…And Less Than Kind

The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell
Harper, 992 pages, $29.99

Why, as the decades pass, do novelists—not to mention film-makers, biographers, and moral philosophers—grow more, not less, fascinated with Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II? Maybe the Nazi era is made more approachable because our vision of its horrors has blurred with time. But maybe, too, the world’s understanding has been sharpened by reflection and study. Stendhal aside, the golden age of literature about the Napoleonic era did not come in its immediate aftermath. A generation separated Waterloo from The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) and Vanity Fair (1848). Another generation would pass before Tolstoy wrote War and Peace (1869), posterity’s greatest effort to comprehend what Napoleon had wrought. We might therefore expect someone to write the great novel of World War II about now. And indeed, much of the French reading public believes someone has just written it.

Jonathan Littell’s thousand-page The Kindly Ones has sold a million copies in France since it was published in the autumn of 2006. It won the country’s two major literary prizes (the Prix Goncourt and the novel prize of the Académie Française) and has just been published, to much fanfare, in English translation. The writer Jorge Semprun, a survivor of Buchenwald, gave The Kindly Ones his vote on the Prix Goncourt jury, calling it “the book of the half-century.”

There are two odd things about The Kindly Ones. First, the author is a native New Yorker, although one should restrain one’s wonderment that an American could write a long, literary novel in French. The son of an American spy novelist, Littell was born in 1967. His parents, disillusioned with Vietnam-era America, moved to France shortly thereafter. Apart from studies at Yale, the younger Littell has not spent much time in the United States; he became a French citizen in March 2007. Before The Kindly Ones, he wrote a short science-fiction novel in English and served as an aid worker in various war zones. The second oddity is that the book’s narrator and protagonist is an Alsatian SS officer named Max Aue, a Nazi and a profoundly bizarre man—homicidal, sexually twisted, yet level-headed in his analyses of the butchery going on around him.

In the book’s opening pages, Aue, the aged owner of a lace business in France in the present day, seeks to bully the reader into a proper understanding of the story he is about to recount. He insists that his readers, had they been unfortunate enough to be Germans at the time, would have behaved just as the Nazis did, just as he did. An executioner’s story, Aue claims, is “a sequence of accidents that led him one day to end up on the right side of the gun or the sheet of paper while others ended up on the wrong side.”

Aue’s story is an inhuman picaresque. He witnesses, and helps commit, the worst Nazi atrocities. He marches through Ukraine with an Einsatzgruppe; participates in the Babi Yar massacre; is present for the transition to using gas vans, rather than firing squads, for the murder of Jews; spends weeks studying troop morale in Stalingrad; and helps organize the deportation of Hungarian Jews late in the war. He crosses paths with actual historical figures: the collaborationist writers Lucien Rebatet and Robert Brasillach in Paris; Friedrich Jeckeln and Paul Blobel, Einsatzgruppe officers prominent in the massacres of Jews on the Eastern front; and Otto Ohlendorf (“one of the best minds of National Socialism,” says Aue), who was hanged in 1951 for having overseen the murder of 90,000 Jews. Aue works briefly under Heinrich Himmler in Poland, where he is preoccupied with feeding concentration-camp inmates better so that more labor can be wrung out of them before they die. His zeal brings him to the attention of Albert Speer, whom he assists in operating Mittelbau-Dora, a satellite camp of Buchenwald that doubled as a subterranean rocket factory.

Although The Kindly Ones is constructed like an airport potboiler, its scope, its intellectual sophistication, and its stately prose all point to Littell’s enormous literary ambition. His knowledge of the war, down to its most hidden bureaucratic crannies and its most private anguishes, is astonishing, particularly for an author who speaks no German. The filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, told an interviewer, “The only two people who could understand this book from A to Z are [Holocaust historian] Raul Hilberg and myself.”

The Kindly Ones is attentive to situational ironies and the grotesque shapes into which Nazism molded its followers. Aue asks a German soldier how he wound up in the ghetto during a roundup of Jews that was supposed to be carried out by Ukrainians. “I had ordered a pair of leather boots from a Jew,” the soldier replies, “and I wanted to try to find him before . . . before . . . ”

The book is also full of gripping physical descriptions, like the sound of cows in bomb-shattered villages mooing in pain from trapped milk. But more often the author lavishes his descriptive power on scenes of revolting violence, as when Aue is asked to enter the mass grave at Babi Yar to “finish off” the wounded by shooting them at close quarters:

You had to walk over bodies, it was terribly slippery, the limp white flesh rolled under my boots, bones snapped treacherously and made me stumble, I sank up to my ankles in mud and blood.

