The Kindly Ones (original 2006; edition 2009)

OFFICE POLITICS IN HELL

The persistent question about the Holocaust is how Germany, such a cultured, civilized nation, could decide--in the 20th century, no less--that the life of the nation depended upon wiping out all of Jewry. Littell confronts this dichotomy through the person of his narrator, Max Aue.

Aue is knowledgeable about and interested in art, literature, philosophy and, most of all, classical music. But he is also a mid-level SS functionary and a cog in the machinery of death. He observes and writes reports about the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings, and selections and crematoria in the death camps. He regularly meets with Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Albert Speer and other big names in the history of the Nazis' genocide.

Aue suffers severe gastrointestinal illness from his field work, but he never connects it to the horror of what he observes. He believes in National Socialism and the Final Solution. When he becomes friendly with a linguist who tells him that Nazi racial science is utter hogwash, Aue responds that he has been given something to think about and wishes to return to the discussion, but he is saved from the necessity when his friend is killed. Instead, he continues to plod along in his career path and blandly reports it all to us in this lengthy novel.

So what's it all about? I came to the conclusion that, in essence, this is a history of the management of the worst corporation ever. A corporation whose mission is the most spectacularly wrong-headed and horrific thing imaginable---but whose failure to achieve its goal is attributable to those most prosaic banes of so many companies: office politics and the Peter Principle. All the various functionaries spend most of their time squabbling with each other for position or to try to achieve whatever they think the Führer's will is. Since they are all petty men of limited imagination and intelligence, of course it's all a complete schweinerei, as Aue likes to call it.

Does that mean this is another novel whose point is the banality of evil? Not exactly. Aue is not just some Aryan in an SS uniform. He is one screwed-up bizarro. He has a sexual fixation on his twin sister, with whom he had childhood incestuous relationship, broken up by his mother and stepfather. He often digresses from his tales of another lousy day at work into lengthy, hair-raising descriptions of violence, repulsive bodily functions and sexual perversions, real and imagined.

Littell is not the first author to try to connect Nazism with sexually-related mental illness. It makes a sort of sense. It's somehow easier to understand the Holocaust if we tell ourselves that those Nazis weren't like normal people; they were a bunch of sickos. But I think this detracts from the story.

Littell could lose all of the psychosexual and endless scatological stuff and have a much more powerful narrative. Aue's screwed-up psyche gets in the way of Littell's point that there is not, in fact, some bright-line difference between normal, ordinary people and those who can participate in unspeakable horrors. Littell does an excellent job of showing how Germans involved in the genocide become increasingly desensitized and brutalized. It's unfortunate that this, the most powerful part of the book, becomes obscured by Aue's psychosis and his escalating perversity, including a ridiculously over-the-top murder subplot.

Still, despite its huge flaws, this is a tremendously ambitious book, well worth reading. ( )

A monstrous account of the Holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi bureaucrat who participated in it. ( )

"A new War and Peace ... Never, in the recent history of French literature, has an early work been so ambitious, so masterfully written, so meticulous in its detail or so serenely horrifying."
-Le Nouvel Observateur, taken from the back cover

�E€EWhat is this shit?E€E
-A former French resistance fighter on this book, as quoted by Laurent Binet in The Millions

This is a book that could have been. There were brief flashes of fascination, tantalizing ideas, lost in an interminable sea of dreck.

The opening Toccata gives us a few teasing sentences: "y human brothers, let me tell you how it happened." says the SS-Officer, and ends with "I am a man like other man, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you." Now is this a pleasing lie to himself or a plea to persuade? This brings to mind Arendt's study Eichmann in Jerusalem, on how ordinary people can be convinced or seduced to commit great evils and justify them.

But the book turns sour. The chapters with their musical titles of Allemandes, Courante, Sarabande, so on, are played largo in E minor.

