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| Dell Books, 1987 |
My Helga believed I meant the things I said about the races of man and the machines of history — and I was grateful. No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed — and my Helga was the angel who gave it to me.
Copiously.
No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord — as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.
Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had — its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn't go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed.
Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and I for mountains.
The Novel: Kurt Vonnegut's third novel Mother Night tells the ironic first person tale of Howard W Campbell Jr, a North American playwright forced to write his memoirs while awaiting trial in a Jerusalem prison for the crime of publicly broadcasting anti-Allied propaganda over German radio during World War Two –– an activity, his accusers are convinced, that indirectly assisted the Nazis to exterminate the unjustly imprisoned Jews held inside their concentration camps. What the Israelis don't know is that Campbell, who grew up in Germany after his father was sent to work there by the General Electric Company, was secretly employed by the US Government throughout the entire conflict, his status as a celebrated dramatist famous for writing 'medieval romances' starring his famously beautiful German-born wife Helga Noth serving as the perfect cover for his espionage activities.
Campbell had no idea what type of information he was transmitting during his broadcasts, having done so via a complicated code of 'mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences. People I never saw,' he confesses in his detached deadpan manner, 'gave me my instructions… I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus.' Nor does he know why his life was spared after he was captured by US forces on the Eastern Front after going there in 1945 to lead the Free American Corps, a special SS unit comprised of prisoners of war assigned the hopeless task of stopping the rapidly advancing Soviet army. Campbell believes he was saved by the intervention of Frank Wirtanen, a counter-intelligence operative employed by the War Department who called himself his 'Blue Fairy Godmother.' It was Wirtanen who recruited him in Berlin in 1938 and told him that, if he became a spy, he would be 'volunteering to be a dead man. Even if you live through the war without being caught you'll find your reputation gone –– and probably very little to live for.'
Wirtanen's words proved to be uncannily prophetic. Shortly after his capture Campbell learns from Bernard B O'Hare, a US Infantry Lieutenant, that one of the last messages he transmitted over the radio spoke of the death of his beloved Helga, a Nazi propaganda star in her own right, in the Crimea. Deprived of the love of his life, the other inhabitant of the idyllic 'Das Reich der Zwei' or 'nation of two' their marriage had been before the war, Campbell is subsequently smuggled out of Germany and sent to New York City to live out the remainder of his days in lonely anonymity.
That, at least, is the plan –– a plan that works like a charm until he buys a war surplus wood carving set (surplus from the Korean War, not World War Two) and carves himself some chess pieces as a means of filling the empty hours. (He has plenty of money to live on thanks to a number of wise investments made by his dead parents who were also his only relatives.) His project completed, Campbell then takes the unprecedented step of knocking on the door of his cantankerous artist neighbor George Kraft –– they occupy the same rundown apartment building in Greenwich Village along with a Jewish family called the Epsteins, among others –– and challenging him to a game of chess, initiating an unlikely friendship that allows them, widowers both, to find some solace in each other's company.
After a year or so, Campbell feels comfortable enough with Kraft to admit that he is, in fact, the same traitorous, venom-spitting Howard W Campbell Jr that his countrymen loved to hate so much back in the 1940s. Kraft, who has genuine talent as an artist but stubbornly refuses to exhibit his work, is sympathetic to his friend's plight as an unacknowledged spy and encourages him to write again, insisting that doing so will help restore him to life following the still painful loss of his beloved but long dead Helga. But Campbell no longer possesses the will or even the skills required to write. Rather than argue about it with his only friend, he goes downstairs to check his mail, unaware that his past is about to catch up with him in a very confronting way.
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Avon Books, c 1962
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The first letter he opens contains a copy of a crackpot white supremacist newspaper called The White Christian Minuteman published, it says, by the Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones. The second letter is from Bernard B O'Hare, the same Infantry officer who captured him in 1945 who, along with the other members of his local American Legion post, plans to petition the government to have him hung as a traitor or at the very least deported to Germany. Unsure how O'Hare located him, Campbell finds the answer waiting for him in the pages of The White Christian Minuteman in the form of an article written by the Reverend Dr Jones in which he is described as 'a great writer and one of the most fearless patriots in American history' now living 'in poverty and loneliness in the attic of 27 Bethune Street.'
