A Hideous Hero

Click here to read about German response to The Kindly Ones

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

To situate this stunning novel in any kind of literary tradition, the reviewer must move forward from some obvious precedents. The Third Reich background as a dysfunctional, continent-wide House of Atreus? The protagonist, Dr. Maximilien Aue, as Shakespeare’s homicidal Macbeth or a sinister combination of the Bard’s Richard II and Richard III? The blood-spilling idealism of Schiller’s outlaw community brought to some awful peak of cruelty? Gogol’s crazy humor somehow situated within nightmare worlds even he could not have experienced or predicted?

Each example brings us closer to the mark, a precedent fully evoked in this story otherwise so full of literary references but reluctant to name its horrific primary source. Gogol gets us almost there, and it is not for nothing that, among Aue’s randomly violent final acts, he bites the Führer’s “bulbous nose” during a freakish scene in the bunker as the Nazi world sinks into oblivion. Thoughts of Gogol’s masterfully bizarre story The Nose, with its disembodied title hero, attack our imaginations—we are getting closer!

By this time, we have traversed, with increasing willingness and fascination, more than 900 pages of murderous madness. We have been the constant companions of a totally repulsive narrator whose calm and legal education somehow have provoked rather than prevented his genocidal mania. We have walked with him through the killing fields of western Russia where his ascension to rank and power in Hitler’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD) begins with his coup de grace to Jewish victims wiped out in the millions by individual shots to the head as they stand over mass graves they have been forced to dig, and this long before Zyklon-B or Auschwitz were even gleams in Heydrich’s or Eichmann’s or Himmler’s eyes. We have learned of his private as well as his public perversions, and we stroll with him through his family house in the south of France where he strangles his own mother, having already axed her despised second husband.

A law student become ax-murderer who somehow merits our benumbed but all-encompassing attention as though the pages of a long novel are reflecting endless moments in one of our worst nightmares? A double homicide projected into the vicious mass murders in Byelorussia and then in Sobibor? The logic of the law adumbrated into impersonal slaughter?

Yes, dear reader: We have rejoined and updated Dostoevsky, whose feverishly resentful underground man finds fruition in the double ax-murdering protagonist of Crime and Punishment.

Perhaps it is Dostoevsky who has most accustomed us to violent literary protagonists. Repelled, we still want to know more and more about their violence because it reflects the intellectualized viciousness of our species at its worst. The Kindly Ones maps the tradition from the Greeks to the late 19th century novel, and then through Kafka, Grass and Camus, onto the geography of Hitler’s genocidal Europe. Our mesmerized eyes, which followed Radion Raskolnikov from the murder of two innocents onward to his punishment in Siberia, now find an Endloesung, a final solution to our own exploration of the darkest rather than the most sublime extremes within us.

And so, when Aue brings a copy of Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education with him through his personal “end-game,” a crazed and murderous march from his sister’s country house to Berlin as the victorious Russians close in on that seat of Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich, Littell has chosen another law-school protagonist as distraction. Flaubert’s Frederic Moreau again replicates both Aue’s place as Bildungsroman hero and Littell’s quest to build a recognizable literary form around an ungraspable historical enormity. Littell’s legalistic anti-hero finds comfort in Flaubert’s Bildungsroman, for what Aue has seen and done would have boggled the brain of Moreau, whose immersion in the chaotic Paris of 1848 seems like a cakewalk compared to Aue’s violent wanderings through Hitler’s Europe. Thus do literary and actual history conjoin: In the space of less than a century, Europe’s revolutionary ideals have turned to ash.

Europe’s awful genocide has deserved and found its specific denouement in the pages of this masterpiece. Along with the literary sourcing that preciously (in both senses) situates intellectualized violence in a long tradition of reader-responsiveness, Littell has done his factual homework. As an historian of wartime France myself, I vouch for the accuracy of almost every Vichy-related figure evoked­—from Celine to Maurras to Sartre to Pétain to Brasillach to Werner Best (chief of the Paris occupation until he moved on to Denmark) and another of Littell’s “narrow minded lawyers” who raise the narrative question, “What man of sane mind could ever have imagined that they’d pick jurists to assassinate people without a trial?”

