‘Mother Night’, evil, and punching Nazis
Mother Night is Kurt Vonnegut’s third novel, and is distinguished from his first two by its use of simple, plainspoken prose: a style that, as many American high-school students would later appreciate, is replicated in his most well-known book, Slaughterhouse Five.
As is typically the case for Vonnegut, however, prosaic language is used to express deep subjects. Like many of his works, Mother Night is a story whose plot provides insightful commentaries on the human condition. It’s a testament to Vonnegut’s imaginative mind that he can rely on the details of the story, rather than sheer eloquence, to delve into our psychology in an engaging and memorable way.
One of the themes explored in Mother Night pertains to the nature of evil, and is nicely encapsulated in a single dramatic scene that occurs towards the end of the book. Like all great lessons from literature, it stands as a prescient commentary on our current age. Specifically, it can help us make sense of a particular moment in social media politics that’s summarized by the question: “is it OK to punch a Nazi?”
Mother Night is narrated as the memoir of Howard Campbell Jr, an American double-agent who’s been imprisoned in Israel. Having moved to Germany as a young boy, Campbell becomes a successful playwright and earns the respect of prominent Nazi figures. Shortly afterwards, he’s recruited by the United States government to work as a spy during World War II. Over the course of the war, he conveys secret messages in the seemingly random pauses, throat-clears, and inflections of virulent anti-Semetic speeches addressed to the German publc.
After establishing himself as the foremost propagandist in Nazi Germany, Campbell is captured by a soldier named Bernard O’Hare and is taken back to America. Although his status as a spy earns him his freedom, the world still percieves him as a Nazi collaberator and a traitor to his country. He leads a quiet existence in a small New York apartment until his whereabouts become known and he’s forced to leave.
Like so many characters in Vonnegut’s stories, Campbell is buffeted around by the winds of fate, tracing the kind of compelling narrative arc characteristic of world-class storytelling. Amidst these slings and arrows, the question that keeps recurring concerns the extent of Campbell’s culpability. His role as a spy notwithstanding, is he still a criminal for the hatred and visciousness that he inadvertently inspired among his Nazi compatriots? To what extent can we judge a person based on their intentions versus the consequences of their actions?
But another equally important theme of the novel involves not the degree of Campbell’s culpability, but rather, society’s reaction to Campbell’s actions. This idea is brought up in chapter 43, which comes towards the end of the book. A beleagued Campbell returns to his apartment, which has since been completely ransacked, stripped even of its light-bulbs. There, he encounters a familiar face: O’Hare, the soldier who first captured him, plastered and belligerent.
We come to learn about O’Hare’s life since the war in this pitiful soliloquy:
“When the war ended, I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks. I was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter … There wasn’t anything I couldn’t be. And then I got married, and the wife started having kids right away, and I opened a damn diaper service with a buddy, and the buddy ran off with the money, and the wife kept having kids. After the diaper service it was Venetian blinds, and after the Venetian-blind business went bust, it was frozen custard. And all the time the wife was having more kids, and the damn car breaking down, and bill-collectors coming around, and termites boiling out of the baseboards every spring and fall … And I asked myself: What does it mean? Where do I fit in? What’s the point of any of it?”
The story that Campbell weaves is a familiar one. Here is a man who once had big and noble dreams, and who has since become disappointed by the direction that his life has taken. His disillusionment leads him to question the purpose of his life — until, as he tells us:
“And then somebody sent me a copy of that newspaper with the story of how you were still alive. And then it hit me … Why I was alive, and what the main thing I was supposed to do …”
Here, we begin to understand the true context of this encounter, and the signficance it holds in O’Hare’s life. He exchanges the following words with Campbell:
“Do you know what you are to me, Campbell?” He said
“No,” I said.
“You’re pure evil,” he said, “You’re absolutely pure evil.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re right — it is a kind of compliment,” he said. “Usually a bad man’s got some good in him — almost as much good as evil. But you — ” he said, “you’re the pure thing. For all the good there is in you, you might as well be the Devil.”
O’Hare has been hiding out in Campbell’s apartment, waiting to tear apart the ‘Devil’ in the off-chance that he returns to his former residence. It’s clear that the thought of destroying Campbell has become some kind of form of redemption for O’Hare, who can find little else in his life to become excited about or to take pride in.
