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At bottom, a man like him

THE KINDLY ONES

By Jonathan Littell (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell)992 pp. Harper $29.95Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you’llretort, and I don’t want to know. And it is certainly true that this is a bleak story, but anedifying one too, a real morality play, I assure you. You might find it a bit long — a lot of things happened, after all—but perhaps you’re not in too much of a hurry; with a littleluck you’ll have some to spare.

Toccata,

The Kindly Ones

This intriguing opening paragraph is how Jonathan Littell in his controversial behemoth

The Kindly Ones

lures readers into the abysmal world of Dr. Maximilien Aue, the book’snarrator. Aue, an unrepentant Nazi bureaucrat, takes his audience on a journey back through history to the most miserable places— Babi Yar, Stalingrad, and Auschwitz—andreflects about his past as a young man before the war and as an SS officer, reasoning withhis readers that if he was able to commit atrocities in the name of country and duty,weren’t they capable as well?Compared to Tolstoy’s

War and Peace

and winner of France’s most prestigious literaryawards—the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman,—the premise to

The KindlyOnes

is fascinating, but as the story moves forward this increasingly disturbing,overbearing, and long-winded tale leaves one wondering at every page turn, Oy, whenwill this finally end?

Divided into seven musical compositions—Toccata, Allemandes I and II, Courante,Sarabande, Menuet (en Rondeaux), Air and Gigue—and written in a Proustian-style of never ending sentences, paragraphs that go on and on, and tongue-twisting Germanmilitary ranks and expressions, this seemingly highbrow novel with its erudite narratortakes a wicked turn and our sophisticated and cultivated Nazi becomes a clich

of perversity.As we follow his eyewitness accounts of the grisly mass executions by the

Einsatzgruppen

of Jews and Bolsheviks in the Ukraine and the Caucuses, and later to theSiege of Stalingrad, we are also subjected to vivid reports of his intestinal and bowelproblems. However, scattered among the grotesque, Littell sprinkles his story with someinteresting scenes, including a long discussion with a linguist about language and race, aswell as an enlightening interview with a captured Russian Commissar, in which Aue andthe Bolshevik debate the finer points of Communism and National Socialism.While the war rages on and on, so do Aue’s pedantic observations. We become moreacquainted with our learned protagonist and much of what we discover is repulsive. Forexample, Aue clearly details his incestuous relationship with his twin sister as a teenager(and for whom he stills yearns), as well as his homosexual encounters—in one longseduction of a young Catholic soldier he pontificates on how warriors had lovers andfought in battles side-by-side in ancient Greece. Aue also enumerates his ownmasturbatory predilections. Many of these scenes seem to be gratuitous and lend little tomove the story forward.The pace picks up, however, when Aue encounters major Nazi officials, includingEichmann, Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Ho

ss. It’s in these passages that Littelldoes an exemplary job of writing about actual characters that the reader is familiar withand realistically incorporates them into scenes with Aue. One particular section thatstands out is a discussion on the sadism and humanity of SS concentration camp guardswith Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz:

I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic because hethinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage increases and turns intosadism when he sees the inmate, far from subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all, and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard findsunbearable, this silent persistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to maketheir shared humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes, the more he’s forced to see that the inmate refuses to recognize himself as non-