Littell’s lawyers and judges dominate his story, permitting him to show that the space between reason and madness is paper-thin. The writer has mastered the intricacies of Nazi “law” and included every jurist of note, from Hitler’s legal philosopher, Carl Schmitt, to the ranting People’s Court judge, Roland Freisler. His pages accurately adumbrate the debate between those who “just followed the law”—however immoral—and those many other judges who anticipated what the Führer would have wanted in any given case and thereby inflicted even greater terror on defendants precisely because they did not even need a written law to go by. Aue’s over-the-top self-indulgence is thus constantly balanced by his perfectly rational and fully historicized legalistic perspective. This period cannot be portrayed accurately without both of these elements, and in my view Aue’s wildness and his logic are necessarily and proportionately combined.

Imaginatively recreating from a firm factual base, the writer accurately represents Aue’s personal relationships with men like Eichmann, Rudolph Hoess—the commandant of Auschwitz—Himmler, Speer and others high and low on the Nazi flow-chart of civilian death productivity. Furthermore, every bridge, every town, every dialect destroyed by the Final Solution has been meticulously recovered. There will be quibbles, but this is not a work of law or history, and a wrong detail or two does not detract from this record. Much more significant might be our response to the larger issues that no sentient reader can ignore, despite horrors not even evoked here that make for occasionally difficult reading.

Very controversial, for example, should be the consistently projected idea that Nazi and Jew have much in common, but this narrative doubling is seen, especially by the exterminators, as opposing warriors along an ethical spectrum that believes in substantive values often embodied in law. Even the Nazis are comprehensively shown here to have had a warped hatred of “corruption,” an enforceable sense of wrongdoing within their own ranks that would rival Jewish prophetic strictness within the tribe if the latter were not supremely commendable and the Nazi “code” such an abomination both of logic and morality. The compelling hideousness of Aue makes us see that humans are attracted to the acting out of ideas on earth and not in some afterlife; but we are also asked by the novel to make choices among these ideas. Once they survived the worst, Littell seems to be suggesting, the Jews had the right and perhaps the obligation to express their infinitely more humane and noble set of ideas, however imperfectly they may have done so when the world allowed them to achieve freedom and power.

But just as the novel—in one of its strongest Dostoevskian modes—evokes this strange Doppelganger, with the Nazis’ genocidal impulse partly explained by their awareness of the mirror-image strength they need to destroy (Hitler is twice imagined in a Rabbinic prayer shawl), it strangely hedges its bets when it comes to Christian responses to Hitler. The narrative treats European Christianity during the Shoah with kid gloves. Another pervasive, unavoidable theme, this copping out on the question of how Christian Europe managed to abide if not encourage the beast in its midst is exemplified by such passages as “the rare opponents of our power were for the most part believers” or “eliminating the Jews and keeping the Christians would be like stopping halfway,” the former intoned by the protagonist and the latter by no less than Heinrich Himmler in one of their otherwise richly imagined conversations.

The Catholic Church is given specific credit for hiding “thousands of Jews that we can’t find,” and if the doubled-image of strong but antithetical beliefs of Jew and Nazi is provocatively propounded, the collaboration of Christian institutions with the Nazis is strangely and a-historically obfuscated. The only exception comes at the very end, where soon-to-be Nazi war criminals predict that “the Church will not let down its flock in its time of distress,” but the wartime response of that same Church tends more toward exoneration (“The Church caused you some problems when you wanted to evacuate the Jews of Rome,” Aue is told. Is that the best this book can do on the behavior of Pius XII?).

Each reader will have strong responses to the representation of this fraught historical period. But when I found myself shaking my head “No,” it was just as I shook my head “No” to the double-murder Dostoevsky’s protagonist thrusts on us in the early pages of Crime and Punishment. I wanted nonetheless to go on, deeper and deeper, because truth was emerging. This truth is anticipated in Dostoevsky’s Ivan, the intellectual Karamazov brother who tortures his gentle sibling Alyosha by recounting tales of men who grab babies from their mother’s bosoms and throw them onto pitchforks and into fires. Littell’s unfortunate task, brilliantly rendered, was to bring us in nauseating detail the embodiment of Ivan’s nightmares—not a crazy man but a “hero of his time.” If there are no Aues walking the earth today, let us take steps to ensure he never returns to plague our children and grandchildren.

Richard H. Weisberg is Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University; author of Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France and recent recipient of the Legion d’Honneur for his work on behalf of the victims of Vichy racial law.