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The Kindly Ones: A Novel
The Kindly Ones: A Novel
The Kindly Ones: A Novel
Ebook1,309 pages27 hours

The Kindly Ones: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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“Simply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” — Time

A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been called “a brilliant Holocaust novel. . . a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force,” (Michael Korda, The Daily Beast). Destined to join the pantheon of classic epics of war such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, The Kindly Ones offers a profound and gripping experience of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust.

A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.

Editor's Note

Unflinching examination…

A harrowing tour of some of the worst atrocities in human history, as related by one of Nazi Germany’s witting agents. An unflinching examination of the ways the State transforms even honest & honorable people into murderers.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 6, 2009
ISBN9780061972966
The Kindly Ones: A Novel
Author

Jonathan Littell

Jonathan Littell was born in New York to American parents, and grew up in the United States and France. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.

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Rating: 3.735294117647059 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Perhaps one of the most compelling WWII books dealing with Nazism. Possibly the best contemporary book I read. And I read a lot!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The story of Max Aue, a German/French man who served in WWII. He is a lucky man but a very "sick" man. Max is guilty of murder of children, women, he is guilty of incest, and he is guilty of matricide. Yet, he states in the beginning of the book, "I am a man like you". The book examines a lot of philosophies and political ideology and historically it was an interesting read but the sexual and autoerotic "crap" and I use that word both as description and literal was beyond what I feel is necessary in a book to get the point across. I liked the parts where Littell examines different people groups, how he shows that many nations have acted similarly. He made many interesting comments about Political ideologies and ethnic cleansing. Littell is an American born author who chose to write in French. He won the Goncourt, Grand Prix du Roman de L'Academie francaise, and Bad Sex in Fiction Award among other homors. This title is based on Greek mythology of Aeschylus's trilogy, The Oresteia who kills his parents and has sex with his sister and then is judged but given clemency by the Furies who are renamed the Eumenides or Kindly Ones.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Horrifying book
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    "A new War and Peace ... Never, in the recent history of French literature, has an early work been so ambitious, so masterfully written, so meticulous in its detail or so serenely horrifying."
    -Le Nouvel Observateur, taken from the back cover

    E€EWhat is this shit?E€E
    -A former French resistance fighter on this book, as quoted by Laurent Binet in The Millions

    This is a book that could have been. There were brief flashes of fascination, tantalizing ideas, lost in an interminable sea of dreck.

    The opening Toccata gives us a few teasing sentences: "y human brothers, let me tell you how it happened." says the SS-Officer, and ends with "I am a man like other man, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you." Now is this a pleasing lie to himself or a plea to persuade? This brings to mind Arendt's study Eichmann in Jerusalem, on how ordinary people can be convinced or seduced to commit great evils and justify them.

    But the book turns sour. The chapters with their musical titles of Allemandes, Courante, Sarabande, so on, are played largo in E minor.

    It is to be understood, in a book like this, that there is due to be excessive violence. This is, after all, about an SS-Officer in the Eastern Front. It is gruesome, but endurable. And furthermore, I must give credit to the author for doing his research. He apparently got the hierarchy of titles and organizations right, as far as I can tell. And his long information dumps are intensely fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of languages and ethnicities of the Caucus, and the absurdity of trying to classify them into Jewish or not-Jewish so they can be exterminated shows the foolish ideal of the Nazi goal of racial conquest.

    For those, I give the author credit. And he has had his experience with war and suffering - mainly, volunteer work in the DR-Congo.

    But after that, there is little investigation of moral dilemmas at all. Just chronology. Atrocity, extermination, rear-guard action, pincer movement, all become a dull sludge. Only a few cursory fragments, as tempting as they are, give us reason to think. But otherwise it is a catalog of atrocities.

    Speaking of sludge, what is it feces and this book? Perhaps it may have been written as a shock factor, but instead of any contemplation or angst at all, we see a more physical psychosomatic reaction. Do something evil? Just poop it out! Your nation and ethos crumbling around you? Put a sausage up your butt in the Siege of Berlin, 1945 and cry thinking about fucking your twin sister!

