4-4-2009  

Jonathan Littell

Les Bienveillantes

The Kindly Ones

Cultures - Article paru le 4 novembre 2006

Les Lettres françaises

Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell

François Eychart

Beaucoup de choses vont surprendre dans ce vaste roman écrit à la première personne, à commencer par le ton avec lequel le sujet est traité. En 900 pages le narrateur relate sa vie au service du IIIe Reich, dans les Einsatzgruppen, c’est-à-dire les unités SS chargées de besognes hautement criminelles sur les arrières de la Wehrmacht, en Pologne et en URSS. Il s’agit du massacre des juifs, des communistes et de toutes sortes d’indésirables. Après le stade du meurtre de masse, que l’on peut cependant qualifier de conventionnel, la direction des SS est amenée à passer au stade industriel, celui d’Auschwitz. Aussi le narrateur, l’Obersturmbannführer Aue, s’applique-t-il à exposer en détail tous les problèmes rencontrés, allant du comportement des victimes aux difficultés techniques pour mettre en oeuvre les exécutions, avec les troubles profonds qu’ils provoquent chez les SS et les affrontements entre hauts dignitaires en charge du programme. Sans oublier le rôle des groupes nationalistes locaux alliés des Allemands. Tout cela est rapporté avec une élégance de langage qui contribue à la clarté des faits mais leur donne une réalité quelque peu étrange, les privant de la part d’opacité propre à tout événement traumatique.

Car, concernant des faits qui sont insupportables, on a peine à admettre la description clinique qui en est donnée, même si elle est jalonnée d’interprétations audacieuses ou cyniques et de réflexions douloureuses propres au narrateur qui montrent qu’il n’est pas une marionnette. Cette clarté contribue à servir l’objectif qu’il poursuit en entreprenant son récit puisque la description des assassinats, le modus operandi, les intrigues et conflits qui en découlent occupent l’espace intellectuel du lecteur et lui permettent de refouler la question de leur justification profonde.

Dès la première partie du roman intitulée « Toccata », sorte de libre improvisation sur son sujet, Aue expose qu’il ne cherchera pas à cacher la réalité des actes commis par lui pendant quatre ans. Il a aidé à assassiner des millions d’êtres humains et personnellement commis des meurtres. Rien n’en sera dissimulé, ni des faits plus personnels qu’il ne rattache pas à ses fonctions, comme son homosexualité. Rester à la surface des choses ou en cacher une partie nuirait à l’objectif qui vise à faire admettre que, si tout cela fut criminel, et à un degré jamais égalé, tout un chacun, à sa place, en eût fait autant. Pris dans l’étau de l’histoire, assujetti à la puissance d’un État moderne, avec sa doctrine, ses institutions, ses intrigues de pouvoir, personne, selon lui, ne peut affirmer sans mentir qu’il n’aurait pas endossé le rôle d’assassin qui fut le sien. Ce qui est décisif ne serait pas le système de valeurs dont chacun est imprégné mais le fait d’être né à un certain moment de l’histoire, le poids des circonstances primant alors sur le bagage culturel dont tout être est porteur. Ce bagage n’a d’ailleurs jamais été une digue suffisante, en tout cas absolue, contre la barbarie. Non pas qu’Aue ne se sente pas coupable. Coupable il l’est, il le comprend, mais la seule question qu’il pose et qui vaille sans doute qu’on y réponde est celle de savoir s’il est possible de faire autrement.

Aue, qui s’est refait après-guerre une belle situation comme directeur d’une usine de dentelle, a beau jeu d’exposer que dans d’autres pays les hommes ont obéi à des ordres semblablement criminels, en tout cas d’essence criminelle. Sans être ensuite ni jugés ni rejetés. Quel pays n’a pas ses assassins décorés ? Certes. Mais se délester du mal sur l’État n’empêche pas celui qui prête la main au mal de s’y détruire.

C’est d’ailleurs un des problèmes. Les massacreurs sont minés de l’intérieur par le comportement de leurs victimes qui récupèrent dans le moment même de leur mise à mort le statut d’humain que les nazis leur avaient ôté. Ainsi un SS en train de diriger une effrayante boucherie est-il littéralement cassé par la demande d’un juif qui lui dit : « S’il vous plaît, monsieur l’officier, fusillez les enfants proprement ! » Les plus avisés des SS constatent qu’ils ne sont que des assassins, et que ces meurtres, voulus par leur État, sont contraires à toutes les règles admises. Ils sont donc coupables d’y participer, sans circonstances atténuantes puisqu’ils ont tout compris, y compris l’échec final à venir.

