«"Sapevi," disse, "che quasi fino a questo momento niente mi avrebbe fatto più piacere che dimostrare che eri una spia, e assistere alla tua fucilazione?"
"No," dissi.
"E sai perché adesso non mi importa più di sapere se eri o non eri una spia?" disse. "Adesso potresti anche dirmi che eri una spia, e noi continueremmo tranquillamente a parlare, come stiamo facendo. E ti lascerei andare dovunque vadano le spie quando la guerra è finita. Sai perché?" disse.
"No," dissi.
"Perché per quanto bene tu possa aver servito il nemico, per noi hai fatto di più," disse.»

Future civilizations - better civilizations than this one - are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.

Mother Night is one of the author's favorites, so according to the above quote extracted from the book, it is how he would want to be judged by posterity. I believe I read somewhere than Vonnegut disliked being dismissed by the literary establishment as a genre writer, dealing with aliens and spaceships. Mother Night may be his answer to these critics, as it is a straightforward story without any Science-Fiction gimmicks and few stylistic experiments, a powerful denunciation of Nazism that transcends its initial borders to address universal questions about the use of power, propaganda, government secrecy, the role of art in the modern world. The absence of the SF elements may be one reason why the book is less appreciated by the author's usual readers, but for me it was just as good as his more popular titles.

I admire form. I admire things with a beginning, a middle, an end - and whenever possible, a moral, too.

As I said, the novel is the closer Vonnegut comes to non-genre fiction: straight up storytelling, clear prose, unambiguous message. The satire and the black humour are here of course, but I found them toned down compared to his other books I've read. The style is appropriate to the subject here, as Vonnegut explores the events of his youth that would mark and come to define his whole career: the atrocities commited in time of war, in particular the firebombing of Dresden and the revelations about the concentration camps.

The Beginning
Howard Campbell is writing his confession in an Israeli prison as he waits to be tried for war crimes commited during World War II. Campbell is an American playwright who married a German actress, moved to her country in the 1930's and became succesful with his plays and his poetry. During the war he was the most famous renegade American voice of the Nazi propaganda machine, his speeches full of aryan / white supremacy dogma and hatred for the Jews.

The Middle
Campbell was allegedly working as an undercover agent for an American Agency and his radio speeches contained hidden messages from the German spies. So, after his capture at the end of the war, his handler gets him free and arranges for his return to the US. But given the secret nature of his mission, the government keeps mum about his real activities and the rest of the world still regards
Howard as a criminal. He keeps a low profile for years, living alone in a cheap New York apartment, until his identity is leaked to the press and things start to get hot. American white supremacists want to claim him as a hero figure, discharged soldiers want to kick his butt for fallen comrades and hardships endured in the war, the Russian and the Israelis are racing to get their hands on him first. His only friend is a painter living in the same building. They are brought together by a common passion for chess, and they like to debate art and current events.
This section of the book was a bit dragging, with numerous flashbacks to Howard's time in Germany, cameos and anecdotes of famous Nazi leaders, internal monologues and thoughts on art. The two aspects of Howard Campbell's personality that Vonnegut wants to underline here are : his willing participation in the creation of the Nazi propaganda materials (he never denies being the author of the reprehensible materials) and his refuge from dealing with the morality of these actions by in the love for his wife. Together they are citizens of a Nation of Two (the title of one of his plays). lost in a sensual world where politics and power games are insignifiant (Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova is the title of his one novel describing Howard's infatuation with his wife). In his later years, Howard's conscience drives him to seek punishment for what he perceives as his errors in judgmement. Before coming to trial in Israel, he already has reached a verdict on his own.

