Le benevole By Jonathan Littell
“Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly.”
― Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones
Such a fiercely compelling novel, one of the most evil stories ever told. I had to listen to the audio book while taking my walks and let all the evil from the novel run down my legs and out the bottom of my feet; so much evil, thus my initial reluctance to write a review and highly recommend. However, the writing is excellent and the insights on human nature, history and culture numerous.
The first-person narrator starts his story by telling us nowadays his head begins to rage with the roar of a crematorium, that when he is at a bar he pictures someone entering with a shotgun and blasting away; that when he is watching a film in a theater he imagines a live grenade under the seats; that when he is among dozens of happy families on a pleasant Sunday afternoon attending a festival in the town square he sees a car filled with explosives blowing up, turning the festivities into unending carnage, blood and guts everywhere, groan, screams, pitiful cries filling the air and then a long harrowing silence and emptiness for the survivors.
Such are his thoughts since, as he also tells us, he is a veritable memory machine, unceasingly manufacturing memories whenever he has the time to think. Thus, he discovers when he once took a leave-of-absence from his responsibilities as manager of a lace factory, he can’t be left alone too long to think.
So, Little’s novel has Maximilien Aue recounting memories in the spaces between his normal round of work and family, recounting memories as a man in his mid-fifties currently living in 1970s France. And what is the focus of his memories? Back when he was a young man, an Untersturmführer, that is, a Nazi SS Lieutenant living through the bitter cold and mass killings at the Russian Front, the slaughter of the concentration camps, the murders he committed with both his own pistol or his own hands, the perversions of his personal life and violence of his family life, all recounted and reported in chilling detail, in a narrative voice unflinchingly calculating and as cold and as hard as steel, say the steel of an abandoned tank in subzero January. As a good number of readers have remarked once finishing this thousand pager, not an easy read, in many respects, a downright harrowing and horrifying read. Once read, never forgotten.
Rather than the killings, slaughter, perversions and other violations of humanity in Max’s waking life, I will synopsize four of the Nazi SS officer’s vivid, intense dreams:
ONE: Max is on a high cliff watching a procession of gondolas glide down a river, he clearly sees his gorgeous identical twin sister sitting cross-legged, her long flowing black hair falling over her perfectly shaped breasts. (Sidebar: in real life Max is sexual infatuated and romantically in love with Una, his identical twin sister). Max shouts her name many times. She raises her head and their eyes meet. At this point Max feels violent stomach cramps, undoes his pants and squats down, but instead of shit, real live bees, spiders and scorpions gush out his anus. He screams out and then turns his head and sees identical twin young boys staring at him in silence.
TWO: Max is gliding at different levels high up in the sky looking down, almost more like a camera than a human, looking down at a huge city set out on a uniform grid, seeing thousands and thousands of blue-eyed men and women and children, faceless, moving mechanically through birth, growth, adulthood and death creating a perfect equilibrium which reminds Max of what an ideal concentration camp would be like.
THREE: In a dark bedroom Max sees a tall beautiful woman in a long white dress. He recognizes the woman is his sister. She suffers uncontrollable convulsions and diarrhea, black shit oozes through her white dress causing Max to experience great disgust and nausea.
FOUR: Max exchanges cloths with his sister Una, he putting on her dress, she putting on his uniform. He sits in her chair at her dressing table and then Una carefully makes up his face, combing his hair, applying lipstick. Una then straps on an ebony phallus. After an intense session of intertwining like snakes, Max rests on the floor and says he is her sister and she is her brother to which Una replies that you are my sister and I am your brother.
Of course, we could envision what a psychoanalyst, either a Freudian or a Jungian or an analyst from any other school would make of Max’s dreams. Let me simply conclude by saying that anybody wishing to read this novel must be prepared for the many more brutal, cruel and murderous scenes of Max’s waking life, reminding me of the hell scenes of the artist Hieronymus Bosch . Again, one of the most evil tales ever told.
Jonathan Littell The Kindly Ones is an unsentimental journey to the darkest side of the human history.
Fascism turned the Germany into a factory of death… And every factory must have an effective technology… So any technology must be perfected and the technology of murder as well.
Killing was a terrible thing; the reaction of the officers was a good proof of that, even if they didn’t all draw the consequences of their own reactions; and the man for whom killing was not a terrible thing, killing an armed man as well as an unarmed man, and an unarmed man as well as a woman and her child, was nothing but an animal, unworthy of belonging to a community of men. But it was possible that this terrible thing was also a necessary thing; and in that case we had to submit to this necessity. Our propaganda repeated over and over again that the Russians were Untermenschen, sub-humans; but I refused to believe that.
The novel is an uncompromising story of fascism – starting with its bloodthirsty snarl at humanity and ending with its agony and rigor mortis. Ideology can pitilessly transform an ordinary man into a killing machine and use it until this machine breaks.
But even in such inhumanly perfect society as fascist state there are corruption, intrigues, hatred and fear and they keep destroying the power from within. And the rest of humankind started destroying fascism from without.
“So what’s the most atrocious thing you’ve seen?” He waved his hand: “Man, of course!”—“I meant medically.”—“Medically, atrocious things don’t interest me in the least. On the other hand one does see extraordinary curiosities, which completely revise our notions of what our poor bodies can endure.”—“What, for example?”—“Well, a man will catch a tiny piece of shrapnel in the calf that will slice through the peroneal artery and he’ll die in two minutes, still standing, his blood emptied into his boot without his noticing. Yet another man might take a bullet through the head, from one temple to the other, and will get up on his own to walk to the first-aid post.”—“What an insignificant thing we are,” I commented.—“Precisely.”
War is a most atrocious evil and it is capable to lower human being to the primordial animal state so humans become monsters, beasts and cattle. Jonathan Littell Lugging this gigantic book around, from Omaha to Minneapolis to Dubai to Chicago back to Omaha, I began to question why I was reading it. It's nearly a thousand pages long; it's poorly translated; it was apparently edited by a monkey dying of Ebola; it has paragraphs that run on for pages, and pages, and pages; for some reason, there is no indentation for dialogue, so you're left guessing which indistinguishable character is saying which facile/stilted/cliched/boring thing; the translation is imprecise; and the overuse of the semicolon is rampant.
In the end, the unasked question - why are you reading this? - is answered by a phrase provided me by the US Supreme Court's case-law on obscenity: it appealed to my prurient interest.
The Kindly Ones is an ambitious wreck. It's a hot mess, but with aspirations. (It's opening line - Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened - smacks of Homer). Indeed, right up until the penultimate chapter, I was halfway enjoying it. The novel, told in first person my SS officer Maximilien Aue, attempts to encompass the whole horror of the Holocaust. Like a sadistic, bloodstained Forrest Gump, Aue bounces from einsatz aktions in the Caucuses (there is a grim depiction of the massacre at Babi Yar), to the winter hell of Stalingrad, to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, and finally to Hitler's bunker and the twilight of the gods.
I heard of this book by way of its controversy. It was a big hit in France, which should forever lay to rest any lingering belief that the French know anything about art. Here in America, it was severely panned by none other than Michiko Kakutani. When she described its unsavory elements - murder, incest, sodomy, unrelenting gore - I knew I had to purchase this work immediately.