It is to be understood, in a book like this, that there is due to be excessive violence. This is, after all, about an SS-Officer in the Eastern Front. It is gruesome, but endurable. And furthermore, I must give credit to the author for doing his research. He apparently got the hierarchy of titles and organizations right, as far as I can tell. And his long information dumps are intensely fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of languages and ethnicities of the Caucus, and the absurdity of trying to classify them into Jewish or not-Jewish so they can be exterminated shows the foolish ideal of the Nazi goal of racial conquest.

For those, I give the author credit. And he has had his experience with war and suffering - mainly, volunteer work in the DR-Congo.

But after that, there is little investigation of moral dilemmas at all. Just chronology. Atrocity, extermination, rear-guard action, pincer movement, all become a dull sludge. Only a few cursory fragments, as tempting as they are, give us reason to think. But otherwise it is a catalog of atrocities.

Speaking of sludge, what is it feces and this book? Perhaps it may have been written as a shock factor, but instead of any contemplation or angst at all, we see a more physical psychosomatic reaction. Do something evil? Just poop it out! Your nation and ethos crumbling around you? Put a sausage up your butt in the Siege of Berlin, 1945 and cry thinking about fucking your twin sister!

I'm not saying that feces as a metaphor is inherently bad. Nor does the gratuitous and forced incest make an inherently bad novel, although they can understandably disgust so many readers and either dissuade or titillate so many others. Instead, they are more like a substitute for something more important, as though a long and difficult conversation is being avoided or hidden with more gratuitous shock value.

The author seldom mentions the simmering occupation of France. Only a few mentions, if perhaps at all. If the author spoke of atrocities there, say Oradour-sur-Glane, would the book arouse such prurient interest, visceral recognition of true evil? But that, too, is another omission.

Tant pis. 1 star, not because the whole work is to be discarded (at least, all but the beginning), but because of how much it frustrated and disappointed.hhap ( )

Madness. Despicably disgustingly amazingly crafted madness. The ability of authors to write out these scenarios, diving into and drowning in the minds of the most horrific human beings imaginable, without completely losing their minds astounds me sometimes.

Maximilian Aue is just a byproduct of this whole history, if you can believe it. He starts out with horrific tendencies, to be sure : incest from an extremely young age, coprophilia, murderous inclinations. And then comes the war and its horrible mesh of insane procedures combined with genocide in the name of a logic that only exists in minds blinded by 'the bigger picture'. The motto of the war? It's someone else's responsibility. Every bit of it.

And the sheer idiocy of it: setting out to wipe out entire races while simultaneously saving them for an efficient work force? The entire war effort of the Germans degenerated into a paradox along these lines; at the end it became nothing more than an atrocious mess of confusion and futile attempts at maintaining order, and above all rampant killing. You look at Dr. Aue, and you look at a microcosm that contains a good deal of the horrors. The thing is, even he wasn't enough of a monster to fully appreciate them; the war machine around him combined with extreme physical trauma tormented his conscience into complete insanity. One of the more completely fucked up characters of literature.

You have to appreciate the detail of the book; it's so easy to sink into the world described from every aspect of cultural/political/societal context. Of course the sick taste of madness never fully leaves the pages; the aim of the book is not to leave you comfortable. Yes, quite a bit of this book will turn your stomach. But if you condemn it solely because of that, you're missing the entire point that Germany in WWII was not a nice place. It would sicken you then, so there's no point if it doesn't sicken you now.

In a more accredited person's words:

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

-Oscar Wilde

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NB: These remarks will be classified in The Critic’s Notebook. Unlike a more tightly constructed and formal book review, these notes will possess a larval nature: impressionistic, half-formed, spontaneous. It stands as a record of my first impressions as well as operate as raw material I will mine when I prepare a more in-depth critical analysis. This later analysis will also cover William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959), and William Gass’s The Tunnel (1995).

NB2: Spoilers ahead! So don't read this review if you want to read the book.

First Impressions:

1. An overall assessment has me borrowing Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops terminology. In this specific case: Fiasco.

