A clip of our new bonus episode on Kurt Vonnegut's great anti-fascist absurdist tragicomic novel Mother Night and the 90s film version. Full episode exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Welcome to this IDSG bonus episode about the Kurt Vonnegut novel Mother Knight and the film adaptation from the late 90s.
Just a quick warning, we are going to spoil the shit out of the story.
So if you haven't read it, please go and do that before you listen.
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
What?
Pardon me?
I asked if you spoke German.
Oh, no, no, no, I'm afraid not.
Okay, and welcome back to another trying to think of a funny way of mangling the title.
I don't speak German, but I should have prepared and I didn't.
So it's just I don't speak German this time.
Yono Ablo Alemann.
Ah, there you go.
And you heard his voice.
It's the Daniel Harper, Daniel Harper.
I wonder how you did, Lee.
The one and only, although not, but you know, the one and only that ever gets to be on this podcast.
Doing all right.
Making it.
Enjoyed a very good book over the last couple of days.
So that's always nice.
It's always nice when it's a good thing and not a bad thing that we've been subjecting ourselves to.
Granted, I subject myself to plenty of bad things, but also one good thing this week, or more than one good thing, but this is definitely one good thing.
That's right.
Very good thing because we're talking in this episode about, and we're doing another Vonnegut episode.
We've already done an episode, a bonus episode, quite a way back now, I think, where we talked about.
Two or three years ago, at least, yeah.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Where we talked about the Kurt Vonnegut book, Saudi House 5, his most famous book, I would say, arguably, and the movie adaptation thereof.
And we're kind of doing a sequel to that.
And this time we're talking about book and movie Vonnegut again, but it's Mother Knight this time.
Yes.
So just maybe to run over this again, Daniel, your history with Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut is an author I discovered because I was a big science fiction fan.
So I was reading a lot of the like Asimov, Heinlein, Clark stuff like throughout my childhood.
And Vonnegut always got kind of like mentioned if you read like their biographical material, particularly Asimov, would talk about how, you know, he could sell to like the cheap, you know, the cheap papers.
But Vonnegut could write like a similar story as Asimov tells it and get it published in like Playblay or get it in the in the slick papers.
It's, you know, where you get 10 times as much per word to get charged for it.
So I, um, to be paid for it.
So I always knew Vonnegut as a name from my childhood.
And I know in my teenage years, like in my, like, the last year, I mean, the last year or two of high school, I managed to find a bunch of his books in the library.
And so I just not really knowing a whole lot about them.
And I've read some of the short stories.
I mean, I think Harrison Bergeron, we probably read as a in school.
And maybe even Welcome to the Monkey House.
We might have read Welcome to the Monkey House, or I might have read that one independently.
But Harrison Bergeron being the one thing that like, you know, the one thing that Vonnegut ever wrote that you could give to a 10-year-old, you know, I don't know.
And it's also not, I think, coincidentally the one thing Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote that right-wingers like.
Yes, exactly.
They are wrong to like.
They are wrong to like it.
They are wrong to like it.
Yes.
They like it because they've misunderstood it.
Yeah, they think it's an Ayn Rand allegory.
And it is definitely not that.
Yes, this fits very neatly with Vonnegut's other works.
Yes.
This is Ayn Rand Pasty.
Yeah, this guy suddenly just writes this libertarian anti-socialist thing out of nowhere.
Exactly.
So I would have read, I think I read Jailberg.
I might have read Slapstick and maybe Hocus Pocus.
I probably read those three in that time period, none of which I have revisited in the years since.
And then when like a few months later, in between this kind of high school and college experience, in that three month time, I read Slarhouse Five for the first time.
And that was a like life-changing book.
Actually, I know that I might have read it in the last like few, the last months of high school, but it's kind of in that like, you know, that like period where you're graduating high school and you're becoming an adult and you're going off to college, like that time kind of time period.
And Slarhouse Five was a really important book for me.
I still own that specific copy of that book.
You know, it's funny that I read Slaughterhouse Five and saw pulp fiction within a couple of months of each other.
And it was like, that's, that's the thing that made me who I am in so many ways.
You know, it's like one of those things.
And since then, I have read, well, when he died, when Vonnegut died in 2007, I had the intention of reading them all in order.
And I got as far as, so it's Player Piano and then Sirens of Titan.
And the next one would have been Mother Night, but I never got to Mother Night.
So Mother Night, I have not read until this week when we were doing it for the podcast.
But I have seen the movie.
We'll talk about the movie shortly.
And I actually saw, I'll just stay it now.
I saw it in that same period because I was getting into being a movie nerd.
