Vonnegut, Kurt. “Mother Night”

Mother Night is the fourth novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut. Published in February 1962, it was written during the global broadcast of the Eichmann trial – a hallmark of the Holocaust’s demand for admission into the public sphere and the collective memory of the war’s genocide. The event of Eichmann’s trial shapes not only the politico-historical window of the novel’s production, but also the backdrop of the narration itself, which briefly introduces the fictionalized and heavily satirized figure of Adolf Eichmann as writing his trial defence in Jerusalem. 

Mother Night is framed as a historical document, presenting the fictional confessions of playwright Howard W. Campbell, Jr., intended for the archives of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Criminals. Campbell is writing his confessions in 1961 in anticipation of his trial, after voluntarily surrendering to be tried for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem. An American by birth, he was a “shrewd and loathsome” writer and broadcaster of anti-Semite propaganda as well as “the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Entertainment and Propaganda” (Vonnegut, 26) during the Nazi regime. Campbell claims to have been recruited as a double agent in 1938 by the American agent Frank Wirtanen to transmit coded messages to the Allies. After the war no evidence is found of the agent’s existence, hence, the United States government neither acknowledges nor denies Campbell’s claim. Instead, they relocate him to New York City, where he lives anonymously, in a state of severe alienation for the next fifteen years. When a white supremacist paper exposes his identity, the overwhelming public reaction results in an outcry for his arrest and trial. Concurrently, the Nazi sympathizers and paper publishers attempt to renew Campbell’s shattered will to live through reuniting him with his long-lost wife Helga, who later turns out to be her younger sister Rezi. When Campbell realizes that both Rezi and his only friend – the painter George Kraft – are Russian spies colluding to take him to Moscow, he surrenders to his neighbours and Auschwitz survivors to turn him over to Israel. His confessions end a day before his trial when he decides to take his own life, despite having received a note from Wirtanen confirming his existence and intention to intervene in his defence.

The question of evil’s nature is central to Mother Night’s autodiegetic, unreliable narration, which has been popularly interpreted in relation to Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “banality of evil”, coined in her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem. The novel presents the perspective of a character deeply entangled with both the systematic bureaucratic compliance that produced Holocaust’s horror, and the obscurity of the American government’s narrative of self-righteous war heroism. In doing so, it challenges the perception of evil as monstrous otherness through exemplifying the complex interplay of human nature with socio-political structural conditions, central to shaping people’s behavioural and moral choices. 

As an example of perpetrator fiction, Vonnegut’s novel is one of the first autodiegetic literary representations of the perpetrator consciousness. Contemporary to and critical of the public conception of evil in the era of the witness, it complicates the close-ended, binary categorisations of evil and heroism. In the context of literary studies, Mother Night can be interpreted with a focus on its narrative strategies for nuancing the readers’ evaluation of the perpetrator figure as a radical Other, exemplifying the role of literature as a critical tool for challenging established conventions in public sentiment and discourse.  

Author of this entry: Bilyana Manolova

Vonnegut, Kurt. Mother Night. Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999.