2. Other categories for the Kindly Ones:
a. Difficult
b. Controversial
c. Problematic

3. Difficult:

a. European-style paragraphing (no paragraph breaks for dialogue).

b. Epic size. Does scale mean an inherent value or profundity? Cf. volumes from The Song of Ice and Fire, Atlas Shrugged, The Bible, and so on.

c. Untranslated German military ranks.

d. Numerous characters to keep track of.

4. Controversial:

a. Prize-winning. It won the Prix Goncourt in 2006, putting it in heady company, including Michel Houellebecq, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.

b. The sexuality of Dr. Maximilien von Aue. Reviewers have categorized Aue’s sexuality as “deviant.” (The construction of Aue’s sexuality will be further explored in the last category, since it is highly problematic.)

c. Aue’s sexuality has a certain grindhouse quality to it, giving the novel a sensationalist and exploitative gloss. One thinks of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, the Night Porter, and the Damned.

5. Problematic:

a. The narrative is at war with itself.

b. What is it? At once a realistic historical novel and a mashup of the Orestia.

c. The novel starts strong, but ends weak.

d. Two major narrative demerits:

i. Aue’s head wound suffered in Stalingrad.

ii. Murder of parents (but with no memory of committing the act).

e. These major plot devices get built upon until it becomes implausibility heaped on implausibility. (Aue’s advancements in rank and the police investigation. The investigation begins as a real threat to Aue’s life and prestige, and then it devolves into a ridiculous farce.)

6. While the novel is loaded with excessive violence and explicit sex, these things aren’t inherently bad (Cf. Gravity’s Rainbow and Funeral Rites).

7. Do narrative fiascos have their own value to readers and critics? What can critics extract from works that fail?

a. What do we mean by fail? Not move units off the bookshelf? (The Nathan Rabin-esque flop.) Baffled/horrified/negative critical reception? (Fiasco and/or Secret Success.)

8. Father & Son:

a. Jonathan Littell is the son of American espionage writer Robert Littell. The Littell the Elder author of The Company, a multigenerational epic about the CIA.

b. With The Company and his other works, R. Littell tells the history of the US intelligence community via the “Jewishness” of the characters (Cf. Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, etc.).

c. Jonathan Littell’s grandparents were Russian Jews who fled Russia and settled in the United States.

d. Both Jonathan and Robert reside in France.

e. Jonathan Littell reframes his Jewish heritage with a narrator who is an SS jurist (i.e. an elite within Nazi German society).

i. Littell further complicates this with Aue’s sexuality (see below) and Aue’s Alsatian heritage. Alsace-Lorraine was German territory from 1871 to 1918 and re-annexed by Germany after the fall of France in 1940, then returning to France in 1945. Alsace is a border province, lacking the historical credentials of a province within the German Altreich. The sexuality and Alsatian heritage make Aue a luminal character, existing on the boundaries of society.

9. Aue’s Sexuality:

a. Max had incestuous relations with his sister, Una, when they were children.

b. Max and Una are twins.

c. Lacking the presence of Una, Max can only become sexually aroused via anal sex.

d. Does this make Max a gay character? To this reader, a resounding no. But this requires further explanation, since this shouldn’t be confused with “Homosexuality is a choice” parroted by the deranged, hypocritical, and ignorant of the Modern Theocratic Right.

e. Can “gayness” even operate as an accurate label for a scenario this contrived?

f. The contrivance is created for the purposes of the narrative fitting into the Orestia, since the play cycle has its fair share of demented sex and violence.

g. This contrived sexuality is odd given the very real history of Germany’s many thriving gay subcultures (the Prussian military, Weimar Berlin, and the SA).

The novel draws upon the darker thread of French literary history, especially DAF Sade and Ferdinand Celine with its violence, depravity, gratuitous sex, and severe, albeit alien, morality. Unlike the novel Shadows Walking, which is written from a more realistic Balzackian tradition, depicting a “slice of life” of German Nazi-era society.

http://driftlessareareview.com/2012/10/30/translation-tuesdays-the-kindly-ones-b... ( )