The Kindly Ones

There were times while I was reading this that I thought perhaps the vast amount of history could have been cut. A thousand-page novel...really? When is that actually necessary?
Well, it is for this book.
I had also thought at times that the dialog could have been trimmed up for pacing. But then I also considered that the author was handling the dialog that way for a purpose, and that eventually the purpose would be revealed. It was, in the last 100 pages when the protagonist retreats to his sister's house and spends a bizarre few weeks there in isolation.
So, the two elements that I thought maybe could have been trimmed in the end revealed themselves as masterworks by the author. I don't want to say much more because, despite this being show more 1,000 pages long, there's actually not much I can detail without providing spoilers.
Know this one thing: The most important revelation comes literally with the last sentence. The entire work...how the history is handled, that dialog, the protagonist's journey through the war as well as his personal events...all come together in that single masterful last sentence.
This is a brilliant novel. Well worth the dedication to read all 1,000 pages. show less

I read this novel over last summer - a bit of an odd choice for holiday reading. While I couldn't say that I 'enjoyed' it in the conventional sense of the word, I certainly found it interesting both in what Littell was attempting - the sheer scope and size of his research is mindboggling - and in the way he chooses to do it. He draws out the mythical thread of The Kindly Ones, in what is otherwise a work of brutal realism, in order to present the protagonist's mental decline. This is a major feature of the novel; Littel often uses his painstaking research to demonstrate the strangeness of Aue's world, for example when a colleague speaks for pages and pages about linguistics systems in the midst of chapters on atrocities.

I did struggle show more with it as the narrative becomes more and more commandeered by Aue's descent into utter madness. The extremely unerotic sexual scenes and the fantasy episode make this a hard book to stick with until the end, which is inevitably disappointing. As the whole text is set out as a flashback, we're left wondering how he could possibly conceal this madness in his new life.

The book becomes less about the reality of the Holocaust and more spiralling uncontrollably around the obsession of Aue with The Kindly Ones (no spoilers, but if you know what they are you can probably guess). He develops a sort of fatalistic idea of his approaching judgement, which is in his mind not for the thousands of innocents he has helped to kill but for a far more personal crime. We simultaneously condemn him for his blindness and wonder if, as a projection, it is another unpleasant effect of his circumstances - leading us again to question how far he's responsible for his own actions.

I've given it 3 stars because, while it is thought-provoking, I honestly don't know who I could recommend this book to, if at all. I don't think it's something I'd read twice. It leaves you feeling that it's fallen short somehow, that justice is not done - but the same is true of history. show less

I can't say I loved this book as I struggled through it but it was quite an experience. The only word I can use to describe it is "dense." For everyone who criticized the book because of the grim subject matter: what the hell were you thinking? Did you expect rainbows and kittens? War and destruction are heavy subjects and I think the author handles them deftly.

I was impressed by how complex the character of Aue was and I felt that this book, unlike many others, allowed the reader to see the tangle of bureaucracy that makes up the war machine.

I do agree that the lack of paragraphs made this difficult book even more painful to get through.

Wow! An extremely well written, horrible story of Max Aue, an officer in the German SS during WWII. (1941-45) An awful story but I couldn't quit reading it! It was written so beautifully. Max narrates his experiences and they are so believable (except he was at every important battle and knew so many 'important' people).

Originally published on Upublica: http://www.upublica.com/article_c/article_detail/73/the_kindly_ones_by_jonathan_...

The Kindly Ones is the fictive memoir of Max Aue, a Nazi officer. Intelligent and well educated, Aue never wanted to be a career officer, nor was he ever an ardent follower of Nazi ideology. Like so many other ‘ordinary’ Germans he is a victim of circumstance, and as the war evolves he finds himself caught up in the Nazi programme of exploiting the labour of concentration camp prisoners. This takes him in and out of government ministries and concentration camps; though a senior government official, he is reduced to the role of a spectator, a victim of institutional rivalry.

Plunging at times into violent and show more pornographic orgies, The Kindly Ones is not for the faint hearted. It is, however, quite a spectacular accomplishment, not least because it succeeds in exploring in great nuance some of the core themes of the Holocaust. It presents a splendid portrayal of how the various Nazi institutions competed with one another, often resulting in bureaucratic inertia and endless political battles. Littell shows how the Nazis did not start out with an extermination master plan. Rather, the killing came about only gradually, the gassing by trial and error. Another theme that Littell explores with great insight – and one that is contrary to popular belief – is how Nazi officers were in fact allowed to express their own opinions, and indeed challenge orders without fear of reprisal.

