Mother Night

Vonnegut invents a handful of Nazis for Mother Night—Campbell, Helga, and her family—but otherwise populates his wartime Germany with historical personages who would have been readily recognized by readers in 1961, but now require some contextualization. Vonnegut makes use of their familiarity but rarely offers an explanation of their place within the Nazi hierarchy beyond their titles. Even Campbell, a fictional American-born propagandist for the Nazis, would have stuck many readers as an obvious analogue for William Brook Joyce, also known as Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce was born in New York, but eventually found himself in Germany working as an anti-American propagandist, broadcasting in English about the evils of America and Britain while trying to recruit officers for the British Free Corps, a Nazi division. Joyce was eventually captured after the end of the war and executed for treason in Britain, but his infamy lasted, and provided Vonnegut with a solid model for Howard Campbell. Likewise, Mata Hari, to whom Campbell dedicates the book, was a Dutch spy who worked in Germany as an exotic performer in World War I, representing performance and idealization, and suggesting an enduring romantic figure that would have been recognized in 1961 as a figure which Campbell undoubtedly would like to emulate.

Though it is not initially obvious, the figure of primary importance to the novel is Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust—the “bureaucratic Genghis Kahn” (167) as Campbell styles him. In 1960, around the time Vonnegut began writing, Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina and brought back to face trial for war crimes in Jerusalem. The philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker, and her article was later reprinted as a book with the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The phrase “the banality of evil” has since become part of the modern lexicon, signaling the enormous harm that can be done by people who are—as Eichmann claimed to be—merely following orders without applying their own moral judgment. It’s not clear whether Vonnegut read Arendt’s work, but their portrayals of Eichmann are strikingly similar, and his trial and imprisonment served as a creative catalyst for both writers.

Eichmann’s trial, held in 1961, came after an extended period in which most of the highest-ranking Nazis had been tried on the world stage, and there were some, including Arendt, who questioned the timing, as the trial bolstered the power of the sitting Israeli government and came more than 15 years after the end of the war. The original trials, held by in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946 and at the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in 1947, featured other prominent Nazis Campbell refers to in passing, such as Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz (17), who was responsible for instituting and supervising its horrendous extermination programs. Hoess was captured at the end of the war and executed in Poland, at Auschwitz, where he had experienced a reclamation of his faith in humanity due to the kindness of his guards. Joseph Goebbels, Campbell’s direct “boss” (18), was the head of Nazi propaganda and eventually succeeded Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. He held this position for only one day, however, and was never brought to trial, as he killed himself, his wife, and his six children a mere 24 hours after Hitler’s suicide. Campbell also mentions Hermann Göring, an immensely powerful politician within the Nazi regime, who created the Gestapo and was the head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. Göring was tried and sentenced to death at the Nuremburg trials in 1946, but he, too, died by suicide mere hours before the order was carried out.

The American Nazis and white supremacists Campbell encounters are not direct representations of historical figures, but the characters have solid roots in actual American history. There was a figure known as the Black Fuhrer of Harlem in the 1930s, a man named Sufi Abdul Hamid. An early African American convert to Islam, Hamid assumed the nickname due to his activism against the discriminatory hiring practices of Jewish and Italian storeowners, which was interpreted as antisemitic. Jones and Keeley, not directly based on historical figures, represent two common tactics of American Fascism: disinformation, or conspiracy theories, and the corruption of religion, particularly Christianity, to identify an outside group as evil and thus permit their prosecution. August Krapptauer, a representative of the German American Bund, illustrates the growth of American Nazism that Vonnegut personally witnessed while growing up in the German immigrant community of Indianapolis the 1930s.