Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

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MOTHER NIGHT

BY: KURT VONNEGUT

(please correct any spelling errors you may encounter)

A LAUREL BOOK

Published by

Dell Publishing

A division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property.

It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the

publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by

law. For information address: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.

The trademark Laurel(r) is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other

countries.

The trademark Dell(r) is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

ISBN: 0-440-15853-2

Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

November 1991

40 39 38 37 36

RAD

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 Toon, 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

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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, wanning 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

vii

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

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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 Cotuft, 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 tide of die book is Campbell's; it is taken from a speech by Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust.

As translated by Carlyle F. Maclntyre (New Directions, J941), die 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.

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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.

KUKT VONNEGOT, JB.

xii

THE CONFESSIONS

OF HOWARD W. CAMPBELL, JR.

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 burned As home his footsteps

he hath turned from wandering on a foreign strand?"

-SIR WALTER SCOTT

Chapter One - 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.

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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

Schutz-staffel, 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 tells me, an

Israelite army captured Hazor, killed all forty thousand inhabitants, and burned it down.

"Solomon rebuilt the city," said Arnold, "but in 732 B.C. Tiglath-pileser the Third burned it down

again."

"Who?" I said.

"Tiglath-pileser the Third", said Arnold. "The Assyrian," he said, giving my memory a nudge.

"Oh," I said. "That Tiglath-pileser."

"You act as though you never heard of him," said Arnold.

"I never have," I said. I shrugged humbly. "I guess that's pretty terrible."

"Well-" said Arnold, giving me a schoolmaster's frown, "it seems to me he really is somebody

everybody ought to know about. He was probably the most remarkable man the Assyrians ever

produced."

"Oh," I said.

"I'll bring you a book about him, if you like," said Arnold.

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"That's nice of you," I said. "Maybe I'll get around to thinking about remarkable Assyrians later

on. But right now my mind is pretty well occupied with remarkable Germans."

"Like who?" he said.

"Oh, I've been thinking a lot lately about my old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels," I said.

Arnold looked at me blankly. "Who?" he said.

And I felt the dust of the Holy Land creeping in to bury me, sensed how thick a dust and rubble

blanket I would one day wear. I felt thirty or forty feet of ruined cities above me, beneath me

some primitive kitchen mittens, a temple or two and then Tiglath-pileser the Third.

Chapter Two - Special Detail...

The guard who relieves Arnold Marx at noon each day is a man nearly my own age, which at forty-

eight He remembers the war, all right, though he doesn't like to.

His name is Andor Gutman. Andor is a sleepy, not very bright Estonian Jew. He spent two years in

the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to

going up a smokestack of a crematorium there:

"I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando,'' he said to me, "when the order came from

Himmler to close the ovens down."

Sonderkommando means special detail at Auschwitz, it meant a very special detail indeed one

composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then

to lug their bodies out When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves

killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains.

Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando.

•Why?" I asked him.

If you would write a book about that," he said, "and give the answer to that question, that 'Why?'

you would have a very great book."

"Do you know the answer?" I said.

"No," he said. "That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it"

"Any guesses?" I said.

"No," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "even though I was one of the ones who

volunteered."

He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the

thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me:

"There were loudspeakers all over the camp," he said, "and they were never silent for long. There

was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music

sometimes the best."

"That's interesting," I said.

"There was no music by Jews," he said. "That was forbidden."

"Naturally," I said.

"And the music was always stopping in the middle," he said, "and then there was an announcement.

All day long, music and announcements."

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"Very modern," I said.

He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. "There was one announcement that was always crooned,

like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando,"

"Oh?" I said.

"Leichentriiger zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed.

Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse." In an institution in which the purpose was to

kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry.

"After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to

me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job."

"I can understand that," I said.

"You can?" he said. He shook his head. "I can't," he said. "I will always be ashamed. Volunteering

for the Sonderkommando, it was a very shameful thing to do."

"I don't think so," I said.

"I do," he said. "Shameful," he said. "I never want to talk about it again."

Chapter Three - Briquets...

The guard who relieves Andor Gutman at six each night is Arpad Kovacs. Arpad is a Roman candle of

a man, loud and gay.

