Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Mother Night is the darkest novel by this author I have encountered so far. As an early novel, it contains some of the types of characters, situations, ironies, and philosophical explortions that would be developed in his later works. But this is one of his first publications so it isn’t as polished or fully-realized as his subsequent works would be.
Mother Night tells the story of Howard Campbell Jr., a bland, everyday kind of American male. The narrative starts with him writing his final work of literature while confined in an Israeli prison since he is on trial for war crimes during World War II. How he got there is the obvious thrust of the plot. As a young man, Campbell went to live in Germany where he found a German wife and became a playwright of stature. When World War II broke out, his prominence in the theater scene earned him special status with the Nazis who admired his work. They gave him a job writing and delivering speeches in favor of the Third Reich. Campbell justified this to himself because he was also a double agent, working for the American military. After being approached by a spy in a German park, he agreed to lace his radio speeches with hidden meanings that could easily be picked up by commanding officers in the field. So Campbell had the unique distinction of promoting the cause of the allies and the axis simultaneously.
The twisted thing about this all is that Campbell is entirely apolitical. He only agrees to these arrangements so he can stay in Germany to be with his wife who dies soon after the war starts. At the beginning of the war, Campbell begins work on a statement about his apolitical stance, a play called A Nation of Two meant to explain that his only commitment in life is to his marriage, not to any political cause. He feels no hatred towards anybody whether they be Jews, Germans, Americans, Russians, Black people or anything. He feels no lyalty to them either. You could say that he has never reached full development as a human being. Campbell is also the kind of man who never says “no” to anybody. He acts under no agency of his own and lets himself be manipulated by anybody he encounters. The only exception to this is when he writes. In this way, Vonnegut draws a sharp distinction between Campbell’s public persona and his vacuous inner life. This dichotomy is set up to drive one point home that Vonnegut wants to make about human nature.
True to this author’s writing style, the narrative jumps around from place to place and from time to time. After the war ends, the U.S. military sneaks Campbell into New York City where he settles down in a brownstone attic, a place that becomes like a prison cell. In the apartment below lives a Jewish doctor and his mother who are both Holocaust survivors and below them, an elderly painter named Kraft that Campbell befriends. He doesn’t know it at first, but this man is a Soviet secret agent who has plans for Campbell as he acts as the deus ex machina of the novel.
Kraft secretly arranges for a dentist named Jones to show up at Campbell’s apartment. Jones is a middle-American crank, a white supremacist who listened to Campbell’s speeches via shortwave radio during the war. He regards Campbell as a hero. He shows up at the attic with his friends, a Nazi named Krapptauer, a Catholic priest named Keeley, and an African-American man he calls the Black Fuehrer. Later, when Jones is confronted by the police as to how he could be friends with a Catholic and a Black man, two groups of people he claims to hate, he says they are friends because they all have the same enemy, the Jews. Again, we are given another piece of the puzzle that Vonnegut constructs for the reader. He also brings a woman who says she is Helga, Campbell’s German wife. But nothing about her is as simple as it seems on the surface.
Helga turns out to be, in actuality, her sister Resi. After revealing this secret to Campbell, they agree to stay together as man and wife. Resi is yet another character who has contradictions in her personality. Aside from deceiving Campbell about her identity, she is also a secret agent for the communists. One thing she reveals to him that a Russian soldier, while fighting in Germany, found a trunk full of Campbell’s writings. He took them to the USSR and published them under his own name where they took off in popularity. His success as a writer is actually beyond his control, happens without him knowing about it, and even without his making any effort at getting published. Vonnegut is telling us that our work can have consequences beyond our reach, taking on a life of their own, and going places we never intended them to go. All the more reason we need to be careful.
Meanwhile, Krapptauer dies of exhaustion after climbing a staircase and Campbell agrees to give a speech at the funeral in front of a group of neo-Nazi teenagers despite his inner repugnance to their cause. Campbell remains characteristically unemotional and without affect throughout the whole book. As he meets up with Helga/Resi and the white supremacists at the funeral, his past is paraded in front of his eyes so that he sees the unintended consequences of his actions. He describes himself as being numb and emotionally dead. He is unable to reconcile the conflict of being a hero to Americans, Nazis, and Communists all that same time and he is also unable to fully engage with the atrocities of the Holocaust that he helped perpetuate. The simplest thing to do is to suppress his emotions, shut off his mind, and plunge himself into a catatonic stupor of anhedonia.
