This epic novel, nearly 1,000 pages long, has already made publishing history
in France. Two years ago, it exploded like a bombshell in the semi-stagnant
pool of contemporary literature. Littell, an American, who wrote Les
Bienveillantes in French, won the Prix Goncourt and has sold more than a
million copies in that edition alone. The book has been hailed as a classic
work and compared with the masterpieces of Tolstoy, Pasternak, Genet,
Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Céline and Grossman. It is appearing in some 30
foreign editions. This Anglo-American translation, which is certainly
faithful, cannot quite capture the stunning use of language in the French
original, in which harsh-sounding German ranks and technical terms strike
the ear like the crack of a whip.
The Kindly Ones are the Eumenides, the Furies, and the novel is structured as
a classical Greek tragedy. It is written as the defiant confession of Dr Max
Aue, an SS officer deeply involved in the Final Solution. Aue, a half-German
and half-French lawyer and intellectual, is sent on a variety of missions.
This enables him to act in the book as a sort of video camera with a biting
voiceover. Through his eyes we see the brutal but clumsy work of the
Einsatzgruppen murdering Jews and communists behind the lines during the
invasion of the Soviet Union. Following the German Sixth Army, Aue also is
present at the massacre of Babi Yar outside Kiev, and he witnesses the mass
hangings in Kharkov. He then is sent to the Caucasus in 1942 when the German
Panzer divisions race south towards Grozny and the oilfields, but are halted
by Soviet counter-attacks.
Aue is transferred to Paulus's Sixth Army in Stalingrad - the pivot of the
book as well as of the war. He conducts a long interview with a captured
Soviet commissar who is about to be shot. Their revealing ideological cut
and thrust is inspired by a similar debate in Vasily Grossman's Life and
Fate. (Like Grossman himself, who was heavily influenced by Tolstoy, Littell
believes in semi-plagiarism as an act of literary homage.) But it is the
Germans who are about to suffer as the Soviet encirclement crushes the
starving remnants of the proud Sixth Army - the retribution after their
hubris. Aue receives a serious head wound and is evacuated by air just
before the German surrender.
He returns to convalesce in Berlin. There he is attached to Himmler's personal
staff. He is ordered to report on Auschwitz and other camps, where he
discovers corruption, the bureaucratic rivalries of different departments
and the incoherence of the extermination programme. It is the chaotic
apotheosis of Hitler's regime.
Aue is also sent to Budapest in 1944 to report on the rounding up of the
Hungarian Jews. Although they are required for slave labour by the embattled
Reich, most are killed by a machine designed for the annihilation of people
rather than winning the war. He also witnesses the terrible death marches of
January 1945 when concentration camp prisoners were brought in towards the
Reich through freezing snow without food. Then, just as Soviet armies sweep
into Pomerania before delivering the coup de grace on Berlin, Aue drives
there to the manor house of his brother-in-law to save his beloved sister.
The empty house is isolated in a landscape of deep snow. In the most
extraordinary and beautiful passages of the book, Aue abandons himself to
his fantasies and dreams, knowing that the Red Army may arrive at any moment
and that he, in his SS uniform, would be shot on the spot.
Although Aue may seem improbably cerebral for the SS - one suspects at first
that this is to allow him to provide an incisive commentary - he is part of
an extraordinarily intellectual clique that really existed within the
Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS. As Littell has
acknowledged, this helped him to identify with his character and explore his
mind and motives.
Aue is fictional, but he meets a number of historical figures, including
Eichmann, Himmler, Speer and other Nazi notables. Apart from one or two
mischievous tweaks (Aue bites Hitler's nose in the Reichschancellery bunker
when presented with a medal during the downfall), Littell has been very
faithful to real events: his research is impressive. Where Littell is
particularly strong, both in historical terms and as an integral part of his
novel, is in his depiction of the Nazi and SS bureaucracy, with their rival
departments, each with its own viewpoint and ethos. They are all trying to
control this monstrous industry without any sense of objective factors, such
as whether their decisions are helping the war effort and thus allowing the
regime as a whole to survive. It is indeed a case of “those whom the gods
wish to destroy, they first make mad”.
