For most of the afternoon, which I ought to have spent preparing the house for the holidays and its meals, I’ve been slumped over my copy of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (in Charlotte Mandel’s translation). It is ludicrously untimely reading — its thousand pages recount the World War II experiences of a Nazi bureaucrat belonging to the SS — but instead of distracting me from the sound of sleigh bells, it intensifies the keenness with which I hear them. The massiveness of such a piece of great literature is always viscerally affirming. No post-modern accumulation of details this, The Kindly Ones accumulates its formidable heft minute by minute, as Max Aue slips and staggers beneath an insanity that is not his alone, but an entire nation’s.

Recognized as a masterpiece in France when it appeared (as Les Bienveillantes, in 2006), but dismissed almost neurasthenically here, when it appeared in English last year, Littell’s book forces upon the reader a shocking reconsideration of the Hitler years. Reconsideration, I say; not revision. Even though the novel’s point of view is resolutely fastened within the mind of a would-be intellectual, there is not a whisper of real support for the Nazi apologetics that the protagonist elicits from his interlocutors between the moments of atrocity and mayhem that burst through the narrative. What’s new is that point of view, which, however much that of a Nazi, is incontrovertibly that of a human being. There are readers for whom this humanizing tendency must be suspect, as a kind of pleading the Nazi case; I suspect that they’ll be the readers with personal recollections of the War.

For those born long afterward, however, humanization simply makes the whole nightmare worse. For the Nazis were not an army of alien zombies who appeared out of nowhere and started to make trouble. They were as rooted in the soil of history and circumstance as we all are, and that is the lesson of this long read: although the Nazis were, at the very least, monstrously wrong-headed, their wrong-headedness was nothing special. They had personal ambitions and weaknesses and grudges and they were easily intoxicated by Hitler’s promise of excitement. This excitement, in particular, gave them a ruthlessly efficient appearance, because we are always a bit ruthless about taking what we want when we think that we’re entitled to it; but as the inaugurators of a new world order, the Nazis were incoherent bumblers. They had no realistic long-term plans. And they were ridiculous. This was noted at the time, but shushed up when the extermination of the Jews came to be widely understood. There could be nothing ridiculous about the architects of death factories. But almost everything else about the Nazi experiment became ridiculous as mass murder became its principal obsession.  

I’m only halfway through; I’ve got almost five hundred pages to go. Much of that, I’ve gathered from what I’ve read about the book, will concern the death camps, and I expect it to be as difficult to read as the account of the SS aktionen in the Ukraine that fills the first couple of hundred pages. These “actions” were horrifically improvised liquidations of Jewish populations in the cities and towns that the German army swept through in its reach for the oil reserves of the Caspian shores. The Kindly Ones obliges us to consider the distress and psychological damage that was borne by the German troops charged with the one-by-one shooting of thousands of men, women, and children. We have understandably preferred to regard this damage as infinitesimally small, which it is, but only in comparison with the wretchedness suffered by the victims. We do not consider the victims here: that is the power of Jonathan Littell’s literary achievement. And precisely because the distress is now overwhelming in its own right, we the measure of the woe of the Holocaust is greater and darker. We realize, as we turn the many, many pages of the novel’s Allemande section, that a measure of comic relief that helped us bear up against the fact of the Holocaust will henceforth be denied. 

I’ve been so lost in the factuality of the story, with its swerves between banal office politics and unspeakable barbarism, that I did not, until about twenty minutes before reaching the end of the Sarabande, see how literally the title is intended. The Kindly Ones are, of course, the Furies, and their most celebrated appearance in classical literature is at the trial of Orestes, who avenged the murder of his father by murdering his mother. Twenty minutes before I got to the end of the Sarabande — a relative brief respite from war that Max Aue spends in Berlin, Paris, and Antibes — a faint neural pealing grew into a tintinnabulating fanfare: Littell has underpinned his epic of hatred and frenzy with one of the West’s foundational studies of guilt: the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2010 at 6:35 pm.