It isn't long before Campbell receives a visit from Jones, his bodyguard (the brilliantly named) August Krapptauer, his secretary Keeley, a defrocked Paulist priest and Jones's driver, an African-American named Robert who describes himself as 'the Black Führer of Harlem.' This unlikely quartet is accompanied by a woman who, to their wary host's initial disbelief and eventual delight, proves to be none other than his long-lost Helga, gray-haired but 'as lithe and blooming' as she was on their wedding night. Campbell is naturally overjoyed that his wife survived what he is told was sixteen years in a Soviet labor camp, but not so thrilled to receive copies of his long since disowned dramatic work –– 'treasures' Helga has been saving all these years, she says, in expectation of the day when they would at last be reunited. Campbell, however, is more interested in exchanging his war surplus army cot for a proper double bed in which they can at last begin to rebuild their shattered 'nation of two.'
It is while they're out shopping for this bed the following day, happy and satisfied after a night of gentle love-making, that Campbell learns the truth about Helga. It turns out she isn't Helga at all, but her younger sister Resi –– the child whose dachshund dog her father, the former Chief of Police of the city of Berlin, asked him to shoot when he visited the Noth residence on his way to the Eastern front. Resi confesses that she's loved Campbell all her life, that the idea of being married to him was the only thing that sustained her during the terrible years in the labor camp where she was forced to spend twelve hours a day operating a machine that manufactured cigarettes. Campbell is horrified at first but, unwilling to be alone again after having his fantasy revealed as such, soon comes round to Resi's way of thinking. Why shouldn't Resi become Helga if that will make her happy? Why shouldn't they be together if Resi, who appears to grow younger by the second after admitting the truth to him, has always loved him as much as she claims she does? What real harm can there possibly be in going along with any of it?
But this, like almost everything else about Campbell's life, turns out to be a lie. Resi did not re-enter his life by chance any more than the letters he received from Bernard B O'Hare and Dr Jones appeared in his mailbox by accident. It was a set-up organized by his friend Kraft who, it turns out, is really a Soviet spy named Iona Potapov who has been working undercover in North America for the past quarter of a century. Campbell does not know this, however, when he's beaten up one night in the lobby of his building by an ex-serviceman who served under O'Hare in Germany and then has his injuries treated by Abraham Epstein, the young Jewish doctor who lives downstairs and who, along with his elderly mother, survived the horrors of Auschwitz and came to New York in the hope of putting that harrowing experience behind them.
When Campbell awakens hours later in the building's basement, which has now been transformed into the headquarters of Jones and his cronies, Kraft tells him that arrangements have been made for him, Resi and himself to fly to Mexico City where they will assume new identities before being permitted to live in unbothered anonymity while enjoying a certain measure of material comfort. Campbell believes this story and begins to plan for their departure, only to receive a note from Wirtanen, the 'Blue Fairy Godmother' whom he hasn't seen since 1938, telling him to meet him urgently in a vacant store across the street because his life is in danger.
It's Wirtanen who informs Campbell of Kraft's true identity and tells him that Resi, his new love, is also a Soviet agent. His dream of starting a new life in Mexico is just that –– another dream concocted by Kraft/Potapov, with the girl serving as bait, so he can be arrested and flown to Moscow where he'll be tried for his war crimes by a Soviet government eager to exploit his propaganda potential. Wirtanen then tells him to clear out of Greenwich Village right away because the basement is about to be raided by Federal agents who plan to deport Resi and arrest Potapov for spying.
But Campbell, his life once again shattered, does not follow his handler's advice. He returns to the basement to confront his betrayers and tells them the jig is up. But they insist that, although they're indeed the spies Wirtanen claimed they were, they had no intention of going through with the Soviet plan to smuggle him to Moscow. They were going to go to Mexico and stay there, all three of them, bringing a permanent end to the miserable charades their post-war lives have become. Campbell is unconvinced by this argument and, on uncertain ground again, questions the love he thought he felt for Resi. He tells the weeping girl as much, eliciting the response that she'll have nothing left to live for if she no longer has what she believed was their real and abiding love for each other to support and sustain her. When federal agents burst in to arrest everybody, the heartbroken Resi pops a cyanide capsule into her mouth, biting down on it to kill herself.
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| Hungarian edition, 2012 |
Released from police custody an hour after his arrest, Campbell has nowhere else to go except back to his apartment which has been ransacked in his absence by people who consider him a traitor and know nothing of his clandestine work as an Allied spy. One of these haters soon comes back to visit him –– Bernard B O'Hare, his original captor whose life has become nearly as bleak as his own life since the war that dominated their young manhood ended in 1945. O'Hare, who is very drunk, declares that he's going to kill Campbell, but Campbell defends himself and, in the end, sends the slightly injured ex-Lieutenant safely on his way. Campbell follows his would-be assassin downstairs a few minutes later and knocks on the door of the Epsteins, telling them who he really is and that he would like to surrender to them so he can be tried by the state of Israel for his crimes against humanity. Abraham Epstein reacts to his confession with confusion and anger and orders him to leave, but Mrs Epstein understands his need to make amends and accepts his surrender on behalf of the Jewish people.
