Mother Night

1: Tiglath-pileser the Third ...

My name is Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination.

The year in which I write this book is 1961.

I address this book of mine to Mr. Tuvia Friedmann, Director of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals, and to whomever else this may concern.

Why should this book interest Mr. Friedmann?

Because it is written by a man suspected of being a war criminal. Mr. Friedmann is a specialist in such persons. He had expressed an eagerness to have any writings I might care to add to his archives of Nazi villainy. He is so eager as to give me a typewriter, free stenographic service, and the use of research assistants, who will run down any facts I may need in order to make my account complete and accurate.

I am behind bars.

I am behind bars in a nice new jail in old Jerusalem.

I am awaiting a fair trial for my war crimes by the Republic of Israel.

It is a curious typewriter Mr. Friedmann has given to me — and an appropriate typewriter, too. It is a typewriter that was obviously made in Germany during the Second World War. How can I tell? Quite simply, for it puts at finger tips a symbol that was never used on a typewriter before the Third German Reich, a symbol that will never be used on a typewriter again.

The symbol is the twin lightning strokes used for the dreaded S.S., the Schutzstaffel the most fanatical wing of Nazism.

I used such a typewriter in Germany all through the war. Whenever I had occasion to write of the Schutzstaffel, which I did often and with enthusiasm, I never abbreviated it as 'S.S.,' but always struck the typewriter key for the far more frightening and magical twin lightning strokes.

Ancient history.

I am surrounded by ancient history. Though the cell in which I rot is new, some of the stones in it, I'm told, were cut in the time of King Solomon.

And sometimes, when I look out through my cell window at the gay and brassy youth of the infant Republic of Israel, I feel that I and my war crimes are as ancient as Solomon's old gray stones.

How long ago that war, that Second World War, was! How long ago the crimes in it!

How nearly forgotten it is, even by the Jews, the young Jews, that is.

One of the Jews who guards me here knows nothing about that war. He is not interested. His name is Arnold Marx. He has very red hair. He is only eighteen, which means Arnold was three when Hitler died, and nonexistent when my career as a war criminal began.

He guards me from six in the morning until noon.

Arnold was born in Israel, He has never been outside of Israel.

His mother and father left Germany in the early thirties. His grandfather, he told me, won an Iron Cross in the First World War.

Arnold is studying to be a lawyer. The avocation of Arnold and of his father, a gunsmith, is archaeology. Father and son spend most all their spare time excavating the ruins of Hazor. They do so under the direction of Yigael Yadin, who was Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army during the war with the Arab States.

So be it.

Hazor, Arnold tells me, was a Canaanite city in northern Palestine that existed at least nineteen hundred years before Christ, About fourteen hundred years before Christ, Arnold tells me, an Israelite army captured Hazor, killed all forty thousand inhabitants, and burned it down.

'Solomon rebuilt the city,' said Arnold, 'but in 732 B.C. Tiglath-pileser the Third burned it down again.'

'Who?' I said.

'Tiglath-pileser the Third', said Arnold. 'The Assyrian,' he said, giving my memory a nudge.

'Oh,' I said. 'That Tiglath-pileser.'

'You act as though you never heard of him,' said Arnold.

'I never have,' I said. I shrugged humbly. 'I guess that's pretty terrible.'

'Well — ' said Arnold, giving me a schoolmaster's frown, 'it seems to me he really is somebody everybody ought to know about. He was probably the most remarkable man the Assyrians ever produced.'

'Oh,' I said.

'I'll bring you a book about him, if you like,' said Arnold.

'That's nice of you,' I said. 'Maybe I'll get around to thinking about remarkable Assyrians later on. But right now my mind is pretty well occupied with remarkable Germans.'

'Like who?' he said.

'Oh, I've been thinking a lot lately about my old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels,' I said.

Arnold looked at me blankly. 'Who?' he said.

And I felt the dust of the Holy Land creeping in to bury me, sensed how thick a dust and rubble blanket I would one day wear. I felt thirty or forty feet of ruined cities above me, beneath me some primitive kitchen mittens, a temple or two — and then —

Tiglath-pileser the Third.