March 20, 2009
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Kindly Ones': An Acquired Taste But a Powerful Tour de Force for Those with Strong Stomachs
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
Having plowed my way through the almost 1,000 pages of Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones" (HarperCollins, 992 pages, $29.99, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell), I'm trying to figure out what's the source of all the controversy that this book on the Holocaust and Germany's war in the Eastern Front has stirred up.
It's really quite simple, in my opinion: Max Aue, the protagonist of "The Kindly Ones," is a Nazi Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel "American Psycho." Aue, a fictional character born Oct. 10, 1913, is how Littell, born Oct. 10, 1967, imagined how he might have behaved had he been born in Europe and became a dedicated Nazi bureaucrat.
By imagining Aue as a Nazi Patrick Bateman, I'm not spoiling the novel, written in French by the son of novelist Robert Littell. Jonathan Littell was educated in both France and the U.S., earning his baccalaureat diploma in France and earning his college degree from Yale University. Published as "Les Bienveillantes" by Editions Gallimard in 2006, the novel was a runaway bestseller in France, garnering two major prizes along the way and gaining Littell French citizenship in 2007.
Littell spent years of study accumulating facts for his novel, in which Aue, a law graduate of the University of Berlin, opens the book by telling -- in part; he saves the full story for the very end of the book -- how he escaped the war crimes trials, becoming a respected French lace manufacturer.
It helps that Aue is perfectly bilingual. Aue, or to give him his final title before the fall of Berlin in 1945, S.S. Obersturmbannführer Dr. Maximilien Aue, had a French mother and a German father. He was born in Alsace, then a part of Germany, now part of France. Littell provides a helpful glossary at the end of the book, with the Nazi military ranks and their American equivalents.
Many of the most dedicated Nazis -- including Hitler himself, an Austrian -- weren't German. Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist and proponent of the racial policies that resulted in the Final Solution, was a Baltic German, from what is now Estonia, but a part of Russia when he was born in the 1890s. Otto Skorzeny, a Waffen S.S. Obersturmbannführer (Lt. Col.) who rescued Mussolini, was born in Vienna, Austria. Aue deals with Nazi units from France, Belgium, Croatia and the Ukraine, among other nations, during his service in Russia.
A Zelig-like character, Aue is wounded at the siege of Stalingrad in 1943, meets and interacts with Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer and other high-level Nazis, up to and including Hitler himself.
It's obvious to any reader of Holocaust literature that Littell's novel was influenced at least in part by scholars such as Daniel J. Goldhagen ("Hitler's Willing Executioners," 1996) and Christopher Browning ("Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution," 1992).
Aue is an "ordinary" man, albeit one who is highly educated and a lover of good music, fine wines and open to discussion about the world view of the Nazis. He tries to rescue Jews and other concentration camp prisoners from fanatical bureaucrats like Eichmann, but only to have them serve the war production goals of the Reich. He has no compunction about working the inmates to death under bestial conditions.
Aue is also predominantly homosexual, although he's sexually obsessed with his twin sister Una. His friends tell him to get married, that his single state and lack of interest in women is calling attention to himself in a regime where "Aryan" men are supposed to do their part to keep the master race populated. Attractive, willing women are constantly provided to Dr. Aue, but he always has excuses to reject their sexual advances.
Adding a comic touch to a novel that has more than a few instances of black humor are two German police detectives, Weser and Clemens, who are trying to pin a double murder on Aue. The murders took place in the part of the French Riviera occupied by the Italians during WW II. When he least expects it -- in the manner of TV Detective Columbo -- Aue is confronted by the duo, who claim to know of evidence that ties Aue to the murders. All this at a time when the Germans and their collaborators are murdering millions and themselves are being bombed into the stone age by the Allies.
I also found it comic when the powers in Berlin send a dour Fraulein Doktor to the Caucasus where Aue is stationed to determine if a tribe of so-called Berg Juden (mountain Jews) are "racially" Jewish or were converts. This recalls the Khazars, a non-Semitic people who converted to Judaism and ruled the Caucasus and Volga basin from the Seventh to 11th centuries. According to a thesis advanced by Arthur Koestler in "The Thirteenth Tribe", published in 1976, the Khazars, uprooted from their empire by Mongol invaders from the east, moved to the Ukraine and Poland and became the ancestors of most of Europe's Jews. Anti-Semites have used this thesis to say Jews have no claim to Israel.