The book has caused a furious controversy. This is hardly surprising since in
the past 25 years the Holocaust has become a sacred subject, mistakenly
separated from and elevated above the Second World War itself. Some critics
have argued that humanising one of the oppressors creates a form of empathy,
if not sympathy. But I cannot understand how anybody could sympathise with
Aue by the end of this book. Littell, a Jew, rightly believes that the prime
duty of a writer as well as a historian is to understand. He has succeeded
in putting himself inside the tortured mind of his character.
Aue's own sexual narcissism and perverse fixations with graphic scenes of
degradation, to say nothing of a scatalogical leitmotif, has prompted
accusations that the book constitutes a form of Nazi pornography. Yet it is
a far cry from the crass SS orgies of Visconti's The Damned. Aue is
completely obsessed by his twin sister, with whom he developed an incestuous
relationship at puberty. There are mysterious details, such as the
twice-mentioned fact that Aue is circumcised. Littell refuses to explain,
saying that he himself is not sure what they signify, but that they felt
essential when he wrote them: a form of symbolic logic that is intuitive and
completely unplanned. As an author, he feels that it is up to the readers to
analyse as they see fit. It is not the job of the novelist to explain his
own work.
Littell, while admitting to being intrigued by the images of mirrors, refuses
to confirm or deny an intended symbolic parallel between Stalinism and
Nazism. There is also another facet to the apparent theme of mutual
reflection. During an imaginary conversation, his sister Una suggests to him
that the Nazis' anti-Semitic obsession is a repressed form of self-loathing.
Hitler's German race, another “chosen people”, is thus a mirror image of the
Jewish race. In another context, Littell has quoted Grossman's observation:
“The spike of racial hatred is directed against the orthodox Jews who in
essence are racists and fanatics of racial purity. There are two poles now.
On one side are racists who suppress the world, on the other, Jewish
racists, the most suppressed in the world.”
But as Littell reminds us so well, Hitler's obsessive racism became entirely
self-defeating: both in the Soviet Union, when he resisted the recruitment
of Ukrainian and Caucasian forces to strengthen a desperately overstretched
Wehrmacht, and in the astonishing waste of resources to carry out the Final
Solution itself.
It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a
profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping. Littell is far better
qualified than most to engage in such a dangerous enterprise. Having spent
several years working with victims in Chechnya, Sarajevo and Africa, and
having encountered a number of mass murderers, he uses this experience to
explore the motivation and psychology of such killers. It is an area of
vital importance to modern historians, but they are restricted by a comparative
lack of hard evidence.
In the early round-ups and often bungled killings by the Einsatzgruppen,
Littell suggests that much of the brutality came from an anger among the
executioners. This was because they found that their victims, especially the
children, were not as dehumanised as they had been led to expect by their
superiors and the propaganda of the regime. In the book, as in real life,
they suffer mental breakdowns and resort to drink. Himmler soon recognised
that one advantage of the extermination camp system was the way that
prisoners, shorn of their hair and stripped of civilian clothes, were
reduced to human livestock. His SS executioners suffered much less trauma as
a result.
Some critics fear that the power and influence of Littell's book is so great
that it will distort historical perception of the subject for future
generations. But this is a misplaced concern. Even though real characters
appear, The Kindly Ones never descends into the sort of faction that is the
curse of contemporary history. The author rightly refuses all suggestions
that it should be made into a film, despite its great cinematic potential.
It will therefore remain what it is: a great work of literary fiction, to
which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come.
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell translated by Charlotte Mandell
Chatto & Windus, £20 Buy
the book
Antony Beevor's D-Day, The Battle for Normandy, will be published in June