    I'm not saying that feces as a metaphor is inherently bad. Nor does the gratuitous and forced incest make an inherently bad novel, although they can understandably disgust so many readers and either dissuade or titillate so many others. Instead, they are more like a substitute for something more important, as though a long and difficult conversation is being avoided or hidden with more gratuitous shock value.

    The author seldom mentions the simmering occupation of France. Only a few mentions, if perhaps at all. If the author spoke of atrocities there, say Oradour-sur-Glane, would the book arouse such prurient interest, visceral recognition of true evil? But that, too, is another omission.

    Tant pis. 1 star, not because the whole work is to be discarded (at least, all but the beginning), but because of how much it frustrated and disappointed.hhap
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Er is zoveel dat ik zou kunnen zeggen over dit boek. Allereerst: het is gewoonweg impressionant hoe uitgebreid Littell zich gedocumenteerd heeft over de oorlog en vooral over het reilen en zeilen binnen Hitler-Duitsland; ik herkende heel veel van wat ik gelezen had bij Ian Kershaw (vooral zijn Hitler-biografie): de voortdurende interne concurrentie tussen de verschillende machtscentra van het Reich, de toenemende anarchie, en vooral het mechanisme van ?Dem F?hrer entgegen arbeiten?. Uiteraard kan ik onmogelijk oordelen of de fictionele inkijk van Littell in het nazisme historisch helemaal correct is, maar waar hij zeker in geslaagd is, is te illustreren welk een interne coherentie het nazisme had en hoe van binnen uit alle oorlogsgruwelen logisch voortvloeiden uit die coherentie. Ik weet ook wel dat dit een heel omstreden stelling is, want veel oorlogsmisdadigers beroepen zich er juist op om hun persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid van zich af te schuiven. En dat is net ook wat de vertellende hoofdpersoon in dit boek, dr. Max Aue, prominent lid van de SS, doet. Te pas en te onpas houdt Aue vol dat alle hoofdrolspelers in de gruwel gewone mensen waren, zoals u en ik, die hun eigen rolletje wilden spelen in een ?Weltanschauung? die voor hen logisch en steekhoudend was, en dat ze dus geen sadistische demonen waren. Sinds Hannah Arendt zijn we ons daar maar al te zeer van bewust, maar Littell laat Aue in dit boek tegelijkertijd net het tegendeel beweren: na zijn veelvuldige contacten met Adolf Eichman bijvoorbeeld, op het terrein zijn concurrent, houdt hij een vurig pleidooi om Eichman vooral niet te zien als een gewoon, banaal man, maar juist als een top-professioneel die niets ontziend voor het hem opgelegde doel gaat (waarmee hij indirect toch de these van Arendt bevestigt). En zo zit dit boek vol met wolfijzers en schietgeweren, moreel perverse ambigu?teiten die de lezer voortdurend op het verkeerde been zetten, want wat Aue brengt is in de grond natuurlijk een apologie en dus vol revisionistische elementen. Knap, maar voor die lezer toch wel heel veeleisend.In veel recensies wordt onderstreept dat de grote zwakte van dit boek het gebrek aan focus is. En dat is juist, want Littell schijnt inderdaad niet te hebben kunnen kiezen tussen een episch-breedvoerige evocatie van een cruciaal tijdsgewricht (zoals Tolstoi in Oorlog en Vrede), een filosofisch-ethische bezinning op de gruwelen van een totalitaire staat (zoals Vasily Grossman in Leven en Lot), en een psychologische uitdieping van een ogenschijnlijk normaal functionerende maar in feite erg verziekte geest (in dit geval dus dr. Aue). Dat gebrek aan focus maakt dat je soms 150 bladzijden lang gedetailleerde informatie krijgt over troepenbewegingen of over discussies tussen nazi-kopstukken, dan plots een flashback van Aue naar zijn incestueuze relatie met zijn zus, en vervolgens weer een lang uitgesponnen gruwelscene. Die introspectie (want we moeten het uiteraard doen met de versie die Aue zelf ons geeft) is uiteraard interessant, en Littell verbindt ze ook met opzet met het thema van de mentale gezondheid van het nazisme. Dit lijkt me dan ook een sleutelpassage om deze roman te begrijpen: ? Depuis mon enfance, j??tais hant? par la passion de l?absolu et du d?passement des limites ; maintenant, cette passion m?avait men? au bord des fosses communes de l?Ukraine. Ma pens?e, je l?avais toujours voulue radicale ; or l?Etat, la Nation avaient aussi choisi le radical et l?absolu [?]