By Matej Harik
MOTHER NIGHT was first published in 1961. It's amazing how little things have changed. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel
Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Vonnegut's major character, is an American who has lived in Germany since his father was transferred there when he was eleven. As an adult he is making a good living as a playwright when he is approached by a man named Frank Wirtanen, who recruits him to spy for America. Wirtanen warns him that America will never admit they recruited him as a spy. Campbell becomes one of the most famous propagandists in the Nazi party, but during his broadcasts, his coughs and verbal pauses and other mannerisms send important messages to the Allies.
At the end of the war he is captured by Bernard B. O'Hare, as a war criminal, but Wirtanen comes to his rescue and helps him escape to America where he is living in a run-down attic.
At the beginning of the novel Campbell is about to stand trial in Israel, having been outed by a Russian spy named Kraft-Potapov. Prior to his arrest, he is reunited with his wife Helga who he thought was dead. He is also celebrated by a collection of weird American neo-Nazis led by a crazy dentist named Lionel J.D. Jones, who thinks he can prove Jewish and negro inferiority using their teeth. Jones also publishes a newspaper called The White Christian Minuteman.
When Campbell's address is revealed in The White Christian Minuteman, all kinds of so-called patriots come looking for him, the foremost of whom is Bernard B. O'Hare, now a failed businessman who has devoted his life to the recapture of hero/war criminal Campbell.
Irony runs rampant. No one is who he/she seems to be. For me the climax of the book was when O'Hare confronts Campbell. Campbell says to O'Hare, "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."
Here we are in 2007, forty-six years later, and we've still got politicians and commentators reviling "evil-doers," and Swift boaters portraying silver star winners as unpatriotic. It seems like we should've learned something in all that time.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night and many other books you can buy at Shakespeare & Sons bookstores.
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