Mother Night

At the start of his career in Mother Night, Campbell is a young Romantic playwright who professes lofty ideals he may or may not believe, a characteristic exploited by Wirtanen and by Campbell himself. By the end of his life, he has become a realist about what he has done and the harm he has caused. Throughout most of the novel, Campbell is in the grips of his metaphorical “schizophrenia,” a splitting of self that allows him to keep a moral distance from the horrendous acts he commits. Through the process of writing his Confessions, Campbell finally faces his own moral reckoning. When Epstein’s grandmother mispronounces his name as Kahm-Boo, he understands that she has spoken his true, secret name and thus assigned to him his true moral identity—as one who has caused, or enabled, immense suffering. He accepts responsibility for his actions, finally acting to punish himself when the world seems unable to do so. In this sense, his death is less a suicide than the carrying out of a sentence that, in his view, should have been applied by the courts.

Much of the veracity of Campbell’s account can be questioned. He calls his writing of the account, “a command performance” (166) and he mentions, a few times, his “several selves” (184); it is never clear which self is the composer of the Confessions. The irony throughout the work, of course, is that as a person with ambiguous convictions, Campbell is surrounded by people with very definite convictions. This is due, primarily, to his own success as a performer. He maintains this split self even in jail, with his prison guard, Mengel, describing him as the “only man who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war” (15). Even the remorse he claims to feel, however, may be part of the performance. Even in jail, even while composing his memoirs, Campbell vacillates between acceptance and denial of his responsibility. In his encounter with Adolf Eichmann, though, he recognizes a fundamental difference: Like many who participated in the Nazi genocide, Eichmann convinced himself he was doing the right thing. Campbell claims that, unlike Eichmann, he knew what he was doing was wrong but did it anyway. One of the book’s lingering preoccupations is the question of whether knowing right from wrong, on its own, has any moral value.

During his recruitment with Wirtanen, Campbell gives a direct reason as to why he undertakes to become a Nazi: he is “a ham” (39) and wants to impress people with his impression of a Nazi. The entire thing, after years of being behind-the-scenes as playwright, is an excuse for Campbell to achieve his own fame. He succeeds in this goal, and he and he and Helga willingly bask in the adoration of Campbell’s German audience. This strikingly shallow motivation is also deeply embedded in Campbell’s character—Campbell’s evil may have different motivations than Eichmann’s, but those motivations are just as banal as his. Still, Campbell is not necessarily so callous as he claims to be. His catatonia in Chapter 40, in which he attempts to determine what is wrong with him, reveals another aspect of his carefully controlled psychology. He raises the possibility of feeling guilt, loss, heartbreak (231), and other crippling emotions, but in the same sentence states that he has taught himself not to feel the emotion. This portrays a rigorous system of repression that Campbell has fostered since becoming an American agent, and it suggests a dire mental landscape of suppressed humanity. Campbell never breaks down emotionally, nor does he experience a sudden, swinging change-of-heart that would readily explain his willingness to turn himself over to the Israeli authorities, but his doing so suggests a profound exhaustion with maintaining the façade he has always maintained.

His brief appearances in Slaughterhouse-Five—as author of a bombastic report on the behavior of American POWs and as a recruiter for his Free American Corps—confirm that he hanged himself while awaiting trial. His decision to die by suicide is not solely driven by his acceptance of moral responsibility, however, and, like so much else of Campbell’s life, complicates the portrait of the man. Before Campbell’s final act, suicide arises twice in the novel. The second occasion is Resi Noth’s suicide, which springs from her idealistic core and provides a counterpoint to Campbell’s own suicide. The first time suicide arrives, however, suggests a secondary motivation, beyond punishment, for Campbell’s death. In discussing Helga’s loss with Wirtanen, Campbell laments the opportunity he had to kill himself when Helga was lost, making for an aesthetic end to their love story. He doesn’t care for the act of suicide itself, but instead cares for “form” (185). As a writer, Campbell is used to synthesizing his lived experience into the structures of narrative, and he can’t help but regret the chance to tailor his life into an explicit narrative. This, in fact, is what he is doing in writing his Confessions, and his suicide provides a moral and physical resolution to the wider narrative of his life. But the reader, in full grasp of all these evidences, is left to question whether Campbell’s suicide is truly born of contrition or yet another, final performance.