Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

A Man Without a Country

Armageddon in Retrospect

Bagombo Snuff Box

Between Time and Timbuktu

Bluebeard

Breakfast of Champions

Canary in a Cat House

Cats Cradle

Deadeye Dick

Fates Worse Than Death

Galapagos

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Hocus Pocus

Jailbird

Like Shaking Hands with God (with Lee Stringer)

Mother Night

Palm Sunday

Player Piano

The Sirens of Titan

Slapstick

Slaughterhouse-Five

Timequake

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

Welcome to the Monkey House

M Y NAME is Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination.

The year in which I write this book is 1961.

I address this book of mine to Mr. Tuvia Friedmann, Director of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals, and to whomever else this may concern.

Why should this book interest Mr. Friedmann?

Because it is written by a man suspected of being a war criminal. Mr. Friedmann is a specialist in such persons. He had expressed an eagerness to have any writings I might care to add to his archives of Nazi villainy. He is so eager as to give me a typewriter, free stenographic service, and the use of research assistants, who will run down any facts I may need in order to make my account complete and accurate.

I am behind bars.

I am behind bars in a nice new jail in old Jerusalem.

I am awaiting a fair trial for my war crimes by the Republic of Israel.

It is a curious typewriter Mr. Friedmann has given to meand an appropriate typewriter, too. It is a typewriter that was obviously made in Germany during the Second World War. How can I tell? Quite simply, for it puts at finger tips a symbol that was never used on a typewriter before the Third German Reich, a symbol that will never be used on a typewriter again.

The symbol is the twin lightning strokes used for the dreaded S.S., the Schutzstaffel, the most fanatical wing of Nazism.

I used such a typewriter in Germany all through the war. Whenever I had occasion to write of the Schutzstaffel, which I did often and with enthusiasm, I never abbreviated it as S.S., but always struck the typewriter key for the far more frightening and magical twin lightning strokes.

Ancient history.

I am surrounded by ancient history. Though the jail in which I rot is new, some of the stones in it, Im told, were cut in the time of King Solomon.

And sometimes, when I look out through my cell window at the gay and brassy youth of the infant Republic of Israel, I feel that I and my war crimes are as ancient as Solomons old gray stones.

How long ago that war, that Second World War, was! How long ago the crimes in it!

How nearly forgotten it is, even by the Jewsthe young Jews, that is.

One of the Jews who guards me here knows nothing about that war. He is not interested. His name is Arnold Marx. He has very red hair. He is only eighteen, which means Arnold was three when Hitler died, and nonexistent when my career as a war criminal began.

He guards me from six in the morning until noon.

Arnold was born in Israel. He has never been outside of Israel.

His mother and father left Germany in the early thirties. His grandfather, he told me, won an Iron Cross in the First World War.

Arnold is studying to be a lawyer. The avocation of Arnold and of his father, a gunsmith, is archaeology. Father and son spend most all their spare time excavating the ruins of Hazor. They do so under the direction of Yigael Yadin, who was Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army during the war with the Arab States.

So be it.

Hazor, Arnold tells me, was a Canaanite city in northern Palestine that existed at least nineteen hundred years before Christ. About fourteen hundred years before Christ, Arnold tells me, an Israelite army captured Hazor, killed all forty thousand inhabitants, and burned it down.

Solomon rebuilt the city, said Arnold, but in 732 B.C. Tiglath-pileser the Third burned it down again.

Who? I said.

Tiglath-pileser the Third, said Arnold. The Assyrian, he said, giving my memory a nudge.

Oh, I said. That Tiglath-pileser.

You act as though you never heard of him, said Arnold.

I never have, I said. I shrugged humbly. I guess thats pretty terrible.

Well said Arnold, giving me a schoolmasters frown, it seems to me he really is somebody everybody ought to know about. He was probably the most remarkable man the Assyrians ever produced.

Oh, I said.

Ill bring you a book about him, if you like, said Arnold.

Thats nice of you, I said. Maybe Ill get around to thinking about remarkable Assyrians later on. Right now my mind is pretty well occupied with remarkable Germans.

Like who? he said.

Oh, Ive been thinking a lot lately about my old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels, I said.

Arnold looked at me blankly. Who? he said.

And I felt the dust of the Holy Land creeping in to bury me, sensed how thick a dust-and-rubble blanket I would one day wear. I felt thirty or forty feet of ruined cities above me; beneath me some primitive kitchen middens, a temple or twoand then

Tiglath-pileser the Third.

T HE GUARD who relieves Arnold Marx at noon each day is a man nearly my own age, which is forty-eight. He remembers the war, all right, though he doesnt like to.

His name is Andor Gutman. Andor is a sleepy, not very bright Estonian Jew. He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there:

I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando, he said to me, when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down.

Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeedone composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains.

Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando.

Why? I asked him.

If you would write a book about that, he said, and give the answer to that question, that Why?you would have a very great book.

Do you know the answer? I said.

No, he said. That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it.

Any guesses? I said.

No, he said, looking me straight in the eye, even though I was one of the ones who volunteered.

He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me:

There were loudspeakers all over the camp, he said, and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good musicsometimes the best.

Thats interesting, I said.

There was no music by Jews, he said. That was forbidden.

Naturally, I said.

And the music was always stopping in the middle, he said, and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements.

Very modern, I said.

He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando.

Oh? I said.