Vonnegut, Kurt - Mother Night

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Mother Night

Panther

Granada Publishing Limited

Published in 1973 by Panther Books Ltd

Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF

Reprinted 1975, 1976

First published in Great Britain by

Jonathan Cape Ltd 1968

Made and printed in Great Britain by

C. Nicholls & Company Ltd

The Philips Park Press, Manchester

Set in Intertype Plantin

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall

not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

hired out or otherwise circulated without the

Publisher's prior consent in any form or binding or

cover other than that in which it is published and

with a similar condition including this condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is published at a net price and is supplied

subject to the Publishers Association Standard

Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive

Trade Practices Act, 1956

To Mata Hari

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

'This is my own, my native land!'

Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd

As home his footsteps he hath turn'd

From wandering on a foreign strand?

— SIR WALTER SCOTT

Introduction

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvellous 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.

My personal experience with Nazi monkey business was limited. There were some vile and

lively native American Fascists in my home town of Indianapolis during the thirties, and

somebody slipped me a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I remember, which was

supposed to be the Jews' secret plan for taking over the world. And I remember some laughs

about my aunt, too, who married a German German, and who had to write to Indianapolis for

proofs that she had no Jewish blood. The Indianapolis mayor knew her from high school and

dancing school, so he had fun putting ribbons and official seals all over the documents the

Germans required, which made them look like eighteenth-century peace treaties.

After a while the war came, and I was in it, and I was captured, so I got to see a little of

Germany from the inside while the war was still going on. I was a private, a battalion scout,

and, under the terms of the Geneva Convention, I had to work for my keep, which was good,

not bad I didn't have to stay in prison all the time, somewhere out in the countryside. I got to

go to a city, which was Dresden, and to see the people and the things they did.

There were about a hundred of us in our particular work group, and we were put out as

contract labour to a factory that was making a vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant

women. It tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke. It was good. I wish I had some

right now. And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It

was supposedly an 'open' city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or

war industries there.

But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night

of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no

particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and

drive firemen underground.

And then hundreds of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like

seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and

all the little fires grew, joined one another, and became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto:

fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what?

We didn't get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse

with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep.

We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower

of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artefacts

Characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long

ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will.

The malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000

Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse

miners, breaking into shelters, bringing bodies out. And I got to see many German types of

all ages as death had found them, usually with valuables in their laps. Sometimes relatives

would come to watch us dig. They were interesting, too.

So much for Nazis and me.

If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and

gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my

secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.

There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're

dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.

Iowa City, 1966

Editor's Note

In preparing this, the American edition of the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., I have

had to deal with writings concerned with more than mere informing or deceiving, as the case

may be. Campbell was a writer as well as a person accused of extremely serious crimes, a

one-time playwright of moderate reputation. To say that he was a writer is to say that the

demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it.

To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one

is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely

artificial as a stage.

And, now that I've said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of

artistic effect. In the theater, for instance, and in Campbell's confessions, perhaps — can be,

in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.

I don't care to argue the point my duties as an editor are in no sense polemic. They are

simply to pass on, in the most satisfactory style, the confessions of Campbell.

As for my own tinkerings with the text, they are few. I have corrected some spelling,

removed some exclamation points, and all the italics are mine.

I have in several instances changed names, in order to spare embarrassment or worse to

innocent persons still living. The names Bernard B. O'Hare, Harold J. Sparrow, and Dr.

Abraham Epstein, for instance, are fictitious, insofar as this account goes. Also fictitious are

Sparrow's Army serial number and the title I have given to an American Legion post in the

text; there is no Francis X. Donovan Post of the American Legion in Brookline.

There is one point at which my accuracy rather than the accuracy of Howard W. Campbell,

Jr., can be questioned. That point is in Chapter Twenty-two, in which Campbell quotes three

of his poems in both English and German. In his manuscript, the English versions are

perfectly clear. The German versions, however, recalled from memory by Campbell, are so

hacked up and smeary with revisions as to be illegible, as often as not Campbell was proud of

himself as a writer in German, indifferent to his SMQ in English. In trying to justify his pride

in his German, he worked over the German versions of the poems again and again and again,

and was apparently never satisfied with them.

So, in order to offer some idea in this edition as to what the poems were like in German, I

have had to commission a delicate job of restoration. The person who did this job, who made

vases out of shards, so to speak, was Mrs. Theodore Rowley, of Cotuit, Massachusetts, a fine

linguist, and a respectable poetess in her own right

I have made significant cuts in only two places. In Chapter Thirty-nine, I have made a cut

that was insisted upon by my publisher's lawyer. In the original of that chapter, Campbell has

one of the Iron Guardsmen of the White Sons of the American Constitution shouting at a

German, 'I'm a better American than you are!' My father Invented 'I-Am-An-American Day'!'