At first, through about 850 pages, I thought the controversy was a whole lot of nothing. Yes, there were some graphic passages, especially dealing with the einsatzkommandos slaughtering thousands of Jews and other undesirables by firing squad. Yet this is what good historical fiction does: it takes us to that place in time. In this instance, that place and time is unimaginably dark, but that doesn't mean that some light shouldn't be shed. I thought the recreation of the Belorussian slaughter was powerful. I also thought there were some clever moments, as when Aue meets a Caucasian peasant who has been gifted with the ability to have all memories at once. The peasant leads Aue to the mountain summit where Aue is supposed to kill him. For the most part, though, the book was - and I hate to say the word - dull. Hannah Arendt was right: evil is banal.
The book is filled with non-characters. There are names - a veritable who's who of Nazi Germany, with cameos by Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Speer, Eichmann, and Mengele. For the most part, though, they remain names, an undifferentiated mass. There is an fascinating bit, here and there, such as a dinner party with Eichmann, or a grouse hunt with Speer, but they are lost in a sea of never-ending crap prose. There are lengthy, turgid passages on Caucasian languages, and a dense, meandering conversation about the similarities between Bolshevism and Fascism. Also, there are endless mentions of poop. Its smell; Aue's need to evacuate his bowels; detailed descriptions of said evacuation, etc. I've never been exposed to such scatological descriptions, and hope never to be again.
Still, nothing too loopy. Sure, Aue is in love with his twin sister, with whom he had an incestuous relationship, but this dark angle is not dwelt upon (in relation to how much Aue dwells on poop). And he also may-or-may-not have killed his mother, but this is just soap-drama. I started to think that Michiko might have been wrong. Where is the sick, depraved stuff that lured me in (and just to editorialize a little, I feel that many of these book reviews are very regressive when it comes to sexuality; just because Aue is a homosexual does not make him deviant; there is an underlying whiff of homophobia in many of the pans I've read).
Then, at page 865, I came to that chapter. Suffice it to say, it involves a lot of auto-asphyxiation, masturbation, and defecation. I could've done without that. Moreover, this all occurs while the Russians are encircling Berlin. With the whole nation collapses, Aue manages to get vacation time so he can spend some time with himself. That stretches credulity.
In fact, the whole endgame of this enormous book is terrible. Everything falls apart. There isn't a single believable instance (Anthony Beevor, I'm surprised at you for suggesting this book!) It's not just that Aue is led to Hitler's bunker and does something completely ridiculous, it's that in the final pages, all the main characters somehow meet each other. Really? The Russians are pouring into the city, bombs are bursting, mortar rounds are exploding, buildings are burning, bullets are whistling, yet everyone manages to come together for a final, bloody denouement.
This utter collapse - the same malady affecting The Dark Knight - really ruined things for me. For as I said, up till that time, this book has a lot of interesting things to offer. There are vivid, nightmarish descriptions that would make Dante proud. There is a strangely beautiful, ghastly scene in which Aue goes swimming in the Volga outside Stalingrad:
The swift current created whirlpools that soon carried me away under the ice. All kinds of things were passing by me, which I could clearly make out in this green water: horses whose feet the current was moving as if they were galloping, fat and almost flat fish, bottom-feeders, Russian corpses with swollen faces, entwined in their curious brown capes...Above me, the ice formed an opaque screen, but the air lasted in my lungs, I wasn't worried and kept swimming, passing sunken barges full of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current. Then slowly in front of me the water grew lighter, columns of green light plunged down from holes in the ice, became a forest, then melded into each other as the blocks of ice drifted farther apart.
There are parts of this book that reminded me of the sweep of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, if those great books had been written by Cormac McCarthy. Then there are parts of this book that remind me of Team America: World Police.
It's an interesting book, and I mean interesting in the Confucian sense. There are incredible moments, some of which I've mentioned, others I can only note in passing, such as gripping scenes set during the bombing of Berlin. There are moments of pure inanity, as Aue - a self-righteous, pretentious, preening gasbag - holds forth on various topics in his grating, solipsistic manner (the tragedy of Aue not being able to fornicate with his sister tends to pale next to the murder of 6 million Jews). Then there are moments of sheer weirdness, such as a dream sequence in which Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, masturbates next to Aue's bed. I don't know why, though perhaps this could be a thesis topic if I ever go for my PhD in English.
I guess the best praise I can give this book is that it got a reaction from me. Which ain't nothing. Jonathan Littell I felt like abandoning this just about every day. At times it irritated me, at others it bored me. My stubborn nature finally won out though and I ploughed through all its 975 pages.
It's always going to be an act of hubris to believe you can explain the Nazis. The Kindly Ones purports to offer an insight into the transformation of an ordinary young man into a Nazi monster. Early on, Max Aue, the narrator, an SS Obersturmbannfürher, makes a case that all of us might have done what the Germans did in their place, that we are mistaken to believe that what the Nazis did was some sort of unique phenomenon confined to Germans in the middle of the 20th century. First off, I'm not sure most of us do believe that. We might not believe the scale of the Nazi death machine could be repeated but racial hatred is still a political factor in modern life. Fervent nationalism, a disenfranchised underclass, an economic crisis and a handy racial scapegoat are the first prerequisites for a fascist state. Many countries are presently vulnerable. There are still plenty of potential Nazis in the world and probably always will be. Nor do I think most of us delude ourselves that we would have actively opposed the Nazis were we living under the terrifying close surveillance of the Gestapo. However, there's a big difference between, for example, turning a blind eye and zealously reporting anyone you don't like to the Gestapo; an even bigger difference between serving as a soldier in the regular army and executing naked women and children by the side of the ditches. The author however tells us all are equally culpable, that there's no difference between a member of the Einsatzgruppen and the railway worker who changed the tracks for the freight cars. With this logic the airline employees who sold the 9/11 terrorists their tickets were no less responsible for the deaths in the twin towers than the terrorists themselves. Of course, the Nazis held to a mantra of collective responsibility so, given our narrator is an unrepentant Nazi, we can perhaps forgive him his trite philosophising.
But seeing as Littell begins with this idea of collective responsibility you assume he will have as his narrator a kind of everyman who will bear his theory out that we are all potential Nazis. Before long though we find out our narrator's pivotal childhood memory is of engaging in anal sex with his twin sister at the age of twelve. I stopped here to ask myself how many people there are currently in the world who have known this experience. I concluded less probably than people born with three eyes. Max Hue is like some twisted adolescent fantasy character conceived after immersing oneself in the complete works of the Marquis De Sade. In fact, twisted sexuality is often a subplot, with the suspicion that the author is implying that Nazism was some kind of symptom of sexual deviation. Max Hue is a closet homosexual; he's also an intellectual and an aesthete. In other words, everything the Nazis loathe. He could hardly be less representative of a typical Nazi. I never once understood why the author chose to make his narrator so preposterously unbelievable. Probably the one thing he did do well for me was to delve into the dissociative ingenuity of the human brain. But dissociative identity disorder was an inevitable consequence of Nazi barbarity rather than, as Littell implies, its cause.