On a more abstract level the book explores the warped psychology of Nazi culture. Max Aue’s civilised veneer is gradually ripped apart, his character constantly oscillating between the civilised human being he once was, and still bears traces of, and the animal that he has become. One moment he is discussing literature with a fellow officer and the next he is executing a prisoner.

This is where The Kindly Ones fails. Max Aue paints a picture of himself as an ordinary person, like you and me. In the beginning of the book he takes pains to let the reader know that there is nothing to distinguish him from the reader. Consequently, we are led to believe that we would have acted similarly under the same circumstances. This is not controversial: that the majority of Nazi criminals were indeed quite normal people is a well established historical fact stressed in several history books such as Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men.

Max Aue might think he is normal but the fact is that he is nothing like an ordinary person. Few people, at least as young as him, are as intelligent and well versed in literature, philosophy and music. Few people have an incestuous relationship with their sister. Few people go to the park cruising for gay sex. Few people kill their parents. Max Aue is all of that – or, at least this is what we are led to believe as The Kindly Ones mixes reality and fantasy into a surreal cocktail. If it is Littell’s intention to convey the idea that the Nazi perpetrators were ordinary people like you and me, then he couldn’t have chosen of worse protagonist than Max Aue. Max Aue’s murderous and sexual fantasies are so bizarre that if we are to believe that he is representative of the average Nazi, then we are also forced to acknowledge the veritable gulf that lies between the average Nazi and ordinary people like you and me. This realisation flies in the face of historical evidence suggesting that Nazi perpetrators were ‘ordinary men’ and undermines the thesis of Littell’s book. show less

I read this in 2011 and wrote a lengthy review at the time, so may as well post it here.

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Reading this book was a very intense experience, which I'm now going to ramble about. 'The Kindly Ones' is an account of the second world war told in the first person by an SS officer, so be warned that it is not what you would call pleasant. I suppose there may also be spoilers, although I will avoid any details that would in my view affect the experience of reading it yourself.

I hardly know where to start. This novel is as dense, intense, and horrifying as any I've ever read. It has been translated from French and includes quite a lot of German terms (all relating to the SS and its activities). The sentences are long, the paragraphs show more interminable and abrupt-ending. All this adds to the sense that you are in the head of the narrator, Dr. Max Aue. The book is his memoir and revolves so closely around him as to feel claustrophobic. No character he encounters has any real depth, nor clear motives. The reader experiences the second world war through Aue's eyes and other senses. By the end, I felt as if I knew him, much better than I wanted to and too well to be able to make any unequivocal judgement about him.

At the start of the novel, Dr. Aue is at pains to point out to the reader that he is just like us, an ordinary man who did horrible things due to circumstance. He is articulate and persuasive, presenting the point that in war men not only lose their right to live, but also their right not to kill. However even at the very start, when we know nothing of his life, there is a deeply unsettling undercurrent to this. For one thing, we know he was in the SS. For another, he drops hints and describes physical ailments which seem like manifestations of deep psychological disturbance. I initially read this introductory chapter then put aside the book for a few weeks to read five others. None of them were bad, but when I came back to this it was as if I was drinking black coffee after nothing but glasses of water. I finished the remaining 800 pages in just over a week.

As the novel unfolds, you follow Aue across Europe as he is sent to undertake various bureaucratic tasks. Because, essentially, he is a bureaucrat. In point of fact, this novel is enough to give you a phobia of bureaucracy. Aue is not a soldier, he is an intellectual who claims that in another life he would have been happy writing literature and playing the piano. His tasks as an SS officer largely involve writing reports, the macabre horror of which lies in their implications. Whilst in the Ukraine, he is tasked with determining whether a race of so-called 'mountain Jews' are Jews according to the Nazi definition. This involves quite a bit of data-gathering, the consultation of experts, and ultimately a conference. The implication remains unspoken - if his report decides that this group are in fact sufficiently Jewish to meet the definition, they will all be killed. To Aue, this is a purely academic matter, and it irritates him that different groups within the occupying German force try to sully his endeavour with political machinations. He has no interest in the fate of the Mountain Jews after he makes his report; that is someone else's job.