Aue had noticed “a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant,” and now she catches his attention again:

She was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprised incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out, I was a rag doll and didn’t feel anything, and at the same time I wanted with all my heart to bend over and brush the dirt and sweat off her forehead, caress her cheek and tell her that it was going to be all right, that everything would be fine, but instead I convulsively shot a bullet into her head, which after all came down to the same thing, for her in any case if not for me, since at the thought of this senseless human waste I was filled with an immense, boundless rage, I kept shooting at her and her head exploded like a fruit . . .

Aue is a dedicated Nazi (he calls a fellow officer “insolent” for joking about Hitler), but he is a dissident of a peculiar sort—not moral, but rather economic and aesthetic. His dissidence is economic in the sense that he believes the persecution of the Jews is inefficient, and their murder even more so. It is aesthetic in the sense that, in him, snobbery takes the place of a sense of right and wrong.

There is an uncouth captain named Turek, whom Aue has upbraided for bashing in a Jew’s head with a shovel. (“I clearly saw an eye, knocked out by the blow, fly a few meters away.”) Aue dislikes him as “one of the rare, visceral, obscene anti-Semites, in the Streicher mode, whom I had met in the Einsatzgruppen.” The Nazis of Aue’s acquaintance “cultivated an intellectual kind of anti-Semitism.”

This perspective is an ingenious trick on Littell’s part, because it allows Aue to maintain his transgressive credentials as a “Nazi narrator” while objecting to much about Nazism that a non-Nazi reader would. He just objects for unexpected reasons. An obvious question is whether this dodge renders pointless the whole project of describing the Holocaust through one of its perpetrators in the first place.

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Aue spends the book philosophizing to himself. He is as well read as the author who created him, and has the same favorite authors—from Gustave Flaubert to the mid-century literary theorist Maurice Blanchot. The Kindly Ones is insistently, oppressively “cultural,” even pretentious. Its chapters are titled after sections of a Bach cantata: “Menuet (en Rondeaux),” “Air,” “Gigue.” Its title is drawn from an epithet that the Greeks applied to the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance.

Aue is a collection of intellectual attitudes—attitudes, moreover, that a lot of contemporary French intellectuals would embrace. He judges the events around him as effective or ineffective, interesting or not, but he has no emotional engagement with them, or with much else. He forms no plausible human relationships in the whole of the book, although he has many interesting discussions on philology, oenology, Communism, and classical music. The volume of Sophocles that he carries around for much of the book is a hint that we are to understand him as an archetype—that his character is developed to the standards of Greek tragedy, not to the more exacting ones of the novel. But this is only another way of saying that he is not a character at all.

The one fully developed and idiosyncratic aspect of Aue, aside from his intellect, is his sexual appetite. He is a homosexual, an incestuous lover of his twin sister, and a compulsive and versatile masturbator and fantasist. Sex is a constant presence in The Kindly Ones, and it is never conventional sex. It involves guillotines, torture instruments, belts, bottles, brooms, branches, and the sausages Aue’s stepfather favors. These scenes are so bizarre, so frequent, and dwelt on with such patient humorlessness that they must serve some purpose.

Perhaps they are meant to show Nazism as an aspect of a more generalized perversion, as the Italian director Luchino Visconti did in his 1969 film The Damned. Indeed, the back jacket of the French edition of The Kindly Ones promoted the novel by placing it in the tradition of Visconti. But in later interviews, Littell repudiated Visconti and said he hates The Damned anyway.

Perhaps the incest is meant somehow to symbolize and belittle the Nazis’ reductio ad absurdum of the idea of racial purity. Perhaps the homosexuality is present as a source of plot twists. Aue is blackmailed into the security services after having been arrested, post coitum, in a gay cruising zone near the Berlin canals. He seduces a young Waffen-SS lieutenant, a devout Christian and a rabid anti-Semite, by convincing him (reasonably enough) that the Christian disapproval of homosexuality is, in its origins, Jewish. But graphic sex does not do in The Kindly Ones what it does in most novels, connecting characters to each other in a different way. (Whether the graphic description of sex is ever a worthwhile literary technique is a different question.) The sex here is sex for its own sake.

