Mother Night

Mother Night is a novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut, first published in February 1962. It takes the form of the fictional memoirs of Howard W. Campbell Jr, an American who moved to Germany as a boy, became a well-known playwright and later broadcast Nazi propaganda.

Campbell's account is that he was working for American intelligence while making those broadcasts, which means his crimes and his service are the same acts. The novel is written from a cell in Israel, where he is waiting to be tried, and it moves back through the people he knew: his wife, his father-in-law, the German officer who recruited him and the Americans who used him.

Vonnegut published the book early in his career and gave it a moral in his introduction, that people should be careful what they pretend to be, because they become it. It is one of his darker novels, it is often read with his war writing, and that moral is the reason it is quoted so often, along with the dry voice of a man who has stopped expecting to be believed.