FICTION: The Kindly OnesBy Jonathan Littell Chatto Windus, 992pp. £20 - JONATHAN LITTELL'S novel The Kindly Onesis already a literary sensation in continental Europe: a Holocaust novel written by a Jewish-American author from the viewpoint of an SS executioner. When the novel was first released in France in 2006, some critics compared Les Bienveillantesto Tolstoy's epic War and Peaceand hailed it as a milestone in contemporary fiction.
Since then, the French edition alone has sold more than a million copies and was awarded France’s two most prestigious literary awards, the Prix Goncourt and the annual Grand Prix of the Académie française.
Formally structured as a classical Greek tragedy and named for the Furies of ancient myth, The Kindly Ones is the fictional post-war confession of Dr Max Aue, an SS Obersturmbannführer who is deeply implicated in the Holocaust.
Aue is unashamed of his active involvement in mass murder during the German invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union. A trained classicist and lawyer in pre-war civilian life, he is a Nazi by conviction, a cultured man who nonetheless firmly believes in racial ideology. He reads Flaubert during his violent journey through the war-torn wastelands of Eastern Europe and searches for enlightenment in the works of Plato and Sophocles.
Although he may seem improbably cultured for a racist mass murderer, Aue’s intellectual background is not unrealistic. The vast majority of Einsatzgruppen commanders were highly educated and many of them had PhDs, often in law. “What man of sane mind,” Aue asks his readers at one point, “could ever have imagined that they’d push jurists to assassinate people without a trial?”
Through Aue’s character, Littell shows us how “civilised” men become killers. As the war progresses and as massacre follows massacre, Aue becomes progressively brutalised to an extent that he himself would have considered inconceivable at the outbreak of war.
During the first German atrocities in occupied Poland, some of the executioners are hesitant to shoot unarmed civilians, but moral reservations quickly disappear. By the time Aue arrives in Auschwitz, this process of de-sensitisation has reached its apotheosis. Industrialised death, conceived partly to speed up the killing process and partly to spare German soldiers direct involvement in face-to-face shootings of women and children, is seen as a “rational” solution to the “Jewish problem”.
The limits of acceptable behaviour have changed profoundly. In a famous speech of 1943, which Aue attends, Heinrich Himmler praised his SS officers for being “decent” precisely because they were killing the Jews and other perceived enemies of the German Reich. In the Nazis’ twisted logic, murder was now the norm, while the refusal to kill was stigmatised as a deviant form of behaviour.
The Kindly Ones is a sophisticated literary exploration of these issues of morality and evil. Littell makes the unsettling point that there is no innate difference between “ordinary people” and those responsible for mass atrocities, and that each new generation should ask themselves if they, too, could have been perpetrators. Throughout the novel, Aue assumes a disturbing degree of complicity between himself and the reader, addressing him as “my human brother” and reminding him that “the real danger for mankind is me, is you”.
As the recent debates about the adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader have shown, any attempt to portray Nazi perpetrators as human provokes furious controversy.
Obviously it is easier, and more comforting, to represent the Nazis as mindless predators rather than as human beings. But the refusal to acknowledge them as ordinary men (however repulsive) is ultimately dangerous because it conceptualises violent racism as something alien, as something that could never happen in the “civilised” world. The Nazi dictatorship has proven that this assumption is fundamentally flawed and, in this respect, Littell succeeds where others have failed: while it is impossible to feel sympathy for Aue, he is nonetheless far too close for comfort.
The novel does, however, have a number of flaws. Its greatest weakness is Littell’s decision to equip Aue with a radically grotesque set of sexual desires. Apart from his (briefly consummated) obsession with his twin sister, Una, who he wishes to sodomise on a guillotine plank, Aue is also a closet homosexual who feeds his mother and stepfather sausages with which he has previously pleasured himself. By exaggerating this side of Aue’s character, Littell undermines his claim that Aue is not so different from “ordinary” people.
Another weakness is the novel’s unnecessary length of just under 1,000 pages. Littell repeatedly devotes countless pages to bureaucratic arguments between the SS and the Wehrmacht, and other long passages to Nazi infighting over power and influence in the conquered territories. These sections make important historical points, underlining the often chaotic nature of Nazi rule, but some readers will struggle with them. Those who do read on will be rewarded with moments of rare brilliance. The chapter on Aue’s experiences during the Battle of Stalingrad is unquestionably one of the finest accounts of the horrors of that battle I have read.
Other readers will find the copious scatological references and ultra-violent scenes excessive. The lengthy descriptions of Aue’s frequent bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, and his detailed accounts of degradation and slaughter are perhaps more graphic than is strictly necessary. Throughout the book, Jews, Poles and Russians of all ages are shot, hanged, gassed or lashed with horsewhips. It is debatable whether the graphic descriptions of ultra-violence in Littell’s novel help us to understand the horrors of the Holocaust or whether they constitute what some reviewers in France have deemed voyeuristic “Nazi pornography”.
These by no means insignificant points of criticism aside, Littell’s novel is a masterpiece of historical fiction. Its great achievement is to have made this horrific tale, told by such a profoundly appalling protagonist, simultaneously gripping and repulsive.
Robert Gerwarth teaches modern European history at UCD and is director of the UCD Centre for War Studies (www.warstudies.ie). His recent publications include The Bismarck Myth, as well as Twisted Paths: Europe 1914-1945, and Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain, all published by Oxford University Press