And I literally checked out the VHS of Mother Night in like 1998 from my local video store, which puts it in that very particular, you know, ask your parents, kids.
That's all I got to say about that.
But then over the years, I've read several others.
Breakfast of Champions.
That's the one I don't like that I've read.
I know it's, I know people love it.
I really need to revisit it sometime.
If you like it, then we should revisit it.
But to me, that's just, I don't know, it just, it's silliness more than it doesn't, it doesn't interest me.
Two I really love are Galapagos and Bluebeard.
I think those are my two favorites of his.
I think if you made me choose, it would be Bluebeard, but you know, Ask me on a Different Day, it's Galapagos.
But those two are, I think, his, you know, for me, those are the ones that speak most deeply to me.
So, and now Mother Night today.
So that's kind of my history with Vonnegut.
I've, you know, kind of come at him askew, which I think is a good way to come across Vonnegut is not to see him as this great writer, but just like somebody you're interested in reading.
You know, I think I think sometimes you put too much import into his work.
And, you know, if you treat it like homework, then you don't get the value of it sometimes.
I think that's kind of the thing that I would believe about Vonnegut.
And I've read a bunch of his short stories as well.
So anyway, I've babbled on too long.
What's your experience with Mr. Kurt Vonnegut?
Yeah, I agree with you about not sort of plowing all the way through because it's nice to, it's nice to still have some to get to.
I still have some to get to.
It's nice to, because it's kind of ageless.
And, you know, he's a genius.
He's absolutely one of my favorite writers, certainly one of my all-time favorite American 20th century writers.
And it's nice to be able to just think every year or so or every couple of years, just think there's, there's still Vonnegut that I can just pick up one that I haven't read and read it for the first time.
We have very similar stories.
I saw the film of Mother Knight before I read the book, but I read the book longer ago because you've just read it for the first time.
It's long been one of my favorites, if not maybe my favorite of all his books.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd forgotten that I'd seen the film and I saw it very much the same way you did.
I rented it, probably just on the strength of Nick Nulty and an SS outfit on the cover, you know, because it's about World War II and the Nazis.
I was always interested in that.
Well, I knew it was a Vonnegut adaptation.
And so that was why I think that's probably why I wrote it because it was a Vonnegut adaptation.
You see, this is the thing that didn't register with me when I saw the film because when I saw the film, I hadn't read any Vonnegut.
I rented the film as I recall based on, you know, just being interested in the premise.
And it's, you know, it's about World War II and that sort of thing.
And also the fact that Cheryl Lee was in it.
Cheryl Lee, who is, I think she's one of the most underrated screen actresses that there's ever been, frankly.
I think she's an absolute genius.
She gives us a stunning performance in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, particularly in the film Twin Peaks Firewalk with Me, which I think is David Lynch's, maybe not his greatest film, but one of his greatest films that I think is actually one of the greatest films ever made.
I never, I never got into Twin Peaks.
So we should do some Twin Peaks.
And I just, every time I approach that material, it just hits me wrong.
I don't know what it is, but Lynch, as you know, I have kind of a weird relationship with Lynch.
Anyway, continue.
So I haven't seen a lot of her work.
I've been looking at her.
I'm looking at her filmography and a lot of it I just have not seen.
But if you say that I should, it means I should take that seriously.
So anyway, she's continuing.
She did not have the career that she deserved, I think, based on her stunning talent.
If people want to know what I think about Twin Peaks Firewalk with Me and Lynch and Twin Peaks, maybe to a lesser extent as well, I did a podcast on that movie with our friend Elliot Chapman and George Lee as part of the, I think it was Spooktober last time we did that.
Anyway, I'll put a link in the description.
But yeah.
So that's why I rented the film.
Again, rented the VHS from the video rental store.
Again, ask your grandparents, kids, back in the day.
And I remember, aside from thinking that Cheryl Lee was great, and I still think she's the best thing in the film.
I remember being just underwhelmed by it and not getting it.
And, you know, maybe we'll talk a little bit about why that was as we go on.
But this was before I'd read any Vonnegut.
I'm quite sure.
Yeah.
I'm still, this is maybe when I'm, is this, yeah, this must be before.
This must be just before I started reading Vonnegut because I was given a copy of Breakfast of Champions by a friend of mine who's kind of the girlfriend of my best friend, Mel.
And she just, she just gave me this book, you know, she was kind of evangelical, evangelical about Vonnegut.
I know that feeling.
I know those.
Yeah.
I get being that person.
Yeah.
She also.
Especially the teenagers, especially the young people, like you should read this.
It'll change your life.
Yeah, I get it.
Jan was her name.
She was a really nice person.
And she also got me into Radio Head.