Mais justement, s’il est vrai que la responsabilité de chacun procède essentiellement du rôle de l’État, la question se déplace et devient : quelle est l’origine de l’État nazi, qui l’a mis en place, lui a donné les moyens de sa politique ? L’État selon Littell est-il une sorte de Moloch qui se crée lui-même sur lequel nous ne pourrions rien ? À travers ce problème, l’auteur pose celui de la violence dont le XXIe siècle semble aussi prodigue que son devancier, et de la capacité de chacun à s’y opposer. Problème angoissant dont on voit l’actualité tous les jours.

Sodomising his sister on a guillotine

By George Walden

Last Updated: 4:47PM GMT 05 Feb 2007

George Walden reviews Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) by Jonathan Littell

After 150 pages of this book the reader assessing it for publication (I am reliably informed) felt like vomiting. Instead he told Gallimard they had to take it. Shrewd advice, it turned out: Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) has won both the Goncourt and Académie Française literary prizes, and has sold 600,000 copies in France alone.

The author, son of the bestselling spy writer Robert Littell, is a French-educated American, and his book is a fictional memoir by an SS officer who is French-educated too. What repelled the publisher's reader, I would imagine, is not the author's habit of lingering over fascist brutality, or the sex. More likely it was the clichéd mendacity of the hero's (and, we must presume, the author's) central message: that there is a Sturmbahnführer in all of us, ready-drilled and bursting to obey orders to slaughter millions, or gas the Jews. And from there it follows – does it not? – that our hero's murderous war career is only a relative evil, and that German guilt is relative too.

The sense of being served up discredited old hat as hot new fashion doesn't stop there. Predictably our Nazi hero is passionate about music, and a thoughtful fellow (confronted with an appalling atrocity, his reaction is to ask a fellow officer 'Have you read Plato?') Obviously he is bisexual ('Our doctors found women's underwear when they cut away the uniforms of the wounded more often than is supposed').

Understanding no doubt that Liszt-loving, Plato-quoting, bisexual Nazis are well-trodden ground, Littell has his SS man push the boundaries a little further, for the hell of it, by fornicating with his twin sister and murdering his mother, liberties the author has since justified by reference to Aeschylus' Oresteia.

Contrived? You bet, but consistent, because everything here is manufactured. Vast chunks of the war lore have clearly been industrially researched (Littell relishes Nazi terminology such as Reichsicherheitdiensthauptamp – the central office for the security of the Reich, a dutiful glossary informs us), and similar muggings-up are evident in the hero's private life. Littell once translated de Sade and Jean Genet, and it shows, as does the influence of the 1930s apostle of the eroticism of violence, Georges Bataille.

Hence the author's weakness for sexual fantasy, to whose humorous aspects he seems blind, as when our SS officer rhapsodises solemnly about sodomising his sister on a guillotine.

No amount of high-toned chatter about Kant or Darwin can disguise the fact that, with its sex 'n' fascism horror comic theme, at heart this is a low, conventionally minded novel. The only thing missing is a bit of moral equivalence between Hitler's Reich and contemporary America, but the author has recently filled the gap in an interview in Figaro magazine. Donald Rumsfeld equals Adolf Eichmann, yeah, right.

Why has France fallen for such stuff? Partly, I fear, it is envy. Compared to the American novel French fiction is at a low ebb. There is a desperation for something plausibly imposing, and some prize judges (I am told) were thrilled to find an American writing a big fat book in French.

Then there is the Gallic weakness for the perverse and paradoxical – though it is heartening to hear of hesitations and sharp dissensions among the judges. As for the roaring sales, war stories with a faction element (Adolf Eichmann, Albert Speer and Hitler himself feature) are perennially popular, as is Nazi sex, especially when packaged in a validating intellectualism.

This is a work of high vulgarity and great cynicism, whose only attraction is its inadvertent humour. To make the point that his hero is ultimately his own man, Littell has his hero, when he is presented with a medal, tweak the Fuhrer's nose.

His mind perhaps on the inevitable film-rights, his final scene is one of unintentional Grand Guignol. As escaped elephants and chimpanzees roam Berlin in its dying hours, the narrator kills first a detective endeavouring to arrest him for matricide, then his best friend, to steal his identity. Following which he muses: 'I was sad, without really knowing why.'

