The Kindly Ones

A lot of people found "The Kindly Ones" very hard to take, and I can certainly understand where they are coming from. It's difficult to be trapped in the mind of a Nazi killer for a thousand pages. But I thought it was very nearly a masterpiece, although one that should be approached with care. For one thing we need to remember, although the narrator, former SS officer Max Aue, constantly proclaims his lack of remorse and his kinship with fellow "human brothers", he is an unreliable narrator who is more than a little insane. Although he says he regrets nothing, a sense of horror and guilt seeps from every page. Aue is an evil man, albeit one who is intelligent, insightful and possesses a sort of twisted integrity. Throughout the book he almost comes to terms with his role in the appalling events in which he took part; almost. He remains stuck in the morass of fascist ideology, and the spectacle of a man at war with his own decent instincts is what provides the novel's fascination. On the level of historical fiction this book is flawless. Aue becomes a sort of Forrest Gump of the Final Solution, turning up in the right places and meeting the most important perpetrators. I've never read a more realistic and thoroughgoing account of the German side of World War II. Littell takes his Nazis seriously. They aren't straw men, but thinking human beings (who think themselves to the wrong conclusions.) You get a sense of the tremendous pressure of Nazi beliefs on the decision-making of these men and how it leads them away from pragmatism into unfathomable evil. The intellectual officer Otto Ohlendorf is seen by Aue as some sort of major theoretician of National Socialism; but he was also a commander of the Einsatzgruppen, responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in Russia. On this level, "The Kindly Ones" is very similar to Mark Mazower's major history Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. The books share overlapping stories and characters, so much so that Littell's book could be regarded as the fictional transcription of the same terrible facts. Many readers objected to the sheer grossness of Littell's descriptions of the atrocities Aue witnesses. But, of course, these descriptions can't even come close to the monstrous reality. And maybe Littell needs to rub our noses it it, as it were, so we can get the whole unvarnished picture. Stanley Kubrick once said that it would be impossible to make an accurate movie about the Holocaust; the reality was just too terrible to be depicted. Littell does his best in words to do what Kubrick thought was impossible. A more troubling part of the novel is the "mythic" element, in which Aue lives out literally the Greek myth of Orestes. This portion of the novel seems forced to me. But if you look at it as the delusions of a disturbed mind trying to come to grips with a highly disturbing reality it makes more sense. Another, more provocative theory relates to the head injury Aue

In 2006, an American raised in France named Jonathan Littell published a near-1000 page novel in French entitled Les Bienveillantes (The Well-Meaning, now heroically and generally well-translated by Charlotte Mandell as The Kindly Ones). The novel tells the story of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the horrors of World War II and reinvented himself as a lace manufacturer and family man in post-war France. Dr. Aue is a highly educated man, well-versed in literature, philosophy, music and the arts. He is also a serial killer, who before the end of the novel not only murders his parents with his own hand but also supervises and plays a role in the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, the mentally impaired and other groups deemed enemies of the Nazi regime. As you might imagine, Les Bienveillantes was highly controversial when it was published in France. It was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt but evoked both great praise and loud approbation for its depiction of a deeply twisted soul and a regime that engaged in acts so horrific that they remain fundamentally unexplainable to this day. I find myself squarely in the camp of those who consider Mr. Littell's novel one of the greatest and most morally complex works of literature that I have read in my lifetime. While many critics have focused on the allusion to Greek mythology in the novel's title, I would read the title in a more colloquial manner. Nazi Germany was filled with well-meaning people who were completely lacking in moral courage and were just following orders. Dr. Aue was an order-follower, although he certainly exercised freedom of thought outside of his duties as a Nazi officer. The world is filled with well-meaning people who follow orders who overlook things as they carry out their jobs. In Nazi Germany, the consequences of such behavior were horrific. In today's world, the consequences of such conduct may not be horrific, but they are not to be brushed aside as inconsequential. Failure to speak truth to power, in whatever historical context, constitutes complicity with whatever form of evil is currently ascendant in a society. In modern Western societies, that evil most recently consisted of a form of economic capitalism that awarded speculation over production to an extent that rotted away the solid underpinnings of economic growth and opportunity for the disenfranchised. While this may not be as morally reprehensible as genocide, it remains morally reprehensible nonetheless. And those who kept their mouths shut and simply participated in the process are as culpable in the context of their time as Dr. Aue was guilty in his. One of the most searing features of Mr. Littell's book is the portrayal of the toll that the commission of genocide exacted on the Nazi soldiers who were charged with carrying out the actual acts of torture and murder. In one way or another, this behavior dehumanized them. To a lesser but no less tragic extent, participation

