Mother Night -- Vonnegut

MEPHISTOPHELES. Bescheidne Wahrheit sprech' ich dir. Wenn sich der Mensch, die kleine Narrenwelt Gewöhnlich für ein Ganzes hält; Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war, Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar, Das stolze Licht, das nun der Mutter Nacht Den alten Rang, den Raum ihr streitig macht; Goethe, Faust, Part I. I speak you the purest truth, As humankind takes upon itself, To call his little world of fools, Habitually, the whole of life itself. I am a part of the part, That was the beginning of all, Of Darkness, a part, That held Light in thrall, O'erweening Light, That now, Mother Night, The Highest Place, Savagely competes for Grace! One of Kurt Vonnegut's lesser known and shorter novels, but, one of my favorites, is "Mother Night", written in 1962, and probably inspired by a confutation of recent events, at the time. One was the abduction, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, administrator of the Death Camps, by Israeli Mossad in 1961. The other was the release of poet and "war criminal" Ezra Pound, from St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in 1958. In response, Vonnegut created a composite character, an American Nazi radio propagandist apparently, but, actually, a covert American spy, supposedly abducted like Eichmann by Israeli agents and put on trial in Israel, not from South America, but, from Greenich Village, NY. That premise is, actually, probably the funniest thing in the entire book! Vonnegut was undoubtedly satirizing the very concept of war criminals, a concept which he also satirizes in perhaps his most famous novel, also made into a famous film, Slaughterhouse Five, about the fire-bombing of Dresden, certainly the seminal influence of his life. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a anarcho-pacifist, a gentle loving man, who probably never hated anyone in his life, but was compelled to fight the Nazis during WWII, although his heart was probably not in it. Vonneguts's point is, most certainly, that there is no such thing as either pure evil or pure good, but, that everything is part of a greater whole that we may never thoroughly understand. Both Eichmann and Ezra Pound are excellent examples of this. In Eichmann's case, he certainly did incredible evil, but, there's no particular reason to suppose he actually realized this. He was personally responsible for a horrific killing machine that murdered millions of innocent people, but, from his point of view, this was simply a necessary procedure to ensure the success of the German Empire, and even humanity as a whole. The Nazis believed in euthanasia, not just for Jews, but for anyone not meeting a certain standard of aryan purity, including Gypsies, the mentally ill, the terminally ill, homosexuals, and any other races deemed "inferior". This is an extreme right-wing, conservative, fascist philosophy that has always been with us, to a greater or lesser extent, and still is. Ezra Pound to some extent shared this point of view, but as a poet, writer and theoretician, he never went as far as the Nazis did. He had lived in Italy for decades and had been making regular radio broadcasts for years that were primarily literary in nature, but, did contain elements of fascism and anti-semitism. To a large extent, he simply ignored the second world war, and just went on exactly as he had before, as if it really didn't matter to him, at all. He certainly wasn't particularly rooting for Hitler or Mussolini, he just was so arrogant and self-involved that he didn't realize how much danger he was in by broadcasting for the Italian fascists as an American national. The Italians actually thought he was an American spy, particularly since his broadcasts were not propagandistic in nature, and he wouldn't allow a syllable of them to be modified. They thought he might be broadcasting in some kind of code. As it happens he wasn't, apparently, so, the Americans kept him in a tiger cage in the desert for months after capturing at the end of the war, then put him on trial for his life for treason, and his insanity defense was accepted largely because it simply would have been too ridiculous to have executed him! Vonnegut, being Vonnegut, could see a certain parallel between Pound and Eichmann, and to Mephistopheles himself, and thought he would create a satirical confutation of these contemporary world events, to create an analysis of the nature of good and evil, to show that, actually, it is human society itself that has evil implicit in itself at all times. I think Goethe knew this too! #history #Goethe #Germany #wwii #writing #Vonnegut #philosophy