Campbell’s turning point comes when he gets stalked by an American soldier named O’Hare who confronts him in his attic. O’Hare represents a whole other side of Vonnegut’s world view. After returning from the war and being given a medal then sent on his way, he sinks into misery and poverty, becoming an alcoholic and moving from one dead-end job to another without purpose or glory. He expected to live the life of a war hero and instead becomes a bum and a loser. His solution is to hunt down and kill Campbell, the known Nazi war criminal.
Campbell, after coming face to face with his past, is ready to take control over his own life and atone for his sins. He fights off O’Hare and turns himself in to the Israeli embassy to be put on trial in Tel Aviv. He solves all his contradictions and liberates himself by voluntarily going to prison.
So what does it all mean? First off, Campbell exemplifies how we are what we do. In the eyes of society we can be different things to different people. We play different roles in a play depending on who we are talking to. This was written in the era of the sociologist Erving Goffman. To the American military, Campbell is an agent who helped them win the war. To the Nazis he is an effective propagandist. To the Soviets, he is celebrated as a writer of subversive literature, clandestinely sending subtle messages of resistance to the citizens of the oppressive Communist state. He was all of these and none of these at the same time. The fact that he believes in no political ideology is irrelevant during his trial because it is by his public persona that he get judged. Our inner lives, our true, selves, are of little or no consequence in how the public perceives us. However, the one thing we do know about Campbell’s inner life is the he was madly in love with his wife Helga. And so we are forced to ask the question of how far would we go to stay together with the person who matters most. Campbell did what he had to do to keep his marriage, his sacred bond, alive. Given this contradictory bundle of actions and motivations, are we still at liberty to judge Campbell as a person who is either good or bad?
The public personas that Vonnegut portrays are contradictory and confusing though. Each character’s flaws and virtues are on full display so we can examine why people do the confusing things that they do. Kraft, the Russian spy, sought a career in the Soviet secret service so he can live in America. Resi pretended to be her sister Helga so she can be with the man she had loved all her life. The Jewish doctor helped Campbell, the Nazi propagandist, because he learned from the Holocaust that helping people in need was better than judging them. The white supremacist Jones can be friends with a Catholic and an African-American because he believes they are all fighting for the same cause, no matter how idiotic that cause may be. O’Hare wanted to kill Campbell so that people who think of him as a nobody would see him as somebody. What Vonnegut is saying is that people are complex and life is confusing. To eliminate this confusion, people try to see the world in either/or dichotomies of black vs. white or good vs. evil. But this only muddies the waters more, creating more confusion and sometimes causing people to make bad decisions. Whether we support the axis or the allies, we are all coming from the same place and that place is one of confusion. Vonnegut isn’t asking us to forgive or sympathize with the Nazis, rather, he is asking us to admit that the confusion of life can lead people astray, causing them to do the wrong things and sometimes even terrible things. Asking us to examine the human side of Nazis is always a risky business, but I think Vonnegut is saying it is a necessity if we are going to prevent other atrocities like the Holocaust in the future. We don’t want to become like the Nazis we oppose. Vonnegut himself survived life in a prison camp during the bombing of Dresden. The trauma of this experience made him feel like equalized with people on all sides of the war and led him to write the kinds of novels he did for the sake of preventing future wars. The sincerity of his endeavor shines through in books like this and that is why he can get away with posing such controversial questions.
Mother Night is not perfect and I wouldn’t recommend it as the first Kurt Vonnegut novel anybody should read. He follows the dictum of showing without telling a little too carefully, and at times the narrative is so opaque that it might benefit from a little bit more explanation. There is a lot to unpack in this story and it may require some second-order thinking after you finish it. It is not his most direct writing. The flaws are few and minor though and Vonnegut would later iron out such wrinkles in other books.
Mother Night is a probe into the darkest regions of human motivations. It is a probe that levels all of its characters by stripping away all their appearances and exposing the messes inside them and around them. It shows how people are thrown into a world of confusion while making futile attempts at understanding it, shooting wildly in the dark, and bungling everything up further while tricking themselves into thinking we are on the side of the good. But it is impossible to know if we are really doing good so all we can do is keep doing what we do while hoping it is right. The ontological foundation of our existence is one of chaos and nonsense, but we can only forgive ourselves when we are courageous enough to admit that we made mistakes in our judgments, however terrible those mistakes may be. This is the bitterest of pills tp swallow, but one that may be necessary if we are to make progress as a species. And whatever you do, don’t be a man like Howard Campbell Jr., a man with no convictions, living without will and making no effort to take control over his life, getting blown around in whatever direction the wind takes him. Being informed and knowledgeable doesn’t guarantee you won’t make bad decisions, but at least it increases the chances that you might get something right.
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