An unknown American writer (even a bilingually educated one) who attempts to write an immense novel in French would usually expect to receive nothing but mockery for his trouble. As if the linguistic effort weren't audacious enough, then there's the subject matter: an epic of World War II gore and phantasmagoria from the point of view of a reflective--but largely unrepentant--German SS officer. It's the sort of literary high-wire act that should have ended in a face plant. Instead, Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillants" somehow swept France's top literary prizes when it was published in 2006. Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette histoire? After a brief prologue in which the narrator introduces himself as a war criminal in hiding, the action opens with the Germans' brutal invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and concludes, almost a thousand pages later, with Berlin in ashes in 1945. The protagonist and narrator, Dr. Max Aue, bobs along with the flow and ebb of German fortunes on the Eastern Front like a stormtrooper Candide--except that he inflicts as well as endures enormous suffering. Aue is not only an enthusiastic Nazi, but a first-class catastrophe of misdirected sexuality. Without giving anything away about his issues, let's just say that he gives anyone in Dr. Freud's files--or Greek tragedy--a run for their money. Yet whatever sympathy the narrator may occasionally earn for his tortured personal backstory, sporadic self-awareness and reliable literary flair is quickly squandered by his willing participation in many of the Nazi regime's atrocities, as well as several that are entirely his own. Aue's idiosyncratic psyche is a literary creation and not--as some critics have mistakenly assumed--some kind of psychosexual explanation of Nazism of the sort once popular but now largely discarded. Littell has no grand new theories of evil to offer, and to the extent he makes the rather commonplace observation that we are all capable of it, this is actually undercut by Aue's spectacular weirdness. Nor does Littell shed much light on the "whys" of the Holocaust, although the attentive reader will learn plenty about the "how". So why is "The Kindly Ones" worth reading? Quite simply, it's the sheer virtuosity of Littell's writing, which shines through in Charlotte Mandel's English translation, and does not falter even in rendering the most technically difficult and morally uncomfortable tableaus. His inventiveness jolts crackling energy into familiar history--an absolutely startling 87-page dive into the Battle of Stalingrad at the center of the novel being only one outstanding example. The awful grandeur of the subject, the breadth and depth of the author's historical research, the ease with which he shifts from naturalism to surrealism and allegory to farce, his perfect ear for dialogue in what is not only a foreign language but a completely alien way of thinking, the fearlessness with which he portrays the repellent--all of these are marks

Book certainly deserves "Prix Goncourt"- most prestigious French literary award. Expect, when eventually translated to English, to evoke furor of prizes and indignation (we all like to see war in black and white). It is both tempting and hart breaking project, for this reviewer, a survivor of Nazi concentration camp, to evaluate this book Littell's prose flows with exclusive smoothness. Excellent researching on fine details - be it geography, ethnology, languages or jargon of concentration camps. Littell's historical accounts are well researched and far from fiction. In a way book resembles "War and peace", also a lengthy war story of real historical events and real historical actors with fictitious heroes And now short summary of events and "coloring" of those events as narrated by hero. Hero: ex high positioned SSman, concealed homosexual, living serenely incognito and while deriving his income in lace manufacturing, feels compelled to recount his war experiences. He writes for himself. He is well to do and needs, god forbid, no justifications for his past. He wants to tell that he and you, the reader, are just same human beings. After all, he concludes, "The only indispensable for human life is air, drink and excretion, and, oh yes, pursue of truth. The rest is facultatif". And so, our hero after joining SS travels east across Russia with, at the beginning, victorious German troops. There is a lot of work to do and lot to improve. So many humans to be eliminated, so many technical problems - mowing (machine-gunning) Jews at the edge of pit turns to mess: some victims jump in, some just wounded squirming below. Good organization prevails. One orders those condemned to lay side by side, like sardines, and than machinegun them. Than top it with layer of soil, and with another human strata - ingenious. After the work it is time to relax, to have glass of cognac and listen to good music. Yes, our hero is knowledgeable music lover: SS captures young Jewish boy who plays piano as a genius. They advance him to be sort of a mascot who plays in their officers club. Boy plays Bach and Chopin and Mozart to applauses. Narrator, our SSman, befriends him, has talks and share enthusiasm and appreciation of music. He promises him to have notes of Couperin to be send from Paris. One day, boy attempts to help in repairing broken lorry. In the act, his hand is thorn. And so his fate is sealed. He is not of use. Narrator comforts him and than take him to Sturmfuhrer who will, in turn, conduct boy to execution. Before parting narrator begs Sturmfuhrer -"please be gentle with this boy". Couple of days afterward package with Couperin notes arrive. As we advance into immenseness of Russia things are getting rough. Lousy ersatz cafe, limited food, frost bites, and those damn Russian partisans: Russian partisans (terrorists) make procedure of liberation and democratization of Russia by well wishing Germans difficult. In stead of appreciation (and flowers) there ar

This thick and engrossing volume aims to be an insider's look on the entrails of the machinery of death put in place by Nazi Germany in World War II in the east from 1941 through the demise of the 3rd Reich. The point of view and adventures of a former SS officer (Dr. Max Aue) seem at first sight merely technical artifacts to allow the reader the details of several aspects of the Nazi era and the author's thorough knowledge and research of specifics of the period. These range from the bureaucratic struggles and turf wars within the different power spheres within the Nazi regime, the role of police units in the east behind the front lines, Wehrmacht-SS disputes, the military operations in the Caucasus, the linguistic and migratory histories of the Caucasian peoples, the Red Army rampage in East Prussia and the bombing of the Reich, the debauchery in the closing days of the war, music and homosexuality through nazi ideology, the question of how far did society know or wish to know about the atrocities, among many other topics. The most striking aspect in the treatment of these issues is, however, the dark veil of Nazi ideology. The narrative seems to seek the proof that Nazism permeated almost every endeavor of military and social life in World War II Germany, and it succeeds doing so. In parallel to these quasi-historical narratives flows the personal life of Dr. Aue. In these episodes the grip of the author is somewhat less convincing and blunter, implying that deep personal psychological disturbances have had to be at the root of the Nazi evil. The closing paragraph in the book provides a sharp and dramatic ending, putting treachery to the human spirit as the final driver of Nazi ideology.