I could have got past this misgiving about the foundations of his central reasoning if the novel hadn't very quickly showed innumerable sins of crude artistry. Strip this book of its reportage, its non-fiction and what remains is a framework of gothic kitsch. A man as a child engages in anal sex with his twin sister, idolises his father for no apparent reason, later murders his mother and stepfather, is pursued throughout the war by a couple of preposterous Keystone cops who are still intent on bringing him to justice when the Russians are advancing down a neighbouring Berlin street. It's often like bad slapstick comedy which Littell perhaps acknowledges when, towards the end, his narrator takes a fervent dislike to Hitler's physiognomy and instead of accepting the medal from his führer sinks his teeth into Adolf's nose and then speculates why history has remained unaware of this event.
A whole section is devoted to Aue's sexual fantasies. In a novel of nearly a thousand pages the last thing we need is an endless repetitive cataloguing of all the ways Aue comes up with to desecrate his sister's home. He made his point and then went on making it for forty odd pages. Then there's the dialogue. The dialogue is consistently bad. Even straightforward exchanges are heavy-handed and bereft of fluidity. Often a character is drafted in with an encyclopaedic knowledge of a section's pertinent subject which allows Littell to write long unbroken treatises in the form of thoroughly unconvincing dialogue. There's the feeling the author wants to cram in absolutely everything he's read about the war. The most impressive thing about it for me was the quantity of research that went into its construction. But this is also one of its problems because with its endless lists of SS officials and departments it often reads like a non-fiction book with a kind of Forest Gump narrator who always manages to gatecrash every pivotal moment of Nazi history. There's little artistry in the way the research is fed into the novel. He's there at the Babi Yar massacres, he turns up at Auschwitz and, of course, he finally makes it to the Hitler bunker. Also, I often found its voyeurism more disturbing than the atrocities themselves. He's been accused of being a pornographer of violence and I'd agree with that and add to it, a pornographer of bodily functions.
Another massive problem is the punctuation. I don't think I've ever read a book with such shoddy punctuation. Paragraphs continue on for pages with little rhyme or reason. Sometimes sentences too.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself how well did this novel succeed in its intention of providing an insight into the Nazi psyche? I'm afraid I didn't buy into Max Hue at all. At times you might say it's a brilliantly researched book of non-fiction; every time however the fiction in it asserts itself I kept feeling Littell is a long way from being a first rate novelist. Jonathan Littell Notes (since the book is unsummarizable)
1. Deeply transgressive novel that's Dovstvyeoskian in length and intellectual depth. I feel assailed by the book yet I keep on reading.
2. It reminds me a little of my emotional response while watching the World Trade Center collapse from my UWS rooftop. (In the days after, whenever a plane flew over, everyone would look up: Oh, it's one of ours. . .)
3. The narrative often feels derived from post hoc historical considerations, but I suppose this is inevitable. For instance, the talk our Dr. Aue has with his friend Thomas about the possibility of the Wehrmacht failing to subdue Moscow before the winter. There’s a post-hoc feeling, too, when Sturmbannführer Blobel rants against the Wehrmacht’s efforts to distance themselves from the killing. Examples might be multiplied. So, I wonder, were these considerations undertaken by the Germans themselves during the war? But then isn’t this the problem with historical novels generally? Didn’t Tolstoy have to deal with it too?
4. Years ago I began reading widely on the Holocaust. So it's almost as if I can recognize the source material as I read. No doubt I am sometimes mistaken, but sometimes I think I've absolutely nailed it. Here are a few of my suspicions.
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton
Russia Under the Old Regime and The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (in the Stalingrad sections)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Times Arrow by Martin Amis
Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte
Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz by Rudolf Höss
In the Shadow of the Reich by Niklas Frank.
Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny
etc.
5. The Einsatzgruppen— death squads which entered Poland with the Wehrmacht in September 1939 — found the direct killing of Jews too traumatic. This repulsion was one of the reasons why an industrialized killing process requiring less human involvement had to be devised, resulting in the lethal adaptations of Auschwitz and other camps. These “factories” however were not up and running until late 1941 at the earliest, and most of the mass killing — gassing— began in 1942.
“As the weeks went by, the officers acquired experience, and the soldiers got used to the procedures; at the same time, one could see that everyone was searching for his place in all this, thinking about what was happening, each in his own way. At table, at night, the men discussed the actions, told anecdotes, and compared their experiences, some sadly, others cheerfully. Still others were silent; they were the ones who had to be watched. We had already had two suicides; and one night, a man woke up emptying his rifle into the ceiling, he had to be held down by force, and a noncom had almost been killed. Some reacted with brutality, sometimes sadism: they struck at the condemned, tormented them before making them die; the officers tried to control these outbursts, but it was difficult, there were excesses. Very often our men photographed the executions; in their quarters, they exchanged their photos for tobacco, or stuck them to the wall - anyone could order prints of them. We knew, through the military censors, that many of them sent these photos to their families in Germany; some even made little albums of them, with captions: this phenomenon worried the hierarchy but seemed impossible to control. Even the officers were losing their grip. Once, while the Jews were digging, I surprised [SS officer] Bohr singing: ‘The earth is cold, the earth is sweet, dig, little Jew, dig deep.’ The Dolmetscher was translating; it shocked me deeply. I had known Bohr for some time now, he was a normal man, he had no particular animosity against the Jews, he did his duty as he was told; but obviously, it was eating at him, he wasn't reacting well. Of course there were [also] some genuine anti-Semites in the Kommando.” (p. 88-89)
6. The author evinces a deep knowledge of the units and divisions and legions of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the place names, terrain, equipment, ranks (Hauptscharführer, Obersturmführer etc.), not to mention some of the many German euphemisms for killing. My favorites are Sonderbehandlung or special treatment (gassing), and Aktion or bloody massacre. Victor Klemperer wrote an entire book about such Nazi euphemisms; it’s called The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii.
7. The author was about 38 when the novel was published by Gallimard in French, though he’s American and a Yale grad. One wonders in what way his father’s many novels of espionage — The Amateur, Mother Russia, etc. — were influential. The father was publishing in the 1970s when the author was in short pants. How fortunate such a dad must have been for the author's development. I am reminded of other literary fathers & sons, — a relatively rare phenomenon — Kingsley Amis & Martin Amis; etc.
8. Dr. Aue’s speech about the ancient rituals of homosexuality is both preposterously long and clearly an evocation of Remembrance of Things Past. It cleverly seeks to provide his handsome young friend, whom he meets on leave in Crimea, with something like a National Socialist basis for homosexual behavior.
’After the thirteenth of June,’ I went on, ‘when it turned out that many of Röhm's accomplices, like Heine’s, were also his lovers, the Führer was afraid that the homosexuals might form a State within a State, a secret organization, like the Jews, which would pursue its own interests and not the interests of the Volk, an Order of the Third Sex, like our Black Order. That's what was behind the denunciations. [“The Night of Long Knives”] But it's a political problem, not an ideological one. From a truly National Socialist point of view, you could on the contrary regard brotherly love as the real cement of a warlike, creative Volksgemeinschaft. . .' — ‘Yes, but still! Homosexuals are effeminate, men-women as you said. How do you think a State could tolerate men that are unfit to be soldiers?’ — ‘You're wrong. It's a false notion that contrasts the virile soldier with the effeminate invert. That type of man does exist, of course, but he's a modern product of the corruption and degeneration of our cities, Jews or Jewified men still caught in the clutches of priests or ministers. Historically, the best soldiers, the elite soldiers, have always loved other men. They kept women, to watch over their household and give them children, but reserved all their emotions for their comrades. Look at Alexander! And Frederick the Great, even if no one wants to acknowledge it, was the same. The Greeks even drew a military principle from it: in Thebes, they created the Sacred Band, an army of three hundred men that was the most famous of its time. The men fought as couples, each man with his lover. . . .’” (p. 197)
(See James Romm’s The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom.)
