Mother Night is a novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1961. The title of the book is taken from Goethe's Faust. It is the fictional story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American, who moved to Germany immediately after World War I and then later became alternately a well-known playwright and a Nazi propagandist. The action of the novel is narrated by Campbell himself. The premise is that he is writing his memoirs while awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison. Howard W. Campbell also appears briefly in Vonnegut's later novel Slaughterhouse-Five. During the Nazi... build-up after Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, Campbell decides to stay on in Germany despite his parents' decision to leave. He continues to write plays, his only associations being with members of the ruling Nazi party as his social contacts. Being of sufficiently Aryan parentage, Campbell becomes a member of the Nazis in name only. He is politically apathetic, caring only for his art and his wife Helga, who is also the starring actress in all of his plays. The first part of the book ends after Campbell has an encounter on a park bench in the Berlin Zoo.
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| Author: | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Genre: | Novel, Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative fiction |
| Year published: | 1961 |
| Number of editions: | 18 |