Mother Night

“This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.”

Campbell’s vacillation between dedicating his book to Mata Hari and to himself speaks to the strength of his ego, but also to his desire to produce something good, as in morally good, under his own name. This concern with good and evil extends through the work, which itself is an exploration of ‘the crime of his times’ in each of its characters.

“‘You are the only man I ever heard of...who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way.’”

The words of Bernard Mengel, Campbell’s prison guard, describing the flattening aspect of war, in which moral calculation is discarded, or, as Mengel indicates, individually justified until it is no longer a question. Mengel’s assessment of Campbell’s conscience also speaks to Campbell’s double-sided truth; he isn’t feeling guilty, he simply longs for his lost love, but he gives of the appearance of guilt.

“And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful-

'Olly-olly-ox-in-free.’”

A straightforward portrait of Campbell’s longing, one of the very few he offers in the text. The motif of hiding follows him throughout the novel, but it is crystallized here. Wirtanen evokes the cry later, promising Campbell it will eventually come when he is in America; and it does come, though not in the form Campbell is so desperate for.

“It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.

They were people.

Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.”

Campbell emphasizes the role of social context in shaping moral judgment. In retrospect, he can see the evil of the Nazis because the world sees it. During the war, as he works on his radio program, he lives within a social context that does not see the Nazis as evil but assigns them status, power, and respectability—things Campbell wants for himself. Here as elsewhere, Campbell reveals that his own evil is as banal as Adolf Eichmann’s—motivated not by ideology or hate but by ambition and vanity.

“Say what you like about me, I have never touched my principal.”

This slight bit of braggadocio from Campbell slyly functions as a psychological portrait. Much as Campbell is able to live off the interest generated by his inheritance, he also lives off his many selves, including those that are complicit in the atrocities of the Holocaust. Here he suggests that there is a “pure” self, a principal self, which he keeps hidden away, but which is nonetheless the self upon which all else is based.

“I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either. I applied, I think, simply to demonstrate to myself that there really was such a person as me.”

Campbell’s loneliness in New York after the war becomes so acute that it veers into existential angst. Without the persona he relied upon for years, Campbell cannot even be sure of his own existence.

“...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.”

Campbell vastly complicates the moral waters with his full admission of knowingly inflicting substantial harm. Though he uses the biography of Jones to set himself diametrically apart, Campbell is not using Jones’ profile to elevate his own. He makes a singular statement against Jones, yet in the next moment inescapably colors the reader’s interpretation of himself. While there may be no villains in Vonnegut’s work, neither are there any heroes.

“I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American.”

Again, Campbell is asking the reader to reevaluate their assumptions of grand narratives, in this case patriotism. Campbell’s message is clear: though patriotism seems individualistic, and tied intrinsically to a certain landmass, it is essentially the same feeling, no matter who is experiencing it, and is as responsible for the good a nation does as it is for the bad.

“You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.”

Werner Noth confronts Campbell with this striking statement, despite having confessed to not liking him at all. This speaks to the power of Campbell’s propaganda, certainly, but also to the receptivity of his audience, and the need they had to find some sort of justification for what is going on around them, even if it is cartoonishly false.

“The hangwoman on the cover had breasts like cantaloupes, hips like horse collars, and their rags were the pathetic remains of nightgowns by Schiaparelli. The women in the photographs were as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress-ticking.”

Campbell, while reading of his father-in-law’s fate, is confronted with American propaganda, and the inherent paradox of capitalistic publication. While the article contains a thread of truth, the exaggerated presentation overwhelms the truth value. Campbell, ever the alert propagandist, plays a game of finding all the obvious lies.

“My father-in-law was stood on a footstool four inches high. The rope was put around his neck and drawn tight over the limb of a budding apple tree. The footstool was then kicked out from under him. He could dance on the ground while he strangled. Good?”

Campbell’s searing, single-word question calls into question the ethics and effectiveness of capital punishment. Though many in the magazine’s audience would be glad to read about the death of a Nazi, Campbell’s insight into Noth’s fair practices complicates the portrait, reminding the reader, again, that the Nazis were no less human than them.

“‘I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.’”

Campbell, faced with the work of his younger self, admits that his experiences in the war, and his life after, have stripped him of an ability he once so readily practiced. There is irony in his statement, of course, as it comes while he is in the process of writing a memoir, making sense of his life to the reader.

“‘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 they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul.”