Witnesses agree that such a claim was made, but made without any apparent basis in fact the

lawyer's feeling is that to reproduce the claim in the body of the text would be to slander

those persons who really did invent 'I-Am-An-American Day.'

In the same chapter, incidentally, Campbell is, according to witnesses, at his most accurate

in reporting exactly what was said. The actual death speech of Resi Noth, all agree, is

reproduced by Campbell, word for word.

The only other cutting I have done is in Chapter Twenty-three, which is pornographic in

the original. I would have considered myself honor-bound to present that chapter

unbowdlerized, were it not for Campbell's request, right in the body of the text, that some

editor perform the emasculation.

The title of the book is Campbell's; it is taken from a speech by Mephistopheles in

Goethe's Faust. As translated by Carlyle F. Maclntyre (New Directions, 1941), the speech is

this:

I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to

light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient

rank and space, and yet can not succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to

matter and can't get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful; solids

can check its path, so I hope it won't be long till light and the world's stuff are

destroyed together.

The dedication of the book is Campbell's too. Of the dedication, Campbell wrote this in a

chapter he later discarded:

Before seeing what sort of a book I was going to have here, I wrote the

dedication 'To Mata Hari.' She whored in the interest of espionage, and so did I.

Now that I've seen some of the book, I would prefer to dedicate it to someone

less exotic, less fantastic, more contemporary, less of a creature of silent film.

I would prefer to dedicate it to one familiar person, male or female, widely

known to have done evil while saying to himself, 'A very good me, the real me, a

me made in heaven, Is hidden deep inside.'

I can think of many examples, could rattle them off after the fashion of a

Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. But there is no single name to which I might

aptly dedicate this book, unless it would be my own.

Let me honor myself in that fashion, then:

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.

KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

The Confessions

of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

1: Tiglath-pileser the Third . . .

My name is Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination.

The year in which I write this book is 1961.

I address this book of mine to Mr. Tuvia Friedmann, Director of the Haifa Institute for the

Documentation of War Criminals, and to whomever else this may concern.

Why should this book interest Mr. Friedmann?

Because it is written by a man suspected of being a war criminal. Mr. Friedmann is a

specialist in such persons. He had expressed an eagerness to have any writings I might care to

add to his archives of Nazi villainy. He is so eager as to give me a typewriter, free

stenographic service, and the use of research assistants, who will run down any facts I may

need in order to make my account complete and accurate.

I am behind bars.

I am behind bars in a nice new jail in old Jerusalem.

I am awaiting a fair trial for my war crimes by the Republic of Israel.

It is a curious typewriter Mr. Friedmann has given to me — and an appropriate typewriter,

too. It is a typewriter that was obviously made in Germany during the Second World War.

How can I tell? Quite simply, for it puts at finger tips a symbol that was never used on a

typewriter before the Third German Reich, a symbol that will never be used on a typewriter

again.

The symbol is the twin lightning strokes used for the dreaded S.S., the Schutzstaffel the

most fanatical wing of Nazism.

I used such a typewriter in Germany all through the war. Whenever I had occasion to write

of the Schutzstaffel, which I did often and with enthusiasm, I never abbreviated it as 'S.S.,'

but always struck the typewriter key for the far more frightening and magical twin lightning

strokes.

Ancient history.

I am surrounded by ancient history. Though the cell in which I rot is new, some of the

stones in it, I'm told, were cut in the time of King Solomon.

And sometimes, when I look out through my cell window at the gay and brassy youth of

the infant Republic of Israel, I feel that I and my war crimes are as ancient as Solomon's old

gray stones.

How long ago that war, that Second World War, was! How long ago the crimes in it!

How nearly forgotten it is, even by the Jews, the young Jews, that is.

One of the Jews who guards me here knows nothing about that war. He is not interested.

His name is Arnold Marx. He has very red hair. He is only eighteen, which means Arnold

was three when Hitler died, and nonexistent when my career as a war criminal began.

He guards me from six in the morning until noon.

Arnold was born in Israel, He has never been outside of Israel.

His mother and father left Germany in the early thirties. His grandfather, he told me, won

an Iron Cross in the First World War.

Arnold is studying to be a lawyer. The avocation of Arnold and of his father, a gunsmith, is

archaeology. Father and son spend most all their spare time excavating the ruins of Hazor.

They do so under the direction of Yigael Yadin, who was Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army

during the war with the Arab States.

So be it.

Hazor, Arnold tells me, was a Canaanite city in northern Palestine that existed at least

nineteen hundred years before Christ, About fourteen hundred years before Christ, Arnold

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KurtVonnegutJr.MotherNightPantherGranadaPublishingLimitedPublishedin1973byPantherBooksLtdFrogmore,StAlbans,HertsAL22NFReprinted1975,1976FirstpublishedinGreatBritainbyJonathanCapeLtd1968Copyright©KurtVonnegutJr.1961,1966MadeandprintedinGreatBritainbyC.Nicholls&CompanyLtdThePhilipsParkPress,Manchester...

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