9. In my view, the book doesn’t take off until page 291. It’s the winter of 1941-42 and the narrator and his fellow officers are 450 miles south of Stalingrad, in the Caucasus Mountains, distracting themselves with “Who’s the Jew?” Here’s a portion of the discussion:
‘From the Abwehr's standpoint,’ von Gilsa explained, ‘it's a purely objective question of the security of the rear areas. If these Bergjuden cause disturbances, hide saboteurs, or help partisans, then we have to treat them like any enemy group. But if they keep quiet, there's no reason to provoke the other tribes by comprehensive repressive measures.’ — ‘For my part, Bräutigam said in his slightly nasal voice, ‘I think we have to consider the internal relations of the Caucasian peoples as a whole. Do the mountain tribes regard these Bergjuden as belonging to them, or do they reject them as Fremdkörper [foreigners]? The fact that Herr Shadov intervened so vigorously in itself pleads in their favor.’ — ‘Herr Shadov may have, let's say, political reasons that we don't understand,’ Bierkamp suggested. ‘I agree with Dr. Bräutigam's premises, even if I cannot accept the conclusion he draws from them.’ He read some extracts from my [narrator Aue’s] report, concentrating on the opinion of the Wannsee Institute. ‘This,’ he added, ‘seems confirmed by all the reports of our Kommandos in the theater of operations of Army Group A. These reports show us that dislike of the Jews is general. The Aktions against the Jews — such as dismissals from public offices, yellow star, forced labor — all meet with full understanding from the general population and are heartily welcomed. Significant voices within the population even find actions so far against the Jews insufficient and demand more determined actions.’ — ‘You are quite right when it comes to the recently settled Russian Jews,’ Bräutigam retorted. ‘But we don't have the impression that this attitude extends to the so-called Bergjuden, whose presence dates back several centuries at least. He turned to Köstring: ‘I have here a copy of a communication to the Auswärtiges Amt from Professor Eiler. According to him, the Bergjuden are of Caucasian, Iranian, and Afghan descent and are not Jews, even if they have adopted the Mosaic religion.’ — ‘Excuse me,’ said Noeth, the Abwehr officer from the OKHG, ‘but where did they receive the Jewish religion from, then?’ — ‘That's not clear,’ Bräutigam replied….’” (p.295-96)
The subject, historiography perverted for genocidal ends, has been explored elsewhere, but to my knowledge its treatment has not been equalled in fiction.
10. The virtues of narrative — continuity, catharsis, closure etc— are things that the Holocaust does not possess. The book abounds in the pleasures of storytelling; it’s masterly. There’s an account of famished soldiers dying in Stalingrad that’s terribly sad. Does it humanize the Einsatzgruppen, too? I’m afraid it does. No doubt this is what director Claude Lanzmann meant when he criticised the novel. Are the pleasures of narrative misplaced in such a story? Someone said, after Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric. That’s a noble view. But, there is poetry, there is art.
11. In the Stalingrad kessel – a few days before General Paulus's surrender to the Red Army — Dr Aue, feverish and lice-ridden, begins to ramble; his narration soon turns phantasmagorical.
I was walking on the Volga . . . . In front of me, a dark hole opened up in the ice, quite wide, probably pierced by a high-caliber shell that had fallen short. . . . I dove in. The water was clear and welcoming, a maternal kind of warmth. The swift current created whirlpools that soon carried me away under the ice. All kinds of things were passing by me, which I could clearly make out in this green water: horses whose feet the current was moving as if they were galloping, fat and almost flat fish, bottom-feeders, Russian corpses with swollen faces, entwined in their curious brown capes, pieces of clothing and uniforms, tattered flags floating on their poles, a wagon wheel that, probably soaked in oil, was still burning as it swirled beneath the water. . . Above me, the ice formed an opaque screen, but the air lasted in my lungs, I wasn't worried and kept swimming, passing sunken barges full of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current. Then slowly in front of me the water grew lighter, columns of green light plunged down from holes in the ice, became a forest, then melded into each other as the blocks of ice drifted farther apart. I finally rose back to the surface to regain my breath. . . . Upriver, to my left, a Russian ship was drifting in the current, lying on its side, gently burning. Despite the sun, a few large flakes of luminous snow were falling, which lay hidden as soon as they touched the water. Paddling with my hands, I turned around: the city, stretched all along the shore, lay hidden behind a thick curtain of black smoke. Above my head, seagulls were reeling and shrieking, looking at me curiously, or possibly calculatingly, then flying off to perch on a block of ice; the sea was still far away, though . . . . (p. 415-416)
And then it corkscrews into something close to slapstick. Dr Aue comes out onto the far side of the Volga where he sees a dirigible aloft and walks toward it. Soon uniformed men without military insignia accompany him aloft in a kind of balloonist's basket to meet a mad doctor (foreshadowing Auschwitz) whom he interviews then has to escape by climbing a ladder, running across the dirigible's convex surface chased by thugs with guns, before parachuting to safety.
12. Many historical figures appear. Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höss (see Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz), Odilo Globocnik, Josef Mengele, Albert Speer (see Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth), and Hitler himself, batshit in the Führerbunker. When Aue travels to Occupied Paris in the center of the book he meets old pro-Nazi friends again like Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Charles Maurras, and is newly introduced to another rabid antisemite, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine). All the names but Celine's I had to look up. Moreover, Dr. Aue walks insouciantly around Paris. He's on convalescent leave and primarily concerned with his next posting. He's a careerist.
13. Meanwhile a hideous extermination is taking place in Poland. This is the background to Aue's days. While cracking jokes with his friend Thomas, dining out, having my ass drilled by unknown boys, (p. 763) taking his twin sister to Potsdam, seeking a new post, while all this and more transpires — 6 million Jews are executed. Goldhagen called it eliminationist anti-semitism. Eleven million if we include the Roma, asocials, homosexuals, and 3 million Soviet POWs who were starved to death in open camps.
14. There's a twins motif. Dr. Aue and his sister, Una, are twins. When he goes to visit his mother in Italy, she is watching the children of friends, twins who can't be told apart. I think the image has popped up about five or six times. This might make it convenient for Aue when he visits Auschwitz, where Dr. Mengele performed infamous pseudo-scientific experiments on twins, causing enormous pain and death. See Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
15. A great enigma is the tussle within the SS between those who want to exterminate the Jews, and those who wish to employ them as slaves. It's interesting to see dramatized a conflict that some scholars have blamed for Germany's loss of the war, since it diverted essential investment from a commitment to so called total war. They couldn't work the prisoners as slaves because they were too intent upon killing them. In this sense, they were shooting themselves in the foot. Here's the fundamental argument: Eichmann wants to kill the Jews, and Aue wants war production out of them.