Soon Campbell is back where he started, typing out his memoirs in a Jerusalem prison cell, awaiting trial and probable execution. But this is not to be. Wirtanen comes to his aid again, sending him a letter at the eleventh hour in which he admits to acting as his handler during the war –– an admission, he realizes, likely to see him pardoned by the Israelis. Campbell, however, seeks no pardon from his captors or from anybody else. 'I find the prospect nauseating,' he confesses. 'I think tonight is the night I will hang Howard W Campbell Jr, for crimes against himself.'
One of the original reviews of Mother Night described it as 'Black satire of the highest polish.' It certainly is that but it is also a moral fable for the twentieth century that serves as a haunting lament for the loss of human innocence in the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the other Nazi death camps. At one point Campbell is asked by Wirtanen what he would have done if the Nazis had won the war. Would he have gone on posing as an enemy of the United States? Broadcasting more filth in the guise of propaganda to a conquered, subjugated world? It takes Campbell a long time to answer but the answer he eventually provides is tragically illuminating: 'The only chance of my doing something really violent in favor of truth or justice or what have you… would lie in my going homicidially insane. That could happen. In the situation you suggest, I might suddenly run amok with a deadly weapon down a peaceful street on an ordinary day. But whether the killing I did would improve the world much would be a matter of dumb luck, plain and simple… Classify me as a Nazi,' he goes on. 'Classify away. Hang me, if you think it would tend to raise the general level of morality. This life is no great treasure.' Campbell is a heartbroken man, without hope of a satisfying future from the moment he learned that his precious Das Reich der Zwei had been destroyed by the death of his darling Helga. The rest, Vonnegut suggests, is just a futile game played by a man with no real identity and nothing left to lose, a traitor who betrays himself by being, in the end, morally ambivalent enough to allow his wife's sister to live out her fantasy of loving him and then commit suicide when he casually destroys that same fantasy in the name of what he justifies to himself as being a long overdue attack of honesty.
'This is the only story of mine,' Vonnegut writes in his introduction to what remains perhaps his most flawlessly written novel, '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.' Campbell's tragedy is that he becomes so determined to cling to the idea of his lost 'nation of two' that he loses sight of everything that must be sacrificed –– compassion, integrity, the ability to interact truthfully and without hidden agendas with other human beings –– to achieve that dubious aim. He plays his self-defined role so convincingly that, in the end, he's incapable of seeing where the lies stop and the 'real' Howard W Campbell Jr begins. As Vonnegut himself might have put it –– if that doesn't qualify as a tragedy, then I don't know what does.
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| KURT VONNEGUT, c 1962 |
The Writer: Kurt Vonnegut Jr was born in the large midwestern city of Indianapolis, capital of the North American state of Indiana, on 11 November 1922. His father Kurt Vonnegut Sr was, like his own father before him, an architect who designed some of the city's most impressive municipal buildings and grandest private residences until the stock market crash of 1929 eliminated the need for his skills virtually overnight and drastically reduced his family's wealth, which had mostly been acquired in the hardware business, right along with it. Vonnegut Sr married Edith Lieber, a member of one of the city's other wealthy and socially prominent German-American families, on 22 December 1913. Edith, an exceptionally tall woman who had broken off several engagements prior to their marriage, gave birth to their first child, a son named Bernard, on 29 August 1914. (Bernard Vonnegut would go on to become an atmospheric scientist who would discover that silver iodide can be used to 'seed' clouds to artificially induce rain and snow.) A daughter named Alice followed in 1917. Like her mother, who would commit suicide on Mother's Day in 1944 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, Alice would die well before her time in 1958, succumbing to cancer just two days after her husband perished in a train accident. 'Allie is up in heaven now,' Vonnegut would write in the introduction to his 1999 collection of short fiction Bagombo Snuff Box, 'but I still write to please her. Allie was funny in real life. That gives me permission to be funny, too. Allie and I were very close.'