If the translation (due later this year) of this absurd and odious novel finds an audience in Britain, the reasons to be sad will be clear enough.

November 7, 2006

American Writer Is Awarded Goncourt

By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, Nov. 6 — Jonathan Littell, a New York-born writer whose French-language novel about a murderous and degenerate SS officer has been the sensation of the French publishing season, on Monday became the first American to win France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.

The 903-page book, “Les Bienveillantes,” was the strong favorite for the century-old prize that goes to novels written in French. Previous winners include Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras; non-French citizens including Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amin Maalouf and Andreï Makine have also won the Goncourt.

“Les Bienveillantes,” or “The Kindly Ones,” has been acquired by HarperCollins for publication in the United States and has already been sold for translation into German, Spanish, Hebrew and several other languages. Last month the book, which has so far sold some 250,000 copies in France, won the Académie Française’s annual fiction prize.

Mr. Littell, 39, who has tried to escape the circus atmosphere surrounding his sudden celebrity, even refusing to appear on television to promote his novel, recently moved to Barcelona and did not come to Paris for today’s announcement.

“He hopes his absence will not be misunderstood or, even less, be interpreted as disdain for the jury,” his French publisher, Antoine Gallimard, told reporters here. “He has no need for publicity, both out of modesty and because he believes that literature is not part of show business, that what’s important is the book.”

Still, part of the novelty of “Les Bienveillantes” is that it was written in French by an American, although one who grew up in France after his father, Robert Littell, a journalist-turned-thriller writer, moved the family here in the 1970s.

Later, after attending college in the United States, at Yale, Mr. Littell spent much of the 1990s working for the French humanitarian group Action Against Hunger, in conflict zones including Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

In occasional interviews with French newspapers, he has explained that the idea for the project first came to him in 1989 after he saw “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary about the Holocaust. But it was only in 2002 that he began research for the book, whose first draft he wrote in 112 days.

Mr. Littell eventually gave the manuscript to his father’s agent, Andrew Nurnberg, who offered it to four French publishers under the pseudonym of Jean Petit. Éditions Gallimard bought it for an advance of $38,000 (30,000 euros) and, this summer, printed 12,000 copies. Almost immediately French critics enthusiastically responded, with one even comparing it to “War and Peace” and other epic novels.

That said, “Les Bienveillantes” is an improbable best seller, not only because it comprises 903 pages of small print, but also because, apart from a long-forgotten science fiction book, “Bad Voltage: A Fantasy in 4/4,” published in the 1980s, this is Mr. Littell’s first attempt at fiction.

Written in the first person, it is the memoir of Maximilien Aue, a well-educated former SS officer who has managed to escape punishment after the war and reinvent himself as a lace manufacturer in northern France. It is not a confession, though, because Aue sees no reason to apologize. Rather, it is a matter-of-fact description of his decadence — homosexual sadomasochism and incest with his sister — and of his murderous role in the Nazi nightmare.

“Brother humans, let me tell you how things happened,” Aue begins, soon adding: “If I have finally decided to write, it is no doubt to pass the time and also, possibly, to clarify one or two obscure points, perhaps for you and for myself. Moreover, I think it will do me good.”

Born of a German father and a French mother, Aue notes, to explain his fluent French, that he attended secondary school and college in France. “Like most people, I did not ask to become an assassin,” he writes. “If I had had my way, as I said, I would have gone into literature.”

The war takes him to Ukraine during the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar; to Stalingrad, where he is wounded; and to Auschwitz. Like Forrest Gump, he meets historical figures, in this case infamous Nazis, among them Adolf Eichmann, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess and, in the book’s final pages, Hitler himself. All in all he personifies Hannah Arendt’s famous notion — she applied it to Eichmann — of the “banality of evil.”

Unsurprisingly, “Les Bienveillantes” has been debated here as much for its historical accuracy as for its literary qualities, with Mr. Lanzmann lamenting that Mr. Littell “is fascinated by horror and the décor of death,” and other critics complaining that the novel is weighed down by documentation. But a more typical view, like this one from the weekly Le Point, is that the book “exploded onto the dreary plain of the literary autumn like a meteor.”