As it happens, Campbell beats O’Hare in combat, wielding a nearby fire-tong to break his arm. Then, in what could be considered the climax of the story, he proclaims to his attacker:
“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either! Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve! That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves. There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It’s that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”
Campbell’s point is a profound one. He’s spent the whole story so far mulling over the question of his own culpability. But in this crucial moment, he redirects his attention to society at large, symbolized by an attacker who so desperately wants to see him as the pure incarnation of evil. Regardless of how guilty Campbell is of his actions, the idea that he can be fashioned into the figure of evil itself is overly simplistic, self-defeating, and ultimately, the greatest manifestation of evil itself.
A central message of Mother Night, then, is that we should be weary of attempts to anthropomorphize evil, and limit our tendency to direct unbridled hate and anger at some externalized form of it. Evil is not a person — if only it were that simple! — but rather, in the words of a Soviet dissident, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” And it’s this nuanced perspective that will lead to real change and moral goodness.
In this sense, Mother Night is the perfect antithesis to Inglorious Basterds. Whereas Quentin Tarantino treats us to epic scenes of the roating and skull-crushing of Nazis at the hands of Jewish commandos — borderline psychopathic exploits that we’re nonetheless inclined to forgive due to the notoriety of the victims — Vonnegut refuses to indulge us in this way. Indeed, he transforms what at first appears to be a very noble act — the planned murder of someone who is for all intents and purposes guilty of Nazi war-crimes— into the sad, last recourse of a failure.
In other words: whereas Tarantino pacifies our innate repudiation of violence by directing it against figures of pure evil, Vonnegut makes us question the notion of pure evil and thereby deconstructs a violent encounter into its lurid, pathetic, and decidedly human parts.
If you visit the e-commerce website Etsy, which specializes in handmade art and craft supplies, you’ll find that searching the phrase ‘punch Nazis’ will yeild hundreds of results for products that encourage a pugilistic attitude towards the peddlers of National Socialism:
These products, which range from cross-stitchings and mugs to a floral shirt that reads “laugh a lot, love often, and punch every fucking Nazi you see”, have probably been sold to tens of thousands of people based on their number of reviews. Visitors to the site, it seems, can’t get enough of this oddly specific message.
What’s going on here? The idea of ‘punching a Nazi’ was a political meme that took social media by storm in 2017. It all began when Richard Spencer, a self-professed white nationalist, was assaulted by a masked vigilante while giving a public interview. The incident occured on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, at a time when the American public was growing increasingly cautious of populist and racist rhetoric. Such a brazen act of violence against a figure who represented this rising threat became something of a guilty pleasure.
From then on, the idea of ‘punching Nazis’ came to represent an important moral question: when is violence a legitimate tool in the fight against dangerous ideas?
Etsy is an online community that leans towards the political left, and as the search results we saw earlier imply, many enthusiastically took the side of ‘punching a Nazi’. The political agendas of alt-right leaders like Spencer were considered dangerous and potentially destabilizing enough to warrant the use of violence. To this day, the website CanIPunchNazis.com is an enduring reminder of this widespread opinion.
One counterargument against this position warned against the possibility of ‘category creep’: the idea that, once violence against Nazis was permitted, the definition of ‘Nazi’ would become more inclusive over time. In effect, the slogan would become abused by referring to any political figures who the speaker opposes.
Although category creep is a pernicious problem, there’s a better argument to be made against the idea of punching Nazis, and it’s essentially the same one that Vonnegut presents us in Mother Night. Implicit in the idea that it’s acceptable to punch a Nazi is an assumption that the Nazi, like any villain in a Tarantino movie, is an absolute representation of evil, against whom violence becomes not only acceptable but encouraged.
In the formula ‘punch a Nazi’ we find exactly the same spontaneous tendency which Vonnegut identifies and warns us against in Mother Night. The term ‘Nazi’ here isn’t acting as a rigid designator, signifying a specific group of people, but stands rather for an absolute incarnation of evil.
As Vonnegut says, the impulse to fight against pure evil is a part of ourselves that wants to hate with “God on its side”. Of course, there aren’t any religious undertones involved in this specific case. Still, one does sense a recourse to something transcendent in the moralizing position of the left, which can roughly be described as being on the ‘right side of history’. There isn’t a deity involved, but the emotions invoked by this ‘progressive spirit’ are reminiscent of religious fervor.
We should resist all of these things: incarnating evil, percieving ourselves as being on the right side of history, and punching Nazis. Any perspective which simplifies the world into good and evil characters should be recognized as a dangerous form of dualism, one of many ways in which think in absolutes mars our best intentions.
Progress won’t come when good vanquishes evil. Progress will come when evil is joined in dialogue with the good, so that our best nature can make a free choice away from the former and towards the latter.
In his fictional world, Vonnegut doesn’t let a veteran kill an apparent Nazi. Taking our cue from him, we shouldn’t let ourselves punch one, either.