The loss of his family's wealth –– a setback for which his mother never forgave his gentle, artistic-minded father and which was one of the contributing causes to the depression that eventually prompted her to take her own life –– meant that, unlike his older siblings, Vonnegut was educated in the public school system, attending PS43 in Indianapolis and then Shortridge High School where he first discovered his talent for writing and became co-editor of The Shortridge Echo, the same student-run newspaper his parents had worked on when they had attended the school. He was such a good writer and so widely read by his fellow pupils that he was eventually hired by Block's Department Store to provide advertising copy about the clothing lines it marketed specifically to teenagers.
Vonnegut graduated from high school in 1940 and enrolled at Cornell University where, at the insistence of his father and brother who believed he should study something 'useful' rather than signing up for humanities and architecture courses, he majored in biochemistry. While he did not flourish as a biochemist, attending Cornell did allow him to gain a position on its independent newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun where, as he'd done in high school, he became a staff writer and, in time, one of its contributing editors. A satirical pro-pacifist article he wrote for the paper cost him his place in the college's Reserve Officer Training Corps and he was placed on academic probation in May 1942 due to his poor grades, only to drop out of college the following January to enlist in the US Army before he was drafted (an event that would have been inevitable given that dropping out had automatically disqualified him for a college deferment). He was stationed close to home in the Indiana town of Edinburgh and was the first member of the family to learn that his inebriated, deeply depressed mother had killed herself some time between the evening of 13 May and the morning of 14 May 1944. Many believed that the fact that her youngest child was about to be sent overseas to fight and possibly die for his country had been a major factor in her decision to commit suicide.
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| KURT VONNEGUT, 1943 |
Although Vonnegut did not participate in the D-Day invasion, he was in Europe by August 1944, serving as an intelligence scout for the 106th Infantry Division. It was as a member of this division that he participated in the Battle of the Bulge, the final major German offensive of the war –– a battle that resulted in him and fifty of his fellow infantrymen being captured on 22 December and sent by railway boxcar to the eastern city of Dresden, not far from Germany's border with what is now the Czech Republic.
As a scout, Vonnegut was required to work for his keep under the terms established by the Geneva Convention and was sent to a factory which produced 'a vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women' as he later recalled in the introduction to Mother Night. Dresden, he further noted, was 'an "open" city, not to be attacked because there were no troop concentrations or industries there.' Despite its so-called 'open' status, the city was heavily bombarded by British and US aircraft on the evening of 13 February 1945, marking the beginning of a forty-eight hour air raid which triggered a massive firestorm, reducing the city's streets and buildings to rubble and sending its population scurrying into cellars where the majority of them were literally roasted alive. Vonnegut and his fellow POWs only survived the attack –– which remains the largest single massacre in European history and was launched for no other purpose than the tactically negligible destruction of civilian life and property –– because the building they worked in was a slaughterhouse that stood above a solidly constructed underground meat locker. They emerged from this locker on 15 February with their six German guards to find the slaughterhouse –– known as Schlacthof-Fünf or Slaughterhouse-Five in English –– and the rest of the city gone while wild animals, burned and crazed escapees from its zoo, roamed its blazing streets. (Many of these animals were later killed and eaten by the starving inhabitants of Dresden.) With so much devastation to deal with, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were soon put to work digging out bodies, an experience so horrific that it caused one prisoner, a New Zealander, to perish from excessive vomiting. Vonnegut himself would later describe this process as 'a terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt.'
The capture of nearby Leipzig by US troops caused Vonnegut and his fellow POWs to be evacuated on foot to the Czech border, where they were freed and left to fend for themselves until the arrival of Russian troops who arranged for them to be sent to a repatriation camp in northern France. Vonnegut returned home following the German surrender in May 1945 although he remained in the army for several more months, serving in a clerical position until receiving his official discharge in late August following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On 1 September Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart Jane Marie Cox and shortly afterwards moved to Chicago with her where he took advantage of the newly passed GI Bill to enrol at that city's university as an anthropology student, supplementing his small government-provided income by working nights as a reporter for the city News Bureau. As he had at Cornell, Vonnegut left the university without obtaining a degree and, in 1947 with the help of his brother, was hired by the General Electric Company whose headquarters were in the New York town of Schenectady. In 1950, while employed by GE as a research assistant, Collier's magazine paid him $750 for a short story titled Report on the Barnhouse Effect that was subsequently published in its February issue. Now a father of two –– his son Mark was born in 1947, his daughter Edith two years later, with a second daughter Nanette joining the family in 1954 –– he quit GE when his next story earned him the higher fee of $950 and took his young family to live in what was then the relatively isolated Massachusetts community of Cape Cod.
