Language, intuited Kurt Vonnegut in “Mother Night”, has the power to warp reality and sow division. His writing is grimly relevant
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskCampbell begins his account by explaining that he is in detention in Israel, awaiting trial for war crimes. Born in America, he was brought up in Germany as Hitler rose to power. He became a playwright, joined the Nazi party and mingled with its bigwigs; his writing soon attracted the attention of Joseph Goebbels and he was recruited to produce propaganda for English-speakers.
Yet the narrator purports to be a consummate pretender, recruited by American intelligence in 1938. Though he was not motivated by any particular sense of moral duty, he agreed to conceal messages in his broadcasts, a code conveyed in “mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences”. The problem is that no one can verify this assertion. Inconveniently, the American government denies that his handler was one of its operatives.
“Mother Night” suggests it doesn’t matter whom Campbell was really working for, nor what he believed. He had been so convincing in his performance as “Hitler’s right-hand man” that “nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside”. His propaganda was ghastly and effective—witness the acolytes seeking to keep his ideas and rhetoric alive in America—so his intentions became irrelevant.
Vonnegut is one of America’s most celebrated writers about war. His novels explore the logic of conflict or, more often, the lack thereof. He had witnessed the horrors of fighting first-hand, enlisting in 1943 at the age of 20 before being taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. Transported to Dresden, he saw the city’s destruction by the Allies in 1945. Later he satirised the glorification of martial values.
“Mother Night” is less fantastical than works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five”. Its focus is not the war on the battlefield but the war of information. The novel was not a huge hit when it was published, but in subsequent decades it has been adapted into a film starring Nick Nolte as well as stage and radio plays. It is particularly resonant in the context of today’s bloodshed in Ukraine, underscored as it is by Russian propaganda.
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