. Et si la radicalit?, c??tait la radicalit? de l?ab?me, et si l?absolu se r?v?lait ?tre le mauvais absolu, il fallait n?anmoins, de cela j??tais intimement persuad?, les suivre jusqu?au bout, les yeux grands ouverts ?Maar, zoals al aangegeven, Littell slaagt er niet in om dit persoonlijke verhaal van psychische perversie evenwichtig te verbinden met het ruimere verhaal van de op- en neergang en de gruwelen van het nazisme. In de plaats krijgen we een opeenvolging van soms saaie, beschrijvende passages, afschuwelijk langgerekte en gruwelijk gedetailleerde beschrijvingen van oorlogsmisdaden (met accent op het Babi Yar-bloedbad nabij Kiev, de hel van Stalingrad, de verschrikking van Auschwitz-Birkenau en de dodenmarsen op het einde van de oorlog), boeiende, soms erg filosofisch geladen conversaties en af en toe ook de perversiteiten van Aue zelf.Wellicht had Littell dit onevenwicht ook zelf wel door. Dat maak ik tenminste op uit de laatste 100 bladzijden van dit boek, waarin het Aue-personage helemaal ontspoort en daden stelt die niet alleen schokkend, maar soms ook zo belachelijk hilarisch zijn (zijn ontmoeting met Hitler bijvoorbeeld), dat Littell lijkt aan te geven dat we zijn verhaal ook niet te ernstig moeten nemen. Neen, geslaagd is dit boek zeker niet, en persoonlijk vind ik die 1400 bladzijden (in mijn editie) er echt wel over. Als je dan toch een dik boek wil lezen over oorlog en dictatuur, dan zou ik eerder ?Leven en Lot? van Vasily Grossman aanbevelen!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Er is zoveel dat ik zou kunnen zeggen over dit boek. Allereerst: het is gewoonweg impressionant hoe uitgebreid Littell zich gedocumenteerd heeft over de oorlog en vooral over het reilen en zeilen binnen Hitler-Duitsland; ik herkende heel veel van wat ik gelezen had bij Ian Kershaw (vooral zijn Hitler-biografie): de voortdurende interne concurrentie tussen de verschillende machtscentra van het Reich, de toenemende anarchie, en vooral het mechanisme van “Dem Führer entgegen arbeiten”. Uiteraard kan ik onmogelijk oordelen of de fictionele inkijk van Littell in het nazisme historisch helemaal correct is, maar waar hij zeker in geslaagd is, is te illustreren welk een interne coherentie het nazisme had en hoe van binnen uit alle oorlogsgruwelen logisch voortvloeiden uit die coherentie. Ik weet ook wel dat dit een heel omstreden stelling is, want veel oorlogsmisdadigers beroepen zich er juist op om hun persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid van zich af te schuiven. En dat is net ook wat de vertellende hoofdpersoon in dit boek, dr. Max Aue, prominent lid van de SS, doet. Te pas en te onpas houdt Aue vol dat alle hoofdrolspelers in de gruwel gewone mensen waren, zoals u en ik, die hun eigen rolletje wilden spelen in een “Weltanschauung” die voor hen logisch en steekhoudend was, en dat ze dus geen sadistische demonen waren. Sinds Hannah Arendt zijn we ons daar maar al te zeer van bewust, maar Littell laat Aue in dit boek tegelijkertijd net het tegendeel beweren: na zijn veelvuldige contacten met Adolf Eichman bijvoorbeeld, op het terrein zijn concurrent, houdt hij een vurig pleidooi om Eichman vooral niet te zien als een gewoon, banaal man, maar juist als een top-professioneel die niets ontziend voor het hem opgelegde doel gaat (waarmee hij indirect toch de these van Arendt bevestigt). En zo zit dit boek vol met wolfijzers en schietgeweren, moreel perverse