Trying to fashion a coherent response to The Kindly Ones in the immediate aftermath of its impact is wearying work, given my stunned and deranged state of mind. I’m aware of several objectives that don’t cohere. I’ve just read one of the most austerely monumental books that I’ll encounter in my lifetime, but the experience was occasionally so unpleasant that it feels foolish to press the book on your attention with glowing praise. By “unpleasant,” I don’t refer to the gas chambers and the genocide that are always in the background and occasionally in the foreground. I don’t refer to not infrequent display of fecal inconvenience. This subject-matter unpleasantness is, as one has every right to insist, handled ably by the writer’s prose. What I refer to is the impossibility of regarding Max Aue as a monster. The triumph of this novel is its humanization of a participant in the Final Solution. For many readers, I know, “triumph” is not the word for such an achievement; “disgrace” is more like it. But I am one of those people for whom a tiny but unbridgeable gap stretches between moral mind and committed deed, such that the mind is never captured by and reduced to the size of the deed. 

I’m going to jump in to a moment, about four fifths of the way into this thousand-page novel, that burned with cinematic intensity when I read it and that has lodged in my mind undigested. Forty-odd years ago, the scene might have been dished up by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, marinated in absurdist irony. A crazed ghost of raucous laughter still seems to rumble from the far corners of the view — we are standing on one of those ramps where incoming prisoners are “selected” — but therre is none of the distance that makes absurdity funny. 

A bit of background. After his recovery from a gunshot wound that he rather strangely survives, Max casts about for a job in France, but in vain. At the prompting of two shadowy titans of business, Max reluctantly takes on an assignment relating to the concentration camps. Impressed by the pessimism of Albert Speer, who forecasts disaster for the Reich if the production of arms and vehicles is not increased, Max seizes on the hope of putting Germany’s prisoners to work. At first, the bustle of setting up and staffing an office, of arranging meetings and keeping busy, buoys Max up. Not for long, though. What’s alarming about Max’s exhaustive complaints is steady drip of pointlessness that leaks through them. Max imagines that he is running into various obstacles that might, if approached correctly, be moved, but it’s clear to us that all the research into nutrition and the reports on prison populations is simply useless. It’s partial and unreliable going in, and going out, it will have no impact on what anyone actually does. Max’s project is doomed by corruption, indifference, and the rising sense of national emergency. And because Max is trying to save lives, if only in the short term and for the purposes of extracting labor, we’re doubly disheartened: poor Max, poor prisoners. The power of The Kindly Ones rises from Jonathan Littell’s ability to make Max’s workday problems gripping by stretching them out, in lean but comprehensive physical detail, over questions of life and death. If lives, if the future of the Reich were not at stake (contrary goals), then perhaps none of it would be interesting. But since they are, listening to Max is not only fascinating but flabbergasting. After an “action” in Hungary, Max speeds up to Auschwitz, only to find that the rations problem is never going to come up, because most prisoners are immediately dispatched to the crematorium. It’s as though someone in a roomful of people without skills were to call out, “let’s put on a show.”

There wasn’t too much disorder; for a long time I observed the doctors who carried out the selection (Wirths wasn’t there), they spent one or two seconds on each case, at the slightest doubt it was no, they seemed also to refuse many women who looked perfectly able-bodies to me; when I pointed this out to him, Höss told me they were following his instructions, the barracks were overcrowded, there wasn’t any more room to put people in, the factories were making a fuss, weren’t taking these Jews fast enough, and the Jews were piling up, epidemics were beginning again, and since Hungary kept sending them every day, he was forced to make room, he had already carried out several selections among the inmates, he had also tried to liquidate the Gypsy camp, but there had been problems and it had been put off till later, he had asked for permission to empty the Theresienstadt “family camp” and hadn’t yet received it, so in the meantime he could really only select the best,  in any case if he took any more they would soon die of disease. He explained all this to me calmly, his empty blue eyes aimed at the crowd and the ramp, absent. I felt hopeless, it was even more difficult to talk to this man than to Eichmann.

***

All day I surveyed the camp, section by section, barrack after barrack; the men were hardly in better shape than the women. I inspected the registers: no one, of course, had thought to respect the basic rule of warehousing, first in, first out; whereas some arrivals didn’t even spend twenty-four hours in the camp before being sent on, others stagnated there for three weeks, broke down, and often died, which increased the losses even more. But for each problem I pointed out to him, Höss unfailingly found someone else to blame. His mentality, formed by the prewar years, was completely unsuited to the job, that was plain as day; but he wasn’t the only one to blame, it was also the fault of the people who had sent him to replace Liebehenschel, who, from the little I knew of him, would have gone about it completely differently.

This overall picture of ineptitude from which these two extracts are drawn, in a single paragraph that extends for nearly seventeen pages, explodes any idea that of cold German competence. I’m reminded of the ghoulish Chas Addams cartoon in which a patent lawyer aims a baroque weapon out his office window and complains to his would-be client, “Death ray? Fiddlesticks! It doesn’t even slow them down!”

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 at 8:00 pm.