Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

West Germany asked the Government of the United States politely if I might be a citizen of theirs. They had no proof one way or another, since all records pertaining to me had burned during the war. If I was a citizen of theirs, they said, they would be as pleased as Israel to have me for trial.

If I was a German, they said in effect, they were certainly ashamed of a German like me.

Soviet Russia, in short words that sounded like ball bearings being dropped into wet gravel, said that no trial was necessary. A Fascist like me, they said, should be squashed underfoot like a cockroach.

But it was the anger of my neighbors that really stank of sudden death. The more barbaric newspapers printed without comment letters from people who wanted me displayed from coast to coast in an iron cage; from heroes who volunteered to serve in a firing squad for me, as though the use of small arms were a skill known to few; from people who planned to do nothing themselves, but were confident enough in American civilization to know that there were other, stronger, younger people who would know what to do.

And these last-named patriots were right in having confidence. I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it

According to the newspapers and radio, justifiably angry people had already done what they could about me, breaking into my ratty attic, smashing my windows, tearing up or carting off my worldly goods. The hated attic was now under police guard around the clock.

The New York Post pointed out editorially that the police could scarcely give me the protection I needed, since my enemies were so numerous and so understandably murderous. What was called for, said the Post helplessly, was a battalion of Marines to surround me for the rest of my days.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

The News, incidentally, also printed a letter from Bernard B, O'Hare, the man who had captured me in Germany, the man who had recently written me a letter with copious carbons.

'I want this guy all for myself,' O'Hare wrote of me. 'I deserve this guy all for myself. I was the guy who caught him in Germany. If I'd known then he was going to get away, I would have blown his head off right then and there. If anybody sees Campbell before I do, tell him Bernie O'Hare is on his way from Boston by nonstop plane.'

The New York Times said that tolerating and even protecting vermin like me was one of the maddening necessities in the life of a truly free society.

The United States Government, as Resi had told me, was not going to turn me over to the Republic of Israel. There was no legal machinery for that.

The United States Government did promise, however, to make a full and open review of my pulling case, to find out exactly what my citizenship status was, to find out why I had never even been brought to trial.

That Government expressed queasy surprise that I was even within its borders.

The New York Times published a portrait of me as a much younger man, my official portrait as a Nazi and idol of the international airwaves. I can only guess at the year in which the picture was taken, 1941, I think.

Arndt Klopfer, the photographer who took the picture of me, did his best to make me look like a Maxfield Parrish Jesus covered with cold cream. He even gave me a halo, a judiciously placed spot of nebulous light in the background. The halo was no special effect for me alone. Everybody who went to Klopfer got a halo, including Adolf Eichmann.

I can say that for certain about Eichmann, without asking for confirmation from the Haifa Institute, because Eichmann had his picture taken just ahead of me at Klopfer's studio. It was the only time I ever met Eichmann — the only time in Germany. I met him again here in Israel — only two weeks ago, when I was incarcerated briefly in Tel Aviv.

About that reunion: I was locked up in Tel Aviv for twenty-four hours. On my way to my cell there, the guards stopped me outside Eichmann's cell to hear what we had to say to each other, if anything.

We didn't recognize each other, and the guards had to introduce us.

Eichmann was writing the story of his life, just as I am now writing the story of my life. That chinless old plucked buzzard, with six million murders to explain away, gave me a saintly smile. He was sweetly interested in his work, in me, in the guards in the prison, in everybody.

He beamed at me, and he said, 'I'm not mad at anybody.'

'That's certainly the way to be,' I said.

'I've got some advice for you,' he said.

'I'd be glad to have it,' I said.

'Relax,' he said, beaming, beaming, beaming. 'Just relax.'

'That's how I got here,' I said.

'Life is divided up into phases,' he said. 'Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That's the secret of successful living.'

'It's good of you to share the secret with me,' I said.

'I'm a writer now,' he said. 'I never thought I'd be a writer.'

'May I ask a personal question?' I said.

'Certainly,' he said benignly. 'That's the phase I'm in now. This is the time for thinking and answering. Ask whatever you like.'

'Do you feel that you're guilty of murdering six million Jews?' I said.

'Absolutely not,' said the architect of Auschwitz, the introducer of conveyor belts into crematoria, the greatest customer in the world for the gas called Cyklon-B.

Not knowing the man for sure, I tried some intramural satire on him, what seemed to me to be intramural satire. 'You were simply a soldier, were you — ' I said, 'taking orders from higher-ups, like soldiers around the world?'

Eichmann turned to a guard, and talked to him in rapid-fire Yiddish, indignant Yiddish. If he'd spoken it slowly, I would have understood it, but he spoke too fast.

'What did he say?' I asked the guard.

'He wondered if we'd showed you his statement,' said the guard. 'He made us promise not to show it to anybody until it was done.'

'I haven't seen it,' I said to Eichmann.

'Then how do you know what my defense is going to be?' he said.

This man actually believed that he had invented his own trite defense, though a whole nation of ninety some-odd million had made the same defense before him. Such was his paltry understanding of the Godlike human act of invention.

The more I think about Eichmann and me, the more I think that he should be sent to the hospital, and that I am the sort of person for whom punishments by fair, just men were devised.

As a friend of the court that will try Eichmann, I offer my opinion that Eichmann cannot distinguish between right and wrong — that not only right and wrong, but truth and falsehood, hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, comedy and tragedy, are all processed by Eichmann's mind indiscriminately, like birdshot through a bugle.

My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.

If there is another me after this one, I would like very much, in the next one, to be the sort of person of whom it could truly be said, 'Forgive him — he knows not what he does.'

This cannot be said of me now.

The only advantage to me of knowing the difference between right and wrong, as nearly as I can tell, is that I can sometimes laugh when the Eichmanns can see nothing funny,

'You still write?' Eichmann asked me, there in Tel Aviv.

'One last project — ' I said, 'a command performance for the archives.'