In this chap­ter from “Moth­er Night,” the nar­ra­tor reveals his recent dis­cov­ery of the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing his father-in-law Wern­er Noth’s death. It is 1958 or 1959, and he learns of Noth’s demise in a Green­wich Vil­lage bar­ber shop while perus­ing a girly mag­a­zine fea­tur­ing an arti­cle titled “Hang-women for the Hang­man of Berlin.” He does not expect the arti­cle to ref­er­ence his father-in-law and is ini­tial­ly lured in by the sen­sa­tion­al­ism of the mag­a­zine cov­er.

The nar­ra­tor is con­front­ed by a dark pho­to­graph of Noth being hanged from an apple tree. Despite the dis­turb­ing con­tent, he finds him­self ana­lyz­ing the dis­crep­an­cies between the cov­er image and the arti­cle itself, not­ing that the women depict­ed are not the actu­al hang­ers, who are instead described as scrawny men. Fur­ther­more, the women in the pho­to­graph are far from the glam­orous por­tray­als promised on the cov­er. As he con­tin­ues to look at the pho­to­graph, he rec­og­nizes the bro­ken build­ing in the back­ground as Noth’s for­mer home, which brings a rush of mem­o­ries of his wife Hel­ga and her child­hood.

The arti­cle, writ­ten by Ian West­lake, a lib­er­at­ed POW, offers a detailed account of Noth’s exe­cu­tion by slave labor­ers after the war. West­lake por­trays Noth not as a mon­ster, but as a city police chief try­ing to main­tain order amid chaos. He describes how Noth’s main flaw was his involve­ment in a cor­rupt judi­cial sys­tem that sub­ject­ed pris­on­ers to unspeak­able hor­rors. The exe­cu­tion served as a means for the exe­cu­tion­ers to assert pow­er over some­one deemed sig­nif­i­cant, despite their lack of under­stand­ing of his true role.

The nar­ra­tion fur­ther describes the bru­tal­i­ties of Noth’s death, high­light­ing the repeat­ed hang­ings that stripped him of his dig­ni­ty. The chap­ter con­cludes with the narrator’s dis­com­fort upon return­ing to the super­fi­cial­i­ty of the mag­a­zine, which ulti­mate­ly betrays the seri­ous­ness of the account it just pre­sent­ed. This jux­ta­po­si­tion under­scores the harsh real­i­ties of human expe­ri­ence set against the triv­i­al­i­ties often found in media.