German Response to The Kindly Ones

Click here to read Richard H. Weisberg's review of The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones By Jonathan Littell Translated by Charlotte Mandell McClelland & Stewart 2009, $29.99, pp. 992

BERLIN, GERMANY — In Germany, the memory of the Holocaust is carefully guarded. From Berlin’s new memorial commemorating the gay victims of National Socialism to the wax sculpture of Hitler on display in the local Madame Tussaud’s, debate surrounds everything where remembrance and representation of the Shoah are concerned. So it should come as no surprise that the recent publication in Germany of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones sparked an unprecedented blizzard of controversy.

The 1,000-page fictional memoir of a high-ranking SS officer, Maximilien Aue, The Kindly Ones was already a classic in France when it arrived in Germany last February. It had won both the 2006 Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman—France’s most prestigious literary awards—and had been compared to masterpieces like War and Peace, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and even the Greek Oresteia. German critics, however, were less moved, competing to write the most scathing response.

In a review of the original French edition in 2006, Michael Mönninger, Paris correspondent for the influential German weekly Die Zeit, called Littell “a pornographer of violence.” This year, Iris Radisch, a literary editor at the same paper, excoriated the author for universalizing the crime of the Holocaust while individualizing the Nazi at the book’s center. “Why should we…read the work of an idiot who writes terribly, is saddled with sexual perversions, and who is disposed to elitist racial ideology and an ancient belief in destiny?” she wrote. “The nocturnal plants of French academic discourse haven’t done anything to contribute to the solution of the painful question: what made our grandfathers into murderers?”

The writing is impressive, confesses Micha Brumlik, a professor of education at the University of Frankfurt and a former director of the Fritz Bauer Institute for Holocaust Studies. But it “gives an absolutely wrong account about the Shoah.” The book portrays the Nazis as “sick” and “perverted” when “the contrary is the case. As we know, they were very normal people—neither sadistic nor masochistic.”

Brumlik attributes The Kindly Ones’ success in France to a fixation with evil that has persisted in French literature from the days of Baudelaire, the 19th century poet, to the present. Others argue that its extraordinary reception betrays the lack of French public awareness of the Holocaust. “The Holocaust as a panopticon of folly?” the social psychologist Harald Welzer wrote in Die Zeit. “Debate in this country progressed beyond this point long ago,” he scoffed. “Littell is way behind in his perpetrator research,” the historian Christoph Jahr remarked in Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

One of the novel’s few German defenders is Klaus Theweleit, a cultural analyst and the author of a two-volume tome entitled Male Fantasies. In a recent issue of New German Critique, a scholarly journal published by Duke University, he defends precisely those aspects of the novel that many found repellent. The pulp and kitsch, he claims, are not only intentional but necessary. Littell, he reasons, presents Aue not as a “barbarian but forever a human being. Man himself is what is monstrous,” he writes. “Littell’s achievement is not to disburden the Germans but to potentially burden us all.”

Writing in Welt am Sonntag, Bettina Bode offered a more introspective interpretation. “Littell was looking for a niche in the market and found it and then he presented the unsuspecting French with a horror novel about World War II with which he is now making millions. Littell won’t find the Germans so gullible,” she writes. “We Germans prefer to explain the Nazi period ourselves.”

A.J. Goldmann is a writer who divides his time between New York and Berlin.