One particular passage about his radio transmission send a chill up my spine, as I couldn't help noticing how the peddlers of hate and intransigence, the chickenhawks who never served but loudly rattle the sabres of war, right wing extremists ans religious zealots still feature prominently on the present radio waves and television programmes, not only in the US, but in France, Austria, Russia and elsewhere:

I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

The End
The pacing really picks up, as the different factions converge on Howard and verbal and physical violence rise to new heights, forcing the protagonist to leave his ivory tower and take a stand for what he believes in. As he is forced to confront his tormentors and his betrayers, Howard puts on the cloak of the author's secular humanism and lashes back at their stupidity and narrow mindedness:

- "You hate America, don't you?"
- "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. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul.
Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."

in dealing with another zealot:
There are plenty good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservations, 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 limits, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

Vonnegut lashes at us because he cares about us, and he wants us to do better. He is not simply concerned with exposing the comfortable lies we tell ourselves to justify doing nothing to change the world and stand up to the bullies, he also points the way forward. There's an impassionate plea about education that I forgot to bookmark, but you will find it in the book, towards the end. There's also the power of art to reveal and to give hope and direction to our efforts, something he still believed in in 1961.

The Moral
This is given in the introduction of the novel instead of in the last pages. I see in this choice Vonnegut the teacher, who provides his students with useful tips for decoding the book right from the start:
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
and also:
Make love when you can. It's good for you.

In other words, be true to yourselves and Make Love, Not War! . Finally, the question of Howard Campbell's truth (patriot or war criminal) is left to the reader to decide, after he is handed all the facts of the equation. I remember in Breakfast of Champions there was a recurring theme of messages on tombstones. The concern about posterity is part of the present novel too, and I will close my review with a fragment of Howard Campbell's poetry, written on the trunk containing his non-propaganda writings:

Here lies Howard Campbell's essence,
Freed from his body's noisome nuisance.
His body, empty, prowls the earth,
Earning what a body's worth.
If his body and his essence remain apart,
Burn his body, but spare this, his heart.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr writes a “what is truth?” novel. In 1961 when published there was no such thing as fake news. Or was there? The term “fake news” is to my ears of recent origin and comes from the US, at least that’s what I believe. My first encounter with “what is truth?” was many decades back when I was dragged to a pub in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley where journos got themselves smashed to smithereens on Bundy Rum and XXXX beer. This was the only time I ever went to this pub while it was infested with journos and it was at the height of the slow (at least that is what it seemed to me) political downfall of a noted premier of this state of Queensland. A drunken journo blurted out to me that they had always supported this premier as they had been told to from up above. Did YOU really support him I asked? “As close to a fascist as you will ever get” he drunkenly spluttered. So why the written word support? I asked. I got laughed at.

And that is my take on this book. One sometimes must do what one has to do even if one is not sure it is truth. But as was written very early “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Indeed and especially when in a pub drunk.
How cynical of Kurt Vonnegut Jr to even suggest that “truth” and all its derivatives may be pretence for the human species. This is Kurt’s 3rd book and follows his very good The Sirens of Titan. Strangely in that review I wrote that Titan’s might be about “why we might do what we do and might think what we think.” So this is very much the same thematically, but this story is told conventionally as apposed to his previous Sci Fi efforts.

This is a fictional memoir of Howard W. Campbell Jr a US spy in the WW2 who was the equivalent of Lord Haw Haw. Trouble is that not even the US authorities knew he was a spy so consequently he ends up on trial in Israel for war crimes. The question of what is truth and who really knows it is truth is what permeates just about every page. We even get good old love appearing. What shall we do with love sweet love? Let’s just say that one can pretend to be in love, but if one really does fall in love one may have to stop pretending and the consequences of that can be dire.

The consequences of pretending to be what we are not are always dire. That seemed to be Howard W. Campbell Jr's message. I tend to think he had a point.


My 3rd read in my attempt devour Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s oeuvre from first to last.
My review of number 1 here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 2 here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Onwards to the next.

i am so in love with this book
mình dzui đến mức làm hẳn 1 chiếc review trên youtube cơ nhá :v đây nè: https://youtu.be/Y7J_mjMPAuw

Daily Vonnegut – Day 2.

The tone remains the same, but this one is much more palatable than Cat’s Cradle. We’re building a ranking system!