Every year what they call the “literary autumn” — or “la rentrée littéraire” — spawns a veritable avalanche of fiction, with no fewer than 475 new French novels and another 207 in translation published this season. In the summer French publishers choose which novels they will promote for various literary awards guaranteed to boost sales.

No less a ritual, though, is a heated debate about the maneuvering by French publishers that precedes these awards. Critics complain that, unlike those who select most American and British literary prizes, the same jurors for the French prizes sit in judgment for years on end, and that most are themselves writers closely aligned to leading publishers like Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil.

This year the credibility of the prizes was freshly battered by the timely publication of two books of journals. Jacques Brenner, a former senior editor at Grasset who died in 2001, described how publishers agreed to support one another’s books on juries. In one entry in 1985, he writes that, to thank Alain Robbe-Grillet for helping Bernard-Henri Lévy win the Médicis prize the previous year, Grasset “will publish a bad erotic novel” by Robbe-Grillet’s wife.

More topically, a diary published last month by Madeleine Chapsal, a longtime juror for the Prix Femina, included a bitter observation that last year’s verdict was determined before the jury even met. This prompted the Femina jury to expel Ms. Chapsal; another juror, Régine Deforges, then resigned in solidarity.

Still, this year’s Femina prize, awarded to the Canadian-born writer Nancy Huston for her new novel, “Lignes de Faille,” or “Fault Lines,” was considered well deserved. And with “Les Bienveillantes” winning 7 of 10 votes in the Goncourt jury, no one has suggested that this result was fixed.

THE

====     JERUSALEM POST

Unkind overall

Mar. 12, 2009
AKIN AJAYI , THE JERUSALEM POST

The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Harper Books
995 pages; $29.95

'Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened," begins The Kindly Ones, an extraordinary contemplation on the true nature of evil. "I am not your brother, you'll retort, and I don't want to know."

This first sentence sets the tone for the 900-odd pages to come; willfully provocative, it is a challenge to accompany the narrator as he explores the depravity of Hitler's Final Solution. But at the same time, it turns the spotlight onto the unnamed reader - and this could be any one of us - and asks: Are you prepared to go into this, are you secure in the knowledge that you'll think the same of yourself by the time it's all over?

That said, one should not mistake this particular narrator as one motivated by a higher obligation toward the truth. Maximilian Aue is erudite, cultured and highly educated; he was also an SS man, a bureaucrat and an active implementer of Hitler's perverted obsession. Living in bourgeois anonymity in France many years after the war, he is moved to state his case not out of remorse or repentance but instead self-righteousness and arrogance; "…people forget, I see it every day. Even those who were there hardly ever use anything but ready-made thoughts and phrases to talk about it."

"It," of course is the war, and Aue's account is personal history, a detailed account of his service over the course of five years, from Kiev to Stalingrad to Auschwitz and finally Berlin in the final days of the Third Reich. A middle-ranking administrator, he was tasked with ensuring maximum efficiency in the primary functions of the German army - the removal of "enemies of the Reich" - Jews, Bolsheviks, partisans and Gypsies.

The "It" of The Kindly Ones is an obscenity, a pornographic panorama of violence without limits, and Aue narrates bluntly and without sentimentality, uninterested by the moral questions that usually ensue when one man kills another for no other reason than his ethnicity: "In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit."

Jonathan Littell, the American-born author, has observed in the past that he was more attracted to the idea of placing an SS officer as the protagonist of his Holocaust fiction than a victim, because "they are the ones doing something and changing the reality... [from the] attempt to give a voice to the perpetrator, lessons can be learned that will affect the way we look at the world today."

Littell's portrait of Aue is an intriguing one. A lawyer by training, Aue has a sophisticated appreciation of the abstract, and frequently engages in theoretical examinations of the necessity of their - the Nazis' - actions. On the eve of an Aktion in Ukraine, retaliation against a presumed subversive Jewish population, he considers coolly the morality of the forthcoming slaughter: "I thought the method adopted very unfair... If we were committing an injustice we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought."

He expresses disdain for the "genuine anti-Semites" among their number, those who actively embraced the act of mass murder. But these are weasel words, sophistry, and one concludes that Aue is an intellectual coward if not an opportunist, able to conjure up the perfect argument in defense of National Socialism at will, but unable to recognize the sheer speciousness of his rationalizations.