That is horrifying enough. Later in the book, he is given a much more shocking task - to inspect the concentration camps and determine how to make their inmates more productive as workers. By this point, the Nazis are starting to lose the war and a contradiction is emerging; slave labour can only be used to help the war effort as long as the slaves are kept alive. Different government ministries have different aims (production, destruction) with overlapping jurisdictions. But ultimately the whole infrastructure has been put in place primarily to ensure that the Jews, criminals, gypsies, Poles, and political dissidents die as quickly as possible. Aue writes many reports on how greater productivity could be wrung from the concentration camps, but is constantly frustrated by the inability of his superiors to implement his ideas. By this point, he tells us, it is too late and events have their own momentum. A more stark illustration of the principles of political economy would be hard to find. The depictions of the concentration camps are horrific, as you might expect, yet it is still more unsettling to hear them framed as administrative complaints, with the constants deaths a mere inefficiency. One character who stuck in my mind was a judge determined to bring a number of concentration camp administrators to justice for corruption; they stole money, clothes, etc from the camp's victims. He is presented as a principled man, outraged that the perpetrators are stealing German state property. The fact that these items were stolen from Jews and other camp inmates, who were then killed, he doesn't even think to address. Again, someone else's job.

It is the contrasts, I think, that make The Kindly Ones so disturbing. The banality of meetings with functionaries and report-preparation, when compared with their genocidal subject matter. In addition, the contrast of methodical bureaucratic procedure with chaotic madness, which constantly hovers at the edge of events and at times completely subsumes them. Aue is an unreliable narrator, apparently oblivious to or uncaring of his mental instability. There are periods when illness or memory tips him into utter insanity and melodramatic perversion. Not for nothing did this novel win a Bad Sex award. In another setting, his hallucinations and obsessions could seem laughable, perhaps pathetic. In context, they add to the terrible atmosphere of a society that has gone horribly wrong and is trying to repress the fact. Moreover, they make the narrative strikingly tense and unpredictable; the reader already knows with the benefit of hindsight that Germany is going to lose the war.

The sequences in which Aue encounters front-line fighting are characterised by mayhem and insanity, which fits with the non-fiction accounts that I've read. On the other hand, such first-hand accounts ('With the Old Breed', 'Band of Brothers', etc) always emphasise the close bonds of soldiers, that sustain them in terrible conditions. There is none of that in Aue's world. His relationships are probably best described as complicated; too much detail might spoil the plot. Comradeship seems alien to him, he loves only one person and likes very few. Those he does form connections with frequently leave or even perish. This isn't surprising given his job and the war, but also seems to reinforce his underlying madness. He avoids people, pushes them away, damages them. Has the war and the SS warped him, or was he already damaged and thus ended up where he did? The disjunct between personal and professional is a matter to ponder. In his job, Aue is controlled and precise, whereas his personal life is very much the opposite. Nevertheless, a certain callousness pervade both.

In the latter half of the book, I toyed with thoughts of Aue as a metaphor for all Nazi Germany. This is a comparison he makes himself at one point, but it's not a simple one. He knows himself to be responsible for murdering many people, both with his own hands and tacitly through report-writing, but refuses to regret or feel guilt. The institutional edifice in which he found himself made it unthinkable to do other than as he did, or to believe other than that it was necessary for Germany. As the war is lost, he saves himself and starts afresh. This brings us to the title. The Kindly Ones are the Furies of Greek myth; you might remember them from the Sandman series. Also known as the Erinyes, they personify vengeance for horrible crimes, specifically the murder of family members. In the novel, two detectives are clear personifications of the Furies, pursuing Aue through the increasing chaos and violence of war until he finally escapes them at the end. I was shocked by own ambivalence about this; the writing is such that you feel Aue's desperation at the pursuit of the avenging detectives. They are surely right to pursue him, as he has committed terrible crimes, some of which he won't even admit to himself. Yet you feel Aue's claustrophobic sense of needing to escape, from his pursuers, from the chaos of war, from his past. The reader is invited to understand him, I wouldn't go so far as to say sympathise, and to despise his Furies.

There's so much more I could say, but I'm out of practise at literary analysis and 975 pages of complex prose could provoke an endless stream of thoughts. To conclude, what is truly amazing about this novel, to me, is that it feels honest. It may be fiction, but Dr. Max Aue is a convincing character and the big events that he describes happened. If a particularly articulate mid-ranking SS officer were to write his memoirs, who can say that they wouldn't have this tone?

