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Nazi

Apocalypse Then | Elmer on Cat’s Cradle

Jonathan Elmer   Although it takes him six novels—until Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—to directly confront his personal trauma of surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, all of Vonnegut’s early work seems simultaneously to approach, and retreat from, the cataclysm of the Second World War. Maybe “directly” is not the right word, even for the apparently autobiographical Slaughterhouse; but certainly before Slaughterhouse, Vonnegut …

Facts I Can and Cannot Do Without: Vonnegut’s Mother Night and the American Totalitarian Mind | Comentale on Mother Night

Ed Comentale   Apparently, Kurt Vonnegut—beloved hippie hero of postmodern literature—almost became a Nazi. That’s what we learn, at least, in the first few surprising pages of Mother Night. Vonnegut opens his 1961 novel by describing the wealthy German Hoosier clan into which he was born. He recalls “the vile and lively native American fascists” he grew up with in …

The Banality of Irony | Harriss on Mother Night

Cooper Harriss   Mother Night finds Vonnegut back on terra firma, inhabiting the near past and present tense for the first time as he works out the vagaries of postwar life, coming to terms with virtue’s erosion and the illusion of innocence. Still, something is amiss. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about …

Campbell’s Confessions | Shapshay on Mother Night

Sandy Shapshay   Vonnegut’s first novel takes us into an automated, dystopian future; his second carries us deep into outer space; but Mother Night (1961), his third novel, brings us back to Earth and to the not-so-distant past. From the introduction we learn that Mother Night deals to some extent with what must have been the author’s own traumatic involvement …

Vonnegut v. WWII | Castronova on Mother Night

Ted Castronova   In Mother Night Vonnegut finally unleashes a long-held rage directly at its target: The Second World War. Many people see WWII as horrible because of what Germans did. They tend to overlook what Russians, English, and Americans did. Vonnegut can’t, because he was witness to what American and British bombs did to German civilians. As an American POW, …