Still, it is a stance that suits him well as he progresses upward through the SS hierarchy, a journey set against a rich and detailed historical tapestry of the period, replete with appearances from many of the Nazi elite: Himmler, Speer, Bormann, Mengele, Goering and, most significantly, Adolf Eichmann, the "talented bureaucrat" often considered the true architect of the Final Solution.

Eichmann's extended cameo is significant because it brings into sharp focus the primary thrust of The Kindly Ones. Littell has stated that this fiction was an attempt to consider how one might behave if placed in the same milieu as his antihero; the conclusion he seems to lean toward is that the Nazis were not necessarily the psychopathic monsters of contemporary history, but rather creations of a unique combination of social and political factors, albeit with a deranged lunatic as their leader.

This thesis is not new, of course; Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem comes to much the same conclusion. Cheekily, Littell even has Eichmann deferring to Aue on the finer points of the Kantian categorical imperative (an irony this, as Aue muses afterward that he "didn't have much of an idea... I told Eichmann pretty much whatever came into my head." Arendt, in her account of Eichmann's trial, argues that his attempt to rely upon this as an explanation for his actions was bound to fail, since he misunderstood it in the first place.)

Aue as an everyman in extraordinary circumstances is an interesting conceit, but it is one that is fatally undermined by a concurrently evolving psychological profile, a portrait that presents a man with a significantly disturbed emotional hinterland. Discounting his status as "invert" - obviously a problem in Hitler's new Germany - nonetheless a picture unfolds social dislocation, a troubled childhood and adolescence dominated by a hated mother, and disturbing fantasies concerning his twin sister, Una. The material is psychologically compelling, but undermines any presumption that Aue was ever fully compos mentis.

Elsewhere, narrative fact and hallucinatory imagination blend to a disconcerting degree; Aue at times struggles to distinguish between life as it is and life as he imagines it to be. It's all a bit annoying, and at times it seems as if Littell was hedging his bets with respect to his leading Nazi.

This is not to say that The Kindly Ones is not a useful book in its own way. Finely researched, it is at times as convincing a historical document of the decline and fall of the Third Reich as any specialist treatise. But as fiction?

I'm not so sure. When one embarks on a project as ambitious as The Kindly Ones, it is with the implicit understanding of some significant intellectual reward at the end. But, in fact, one concludes with a sense of emotional exhaustion, overcome by the sound and light but still unsure as to what - if anything - tangible that has been left behind.

8-3-2009

A real morality play

By Ina Friedman

The Kindly Ones
by Jonathan Littell (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell), Harper, 984 pages, $29.95

Addressing us as "my human brothers" in the opening line of "The Kindly Ones," former SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Dr. Maximilien Aue, the fictional author of this sprawling wartime memoir, implores the reader to "let me tell you how it happened." In return for the gift of our attention, he promises a tale that is admittedly bleak, but edifying too - "a real morality play, I assure you" - and one that definitely "concerns you: you'll see that this concerns you."

Yet in the same preface to his story, Aue signals that he really doesn't give a damn whether or not we indulge his request. For "if after all these years I've made up my mind to write," he writes, "it's to set the record straight for myself, not for you."

By the time he takes up his pen, Aue (pronounced "Ow-eh") is comfortably ensconced in France (where he spent most of his childhood) as an unremarked bourgeois husband, her and manager of a lace factory. He describes himself as having emerged from World War II as "an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame." But to preclude any charge of misleading us, he also clarifies that, unlike some of his former colleagues, he has never been driven to write a memoir "for the purpose of self-justification, since I have nothing to justify. ... I did my work, that's all." Nor will he be "pleading Befehlnotstand, the just-obeying-orders so highly valued by our good German lawyers," he reassures us, for he acted with "my eyes open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may have been."
If anything, Aue's purpose in embarking on this literary effort is to ascertain whether he can revive his own deadened affections, "to get my blood flowing, to see if I can still feel anything, if I can still suffer a little."

If, after this collection of caveats, you still care in the least, or are even curious, about what this erstwhile SS lieutenant colonel has to say for himself, be further forewarned that what follows is an exhaustingly long, excruciatingly detailed and often tedious narrative that nevertheless, and infuriatingly, does succeed in drawing us in. For Max, Aue proves to be a man toward whom, God help us, we readers fail to exhibit the same indifference (the highest form of contempt) that he flaunts. And indifference, in a word, is key to what this book is about.
Written in French, the novel was first published in 2006 as "Les Bienveillantes" to acclaim (winning both the prestigious Prix Goncourt and the Academie Francaise's Grand Prix du Roman) as well as outrage (from "Shoah" director Claude Lanzmann, for one). German, Spanish and Hebrew editions preceded Charlotte Mandell's skillfully fluent translation into English.