'You know, Obersturmbannführer [Eichmann],' [Aue] replied evenly, 'in 1941 we had the most modern army in the world. Now we've gone almost half a century back. All our transports at the front are driven by horses. The Russians are advancing in American Studebakers. And in the United States, millions of men and women are building those trucks day and night. And they're also building ships to transport them. Our experts confirm that they're producing a cargo ship a day. That's many more than our submarines could sink, if our submarines still dared to go out. Now we're in a war of attrition. But our enemies aren't suffering from attrition. Everything we destroy is replaced, right away, the hundred aircraft we shot down this week are already being replaced. Whereas with us, our losses in materiel aren't made good, except maybe for the tanks, if that.' Eichmann puffed himself out: 'You're in a defeatist mood tonight!' . . . 'I'm not a defeatist,' I retorted. 'I'm a realist. You have to see where our interests lie.' But Eichmann, a little drunk, refused to be logical: 'You reason like a capitalist, a materialist ... This war isn't a question of interests. If it were just a question of interests, we'd never have attacked Russia.' I wasn't following him anymore, he seemed to be on a completely different tack, but he didn't stop, he pursued the leaps of his thinking. 'Were not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. Were waging war to unify Germany, to create a Germany in which you'd want to live. You think my brother Helmut was killed for a refrigerator? Did you fight at Stalingrad for a refrigerator?' I shrugged, smiling: in this state, there wasn't any point in talking to him. (p. 767)
16. Himmler, declaring the Jewish Question solved, orders Auschwitz shut in October 1944. Subsequently attempts were made to demolish it. Dr Aue's account of the Death Marches rings true, but not his involvement in them. Not his running about trying to secure food and clothing for the exhausted inmates or trying to stop the killing of those who can't walk. Jonathan Littell
Nell'Europa travolta dalla furia nazista, l'epopea tragica ed efferata di un ufficiale dell SS, Maximilien Aue, ci fa rivivere gli orrori della guerra dal punto di vista terribile e ripugnante dei carnefici.
Nato in Alsazia da padre tedesco e madre francese, Maximilien Aue dirige sotto falso nome una fabbrica di merletti nel nord della Francia. Svolge bene il suo lavoro, è un uomo preciso ed efficiente. Preciso ed efficiente, del resto, lo era stato anche negli anni del nazismo, quando fra 1937 e 1945 aveva fatto carriera nelle SS in Germania. Pure essendo un nazionalsocialista convinto, il giovane e brillante giurista era entrato per caso nel corpo, punta di diamante del Reich hitleriano: fermato dalla polizia dopo un incontro omosessuale, aveva accettato di arruolarsi per evitare la denuncia. Nel 1941 Max è sul fronte orientale, dove dà il suo contributo al genocidio di ebrei, zingari e comunisti. Trasferito nel Caucaso e poi nella Stalingrado accerchiata dall'Armata rossa, sopravvive miracolosamente a una grave ferita. Dopo il rientro in Germania, lavora a stretto contatto con tutta la gerarchia nazionalsocialista. La guerra è ormai persa, tuttavia, e la Wehrmacht arretra su tutti i fronti. Al crepuscolo del nazismo, viene in aiuto a Max il suo bilinguismo: assumendo l'identità di un francese deportato in Germania, riesce a fuggire.
Trascinato dalla corrente della Storia e inseguito da fantasmi che, come le furie benevole dei Greci, le Eumenidi, cercano vendetta, Max Aue è parte di noi, la parte più nera. Le benevole
It Begins and Ends in Bad Politics
It is possible for human beings to justify all behaviour, no matter how irrational and cruel. Because this is so, some philosophers justify their view that moral norms must lie outside of human control, that there must be a God who knows what good behaviour is. This justification is also irrational and frequently just as cruel.
As for example when the philosophers and theologians of Nazism preached radical anti-Semitism based on universal genetic imperatives of tribal competition. Inhumanity, therefore, is what human beings are good at. As one of Littell's characters has it, ... there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity. This from a man whose job it was to kill wounded German soldiers who were of no further usefulness.
Nevertheless, irrationality and cruelty have to be arrived at incrementally. One's political and legal culture cannot be radically altered too suddenly lest irrationality and cruelty become obvious and rejected as such. It takes time to create new, not to say contradictory, social attitudes. War is a tried and true method for cultural change. War is preceded by exclusionary politics to prepare the collective psyche. War then has its own inevitable agenda of escalating brutality. The aftermath of war requires its own victims. These are supplied by another sort of exclusionary politics. The definition of justice, a reliable barometer of social norms, invariably changes to accommodate the times. Littell has Adolph Eichmann summarise the situation: ...politics change people.
The Kindly Ones is a fictional exploration of the process of radical cultural and political change in Germany from the 1930's to the 1950's. The protagonist and narrator, Max Aue, is a gay SS officer. This irony is compounded by the fact that he is a lawyer and classically educated into a culture of civility and reflective empathy. He writes like a German Vassily Grossman: not to defend but to merely describe his actions and motivations. Slipping slowly from unconcern to acceptance to assimilation to diseased monster, Max isn't German or inherently psychotic or evil; he is Everyman.
It is as Everyman that Max plays a role in the Final Solution for the Judaism of Eastern Europe - in fomenting 'retribution' of Jews by Poles and Ukrainians, in the Einzatsgruppen, whose job it was to murder all Jews found in Russian territory conquered by the Wehrmacht, and in the preparation and supply of victims for the death camps. The scenes depicted are well rehearsed in many other books on the Holicaust.
Littell's take is innovative only because it is created from the point of view of the murderers, capturing their experiences and mental states as the war is prepared for, progresses, and ends. What they see is the terror of their own lives in the dystopia they have created. Meditating briefly on Auschwitz, Max muses, Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life? The camps are the source of a new German culture: a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations.
Max knows he is participating in a war like none before, ... when the State is democratized —then all of a sudden war becomes total and terrible ... Only modern democracy is capable of the atrocities of war on a scale which would not have been tolerated in any other form of government. The democratic state has powers of coercion over its own citizens that could never be claimed by any monarch.
Democracy also possesses the cultural force necessary to turn evil into good through purely social sanctions. The murderer of wounded soldiers, for example, ...killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities?
Judging by the evidence of the 20th century, democracy uses its powers more frequently and with less cause than any other form of government. Democracy inhibits conscience and promotes evil just as effectively as the alternatives. In fact by legitimatising greed for reputation and ambition for power, democracy provides a welcoming framework for their development. This is one of the principle messages of the book. A message as relevant in the age of Trump and Putin as it was in the age of Hitler and Stalin. There may be no Cosmic Organizer but there should be at least a few resistors who can stand against the flow of insanity that pops up from time to time in democracies. As Max knows, The past is never over. Jonathan Littell
So what's the most atrocious thing you've seen?... Man, of course!
The Kindly Ones polarized both readers and critics all over the world. They argued on its literary values and scandalous content, pornocaust or holokitsch were amongst epithets, felt poised between admiration for the gigantic work Littell done and themes he researched and final product and message it delivered. The genre itself confounded almost everyone, was it a history novel or quasi document, a literary fiction or fictionalized story? And autoportrait of Nazi official and aesthete was widely discussed. I can’t say anything new or revealing on its subject so only some words about how this reader feels with this book.