Littell, through his character Max Aue, vividly portrays the increasingly dangerous life in Germany, particularly Berlin, in the closing months of the war. His perspective is that of victims of allied bombing attacks. The erstwhile victors were discovering how it felt to be on the receiving end of bombing.
For a different point of view, I recommend the diaries of Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a German Jew whose life was saved by the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In two volumes of his diaries, published after the war, Klemperer described the ordinary humiliations of daily life in Nazi Germany. Even though he had converted to Protestantism in 1912 and had served as a volunteer in the imperial German Army in World War I, in 1935, under the Nuremberg race laws, he was stripped of his academic position, citizenship and freedom and eventually forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer. He escaped deportation and death until an order came down the night before the firebombing of Dresden. He and his family escaped and lived to see the publication of his accounts of daily life under the Nazi tyranny.
Just as Littell chronicles the wartime hardships of the so-called "Aryan" Germans, Klemperer's diary describes the daily life of restricted Jews under the Nazis. They were even forbidden to keep pets, and one entry, in May 1942, particularly struck me because I'm a cat person, they had to put down their cat, a tomcat named Muschel.
If the name sounds familiar, it's because Victor Klemperer came from the celebrated family that produced the orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer, a cousin of Victor's father. Victor was a second cousin of actor Werner Klemperer (1920-2000), a son of Otto Klemperer who is most remembered for playing Nazi Col. Klink in the TV show "Hogan's Heroes."
Littell's achievement is monumental, but the book is not for the faint of heart -- or stomach. His often interminable paragraphs describe bodily functions in graphic terms. With these caveats, I recommend it as a major literary work that is destined to be a highly controversial classic.
Publisher's web site: www.harpercollins.com.
Share This Story:
Make HNN Your Homepage (IE Users Only)
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Kindly Ones': An Acquired Taste But a Powerful Tour de Force for Those with Strong Stomachs
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
Having plowed my way through the almost 1,000 pages of Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones" (HarperCollins, 992 pages, $29.99, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell), I'm trying to figure out what's the source of all the controversy that this book on the Holocaust and Germany's war in the Eastern Front has stirred up.
It's really quite simple, in my opinion: Max Aue, the protagonist of "The Kindly Ones," is a Nazi Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel "American Psycho." Aue, a fictional character born Oct. 10, 1913, is how Littell, born Oct. 10, 1967, imagined how he might have behaved had he been born in Europe and became a dedicated Nazi bureaucrat.
By imagining Aue as a Nazi Patrick Bateman, I'm not spoiling the novel, written in French by the son of novelist Robert Littell. Jonathan Littell was educated in both France and the U.S., earning his baccalaureat diploma in France and earning his college degree from Yale University. Published as "Les Bienveillantes" by Editions Gallimard in 2006, the novel was a runaway bestseller in France, garnering two major prizes along the way and gaining Littell French citizenship in 2007.
Littell spent years of study accumulating facts for his novel, in which Aue, a law graduate of the University of Berlin, opens the book by telling -- in part; he saves the full story for the very end of the book -- how he escaped the war crimes trials, becoming a respected French lace manufacturer.
It helps that Aue is perfectly bilingual. Aue, or to give him his final title before the fall of Berlin in 1945, S.S. Obersturmbannführer Dr. Maximilien Aue, had a French mother and a German father. He was born in Alsace, then a part of Germany, now part of France. Littell provides a helpful glossary at the end of the book, with the Nazi military ranks and their American equivalents.
Many of the most dedicated Nazis -- including Hitler himself, an Austrian -- weren't German. Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist and proponent of the racial policies that resulted in the Final Solution, was a Baltic German, from what is now Estonia, but a part of Russia when he was born in the 1890s. Otto Skorzeny, a Waffen S.S. Obersturmbannführer (Lt. Col.) who rescued Mussolini, was born in Vienna, Austria. Aue deals with Nazi units from France, Belgium, Croatia and the Ukraine, among other nations, during his service in Russia.