In the same way, the violence comes to seem not like fidelity to history but like the exercise, for its own sake, of a gruesome authorial fancy. Of course, a serious novel about World War II need not skate lightly over the horror of it. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1960), thus far the great fictional masterpiece of World War II, does not flinch from the worst it has to show. Grossman’s work, a major influence on Littell’s, details the enormities of both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The difference between the two books is that Grossman’s Stalinism and Nazism are constantly vying with other moralities (Christianity, Judaism, science) for dominance. That does not make Grossman naïve—totalitarianism’s opponents fare badly in his pages. Nor is he squeamish. He shows Adolf Eichmann holding a wine-and-cheese reception on the floor of a newly completed gas chamber, and a German guard growing aroused watching transports of prisoners enter the gas chambers (“His predecessor had once been found engaged in a pastime more suitable for a twelve-year-old boy than an SS soldier entrusted with a special assignment”). But Grossman understands that a very little of that sort of detail goes a long way. Littell has a different artistic agenda altogether.

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Littell quite obviously intends his book as a contribution to ongoing debates over the war, and particularly over the Holocaust. Since the publication of The Kindly Ones, he has been eager to intervene in various controversies in Holocaust studies, and explicit about where he stands on them. He doesn’t like the words Shoah and Holocaust, because they have theological overtones. The Holocaust is “rife with non-historical meaning,” Littell told the journalist Assaf Uni of Ha’aretz, adding that he believes it is being exploited politically, not least in Israel. He does not compare conditions in the Palestinian territories to concentration camps, but he does draw parallels to the 1930s:

Everyone says, “Look how the Germans dealt with the Jews even before the Holocaust: cutting the beards, humiliating them in public, forcing them to clean the street.” That kind of stuff happens in the territories every day. Every goddamn day.

Littell the interviewee and Aue the narrator share a desire, first, to “anthropologize” the Holocaust, viewing it as one instance of an enduring human tendency rather than as a unique event; and, second, to regard it as an outgrowth of war, which is how German revisionist historians have interpreted it. “It should be noted,” Aue opines, “that in our century at least there has never yet been a genocide without a war, that genocide does not exist outside of war.” Littell, meanwhile, disapproves of Holocaust studies, preferring the idea of Nazi studies, or World War II studies.

Although novel readers should not, as a general rule, mistake a character’s voice for an author’s, Littell has striven to blur the distinction. “This may cause some ambiguity,” he told an interviewer last year, “but I did actually base this character on myself. He has this relationship to the world that’s not too far from my own, even if I’m on one side and he’s on the other.” Aue’s philosophy of life has much in common with Littell’s philosophy of art. In both there is a cult of action and experience. When Aue asks himself why he is participating in the massacres on the Eastern Front, he insists that his motives are not the same as those of the men around him: “Passion for the absolute was a part of it, as was, I realized one day with terror, curiosity: here, as in so many other things in my life, I was curious, I was trying to see what effect all this would have on me.” Littell sees the task of the novelist in similar terms: “It’s certainly not a matter of creating a preconceived object,” he told Le Monde shortly after the book’s publication. “That’s why I can only ever write in one burst. Writing is a roll of the dice.”

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You would think the Holocaust would be the hardest thing in the world to write a novel about. Novels are about moral and emotional possibilities, and the Holocaust overturns our idea of what is morally and emotionally possible. This is what leaves the reader of The Kindly Ones feeling manipulated by the author, even (or especially) in the book’s most powerful passages. For an artist like Grossman, the Holocaust is a moral discipline. For an artist like Littell, who views writing as a “roll of the dice,” the Holocaust is a license, a liberation, even a crutch.

The horrible context is always there to transfix us, even when the relationships, the moral decisions, the emotions—the things that make a novel a novel—are unconvincingly drawn. The Kindly Ones sometimes mourns the Holocaust, sometimes analyzes it, sometimes stands aloof from it, but always uses it as a backdrop against which to camouflage its creator’s lurid imagination.