Author Jonathan Littell, 41, who was born in the United States and raised mostly in France, undoubtedly had ample opportunity to observe the effects of man's cruelty to man while working for the humanitarian-aid group Action Against Hunger in places such as Bosnia and Chechnya. He must also have invested considerable research before embarking on the writing of this novel. Still, it's hard not to be dazzled by his breadth of imagination, not to mention sheer stamina.

Max Aue, who holds a doctorate in law but tells us he would have preferred to study literature and philosophy - and indeed impresses us as well-read in these fields - is recruited into the SS by Thomas Hauser, who thereafter alternates as a mentor and savior. In 1941 he encourages Aue to join a field unit on the eastern front, vaguely explaining that his duties will include "special actions, SP and SD [security police] work, the security of the troops to the rear, intelligence, things like that."

"Does it surprise you that I didn't even hesitate?" Aue remarks. "What man of sane mind could ever have imagined that they'd pick jurists to assassinate people without a trial?"

Those assassinations begin for him in Ukraine, where Aue serves in Einsatzgruppe C as it follows in the wake of the German army and secures the rear against acts of resistance and sabotage by systematically eliminating Bolsheviks, Jews, Gypsies, thieves, looters, farmers hiding their grain, and anyone else who could be vaguely construed as an enemy of the Reich. Aue is a bureaucrat, not an executioner. His job is to observe, analyze and write reports. Only once, under orders, does he actively take part in an Aktion, administrating the coup de grace to victims who have fallen wounded into a ravine outside Kiev (read: Babi Yar). Arguably the book's most harrowing scene, it includes a "Waltz with Bashir"-like moment in which Aue flips out and runs through the ravine, shooting wildly in every direction, until "finally, out of breath, I stopped and started to cry."

'Then I'd understand everything'

Afterward, Aue reflects that "we had invented something compared to which war had come to seem clean and pure." It was something "extraordinary," seemingly "crucial" and if he could only understand it, he muses, "then I'd understand everything and could finally rest." Aue admits he was not devoid of options. He could have asked to be transferred; other officers had, he tells us, and one even landed a cushy job in Berlin. "So why didn't I?" he now asks himself. "Probably because I hadn't yet understood what I wanted to understand."

That is the extent of the explanation we get for Aue's choices, even at this remove. Throughout his posting in Ukraine, however, Aue struggles with his conscience, his feelings, and with questions of logic. He's outraged by the sadism and "emotional anti-Semitism" of some of his fellow officers. He opines to Hauser, in strictest confidence, that the murder of the Jews has "no economic or political usefulness," that it's "a waste, pure loss." And from the Kiev Aktion onward, he suffers frequent bouts of nausea and vomiting, as though his superego had turned somatic. Still, he tells us that although "no one required it," he went back regularly to witness the "executions," noting that the officers who had been involved from the start seemed particularly inured to the task. "I must have been like them," Aue reflects. "One got used to it, and in the long run stopped feeling much." What he was trying "desperately but in vain to regain," by returning to watch the massacres, "was actually that initial shock, that sensation of rupture, an infinite disturbance of my whole being." He never does.

The middle section of the book is a respite from genocide that Aue spends partly in Stalingrad (in itself no picnic), recovering from a head wound sustained there, and on an ill-fated trip to France. He tries to get himself posted to Paris, then Denmark, but willy-nilly is again assigned to the atrocious East, this time to raise the efficiency of the slave labor working in the concentration camps for industries vital to the war effort. Tasked now with saving Jews - and, of course, any other prisoners who, having mastered needed skills, are a pity to lose - Aue is pitted against fellow officers (most prominently Adolf Eichmann) working in the service of the Final Solution. His encounters with the hidebound, irrational Reich bureaucracy attest that he's been charged with an impossible mission.

Ironically, though, this assignment restores, however briefly, Aue's capacity to feel. Intent on ensuring, for example, that the overwhelmingly able-bodied Jews of Hungary being transported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 are channeled into the war industries, Aue fails miserably. Of the 400,000 Jews whom Eichmann had succeeded in deporting, he informs us, barely 40,000 were "retained" for industry. "Shattered, horrified by so much incompetence, obstruction, ill will," Aue writes, he returns to Berlin "sick and exhausted" and ends up collapsing.