Again, Campbell’s suspicion of patriotism comes to the fore, though this time it is heightened by the fact that Germany’s territorial expansion is one of the primary initiators of World War II. Campbell’s insistence on remaining nationless allows him to view all humans as belonging to something greater than lands delineated by governments.

“‘I wrote parts for Helga that let her be the quintessence of Helga onstage.’”

Campbell’s takes credit here for writing a purer self for Helga to inhabit on stage, suggesting that he views all people’s identities as split, not just his own. This notion of a singular, purer version of the self is a psychological coping mechanism for Campbell.

“Watching Kraft pop away at that target, I understood its popularity for the first time. The amateurishness of it made it look like something drawn on the wall of a public lavatory; it recalled the stink, diseased twilight, humid resonance, and vile privacy of a stall in a public lavatory—echoed exactly the soul’s condition in a man at war.”

Originally considering the target he drew as a deliberate overcharacterization, the mode with which he approached his wartime work, Campbell’s shifting sense of guilt and morality lead him to see it a different way. It is a sick and diseased form, born out of a sick and diseased time; Campbell now has enough distance from his wartime self to recognize what he has done.

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

Campbell gets to the core of his own perception of evil. It is not the faith that he has trouble with, but the unquestioning part. Campbell views this willing acceptance, and willing blindness to consequence, as vital human aspects that led to the horrors of the Nazi extermination program. Unquestioning faith allows for immeasurable evil.

“The only advantage to me of knowing the difference between right and wrong, as nearly as I can tell, is that I can sometimes laugh when the Eichmanns can see nothing funny.”

Eichmann represents to Campbell the worst extents of unquestioned obedience, and he reflects Campbell’s own hasty decision to work as a propagandist. This is why Campbell is at pains to differentiate himself from Eichmann, chiefly, here, through his ability to recognize the moral bankruptcy of their lives and retain the ability to laugh at its absurdity rather than take it so seriously.

“I can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn’t believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying.”

Confronted directly with the antisemitism he spewed over the radio, Campbell feels the need to defend himself to the reader. However, he does so in a morally complicated manner. Rather than denying or apologizing for his actions, he simply recognizes them for what they are and lets the fact stand. Still, his instinct to explain himself speaks to the fact that he senses something is still required of him.

“‘The part of me that wanted to tell the truth got turned into an expert liar! The lover in me got turned into a pornographer! The artist in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has rarely seen before.”

Confronted with Bodovskov’s use of his former writings, Campbell finally reaches a breaking point, recognizing, in a rush, all the ways in which he has been wholly used throughout his life. His breaking down of himself into separate categories—truth-teller, lover, artist—speaks to how long his mental plane has been fractured.

“The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible to even ten-year-olds, in most cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information—”

Here, with his metaphor of a cuckoo clock in Hell, Campbell circles in on the cause of so much horror and so-called evil in the world. This active delusion, a willful decision to ignore facts, creates mental conditions for the worst kinds of disinformation and hate to foster, and Campbell credits it as one of the primary factors that allowed for the evils of the Nazi regime.

“‘Most unnatural thing a woman can do is kill her own baby, but she did it...Certain chemicals in the blood made her do it, even though she knew better, didn’t want to do it at all.”

A patrolman shares with Campbell his theory, backed-up with modern studies, of the nature of evil. His is an absolving theory however, removing the questions of guilt and morality, and casting human behavior as no more than the rush of chemicals. Campbell is rightly suspicious of this theory, by now all too aware of the decisions he has made, and he rejects its promise of absolution.

“And all the time the bombs walked and walked overhead, and the schoolteacher’s three children did not bat an eye.

         Nor, I thought, would they ever.

         Nor, I thought, would I.”

Campbell details the deadening of emotions that comes with continual trauma. He is recounting a story from midway through the war, remembering the absolute hopelessness of anyone on the ground of stopping the war, and this image of human powerlessness blasts away any shock or emotion he would have thereafter.

“‘There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate […] with God on its side.”

Here Campbell reaches the core of evil, the driving factor behind so much of the world’s misery. That he recognizes it in an American serviceman is a direct comment on the fact that such evil is not limited by boundaries or nationalities, but roots in heart of humans who do not question it, who feel emboldened to hate for a good cause. This paradox is what Campbell responds to, the notion of a moral hate, and he labels it as ultimately responsible for perpetuating human misery.