The novel stuns with verve and panache, bewilders with erudition and literateness, overwhelms with magnitude of information, names and facts. The author had to dig through hundreds of historical documents up. Sometimes effect feels fascinating, especially deliberations on the vision of national socialism or motivations of the narrator of the novel, then again horrifying with descriptions of mass murders or concentration camps, and at times just fatiguing due to neverending reports full of names and military ranks. It strikes with enormity of violence and cruelty, with graphic depiction of every crime imaginable, and pornographic and scatological content and its matter-of-fact narrative comes almost as a shock. Combining sex with violence, or more precisely sexuality with Nazism is nothing new or original in literature or film. William Styron did it in Sophie’s choice and Lucchino Visconti in his stunning masterpiece The Damned, I prefer the Polish title Zmierzch Bogów refering to Wagner’s opera.
What makes this book unique and shocking, and what sometimes is its the biggest flaw, is the figure of narrator, Maximilian Aue. To establish a murderer main protagonist, to make us read his testimony, hear his thoughts, acknowledge that he escaped, in a way, justice was clever though rather dangerous task. At first everything starts rather innocently, I hope the ironic undertone can be sensed, Max is sensitive and kind of fragile man. We do not know at this point how deeply damaged he is, how unstable, and how twisted his family issues are. He doesn’t like the idea of extermination but since Germans and Germany comes to him first thus he succumbs to orders. But he doesn’t approve unnecessary humiliation and cruelty towards people that were to be killed. On Ukraine he not only observes killings but also as any other officer has to participate in it what effects a nervous breakdown. And it only keeps getting worse from now.
Max is well-educated, enamoured with literature and music, he quotes from memory ancient philosophers and yet is dilligent and amenable cog in machine, a valuable member of horrendous system. Maximilian Aue seems to confuse ethics with aesthetics but by no means is only bureaucratic murderer. He can in one breath talk about wisdom of ancient authors and beauty of human, well, male's body, about love and music and at the same time being able to participate at executions. As he admits himself at some point while standing over graves of murdered Jews: I was haunted by the passion for the absolute and the transcending of limits. And this duality makes him interesting narrator.
In The Kindly Ones can be spotted quite dinstinct references to The Oresteia, a killing of mother and stepfather, an incestuous relationship with sister and the title outright appeals to Erinyes, the gracious ones, translated also as kindly ones, incarnation of vengeance. There were criticisms that by employing the ancient idea of fate Littell intended to justify Max’, or in wider perspective German, deeds and omissions or lessen his crimes.
The novel explores acts that were done not by madmen or lunatics but by technocrats, lawyers, economists and administration. Littell examines damages done to ordinary soldiers that had to face with mass extermination especially in the first days of war, tries to draw a line between them and psychopaths and degenerate individuals relishing these deeds. Through Max' eyes allows us to experience war at Ukraine, Russia and Poland, leads us through battle of Stalingrad, hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau to final days in Berlin. He shows the birth of the idea of Final Solution and its bringing into existence. He depictures Holocaust as a kind of enterprise, a unique project that had to be done and gives us almost technical instruction of genocide. Report of Max is coldly precise and detailed then again hallucinatory and delirious but always intense and powerful.
The novel is truly gruesome and though I can’t say, for example, the slaughter in Babi Jar ravine was alien to me yet the description made me sick. Max makes his remorseless confession many years after the war ended, regrets, that’s for children as his colleague Eichmann would say, and what strikes me the most is his statement that we are not better men than he was, merely more luckier to live in different times and not forced to make his choices. In a way he makes us almost his accomplices who only by a bit of luck could avoid his fate. I find this revelation quite disturbing. Max is not trying to play a martyr or victim to ask for our forgiviness, no, he wants our sympathy and understanding for who or what he was. And it's even more disquieting. And thought-provoking.
I do not regret anything: I did my work, that’s all; as for my family problems, which I might also talk about, they concern no one but me; and as for the rest, I probably did go a little far toward the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was off-balance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me, I wasn’t the only one who lost his head, admit it. Jonathan Littell Με τον κίνδυνο να χαρακτηριστεί πομπώδες αυτό που ακολουθεί θα γράψω με απόλυτη επίγνωση και ειλικρίνεια πως αυτό το βιβλίο ειναι το είδος του μυθιστορήματος που μας θυμίζει γιατί πρέπει να υπάρχει η λογοτεχνία.
Τί είδους βιβλίο είναι αυτό.
Η μόνη απάντηση που μπορώ να δώσω μετά το ανθρωπολογικό τράνταγμα συνειδητοποίησης που υπέστη είναι πως πρόκειται για ένα βιβλίο το οποίο πάνω απο όλα αρνείται.
Αρνείται να δεχτεί, να απλοποιήσει, να κατηγορήσει,
να απενοχοποιήσει και να ταχθεί υπέρ ή κατά στο καλό και το κακό.
Αντί να επικεντρώνεται στο προσωπικό ή το εξατομικευμένο μαρτύριο, ενδιαφέρεται και πραγματεύεται έγκυρα και ιστορικώς αξιόπιστα την γραφειοκρατικοποίηση του θανάτου σε ναζιστικά γραφεία εντολοδόχων.
Αντί να εξετάζει το κολασμένο καζάνι του Ολοκαυτώματος ως ένα απο τα πιο αφόρητα, αιματηρά και απάνθρωπα εγκλήματα της κοσμικής ανοχής,
που φωτίζονται απο τα ανθρώπινο καμμένο λίπος στα φωτιστικά διακόσμησης της εξουσίας στολισμένα με καλύμματα ανθρώπινης σάρκας και γλυκερή μυρωδιά απο βιολογική στάχτη,
χρησιμοποιεί το προφανές που προανέφερα, ως πρόφαση, για να ουρλιάξει μνήμες και σκέψεις στον ανυποψίαστο αναγνώστη.
Αυτό το βιβλίο πίσω απο την κοινοτοπία του κακού που εμπεριέχεται σε πολέμους και παντός είδους συμφορές και βασανιστήρια ζητάει να σκεφτούμε μια παρακινδυνευμένη ιδέα ζωτικής σημασίας.
Ο Littell μας προωθεί να αμφισβητήσουμε την ιδέα του κοινότοπου και της κανονικότητας. Τίποτα δεν είναι τόσο απλό ή τοσο προβλέψιμο και δεδομένα αταβιστικό.
Η ιδέα της έννοιας του συνηθισμένου θεωρείται πως έχει ρίζες παιδαγωγικές, αστικές, επαρχιακές, μέτριες, αόριστες, παρεμποδισμένες και ψυχαναλυτικά φασιστικές.
Σύμφωνα με τον συγγραφέα η κανονικότητα, η ηθική οριοθέτηση, η ανθρωπιά, η συμπόνοια, η άρνηση καθήκοντος και φιλοδοξίας που εμπίπτει σε νόμους φτιαγμένους απο αδίστακτα και αρρωστημένα μυαλά,
με σκοπό κερδοφορία και εξουσία,
είναι μία συνέχεια και όχι μία σταθερή κατάσταση,
και βασίζεται σε ό,τι έχει σχέση με το πλαίσιο εντός του οποίου βρίσκεται το άτομο.