ambiguïteiten die de lezer voortdurend op het verkeerde been zetten, want wat Aue brengt is in de grond natuurlijk een apologie en dus vol revisionistische elementen. Knap, maar voor die lezer toch wel heel veeleisend.In veel recensies wordt onderstreept dat de grote zwakte van dit boek het gebrek aan focus is. En dat is juist, want Littell schijnt inderdaad niet te hebben kunnen kiezen tussen een episch-breedvoerige evocatie van een cruciaal tijdsgewricht (zoals Tolstoi in Oorlog en Vrede), een filosofisch-ethische bezinning op de gruwelen van een totalitaire staat (zoals Vasily Grossman in Leven en Lot), en een psychologische uitdieping van een ogenschijnlijk normaal functionerende maar in feite erg verziekte geest (in dit geval dus dr. Aue). Dat gebrek aan focus maakt dat je soms 150 bladzijden lang gedetailleerde informatie krijgt over troepenbewegingen of over discussies tussen nazi-kopstukken, dan plots een flashback van Aue naar zijn incestueuze relatie met zijn zus, en vervolgens weer een lang uitgesponnen gruwelscene. Die introspectie (want we moeten het uiteraard doen met de versie die Aue zelf ons geeft) is uiteraard interessant, en Littell verbindt ze ook met opzet met het thema van de mentale gezondheid van het nazisme. Dit lijkt me dan ook een sleutelpassage om deze roman te begrijpen: « Depuis mon enfance, j’étais hanté par la passion de l’absolu et du dépassement des limites ; maintenant, cette passion m’avait mené au bord des fosses communes de l’Ukraine. Ma pensée, je l’avais toujours voulue radicale ; or l’Etat, la Nation avaient aussi choisi le radical et l’absolu […]. Et si la radicalité, c’était la radicalité de l’abîme, et si l’absolu se révélait être le mauvais absolu, il fallait néanmoins, de cela j’étais intimement persuadé, les suivre jusqu’au bout, les yeux grands ouverts »Maar, zoals al aangegeven, Littell slaagt er niet in om dit persoonlijke verhaal van psychische perversie evenwichtig te verbinden met het ruimere verhaal van de op- en neergang en de gruwelen van het nazisme. In de plaats krijgen we een opeenvolging van soms saaie, beschrijvende passages, afschuwelijk langgerekte en gruwelijk gedetailleerde beschrijvingen van oorlogsmisdaden (met accent op het Babi Yar-bloedbad nabij Kiev, de hel van Stalingrad, de verschrikking van Auschwitz-Birkenau en de dodenmarsen op het einde van de oorlog), boeiende, soms erg filosofisch geladen conversaties en af en toe ook de perversiteiten van Aue zelf.Wellicht had Littell dit onevenwicht ook zelf wel door. Dat maak ik tenminste op uit de laatste 100 bladzijden van dit boek, waarin het Aue-personage helemaal ontspoort en daden stelt die niet alleen schokkend, maar soms ook zo belachelijk hilarisch zijn (zijn ontmoeting met Hitler bijvoorbeeld), dat Littell lijkt aan te geven dat we zijn verhaal ook niet te ernstig moeten nemen. Neen, geslaagd is dit boek zeker niet, en persoonlijk vind ik die 1400 bladzijden (in mijn editie) er echt wel over. Als je dan toch een dik boek wil lezen over oorlog en dictatuur, dan zou ik eerder “Leven en Lot” van Vasily Grossman aanbevelen!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Difficult book - never finished - Why such large sections dedicated to homosexual acts and thoughts.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    OFFICE POLITICS IN HELLThe persistent question about the Holocaust is how Germany, such a cultured, civilized nation, could decide--in the 20th century, no less--that the life of the nation depended upon wiping out all of Jewry. Littell confronts this dichotomy through the person of his narrator, Max Aue.Aue is knowledgeable about and interested in art, literature, philosophy and, most of all, classical music. But he is also a mid-level SS functionary and a cog in the machinery of death. He observes and writes reports about the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings, and selections and crematoria in the