Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut waited a long time to write about World War II. Upon returning from his service in the war, he intended to write a war book immediately. He hoped to compete with war novels of the immediate post-war period, such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948). But Vonnegut was unable to approach the subject in a manner that appealed to him, and he would write two books, Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), neither of which featured the war, before finally writing in a substantial way about the effects of World War II in Mother Night.

In writing Mother Night, Vonnegut drew not only from his experience in the war itself but also from his early life in the large German immigrant community of Indianapolis in the 1930s, where he was unsettled by the growth of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that dedicated itself in the interwar periods to establishing fascist training camps and to openly supporting Hitler. In his Introduction to Mother Night, Vonnegut labels them “vile and lively native American Fascists” (v). This would have given Vonnegut first-hand experiences with the American fascists and white supremacists he portrays in the novel, making him all too aware of the unchecked and righteous hate he depicts as a central evil in the novel.