I would be truant to omit that "The Kindly Ones" also has a rather indelicate subplot centering on Aue's personal life. Suffice it to reveal here that he is the product of a broken home and has a record of sexual deviance that begins in his unhappy childhood and clouds his life for years thereafter. Can such a troubled history explain Aue's choices and acts as an adult? He claims no dispensation to that effect (no "I'm depraved on account-a I'm deprived" here), and we should be wary of granting it. At the climax of this subplot, when Aue withdraws into lurid fantasies (or perhaps hallucinations) that feed a frenzy of solo sex, it's tempting to regard him as having descended into madness. And his weird physical assault on the Fuhrer in the course of being decorated for his service to the Reich would appear to support that view. Yet as the Russians close in on the heart of Berlin and it's every man for himself, when Aue commits serial homicide for the sake of self-preservation, it strikes us - the context of the six years of carnage that took 26.6 million lives on the eastern front alone, for an average of a new corpse every 4.6 seconds, by Aue's calculation - as an act finally perpetrated for an arguably sane reason. Still, only then does he develop a concern that the Kindly Ones (the avenging Furies of Greek myth) "were on to me."

Why do we keep reading?

The question that nagged me at the close of this novel was not whether - Aue's protests notwithstanding - it actually is a sly, postmodern all-narratives-are-equal justification of the acts of a senior officer in a mass-murder machine, but rather why we feel compelled to keep reading a narrative that, while not void of drama, is constructed largely of a crushing pile of pedantic, eminently forgettable details (names of obscure people and places, to say nothing of the arcane acronyms of Reich agencies), countless characters who are for the most part not developed and about whom we couldn't care less, faux-scholarly expositions (at one point the intellectual Aue holds forth to the unschooled Eichmann on the significance of Kant's categorical imperative, only to admit to us afterward that he'd said "pretty much whatever came into my head"), quotes of both sides of dialogues within the same run-on paragraph so that we must strain to keep track of who's saying what to whom, and rambling ruminations that call up shades of "Portnoy's Complaint" (and consider the construction of this sentence but a mild taste of what periodically awaits you in the novel). Two hundred pages before the end, Aue confesses that he himself is exhausted and bored by "all these details" and "uninteresting bureaucratic episodes," only to pick up where he left off.

I have no doubt that this style is a literary device designed to wear us down and drain us of feeling - Aue's very description of the effect of his job on him. And we can perhaps appreciate why Aue the compulsive memoirist has no choice but to soldier on, so to speak. But we readers do have a choice. So why would we continue to subject ourselves to this grueling saga?

In our abiding bewilderment about the Holocaust, it's possible that we slog through the numbing details and all the blood, gore, vomit, shit and stench that assault our senses in these pages in the vain hope of earning a wisp of understanding of it, no matter how odious the source.

But I have a different take, which evolved as I reached for a pithy way to characterize this novel, and it suddenly came to me: This is grisly picaresque. Then some curious elements began falling into place: improbable plot developments courtesy of a deus ex machina character; the pair of Colombo-like criminal detectives who crop up in the most unlikely places to hound Aue; even the oddly wicked expression on Littell's face in his jacket photo. But only toward the end, where the book dips into out-and-out farce, did the penny definitively drop for this persistently earnest reader (for who could be otherwise when engaged with the subject of the Holocaust?): "The Kindly Ones" is a satire on the Nazi endeavor, a matter in itself so black and so exaggerated that one can be forgiven for missing the trick Littell is playing.

And like all satire worth its salt (think Voltaire or Swift), it plants a seed of suspicion that something of us may be mirrored here - that "in a given set of circumstances," in Aue's words, we too are capable of growing hardened and indifferent to what may once have seemed outrageous and of surrendering ourselves to the flow, that the arrogant Aue may have had a sliver of a point when he declared at the start that "this concerns you." And we read on, and on, essentially in a quest to dispel those disturbing thoughts, without realizing, of course, that the degree to which we succeed is in inverse proportion to the degree we deserve to.

Ina Friedman, a Jerusalem correspondent for the Dutch daily Trouw, is co-author of "Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin."

February 24, 2009

Unrepentant and Telling of Horrors Untellable