So, you know, very influential person on me.
She hands you a copy of Breakfast of Champions on an OK computer and it changed your world.
Pretty much.
Yeah, pretty much.
Because Okey Computer was a 97 because I bought that.
I still own that CD somewhere.
Somewhere in this apartment, I have that CD.
And yeah, no, I have it.
So I still have that original copy from 97 somewhere.
But yeah, so it would have been right about that same time.
So yeah, that makes that makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, Breakfast of Champions blew my head off.
You know, we should maybe talk about that.
Great book.
And so I read Red Loads of Vonnegut, you know, and Storehouse Five, obviously.
And one of the ones that I did read in that first batch was Mother Knight.
And I think it's only grown in stature for me over the years.
I think it's, I think it's possibly his, I don't know if I say it's best, but it's possible.
It's probably my favorite of all his books.
I think it's one of the great anti-fascist novels.
But that's, I don't know, that's kind of limiting because it's more than just an, it is an anti-fascist novel, but it's also kind of just an anti, it's an anti-nationalism novel, an anti-dogma novel, anti-totalitarianism, anti, you know, just anti-insincerity or just, it's just about the traps that, that are in everything we do as human beings.
You know, it's such a slight and light piece of work, like so much of what he did.
It races by and it's so full of jokes and whimsy and irony, but it's just it just seems to hold so much wisdom, I think.
Yeah, so absolutely inquisition, you know, into how we work as strange beings that we are.
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I think it'd be easy to see this as kind of a warm-up for what would what Sauterhouse V would become.
Um, and I think maybe I do kind of see it that way.
Um, I like this a lot more than Slaughterhouse.
Okay, that's interesting.
That's interesting.
I mean, I, again, this is kind of my coming at it as an adult, so it does, it does change your perspective on it.
Um, and as having been a long time lover of Vodigan and a lover of Saudhaus V, uh, you know, it might have been if I had gotten Mother Knight at 18 and not Sauterhouse V, I would agree with you.
But I do, I do want to revisit it because I do really, really love this book.
It was found it like a really, well, I don't know.
It's, it's both, um, I felt it to be very contemporary in terms of like kind of what we're seeing in our lives today, but also like a very particular moment in history.
It's like it's very written in this 1962 Cold War era and like the concerns that are like directly relevant to what's happening to the protagonists and to everybody in the book are very much this, you know, we're 15 or we're 17 years or so after World War II ended.
And this is kind of what the political situation is in the world.
And I thought that was something that really resonated with me is like it is very rooted in that particular moment.
And I think, you know, having the historical knowledge today in 2025 really allows me to approach this material in ways that maybe when I was 18, I would not have like gotten so much of that nuance.
Particularly stuff that's, you know, frankly in the book and is very prominent in the book and makes it in no sense into the film.
So, you know, we're going to definitely get into that.
But I really did love the book.
I guess, I mean, we don't really do synopses here, but I guess, would you like to kind of give at least a kind of the log line?
Kind of give us a little bit of a, what's this book about?
Yeah, plot in 60 seconds, you mean?
Yeah, it's a, as a lot of Vonnegut is, it's an incredible shaggy dog story.
But it starts and it sort of flits back and forth because it's a memoir.
It's a prison memoir, essentially, written by this guy, Howard W. Campbell Jr.
And it's written from a prison cell in Israel in the 1960s.
And he is awaiting trial in Israel, very much like Adolf Eichmann.
This is very much a product of sort of a society that had watched the Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
He's awaiting trial and he is an American who during World War II, he was already living in Germany at the time of the rise of the Third Reich as a playwright and published author.
He's married to a German woman and Helga.
And the Nazis rise and he considers himself just completely apolitical.
At the time, his attitude is, you know, I don't care about politics, not interested.
I just, you know, I love Germany.
I love this woman.
My career is here.
That's it.
He writes these.
Apparently, from the descriptions, we get sort of sentimental medieval romances.
That's what they seem to be, which makes Helga's and then later another woman's passionate belief in his artistic genius seem a little bit suspect, but that's what he seems to be writing.
And he's just, he's one of those millions of people in Germany at the time that's just going along.
And according to his telling of events, he is approached by this guy.
Oh, God, what's his name?
Frank Wartannen.
Wurtannen, that's right.
And although, of course, that's not like so much in this book, it turns out to not be if in fact he exists at all, because he is the ultimate unreliable narrator, this guy.
But the scenario that he lays out is he's approached by a guy representing the US War Department to be a spy or a double agent.
And I'm afraid that's all you're getting of that, at least for the time being.
If you want to hear the rest of it, you'll have to give myself or Daniel as little as $1 a month on Patreon.
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