I thought about the fickle lines that we draw in the sand in order to justify our actions. Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who came to be known throughout WWII as one of the most ardent Nazis in Germany, was approached in a park one day and recruited by a shady character in the US government. He was told to join the Nazi party and rise up through it, as his position would be valuable for the Allies to learn information and pass on messages through coded transmissions over the radio. After the end of the war… not a soul around who is willing to sign off on the fact that he was a spy all along. So all he is left with is his (very real) acts as a high ranking member of the Nazi party. So is he innocent? Can you be innocent if your actions were the direct cause of the death of many, the direct cause of the spread of propaganda? That’s the space within which this novel rests.

Any time that I am faced with reading about this subject matter, I realize the terror rising within me, thinking about the fickle nature of our egos and our fantastic capabilities of reducing cognitive dissonance. Take this snippet from the book:

“Do you feel that you’re guilty of murdering six million Jews?” I said.

“Absolutely not,” said the architect of Auschwitz, the introducer of conveyor belts into crematoria, the greatest customer in the world for the gas called Cyklon-B.”

Allen’s exploration of material surrounding the novel is useful again. He mentions Vonnegut’s introduction to the novel, in which he says “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Allen adds: “The issue for Campbell becomes whether he is the vicious, anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist he seems to be, or whether he “really” is a heroic American double agent risking his life every day to advance the Allied cause.” We also have our first mention of Dresden here within the body of Vonnegut’s novels, the topic that will be the basis of his best novel.

Here are the other chunks of the book that stood out to me:

“What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.”

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “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 its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
“It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr is an American. He is also a Nazi. He is a traitor but also a patriot. A playwright and a spy. He is many things to many people but the defining facet of his life is quite simple, he is who he pretends to be.
Vonnegut’s Campbell is a little of everything and by definition nothing at all.
It is in fact very hard to know what Campbell stands for. He spews vile invective about the Jews on his nightly radio program broadcast over Nazi airwaves that he doesn’t believe, just because it is the path of least resistance. He is less a zealot than someone who simply wants to keep his head down. When he takes a job as a spy with the US government who enlists him to send coded messages to the Allies during his broadcasts some troubling moral questions begin to arise.
He works for the Nazis saying things he believes to be nonsensical to people who think it anything but. Is this evil balanced by his work for the Allies? Without his job with the Nazis he wouldn’t have a platform to help the Allies. Without his spying for the Allies he is simply another seedy propaganda man spreading hate. Vonnegut seems to ask the reader what constitutes true evil? Is it passively allowing evil to happen or is it actively taking part in it? What is our culpability for evil if it is in service of something more noble?
This being Vonnegut of course there are no clear answers or tidy resolutions. Only more questions.
Of all the Vonnegut I’ve read, I’d have to say this is one of my favorites. As much as I enjoy the farcical aspects of his work, this one us quite different in that we seem to have a straight morality tale. Vonnegut himself in his foreword says that of all his novels, this is the only one he is sure there is a moral. An unsettling read for sure, but much to ponder here.

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 its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night.

5.0 Stars Wow! What a book! If I could give this book 10 stars, I would. I had heard over and over during my lifetime how clever Kurt Vonnegut was, and while I never doubted it, I never made the time to finally sit down and read one of his books either.

By the end of 2024 as I was writing my year end wrap, however, I was finally so annoyed with myself on this point that I made it a specific 2025 goal. I’m glad I did that, and I’m glad that I selected this book as one of the ones I wanted to read this year. Because it is truly a great book. Vonnegut is the perfect blend of clever, playful, cynical and sarcastic. And of course, hilariously funny.

I won’t go over the plot of the book. There is nothing I could say that wasn’t in the back cover blurb that wouldn’t be a spoiler. So I shall refrain from that exercise and just say that there is no experience even close to reading a Vonnegut novel. You just need to read one for yourself to find out.

It is worth the effort, believe me!

To moja trzecia powieść Vonneguta i ta była zdecydowanie najmniej absurdalna i najbardziej przystępna. Poleca się na pierwszy raz z twórczością autora.

I've always considered Vonnegut to be one of my favourite writers but I keep forgetting to read his books.