When Arpad came on duty at six last night, he demanded to see what I'd written so far. I gave him

the very few pages, and Arpad walked up and down the corridor, waving and praising the pages

extravagantly.

He didn't read them. He praised them for what he imagined to be in them.

"Give it to the complacent bastards!" he said last night "Tell those smug briquets!"

By briquets he meant people who did nothing to save their own lives or anybody else's life when

the Nazis took over, who were willing to go meekly all the way to the gas chambers, if that was

where the Nazis wanted them to go. A briquet, of course, is a molded block of coal dust, the soul

of convenience where transportation, storage and combustion are concerned.

Arpad, faced with the problem of being a Jew in Nazi Hungary, did not become a briquet. On the

contrary, Arpad got himself false papers and joined the Hungarian S.S.

That fact is the basis for his sympathy with me. "Tell them the things a man does to stay alive!

What's so noble about being a briquet?" he said last night

"Did you ever hear any of my broadcasts?" I asked him. The medium of my war crimes was radio

broadcasting. I was a Nazi radio propagandist, a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite.

"No," he said.

So I showed him a transcript of a broadcast, a transcript furnished to me by the Haifa Institute.

"Read it," I said.

"I don't have to," he said. "Everybody was saying the same things over and over and over in those

days."

"Read it anyway, as a favor," I said.

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So he read it, his face becoming sourer and sourer. He handed it back to me. "You disappoint me,"

he said.

"Oh?" I said.

"It's so weak!" he said. "It has no body, no paprika, no zest! I thought you were a master of

racial invective!"

"Im not?" I said.

"If any member of my S.S. platoon had spoken in such a friendly way about the Jews," said Arpad,

"I would have had him shot for treason! Goebbels should have fired you and hired me as the radio

scourge of the Jews. I would have raised blisters around the world!"

"You were already doing your part with your S.S. platoon," I said.

Arpad beamed, remembering his S.S. days. "What an Aryan I made!" he said.

"Nobody ever suspected you?" I said.

"How would they dare?" he said. "I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan that they even put me in a

special detachment. Its mission was to find out how the Jews always knew what the S.S. was going

to do next There was a leak somewhere, and we were out to stop it" He looked bitter and affronted,

remembering it, even though he had been that leak.

"Was the detachment successful in its mission?" I said.

"I'm happy to say," said Arpad, "that fourteen S.S. men were shot on our recommendation. Adolf

Eich-mann himself congratulated us."

"You met him, did you?" I said.

"Yes" said Arpad, "and I'm sorry I didn't know at the time how important he was."

"Why?" I said.

"I would have killed him," said Arpad.

Chapter Four - Leather Straps...

Bernard Mengel, a Polish Jew who guards me from midnight until six in the morning, is also a man

my age. He once saved his own life in the Second World War by playing so dead that a German

soldier pulled out three of his teeth without suspecting that Mengel was not a corpse.

The soldier wanted Mengel's three gold inlays. He got them.

Mengel tells me that I sleep very noisily here in jail, tossing and talking all night

"You are the only man I ever heard of," Mengel said to me this morning, "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."

"What makes you think I have a bad conscience?" I said.

"The way you sleep, the way you dream," he said. "Even Hoess did not sleep like that. He slept

like a saint, right up to the end."

Mengel was speaking of Rudolf Franz Hoess, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

In his tender care, literally millions of Jews were gassed. Mengel knew a little about Hoess.

Before emigrating to Israel in 1947, Mengel helped to hang Hoess.

And he didn't do it with testimony, either. He did it with his two big hands. "When Hoess was

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hanged," he told me, "the strap around his ankles, I put that on and made it tight"

"Did that give you a lot of satisfaction?" I said.

"No," he said, "I was like almost everybody who came through that war." "What do you mean?" I

said. "I got so I couldn't feel anything," said Mengel. "Every job was a job to do, and no job was

any better or any worse than any other."

"After we finished hanging Hoess," Mengel said to me, "I packed up my clothes to go home. The

catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice within an

hour I did the very same job, once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the

same."

Chapter Five - "Last Full Measure..."

