Earlier this year, I constructed a fascism in literature syllabus which included Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (1962) amongst a long list of other texts. As with most of these mock syllabi, I add texts that I have not read before. Well, the other day I walked into the stacks at my library and pulled Mother Night off the shelf. I literally devoured the novel in less than a day, becoming both infuriated and captivated by Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s confessions as he sits in a jail cell in Jerusalem awaiting trial for his role in the Holocaust as the “Tokyo Rose” of Nazi Germany. My frustration arose, specifically, from Campbell’s own unreliable narration, which is a large part of the novel because he is a German-American who married a German woman who becomes a double-agent, working for the American government, as he rises through the ranks of the Nazi party. This conflation of “facts” makes it difficult for Campbell, himself, to know what is reality and what is actually fiction.

The uncertainty of reality and fiction lies at the hear of Mother Night, as Vonnegut himself puts it in the introduction. Vonnegut states that the moral of Mother Night lies at the intersection of the real and the fictional. “We are what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut says, “so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” Over the course of Mother Night, Campbell keeps telling himself that the antisemitism and propaganda he broadcast over the airwaves in support of Nazi Germany do not represent him, even when members of the fascist Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution embrace him and play back his own words at a memorial service for August Krapptauer. Campbell continually tells himself, and us, of his innocence, even when he speaks with Adolf Eichmann while both sit in jail cells in Israel.

We understand that Campbell, like Rudolf Höss, Eichmann, and others who wrote “confessions” after their capture, wants us to feel, at some level, sympathy for him as an artist who, before the war, had a career as a playwright. Even though he wants us to feel this way, he also acknowledges, at multiple points in his confessions, of his role in indoctrinating the populace, specifically how his words influenced children. When he was hiding from Israeli forces who wanted to extradite him from New York to Israel, Campbell hid with the leaders of the Iron Guard. As he sat in the basement hideout, he thought about the ways others viewed his broadcasts.

He tells us that Israel wanted to put on him on trial as an “educational” exercise for the populace, “teaching that a propagandist of [his] sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.” Campbell ignores this argument, switching immediately to a defense that sounds all too familiar even in this day and age. He writes, “I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!” Campbell sees his role of spewing hate as a game, as a sort of ludicrous grift to better himself. He admits, too, that this position worked so well because people “wanted” to believe what he had to say. They were, from various avenues, primed for it.

Campbell understood the role that parents and educators have in indoctrinating individuals. In the radio broadcast that the Iron Guard played at Krapptauer’s memorial, Campbell directly addresses the parents on US servicemembers. He plays on antiemetic tropes, saying, “You folks at home, you parents and relatives of boys at the front — I want you to think about the Jews you know.” Then, he goes into a diatribe about the war making Jews richer while impoverishing everyone else. He tells the “parents” that while they may receive news of their child’s death that they need to ask themselves if they “know of a single Jewish family that has received a telegram from Washington” with the same news.

Most of the Iron Guard joined up because of the fears their parents taught them. They bought into the antisemitism and hate, letting it seep into their very being. As kids, they could not understand, just as Franz-Karl could not completely understand, what their parents taught them. When the FBI raided the Iron Guard, the members, drenched in “[t]he paranoia their parents had been inculcating for years” saw the moment as the fulfillment of the persecution narrative they had imbibed from their parents, from Campbell, and from others.

At the end of the novel, Campbell opens some main in his cell in Israel. One of the letters is a promotional letter from Creative Playthings asking him, as an “educator” to think about using their products to help kids learn at home, not just at school. They say that kids spend about 25 waking hours per week” with teachers and “45 hours” at home with parents and other caregivers. Campbell replies to the company telling them that those students in his classroom “are not likely to lose their keen edge” outside of the classroom, and he continues by stating that “[t]hey are spying on real grownups all of the time, learning what they fight about, what they’re greedy for, how they satisfy their greed, why and how they lie, what makes them go crazy, the different ways they go crazy, and so on.” Campbell emphasizes that kids learn from adults and those in authority, and he used that link in his own rhetoric to inculcate individuals.

While he did not commit “overt” acts such as Höss, Eichmann, Heydrich, Himmler, or others, he did commit acts through his rhetoric and the influence of his rhetoric. Speaking with Eichmann in jail, the man who killed, through his actions, six million Jews, tells Campbell that he “could spare” a few of the six million for his own confessions. Campbell asserts that Eichmann may have done this because, as he says, “Eichmann wanted me to recognize that I had killed a lot of people, too, by the exercise of my fat mouth.” However, Campbell doesn’t think this. Instead, he thinks that Eichmann would not “spare” any because in doing so “Eichmann’s idea of Eichmann would disappear.” His reality would fracture.

Vonnegut’s Mother Night contains so much that I cannot even scratch the surface here, but what really stood out to me were these discussions of the ways that rhetoric leads to violence. This stood out because Campbell admits, possibly for sympathy, that he said the things he said trying to shock and be ludicrous. Yet, even though he “thought” his comments were absurd, listeners bought into them because they were primed to do so. His words greased the wheels, making the gears turn, as he discusses in the novel. He did not pull a trigger, gas people, or more, but his words did that. They had a part in the violence, in the murder. He tries to convince us otherwise, that he was merely a spy for the United States, but that falls flat. He becomes, as Vonnegut points out, who he pretends to be.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.