Mother Night is quite a different novel from what you'd expect with Vonnegut. There is no mind-bending science fiction or metafictional madness. Instead we have the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American accused of being a Nazi due to his radio broadcasts from Germany during the war. He was actually a US counter-spy leaking Nazi secrets to the US but that little caveat is not well-known, so he is now sitting writing his memoirs in a jail cell in Israel awaiting his trail for war crimes.

Oh and this book is comic. Even Eichmann is in here cracking jokes. The overall tone of the novel is typically Vonnegutian but it is a departure. Campbell is an odd character to be stuck with for 176 pages. I found him somewhat uncomfortable to be around. Then of course there is the chance that since this novel was written essentially as a confession before Mossad that everything in it could be a lie. Maybe Campbell was a Nazi. We'll never know.

I've been somewhat critical of Vonnegut's penchant for fractures narratives before. This short novel is split into 45 sections, most not lasting more than two pages. Vonnegut loved doing this. But whereas I felt that it somewhat ruined the experience of reading Cat's Cradle, here it works quite well. Don't ask me how. I just feel this book flows better.

As you can see I am struggling to write about this book. Something which happens with every Vonnegut novel (oh I've just had a sudden flashback to trying to discuss Vonnegut's uses of metafiction in Breakfast of Champions in one of my final exams of university). I find everything I have to say can be summed up by simply stating 'it is good'. Which it is. And which I shall state again. It is good.

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Before I started writing this review I quickly scanned other reviews of this book on Goodreads just to see if many of them start off with the above iconic quote. I did not find one so I went ahead with putting in the quote. Probably not that great an idea, that is why nobody want to do it! I had no idea what Mother Night is about, it appears to be one of Vonnegut's top five most popular titles according to the ranking on GR’s  Kurt Vonnegut page. So it goes?

Mother Night is about Howard W. Campbell Jr., American author, and playwright working in Germany during World War II. He is married to a beautiful actress called Helga. The Nazi employed him to make propaganda broadcasts for them, his broadcasts were very popular among the Third Reich, and very effective in fueling the anti-Semitic feelings among the population. However, Campbell only took the broadcasting job to work for the US as a spy. He uses the broadcasts to relay the American secret messages, coded through coughs, pauses and other verbal tics. At the end of the war, the US intelligence pretty much disowns him and he is living a secretive and lonely life in New York, his wife having been captured by the Russian army. Nobody knows Campbell was a US spy during the war, and he is wanted for war crimes for the hatred he instigated through his broadcasts.

Credit Englishmajeure.com

Mother Night is different from the five other Vonnegut books* I have read. All the others feature an element of sci-fi, or sci-fi spoof, and includes the character Kilgore Trout, an obscure sci-fi author. Mother Night feels more serious and melancholy than all of them. Yes, even more than  Slaughterhouse-Five. This is not to say that Mother Night is not humorous, it is often very funny but there is something melancholic behind most of the jokes. For example:

“Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”

Funny and sad. I suppose Campbell is not meant to be a likable protagonist, I like him anyway, he is very pitiful and his biggest mistake is that he is too good at his job, both as a spy and a Nazi propagandist. Both sides made good use of him, and in the end, nobody appreciates him, except eccentric fascists. Mother Night is, as I said, melancholy, yet it also made me laugh and smile from time to time. The chief moral of the story seems to be that if you pretend to be someone evil and despicable and you do too good a job of it, you will eventually become that character you pretend to be. Being an actually good person inside will not rescue you from that, and you will have to live with the consequences of what you have done while you were playing that role. From my past experience with his works, I was expecting some element of sci-fi madness and Tralfamadorians cameos, being a sci-fi nerd I enjoy Vonnegut’s unique brand of sci-fi parody. However, I would not change a thing about Mother Night, it is a funny, sad, romantic, touching, thought-provoking story. It is both passionate and compassionate, and it does not need any kind of special effects. I certainly look forward to reading lots more Vonneguts.



* The other Kurt Vonnegut books I read and reviewed:  Slaughterhouse-Five,  Cat's Cradle (bad review, needs rewriting, don’t read it!),  Breakfast of Champions,  The Sirens of Titan,  Galápagos.