I, too, knew Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Ausch-witz. I met him at a New Year's Eve party in Warsaw

during the war, the start of 1944.

Hoess heard that I was a writer, and he got me to one side at the party, and he said he wished he

could write.

"How I envy you creative people" he said to me. "Creativity is a gift from the gods."

Hoess said he had some marvelous stories to tell. He said they were all true, but that people

wouldn't be able to believe them.

Hoess could not tell me the stories, he said, until the war was won. After the war, he said, we

might collaborate.

"I can talk it," he said, "but I can't write it." He looked to me for pity. "When I sit down to

write," he said, "I freeze." What was I doing in Warsaw? I had been ordered there by my boss,

Reichsleiter Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Head of the German Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and

Propaganda. I had a certain amount of skill as a dramatist, and Dr. Goebbels wanted me to use it.

Dr. Goebbels wanted me to write a pageant honoring the German soldiers who had given their last

full measure of devotion, who had died, that is, in putting down the uprising of the Jews in the

Warsaw Ghetto.

Dr. Goebbels had a dream of producing the pageant annually in Warsaw after the war, of letting the

ruins of the ghetto stand forever as a setting for it. "There would be Jews in the pageant?" I

asked him. "Certainly" he said, "thousands of them."

"May I ask, sir," I said, "where you expect to find any Jews after the war?"

He saw the humor in this. "A very good question," he said, chuckling. "Well have to take that up

with Hoess," he said.

"With whom?" I said. I hadn't yet been to Warsaw, hadn't yet met with brother Hoess.

"He's running a little health resort for Jews in Poland," said Goebbels. "We must be sure to ask

him to save us some."

Can the writing of this ghastly pageant be added to the list of my war crimes? No, thank God. It

never got much beyond having a working tide, which was: "Last Pull Measure."

I am willing to admit, however, that I probably would have written it if there had been enough

time, if my superiors had put enough pressure on me.

Actually, I am willing to admit almost anything.

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About this pageant: it had one peculiar result it brought the Gettysburg Address of Abraham

Lincoln to the attention of Goebbels, and then to the attention of Hitler himself.

Goebbels asked me where I'd gotten the working title, so I made a translation for him of the

entire Gettysburg Address.

He read it, his lips moving all the time. "You know," he said to me, "this is a very fine piece of

propaganda. We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are."

"It's a very famous speech in my native land," I said. "Every schoolchild has to learn it by

heart."

"Do you miss America?" he said.

"I miss the mountains, the rivers, the broad plains, the forests," I said. "But I could never be

happy with the Jews in charge of everything."

"They will be taken care of in due time," he said.

"I live for that day my wife and I will Scar that day," I said.

"How is your wife?" he said.

"Blooming, thank you," I said.

"A beautiful woman," he said.

"I'll tell her you said so," I said. "It will please her immensely."

"About the speech by Abraham Lincoln" he said.

"Sir ?" I said.

"There are phrases in here that might be used most impressively in dedications of German military

cemeteries," he said. "I haven't been happy at all, frankly, with most of our funeral oratory.

This seems to have the extra dimension I've been looking for. I'd like very much to send this to

Hitler."

"Whatever you say, sir," I said.

"Lincoln wasn't a Jew, was he?" he said.

"I'm sure not," I said.

It would be very embarrassing to me if he turned out to be one," he said.

"I've never heard anyone suggest that he was," I said.

"The name Abraham is very suspicious, to say the least," said Goebbels.

"I'm sure his parents didn't realize that it was a Jewish name," I said. "They must have just

liked the sound of it. They were simple frontier people. If they'd known the name was Jewish, I'm

sure they would have called him something more American, like George or Stanley or Fred."

Two weeks later, the Gettysburg Address came back from Hitler. There was a note from der Fuehrer

himself stapled to the top of it. "Some parts of this," he wrote, "almost made me weep. All

northern peoples are one in their deep feelings for soldiers. It is perhaps our greatest bond."

Strange I never dream of Hitler or Goebbels or Hoess or Goering or any of the other nightmare

people of the world war numbered "two." I dream of women, instead.

I asked Bernard Mengel, the guard who watches over me while I sleep here in Jerusalem, if he had

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Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

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