Επομένως ο καθένας απο εμάς και όλοι εμείς μαζί, με καρδιές και μυαλά πανανθρώπινων αξιών και ορθών επιθυμιών, με πνευματική καλλιέργεια και φιλοσοφική μόρφωση, με δημοκρατικές προσλαμβάνουσες και διαθέσεις απόλυτης ελευθερίας και αγάπης,
όλοι αυτοί, όλοι εμείς, είναι πανεύκολο και εφικτό κάτω απο κατάλληλες συνθήκες να παρασυρθούμε, να τρομοκρατηθούμε, και να εκραγεί απο μέσα μας μια ακατάσχετη αδιαφορία, μια πολιτιστική και πολιτιστική αμνησία εις βάρος των αρετών και του ελέους.
Δεδομένων των συνθηκών να συνταχθούμε με το ακραίο και το διεστραμμένο,να υποκύψουμε στα τέρατα και τα θηρία και να δεσμευτούμε απο όρκους χιτλερικών υψηλότερων καθηκόντων και ιδεών με την σκέψη πως απλώς εκτελούσαμε εντολές ανώτερων.
Ήμασταν θύματα της εξουσιαστικής παραγγελίας, έπρεπε να δράσουμε χωρίς συνείδηση κ��ι τύψεις, ισχυριζόμενοι ατομικά συμφέροντα με ακράδαντα επιχειρήματα περί κεκτημένων(οικογένεια, παιδιά, συγγενείς, φίλοι, πατρίδα, θρησκεία, μοιρολατρία) και αφοπλιστική αυτονόητη ειλικρίνεια που υποτίθεται ότι μέσα απο αυτά συνάγεται η αξιοπιστία μας.
Άρα, θα υπάρχουν πάντα λόγοι γι’αυτό που κάνουμε... καλοί λόγοι ή κακοί λόγοι δεν μπορώ να το ξέρω απο πριν, μα σε κάθε περίπτωση, ανθρώπινοι λόγοι.
Τρελαθείτε λίγο να δω κάτι.
Πάρτε ένα πνευματικό ισοδύναμο μιας βαθιάς αναπνοής, μήπως, προετοιμαστείτε πριν απο την κατάδυση στην τρέλα της νοητικής βλάβης και των ισοδύναμων του κακού, που αποτελούν και το περιεχόμενο αυτού του βιβλίου.
Διότι αν το αναλογιστούμε ακριβώς έτσι, έχει απόλυτο δίκιο ή και όχι.
Αν έπρεπε να διαλέξεις ανάμεσα στη ζωή του παιδιού σου και στο πάτημα ενός κουμπιού με το οποίο θα πεθάνουν χιλιάδες άνθρωποι αθώοι, καθημερινοί, συνηθισμένοι, ίδιοι με εσένα και με εμένα, αλλά ίσως φυλετικά ή ταξικά κατώτεροι, τί θα γινόταν.
Κυρίως αν μετά το πάτημα του κουμπιού και την εκκαθάριση, θα συνεχίζαμε να ζούμε αυτοάνοσοι στις πολιτικές, κοινωνικές και οικονομικές πιέσεις, συμμορφωμένοι με έναν κώδικα που θα θεωρούσαμε προσωπικά απαράδεκτο.
Δεν πρόκειται για το ολοκαύτωμα και τις γενοκτονίες.
Πρόκειται για τον τρόπο με τον οποίο ο κ. ΕσυκιΕγω πήγε σε εκείνο το φρικιαστικό μέρος με τους καθρέφτες των ψυχών και αντίκρισε όλη την Ιστορία του κόσμου, απο τις φυλετικές επεκτατικές επιδρομές των Μογγόλων εως την Αμερική του Βιετνάμ και του Ιράκ.
Ακριβώς έτσι ή κάπως έτσι, βλέπουμε την ανησυχητική εξέλιξη του βιβλίου μέσα απο τα μάτια ενός αξιωματικού, υψηλά ιστάμενου στην ιεραρχία των SS Max Aue.
Αυτός ο ίδιος προσπαθεί να πείσει τον αναγνώστη πως δεν θα συμπεριφερόταν διαφορετικά εάν βρισκόταν στις ίδιες συνθήκες και το πιο τρομακτικό απο όλα είναι πως στη βάση ουσία δεν έχει άδικο ή δεν έχει απόλυτα δίκιο.
Ο Aue προέρχεται απο διαταραγμένο παιδικό υπόβαθρο, έχει ψυχολογικές εμμονές και σεξουαλικά διαστροφικές λαγνείες,όχι ως ομοφυλόφιλος, αλλά ως παρανοϊκά ανεξέλεγκτος σε μια σχιζοφρενική ηδονική λατρεία προς την δίδυμη αδελφή του.
Ένα τέρας, ένα γοητευτικό καλλιεργημένο τέρας.
Ένας Έλληνας μελετητής της αρχαίας φιλοσοφίας, λάτρης του ελληνικού πολιτισμού, της κλασικής μουσικής, της παγκόσμιας λογοτεχνίας.
Ένας φοιτητής του Πλάτωνα που δεν βλέπει καμία διχοτόμηση στην ευθυγράμμιση της ναζιστικής θεωρίας και τις υψηλότερες αξίες των αρχαίων. Προσπαθεί να δείξει πως οι σφαγές, οι δολοφονίες, η διαφθορά και ο φασισμός είναι αναπόφευκτες καταστάσεις εαν ο κόσμος μοιραστεί δικαιωματικά.
Οι ναζί διορθώνουν την παρακμή που έχει προέλθει σε μία παγκόσμια τάξη, κάνουν μια αναγκαία διόρθωση, μία επανευθυγράμμιση που θα επαναφέρει τα πράγματα στην φυσικής τους πορεία.
Ο συγγραφέας εισέρχεται στο κεφάλι ενός ανώτερου αξιωματικού των ναζί με τις μεθόδους του μαρκησίου ντε Σαντ και του Μπατάιγ. Τη λογοτεχνία της παραβίασης και των φανταστικών και ακραίων υπερβολών.
Δεν προσπαθεί να δικαιολογήσει τα αδικαιολόγητα, ουρλιάζει όμως, με κάθε τρόπο ενόχλησης και παραβίασης, ώστε να κατανοηθεί ο ίδιος περισσότερο.
Δεν πρόκειται για την Εβραϊκή εκκένωση σωμάτων μαι ψυχών απο έναν κόσμο φυλετικά και φασιστικά ανώτερο, αν και αναφέρονται εκτενώς και με απαράμιλλη σκληρότητα οι εκκαθαριστικές δολοφονίες του Άριου έθνους.
Δεν πρόκειται για τους Σταλινικούς μακελάρηδες που δολοφονούσαν προς τιμήν της αταξικής κοινωνίας με έναν Χίτλερ-Στάλιν μπολσεβίκο, υπέρμαχο της ουτοπικής ισότητας και της κολεκτιβοποίησης.
