Teacher Scholar Tuesday

This talk focuses specifically on Mother Night, Vonnegut’s 3rd novel, published in 1961. Presented as the prison confessions of an American-born Nazi propagandist during World War II, the book offers a complex exploration of the shadowy, indistinct line separating good and evil during wartime.  I’m especially interested in the previously unexplored real-life underpinnings of the novel—the rise of American Fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s.  We’ll briefly examine figures such as the American-born, Irish-raised Nazi propagandist known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” who broadcast pro-German and anti-Semitic radio rants to British citizens; William Dudley Pelley, an American admirer of Hitler who founded the white supremacist youth group, The Silver Shirts; German-American Bund leader August Klapprott, often credited with uniting the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan; and Sufi Abdul Hamid, a mystical Harlem street preacher and labor organized, styled “The Black Hitler of Harlem.” I argue that Vonnegut’s novel, while seemingly cartoonish and exaggerated in many ways, actually engages deeply and meaningfully with American history, exposing the bona fide danger of a virulently fascist and white supremacist underbelly in America that did not disappear with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945.