The late 1930s also saw US fascists publishing white supremacist newspapers, organizing youth groups modeled on Hitler’s Brownshirts, and running for office on the Christian Party ticket. While seemingly a small, niche organization, the Bund nevertheless drew 20,000 people to a 1939 fascist rally at Madison Square Garden and organized a large joint rally with the Ku Klux Klan in August of 1940. As part of a large, prominent, German immigrant community in Indianapolis, Vonnegut was troubled by the rise of the German American Bund in the 1930s, an organization that ran fascist training camps and openly supported Hitler. The pull to fascism in the US during the interwar period was stronger than many Americans remember. I argue that the novel, while seemingly cartoonish and exaggerated in many ways, actually engages deeply with American history, exposing the bona fide danger of a fascist and white supremacist underbelly in America that did not die out with the Second World War. My essay in JML 46.1 explores the neglected historical underpinnings of Mother Night, showing that the American Nazis depicted in the book derive from real-world figures that Vonnegut would have been familiar with, growing up in Indianapolis in the 1930s. There really was a self-styled Black Hitler of Harlem. Even Vonnegut scholars have focused heavily on the novel as farce, with one recent critic pointing out the patent absurdity of Nazis playing ping-pong and of the idea that there could be a Black Fuehrer of Harlem.īut my research shows that the novel is not as whimsical, absurd, or fantastical as critics have long thought. Many readers of the novel have made similar judgments, tending to see the American Nazis that Vonnegut depicts in the book as ludicrous caricatures that may diminish the seriousness of his intent. But Polish officials refused to allow his third book, 1962’s Mother Night, to be published in their country until as late as 1984, citing his “whimsical attitude toward the Nazis” (Jamosky and Klinkowitz 218). Kurt Vonnegut was a popular novelist in Poland, with nine of his books translated into Polish and widely available there in the 1970s and early 80s.
1, now a read-for-free feature on Project Muse. By Susan Farrell, author of “ American Fascism and the Historical Underpinnings of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night,” from Journal of Modern Literature, vol.
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