Mother Night

7: Autobiography ...

I, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was born in Schenectady, New York, on February 16, 1912. My father, who was raised in Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister, was an engineer in the Service Engineering Department of the General Electric Company.

The mission of the Service Engineering Department was to install, maintain and repair General Electric heavy equipment sold anywhere in the world. My father, whose assignments were at first only in the United States, was rarely home. And his job demanded such varied forms of technical cleverness of him that he had scant time and imagination left over for anything else. The man was the job and the job was the man.

The only nontechnical book I ever saw him look at was a picture history of the First World War. It was a big book, with pictures a foot high and a foot-and-a-half wide. My father never seemed to tire of looking at the book, though he hadn't been in the war.

He never told me what the book meant to him, and I never asked him. All he ever said to me about it was that it wasn't for children, that I wasn't to look at it

So, of course, I looked at it every time I was left alone. There were pictures of men hung on barbed wire, mutilated women, bodies stacked like cord-wood — all the usual furniture of world wars.

My mother was the former Virginia Crocker, the daughter of a portrait photographer from Indianapolis. She was a housewife and an amateur cellist. She played cello with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra, and she once had dreams of my playing the cello, too.

I failed as a cellist because I, like my father, am tone-deaf.

I had no brothers and sisters, and my father was seldom home. So I was for many years the principal companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was drunk most of the time. I remember a time when she filled a saucer with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and table salt. She put the saucer on the kitchen table, turned out all the lights, and had me sit facing her across the table.

And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her.

'There — ' she said, 'that's what well look like when we're dead.'

This queer demonstration not only scared me; it scared her, too. My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. From that moment on she hardly spoke to me — cut me dead, I'm sure, out of fear of doing or saying something even crazier.

All that happened in Schenectady, before I was ten.

In 1923, when I was eleven, my father was assigned to the General Electric Office in Berlin, Germany. From then on, my education, my friends, and my principal language were German.

I eventually became a playwright in the German language, and I took a German wife, the actress Helga Noth. Helga Noth was the elder of the two daughters of Werner Noth, the Chief of Police of Berlin.

My father and mother left Germany in 1939, when war came.

My wife and I stayed on.

I earned my keep until the war ended in 1945 as a writer and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the English-speaking world. I was the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

When the war was ending, I was high on the list of war criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public.

I was captured by one Lieutenant Bernard B. O'Hare of the American Third Army near Hersfeld on April 12, 1945. I was on a motorcycle, unarmed. While entitled to a uniform, a blue and gold one, I was not wearing it. I was in mufti, in a blue serge suit and a moth-eaten coat with a fur collar.

As it happened, the Third Army had overrun Ohrdruf, the first Nazi death camp the Americans were to see, two days before. I was taken there, was forced to look at it all — the lime pits, the gallows, the whipping posts — at the gutted and scabby, bug-eyed, spavined dead in heaps.

The idea was to show me the consequences of what I had done.

The Ohrdruf gallows were capable of hanging six at a time. When I saw them, there was a dead camp guard at the end of each rope.

And it was expected that I would hang soon, too.

I expected it myself, and I took an interest in the peace of the six guards at the ends of their ropes.

They had died fast.

My photograph was taken while I looked up at the gallows. Lieutenant O'Hare was standing behind me, lean as a young wolf, as full of hatred as a rattlesnake.

The picture was on the cover of Life, and came close to winning a Pulitzer Prize.