Mother night kurt vonnegut9/12/2023 Campbell is writing the memoir for Mr Tuvia Friedmann, Director of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals.Thus, in what is effectively a series of fragments, we learn that: In Israel ![]() The memoir uses Vonnegut’s familiar approach of not giving a chronological approach to Campbell’s life, but ranging far and wide over his former life, to pick out key moments and scenes. Although we are not told till the end of the book how he ended up there, he is now in the custody of the Israeli authorities who are about to put him on trial for war crimes. ![]() Campbell Jr.’s main achievement in life was to become a traitor to his country and a war criminal by broadcasting hard core, anti-Semitic, anti-American Nazi propaganda from Berlin right till the end of the war. The text purports to be a memoir written in 1961 in prison in Israel where Campbell has recently been brought after living quietly in Greenwich Village, New York since the end of the war, because Howard W. The glamorous young couple find themselves invited to society parties and so meeting, among others, many of the leaders of the Nazi Party, notably Joseph Goebbels. (p.3)Īs he came of age in Nazi Germany (he turns 21 in 1933, the year Hitler comes to power) Campbell set out to make a living as a writer, producing so-so plays and poems throughout the 1930s and marrying a German wife, the actress Helga Noth, daughter of Berlin’s Chief of Police. I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination. The main text starts bluntly enough and very much in the tradition of much 19th century fiction: Just one of the numerous meta-fictional devices Vonnegut uses here and throughout his career. This is both designed to give hokey plausibility to the narrative’s provenance while drawing attention to its artificiality. The three-page introduction by Vonnegut uses the hokey old strategy of claiming that the author is merely presenting the authentic papers of a genuine historical figure, which he has edited and corrected in various detail. Campbell Jr., born 1912 (p.17) who goes to Germany in 1923, along with his family when his dad gets a job with the Berlin branch of General Electric (p.18) and so grows up fluent in German. ![]() Mother Night purports to be the memoirs of American Howard W. ‘People should be changed by world wars,’ I said, ‘else, what are world wars for?’ (p.86)
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