Why did I read this novel? Because a couple of years ago I came across a review of it, in the London Review of Books I think, which stuck with me until I saw it in the library. Like many, I find the horrifying parts of recent history fascinating, and I feel a hunger to try and understand why terrible things happened. There's truth in the old saw that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, in my view. Surely this is why the rise of Hitler and the Nazis is taught so intensively in GCSE and A-level history? The Holocaust happened within living memory, when my grandparents were my age. Other crimes against humanity have happened before and since, but this one holds particular sway over the British psyche, I think. Perhaps because it happened so nearby? I'm not a historian and shouldn't speculate.

'The Kindly Ones' has no easy answers. I could unequivocally condemn Max Aue as a criminal, a murderer, and a monster, but what would that achieve? How did he come to commit such crimes? Were his actions any worse than those of his peers? How did norms of behaviour become so extreme and horrifying at that time? Can we blame the abstraction of war, as Aue seems to? How much can political leaders take the blame for individual action? Pondering this reminds me that so much current fiction, TV, and films, unwittingly or otherwise trivialises violence and death. For a novel entirely suffused with both, 'The Kindly Ones' most definitely does not.

It takes great writing to confront you with so many fundamental questions. 'The Kindly Ones' is relentless, horrifying, and stunning; I will carry on thinking about it for a long time.

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'The Kindly Ones' has indeed stayed in my mind. I'll re-read it one of these days. show less

The Kindly Ones is a densely-packed, minutely-detailed look into the eastern front of Hitler’s battle for world supremacy. Mr. Littell leaves no character actionless and no detail indistinct in this tome. Rather, he feels that a reader must have all of the details in order to best assess the psychological impact of the war and the Nazi doctrine on party members, collaborators, and unwilling participants alike, and he truly means all of the details. Dialogue is excruciating as every major and minor soldier has a line, no matter how trivial it may be. The unfamiliar German military ranks only serve as added weight to an already endless narrative, as does the pre-Cold War geography. The narrative and dialogue occur as if a reader is show more there next to Aue, watching the scene unfold firsthand and with the appropriate level of historical context to be able to understand the major players and meaning behind their actions. For readers without the historical knowledge, this makes the entire novel slow, ponderous, and more than a little confusing.

There is no doubt The Kindly Ones is controversial. In fact, it rivals American Psycho for its descriptions of the sick and perverted things one human can enact against another. The matter-of-factness with which Dr. Aue’s contemporaries and fellow soldiers execute the Jews and the gypsies and anyone else on the official “no friend to the Nazis” list, including inmates and hospital patients is terrifying. Similarly, the imagery is stark and gruesome. While Mr. Littell acknowledges that most soldiers struggled with the mass murders, this admission in no ways lessens the impact of such scenes. However, it is not these scenes with which readers will take the most offense. The controversy lies in Aue’s fantasies. As the war progresses, his hallucinations become more ghastly and more extreme, fueled by the strain of hiding his sexuality from the outside world and the compounded trauma associated with the war and the damage incurred by his highly inappropriate relationship with his sister. The last chapter is the culmination of this toxic stew and will simultaneously turn readers’ stomachs as well as render them breathless with Aue’s pain and suffering.

In spite of all of The Kindly Ones’ faults, Dr. Aue is a fascinating character by whom to study the psychology of peer pressure and justification of actions. Early on in the novel, Aue has this to say about guilt:

“What I did, I did 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. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame?…I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception, any more than I was.” (p. 18-20)

It is with this in mind that a reader enters the first chaotic scene of the Germans following the Soviets into Poland and Czechoslovakia and beyond. These few statements not only provide keen insight into Aue’s frame of mind as he writes his memoirs, the fruit of which becomes the novel, but also a curious sense of remoteness as the reader ponders whether Aue is correct in his conclusions – something that leaves quickly upon a reader’s increasing emotional involvement within the story. It definitely raises one’s awareness about the idea of complicity, something that has plagued Germans since the end of the war.

The Kindly Ones is meant for readers with tough stomachs and even tougher psyches. Any scene involving the Jews is achingly brutal in the unflinching details. It is one thing to know of their fate; it is quite another to have their fate described down to the last blood drop or twitch. The nonchalant attitudes of the Germans are equally difficult to accept, as is their sometimes bizarre justifications for their actions. Still, it does no one any good to forget such things, and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones makes it impossible to forget. show less