The paperbacked edition (ISBN 0385334141) is however around print as of 2004.

These are a story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., the United States playwright who is sleep in Germany at the instance of the Nazi seizure of power. Despite his political apathy, Campbell is recruited as an U.s. professional. He lives World War II working as a radio propagandist for the Nazi regime and utilizing his broadcasts to deliver coded messages (a contents of which he himself doesn't understand) to the Allies. When a war, his operate as a propagandist is largely forgotten & his act for the Usa remains secret; intrinsically, he sleep around isolation in New York City, until he surrenders voluntarily to Israel for trial. Throughout the book, Campbell grapples by having a possibility that he was unknowingly extra utile to a Nazis than to the United states of america, & the fact that his brilliance as an Allied professional was non altogether a matter of idealism: "The real reason was that I was a ham ... I would fool everyone with my brilliant impersonation of a Nazi".

Vonnegut utilizes metafiction devices to blur a line between pretence & reality; e.g., the book's dedication is to Mata Hari, and in a text you scroll through that the dedication is Campbell's: "She whored in the interests of espionage, and so did I." Likewise, Vonnegut's introduction treats Campbell's memoir as a echt historical document, & claims that certain chapters keep around been censored due to pornography or fears of libel.

Of these lesson of this story, every bit pointed retired by Vonnegut himself in a introduction, is too the source of his best known quote: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." An additional is "Make love when you can. It's good for you."

Howard W Campbell besides appears briefly inside Vonnegut's down the road novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Film adaptation
Mother Nighttime was mass produced into the film in 1996 by writer / producer Robert B. Weide; it was directed by Keith Gordon and starred Nick Nolte.

Based on datthe from a 1996 low locate Vonnegut said Weide "has been a friend for 15 years so I had a very good idea of what he would do and how well he understood the book. So I was right to trust him"; while asked all about a degree of artistic influence Vonnegut experienced got across a film, Vonnegut said "Almost none. Except my friendship with Weide — I would have kicked him in the balls if he did a bad job."

Miscellaneous

A title of the book is taken from either Goethe's Faust.