes against himself."'
[edit] "The moral of the story"
The phrase "one moral of this story," is one that comes up several times in the novel. As Vonnegut, posing as Campbell's editor, points out in his introduction: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Another is "Make love when you can. It's good for you." Yet another is "When you're dead, you're dead."
[edit] Literary devices
Throughout the novel Vonnegut uses metafiction devices to blur the line between pretence and reality; for example, the book's dedication is to Mata Hari, and in the text we read that the dedication is Campbell's: "She whored in the interests of espionage, and so did I." Similarly, Vonnegut's introduction treats Campbell's memoir as a genuine historical document, and claims that certain chapters have been censored due to pornography or fears of libel.
[edit] Adaptations
A film version was released in 1996, starring Nick Nolte as Campbell.
[edit] External links
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