A Zelig-like character, Aue is wounded at the siege of Stalingrad in 1943, meets and interacts with Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer and other high-level Nazis, up to and including Hitler himself.
It's obvious to any reader of Holocaust literature that Littell's novel was influenced at least in part by scholars such as Daniel J. Goldhagen ("Hitler's Willing Executioners," 1996) and Christopher Browning ("Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution," 1992).
Aue is an "ordinary" man, albeit one who is highly educated and a lover of good music, fine wines and open to discussion about the world view of the Nazis. He tries to rescue Jews and other concentration camp prisoners from fanatical bureaucrats like Eichmann, but only to have them serve the war production goals of the Reich. He has no compunction about working the inmates to death under bestial conditions.
Aue is also predominantly homosexual, although he's sexually obsessed with his twin sister Una. His friends tell him to get married, that his single state and lack of interest in women is calling attention to himself in a regime where "Aryan" men are supposed to do their part to keep the master race populated. Attractive, willing women are constantly provided to Dr. Aue, but he always has excuses to reject their sexual advances.
Adding a comic touch to a novel that has more than a few instances of black humor are two German police detectives, Weser and Clemens, who are trying to pin a double murder on Aue. The murders took place in the part of the French Riviera occupied by the Italians during WW II. When he least expects it -- in the manner of TV Detective Columbo -- Aue is confronted by the duo, who claim to know of evidence that ties Aue to the murders. All this at a time when the Germans and their collaborators are murdering millions and themselves are being bombed into the stone age by the Allies.
I also found it comic when the powers in Berlin send a dour Fraulein Doktor to the Caucasus where Aue is stationed to determine if a tribe of so-called Berg Juden (mountain Jews) are "racially" Jewish or were converts. This recalls the Khazars, a non-Semitic people who converted to Judaism and ruled the Caucasus and Volga basin from the Seventh to 11th centuries. According to a thesis advanced by Arthur Koestler in "The Thirteenth Tribe", published in 1976, the Khazars, uprooted from their empire by Mongol invaders from the east, moved to the Ukraine and Poland and became the ancestors of most of Europe's Jews. Anti-Semites have used this thesis to say Jews have no claim to Israel.
Littell, through his character Max Aue, vividly portrays the increasingly dangerous life in Germany, particularly Berlin, in the closing months of the war. His perspective is that of victims of allied bombing attacks. The erstwhile victors were discovering how it felt to be on the receiving end of bombing.
For a different point of view, I recommend the diaries of Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a German Jew whose life was saved by the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In two volumes of his diaries, published after the war, Klemperer described the ordinary humiliations of daily life in Nazi Germany. Even though he had converted to Protestantism in 1912 and had served as a volunteer in the imperial German Army in World War I, in 1935, under the Nuremberg race laws, he was stripped of his academic position, citizenship and freedom and eventually forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer. He escaped deportation and death until an order came down the night before the firebombing of Dresden. He and his family escaped and lived to see the publication of his accounts of daily life under the Nazi tyranny.
Just as Littell chronicles the wartime hardships of the so-called "Aryan" Germans, Klemperer's diary describes the daily life of restricted Jews under the Nazis. They were even forbidden to keep pets, and one entry, in May 1942, particularly struck me because I'm a cat person, they had to put down their cat, a tomcat named Muschel.
If the name sounds familiar, it's because Victor Klemperer came from the celebrated family that produced the orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer, a cousin of Victor's father. Victor was a second cousin of actor Werner Klemperer (1920-2000), a son of Otto Klemperer who is most remembered for playing Nazi Col. Klink in the TV show "Hogan's Heroes."
Littell's achievement is monumental, but the book is not for the faint of heart -- or stomach. His often interminable paragraphs describe bodily functions in graphic terms. With these caveats, I recommend it as a major literary work that is destined to be a highly controversial classic.
Publisher's web site: www.harpercollins.com.
Share This Story:
Make HNN Your Homepage (IE Users Only)