Ούτε καν για πανανθρώπινες ειρηνικές διαθέσεις και αξιώματα θαρραλέων ηρώων και πεσόντων, ιδεολόγων που πίστεψαν πως οι Ιστορία είναι κατεύθυνση που μπορούν να πάρουν ομαδικά οι πολιτισμένοι, και να την υπερασπιστούν οι διανοούμενοι με πνευματική ανώτερη δύναμη κατά του φασισμού.
Το κακό προέρχεται απο την εξουσία πάντα και απο κάθε μορφή της.
Την εξουσία που αγκαλιάζει κυβερνήσεις, σχολεία, βιβλία,τέχνες, κέρδη, θρησκείες.
Κυρίως όμως η εξουσία αγκαλιάζει ανθρώπους που εθίζονται σε νόμους, συμφέροντα, τιμωρίες, απαγορεύσεις, διαταγές και ανταμοιβές.
Αυτοί οι άνθρωποι είναι οι κουράδες του Μολόχ.
Μολύνουν τον πλανήτη, δεν ξέρουν να αγαπούν, φοβούνται να πεθάνουν και αρνούνται να ζήσουν. Τρεμουν οτιδήποτε απείθαρχο, χαοτικό, ελεύθερο και φυσικό.
Ειναι του κόσμου οι δυνατοί που ορίζουν τη μοί��α μας και τον πλανήτη ως τα πιο τρομακτικά και τρομαγμένα ζώα.
Στρατιωτικοί, κυβερνήτες, αστυνομικοί, επίσκοποι, άθλιοι μαλάκες μονσινιόροι, ανέραστοι και πρωκτό καταναγκαστικοί ελεγχομανείς-εξουσιαστές, καταστρέφουν την ομορφιά και τη σοφία της φυσικής νομοτέλειας και προκαλούν οδυνηρές πληγές στην ανθρωπότητα στο όνομα της ειρήνης και της αγάπης. Στο βωμό του Θεού.
Σταματώ εδώ ( ξύπνησε μέσα μου ο Τρυποκάρυδος και παραληρεί )
Διαβάστε αυτό το αφόρητο έπος.
Αξίζει.
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
💀☠️💀☠️💀☠️👽👿💀☠️💀☠️👽👿
(Δεν μπορούσα να γράψω λιγότερα). 😳 Jonathan Littell I live, I do what can be done, it's the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!
-- Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones
This is a hard book to review. It is like walking out of a David Lynch movie and feeling brain raped by the artist. How exactly to you attempt to explore the depths of Nazi Germany without feeling dark, abused, and sick afterwards? From conversations I've had with those who've hated this novel (and British critics I've read) there is far too much shit, incest, anal sex and death. Certainly. But how exactly do you descend into the depths of Nazi hell without pushing through gouts of madness, clumps of wickedness and wads of depravity? You don't.
Littell uses Obersturmbannführer Maximilien Aue (a cultured, SS Zelig) to explore how an unrepentant rationalist, a bureaucrat, an intellectual could participate in, defend, and justify the extermination of a race. Aue doesn't wrestle any Jewish angels. No, he wrestles himself, his country, his ideology, his sanity. The slow decent of mad Max is a way for Littell to explore the absurd and tortured NAZI self-justifications for their actions.
Littell also uses Max to incriminate us all as a species. How close are we to those in Germany during WWII? We like to think we are better, more moral, kinder, respectable, innocent. Are we? Or are we simply blessed by chance because we don't find ourselves surrounded by madness, wickedness, and final solutions? Does circumstance and chance really make us better? Does the fact that we find ourselves, by fate's mad roll, distant from both victim AND victimizer give us any room to think we exist in a field that really separates us from the horrors of Germany (or Nigeria, or Sudan, or Afghanistan, or Somolia, or Serbia, or Cambodia, or Burma, or North Korea)?
Again, this is not a novel for the faint of heart (or my mother). It doesn't have a happy ending. Hell, it doesn't have a happy beginning, middle, or single clean signature. It is a cold book sewn together with sick corruptions, musical madness, and omnipresent death. It is a dance of evil, a fugue of plagues, a bile-filled nightmare on every page. Yes, I'm glad I read it, but I'm also sure as f#&k glad it is finished. Jonathan Littell Те мислят доброто на човечеството. Искат да го отърват от това, което смятат за нечисти елементи в него, за да може светът да лъсне като новичка кръгла монета от една райхсмарка. Те анализират педантично всеки свой ход, защото мразят да оставят нещата на случайността. Те са блестящо ерудирани и често са горди носители на академични титли. Обичат хигиената въобще, не само расовата.
Добре дошли в света на Доброжелателните.
Макс Ауе, доктор по право, в миналото член на СС, понастоящем управител на фабрика за дантели някъде във Франция, също е бил в редиците на Доброжелателните. Разказът за живота му протича от първо лице, и да, включва и онези няколко години на Източния фронт. Вършел е неизразими, непроизносими неща. Читателят много иска да го намрази, не е ли това идеята на такива книги – да ни накарат да възневидим нацистите и налудничавата им идеология. Там е работата, че през по-голямата част от повествованието д-р Ауе не е садистът, психопатът и ненормалникът, на който сме склонни да припишем определени деяния. Всъщност, той е ужасяващо нормален. Като нас, останалите нормални хора, убедено вярващи, че не сме способни да извършим нещата, които той е вършил.
Всъщност, ако има нещо зловещо в него, това е идеализмът му и възвишено-болният стремеж, впрочем като у мнозина правоверни нацисти, към тотално унищожение, към един своеобразен “Залез на боговете” (по Вагнер). Широките културни хоризонти и мрачният му нихилизъм са просто цвят в бездната, която представлява биографията на Макс Ауе.
И ако си мислим, че циничните размисли на един философстващ нацист са плашещи, те всъщност осветляват един аспект на човешката природа, за който ни е страх да си дадем сметка. Статистически, хората със садистични наклонности не са мнозинството в едно общество. Голяма част от него се състои от “нормалните”, обитаващи средния житейски спектър. Подложени на системна идеологическа промивка, задвижени от “правилните” механизми на бюрократична машина, къде с повече, къде с по-малко приложен йерархичен натиск, тези хора са склонни да вършат, и всъщност вършат, немислими за тях неща. Страничните фактори и мотивации – кариерен напредък, малодушие, страх от санкции, разкриване на интимна тайна, дори чувство за дълг, играят второстепенна роля. Те са просто смазката, която гарантира, че машината работи гладко. Но последната вече е задвижена.
Международните наказателни трибунали наричат геноцида “престъпление на престъпленията”, ако въобще е уместна йерархията на антиобществените прояви. Наред с неговите мисловни архитекти, съществува голяма категория лица, без които осъществяването на престъплението е невъзможно – физическите извършители, набирани из “широките слоеве на населението”.
Та така, предимно съвестни, работливи и усърдни хора обитават пространството на романа.
“Доброжелателните” е трудна, мъчителна и изискваща книга, със сигурност не е за тези, които тепърва пристъпват към темата за нацизма и концентрационните лагери. Освен, разбира се, заради темата, трудността идва и от изумителната ерудиция, с която е написана, педантичното боравене с термини от нацистката бюрокрация, всестранността на посланията и идеите за размисъл на много нива.
Jonathan Littell
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