Summary
The story is told by Howard W. Campbell, a convicted Nazi propagandist, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison. He writes a type of memoir about his own life and experiences. Campbell grows up in Nazi Germany, becoming the “voice” of Goebbels’ Propaganda ministry. What the Nazis don’t know is that shortly before the war, Campbell had been contacted by an American spymaster. The speeches Campbell made were encoded with information for allied intelligence agencies. Thanks to this service, American intelligence agents allow him to escape Germany and live an anonymous life in New York. His past will continue to haunt him, and through a series of twists and coincidences, his will to live is crushed, which leads him to turn himself in to the Israeli authorities to stand trial for his crimes.
Thoughts
I enjoyed this book; it does a great job taking on identity and the parts we cast ourselves in. I’ve often been fascinated by the way in which people view dreams as communicating something about themselves to themselves. It’s as if we know something about ourselves but need to be asleep before we can hear it. This story is a parallel. Campbell has the justification of “really” being a double agent and therefore he is absolved of the weight of the things he said. Besides, the propaganda he wrote was so outlandish only simpletons would ever actually believe it. Unfortunately, this isn’t the full truth. Campbell comes to realize that he likely would have followed the same course of joining the party and becoming a propagandist because it was the direction he was already heading before being recruited by that spy master. The recruitment allowed him to play a double game in his own head.
We are slippery and Vonnegut communicates this well. It is difficult enough to predict how we will behave in a given situation, it’s even harder to know why we do what we do, and so we need stories. We need a throughline, a character to play. This is good while it lasts but has the tendency to stop working in a crisis.