His experiences at GE would later serve as the setting for his first novel Player Piano (1952), a post-World War Three dystopian fantasy that satirizes the rise of North American corporate culture, consumerism and the anti-Communist witch-hunting of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. While well received, the book failed to sell, as did his second novel The Sirens of Titan (1959) which, unlike its predecessor, was marketed as science-fiction and failed to gain the attention of important critics who snootily dismissed this 'popular' genre as being unworthy of their notice. Mother Night, published in February 1962, was similarly ignored by the critics, forcing Vonnegut to supplement what he continued to earn from his short stories with stints as an English teacher, an advertising copywriter and co-owner of the first unsuccessful Saab dealership in the United States. In the end, it was his appointment to the teaching faculty of the newly opened Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, where his students included future bestselling novelist John Irving and his colleagues included Nelson Algren, that enabled him to make ends meet or, as he more succinctly put it, 'saved my life.'
While his fourth and fifth novels Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1964) did attract some critical attention, it was not until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 that Vonnegut truly broke through as a writer, with the book gaining positive reviews and selling enough copies to ease the financial pressure he'd been laboring under since unofficially adopting the three children of his sister Alice following her untimely death and that of his brother-in-law nearly a decade earlier. The book, which masterfully combines science-fiction inspired time-shifting with vivid first-hand accounts of the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath, became a particular favorite with young people who, fed up with their government's ongoing commitment to the Vietnam War, were staging campus protests and eagerly embracing the ideas being offered to them by the new 'radical' counter culture. Vonnegut would become a kind of unofficial spokesperson for this 'radical' North America, an ex-soldier who preached pacifism and a message of atheistic humanism at a time when most of his generation were right wing church-going Republicans who fully supported the aggressive foreign policies of President Richard Nixon. It was for this reason, and others, that Slaughterhouse-Five was banned by many public schools and libraries and continues to upset a lot of conservatives today.
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| KURT VONNEGUT, c 2005 |
Vonnegut did not publish his seventh novel, titled Breakfast of Champions, until 1973, by which time his marriage was over and his eldest son Mark had suffered a nervous breakdown, deepening the depression that would cause Vonnegut himself to attempt suicide in 1984. (His son recovered and went on to earn a medical degree.) Breakfast of Champions was not well-received, with critics attacking its lack of a linear plot and what one derided as 'its lack of substance.' Now living in New York and soon to be remarried to photographer Jill Kremnetz (from 1979 until his death), Vonnegut would continue to publish novels throughout the remainder of the 1970s and on into the 1980s –– Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985) and Bluebeard (1987) –– that divided the critics but earned him a cult following among readers disenchanted with a society that was becoming increasingly consumer-driven, self-obsessed, greedy and environmentally rapacious. He also published a number of non-fiction books during this period –– including Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) and Palm Sunday (1981) –– that collected his journalism and the many forewords, essays and commencement speeches he was asked to write by various periodicals, publishers and student body councils.
His final novel Timequake appeared in 1997 and was followed two years later by the novella length essay God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian in which he conducts imaginary interviews with Isaac Asimov, Adolf Hitler, William Shakespeare and other deceased literary, political and cultural figures. His final book to be published in his own lifetime –– a fifth essay collection titled Man Without A Country –– appeared in 2005 and became a national bestseller.
Kurt Vonnegut died, at the age of eighty-four, on 11 April 2007 from complications produced by a fall he'd taken in his New York brownstone several weeks earlier. He wrote what was probably the best epitaph for himself in his final book, summing up what had often been a difficult and unhappy life but nevertheless a principled, compassionate and caring one. 'My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn't think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn't think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.' A posthumous collection of his unpublished writings about war and peace collected by his son Dr Mark Vonnegut MD was published in 2008 under the title Armageddon in Retrospect. A further volume of his unpublished short fiction, Look At The Birdie, appeared in 2009 and was followed in 2011 by While Mortals Sleep, a second collection of his early unpublished work.
Use the link below to visit the KURT VONNEGUT MUSEUM AND LIBRARY located in his hometown of Indianapolis which was created to 'champion the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut and the principles of free expression and common decency.'
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Fine Line Features, 1996
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An excellent cinematic adaptation of Mother Night, directed by KEITH GORDON and starring NICK NOLTE as Howard W Campbell Jr, ALAN ARKIN as George Kraft, SHERYL LEE as Helga/Resi and JOHN GOODMAN as Frank Wirtanen, was released by Fine Line Features in 1996 and remains widely available on DVD and some online streaming services. Several other novels by KURT VONNEGUT, including Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, have also been adapted for the screen with varying degrees of success.
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Last updated 13 June 2023
