The Kindly Ones

If you like Greek Tragedy, absurdism, Holocaust literature, and turns of phrase like "the demented vision of a perfect coprophagic autarky," (and, believe me, you'll be happier if you don't look that one up), then Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones is for you. Also, best to have a strong stomach. Critic Michael Korda says, "You want to read about Hell, here it is. If you don’t have the strength to read it, tough shit. It’s a dreadful, compelling, brilliantly researched, and imagined masterpiece, a terrifying literary achievement, and perhaps the first work of fiction to come out of the Holocaust that places us in its very heart, and keeps us there."^[20] The book caused a sensation when it was published in France several years ago (according to Wikipedia, Gallimard was forced to suspend publication of the current Harry Potter novel to keep up with demand), much ire when published in Germany, and a curious mix of reviews from the Brits and the Americans, Korda's being the "best," and others accusing the book of being sensationalistic or even hinting at its underlying depravity.

There are a number of things going on that explain the wildly mixed reception the novel has received. First, we are used to Holocaust literature coming from the perspective of a member of a persecuted class--a Jew or a homosexual, say, not a member of the Nazi elite. And the view from inside is, indeed, stomach-churning in its straightforward acceptance of unbelievable cruelty, but it is also, at many times, painfully, stultifyingly, bureaucratically dull. Which is perhaps the point.

We are also not used to thinking of high-ranking members of the SS as anything other than brutes or fiendishly clever evil geniuses, and Littell's Dr. Aue is neither. What he is, is an overeducated intellectual who speaks a great number of languages, has an (over)active fantasy life, troubled past, and extremely sophisticated mind--but who still falls for National Socialism hook, line, and sinker. The attraction of National Socialism for him is one part intellectual/patriotic and one part a kind of homage to his absent father, who abandoned the family after the end of WWI. At the beginning of the book we discover that he has homosexual tendencies, which is something of a curve ball, but later on we learn that his homosexuality has more to do with his suppressed--I say suppressed not repressed--desire for his twin sister, with whom he had an incestuous relationship in childhood and early adolescence, than it does with any real desire for male companionship. So, from the top, we have an intellectual with an active inner life, a bureaucrat's distaste for violence, and an enormous sexual hang up. If Littell wanted to humanize Dr. Aue, mission accomplished, but if he wanted to depict Nazis as anything other than sexually oppressed, shall we say, "perverts"...not so much.

One thing that must be said--Littell has done his research. He sends Dr. Aue from the Ukraine to the Caucasus to Stalingrad to Berlin and we see how the war is progressing on all these fronts. Used as I am to either Western European accounts of the war or Russian horror stories about the siege of Leningrad, it was a learning experience for me to finally understand just how vast a territory the Germans occupied at the height of their power. Several times I pulled out the world map to trace the German-occupied territory, which I finally understood to have been both enormous physically and an enormous threat politically, which I had understood before only as it pertained to Western Europe, as opposed to, say, the Caucuses.

Above all else, Dr. Aue is two things: a coprophiliac, and a bureaucrat. His obsession with diarrhea and feces, his own and others', is just that, obsessive. Unfortunately for him, he has what one might call a "nervous stomach," and the stress of participating in mass executions in the Ukraine or being on the front lines in Stalingrad aggravates his bowels. His descriptions of creeping around Stalingrad and shitting, literally anywhere and everywhere are grotesquely hilarious. As a bureaucrat, he is somewhat removed from the general slaughter. Someone hands him a gun and he finishes off a couple of Jews at the Babi Yar massacre (as befits his status) but until the very end of the novel, he is otherwise always a mere observer of cruelty. And what cruelty he observes. He witnesses several massacres notable for their sloppy execution, with too few shooters aiming poorly at too many victims, who then need to be finished off one at a time. He sees the urine and shit and vomit that are the end result of the special gas trucks intended to make executing Jews "easier" on the German soldiers. He witnesses the selection process at Auschwitz, with the women and children sent straight to the showers.

Throughout it all, he expresses no real antisemitism of his own--his antisemitism, it seems, is the product of culture, not nature. Indeed, he goes so far as to agree with a friend that there is no logical economic or military reason that the Jews should be eliminated. In his job in Berlin working for Himmler he must constantly negotiate the tension between men like Eichmann who want the Jews eliminated no matter what the cost to the Reich, and industrialists like Speer who want the male Jews, at least, to be kept alive (and fed decently) to provide free labor.

One thing that Littell accomplishes very well is showing the dissension among the ranks, at all levels, when it comes to massacring Jews, especially when the edict comes down that women and children are to be killed, too. We don't see men defying orders, but we do see them questioning them. And the SS men are very clear on the fact that the greatest purpose of the acts they are being asked to perform is to entrap them all in one web of guilt and remove all plausible deniability. War may make men brutes, Littell seems to be saying, but they remain thinking brutes, capable of suspecting that they are being duped.

My only real problem with the book is that I think the Greek Tragedy frame story feels tacked-on and unbelievable. I can believe in Dr. Aue's sexual dysfunction and his family dynamic, but the two police officers who dog him (like the furies) even as Berlin is going up in flames seem to push the metaphor too far. I get the larger point--justice, in the Reich, has regressed to a pre-law state, and I think that's a valid observation. I just don't think Littell needed to be quite so literal about it.