1996 movie poster

Quotes:
“Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence,
Freed from his body’s noisome nuisance.
His body, empty, prowls the earth,
Earning what a body’s worth.
If his body and his essence remain apart,
Burn his body, but spare this, his heart.”

“Life’s been too hard for me ever to afford much guilt. A really bad conscience is as much out of my reach as a mink coat.”

“In order to contrast with myself a race-baiter who is ignorant and insane. I am neither ignorant nor insane. Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it. God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.”

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

Waiting to be tried for war crimes, Howard Campbell writes his memoirs in a jail cell in Jerusalem. American-born, but raised in Germany, Campbell was once a successful playwright, married to a beautiful actress named Helga. He had no particular political leaning, but the Ministry of Propaganda thought he’d be the perfect mouthpiece to promote the regime’s ideology through radio broadcasts. In order to protect himself and his beloved wife, Campbell gave this job his all and became a golden boy of the Third Reich. But Campbell was also a spy for the Americans: through his broadcasts, he passed on coded messages to the Allies via coughs, verbal tics and other subtle signals. Years later, he is living in New York, seemingly forgotten by all, when his identity and past are suddenly brought to light, upending his reclusive existence.

Was he truly a Nazi propagandist? Or is he an American patriot whose work as double agent helped the Allies win the War? Which of these two jobs was he the best at? Is he a villain or a hero? Can he be both? Is anything he tells the reader in his memoirs even true?

As usual with Vonnegut’s work, I struggle to aptly summarize it: the narrative is non-linear and zany, exposing the still-raw wounds of the trauma of WWII, interjected with moments of deep insight, all the while making merciless fun of bigots and government agencies. His insane, white-supremacist dentist would be hilarious if he wasn’t an uncomfortably close portrait of some people who stir up hateful ideologies in the country next door (and who base their prejudices on equally nonsensical “evidence”). And as absurd as it might sound, why wouldn’t the American government deny ever having employed a man who very publicly promoted Nazi ideology? The Secret Services’ definition of patriotism has a history of being rather fluid, after all…

Obviously, moral ambiguity and identity are really the central theme of this lesser-known Vonnegut novel. And I say “lesser-known” with a certain amount of disbelief, because I found it to be much better than some of his more mainstreamed novels. I found his trademark blend of humanism and cynicism has never been sharper than it is here, and while I missed his weird aliens and kooky sci-fi writers, “Mother Night” is darker, but more memorable and haunting than a lot of his other books. Also, Howard and Helga’s “Nation of Two” story is probably the most romantic thing he has even penned.

Through Campbell, Vonnegut explores the idea that one must develop a certain kind of schizophrenia in order to be able to be an effective spy (or double agent, or whatever), that the thin line between the wrong thing and the right thing to do can be so strange that they might just drive you a little bit insane if you have any kind of self-awareness or conscience. But it’s not a situation limited to people who ended up in Campbell’s rather extreme situation: I think that most people must, to a degree, put on a daily act in order to get by and protect what they are truly loyal to. That might be what makes Campbell compelling despite being a rather sad and pathetic person: he is oddly relatable.

I really like Vonnegut because I often feel like we both walk a similar fine line of despairing at the state of the world and the behavior of humans, all the while believing we could really do better if we tried seriously, and that laughing at it is the only thing that kept him and keeps me from winding up in the loony bin. I also don’t think I have ever believed that anything is either black or white: to me, everything has always been a shade of grey – some things a murkier shade than others, certainly, but grey nonetheless. When I read a book like that, I feel a bit less alone is my ambiguously pessimistic/hopeful boat.

In our era of fake news and alternative facts, this inexplicably underrated book is not to be missed. You will chew on it for a while, even if it is a very fast read. Right up there with “Breakfast of Champions” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

I went into this book blind, except for the author's excellent reputation.

Current events today make me feel obligated to give trigger warnings. This book contains American white supremacists, German Nazis, Israeli spies, Israeli government, American soldiers, American spies, character death, love found and lost and more.

The author is an astute but cynical observer of people and especially of the US.

I am glad I read it, but I wouldn't blame anyone who put it off for another year. It's a dark book.