death camps. He regularly meets with Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Albert Speer and other big names in the history of the Nazis' genocide.Aue suffers severe gastrointestinal illness from his field work, but he never connects it to the horror of what he observes. He believes in National Socialism and the Final Solution. When he becomes friendly with a linguist who tells him that Nazi racial science is utter hogwash, Aue responds that he has been given something to think about and wishes to return to the discussion, but he is saved from the necessity when his friend is killed. Instead, he continues to plod along in his career path and blandly reports it all to us in this lengthy novel.So what's it all about? I came to the conclusion that, in essence, this is a history of the management of the worst corporation ever. A corporation whose mission is the most spectacularly wrong-headed and horrific thing imaginable---but whose failure to achieve its goal is attributable to those most prosaic banes of so many companies: office politics and the Peter Principle. All the various functionaries spend most of their time squabbling with each other for position or to try to achieve whatever they think the Führer's will is. Since they are all petty men of limited imagination and intelligence, of course it's all a complete schweinerei, as Aue likes to call it.Does that mean this is another novel whose point is the banality of evil? Not exactly. Aue is not just some Aryan in an SS uniform. He is one screwed-up bizarro. He has a sexual fixation on his twin sister, with whom he had childhood incestuous relationship, broken up by his mother and stepfather. He often digresses from his tales of another lousy day at work into lengthy, hair-raising descriptions of violence, repulsive bodily functions and sexual perversions, real and imagined.Littell is not the first author to try to connect Nazism with sexually-related mental illness. It makes a sort of sense. It's somehow easier to understand the Holocaust if we tell ourselves that those Nazis weren't like normal people; they were a bunch of sickos. But I think this detracts from the story.Littell could lose all of the psychosexual and endless scatological stuff and have a much more powerful narrative. Aue's screwed-up psyche gets in the way of Littell's point that there is not, in fact, some bright-line difference between normal, ordinary people and those who can participate in unspeakable horrors. Littell does an excellent job of showing how Germans involved in the genocide become increasingly desensitized and brutalized. It's unfortunate that this, the most powerful part of the book, becomes obscured by Aue's psychosis and his escalating perversity, including a ridiculously over-the-top murder subplot.Still, despite its huge flaws, this is a tremendously ambitious book, well worth reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In the very last sentence of his 900 page book, Jonathan Littell mentions, for the first time, les Bienveillantes or Erinyes (the Furies) of ancient Greek and Roman religion and mythology. I hadn’t heard of them but it seems thatthey were powerful divinities that personified conscience and punished crimes against kindred blood … when called upon to act, they hounded their victims until they died in a “furore” of madness or torment.The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.With this foresight of retribution, he finishes a remarkable book, but not before he exhausted me as much as he informed, horrified and entertained me. To call it a 900 page book is to short-change it, for it is a densely packed text with few paragraphs; not even dialogues merit the use of paragraphs; and page long sentences are not rare. It would be, conservatively, a 1200 page book in conventional formatting. It is also a very uneven work. Detailed blow-by-blow accounts of momentous occasions (such as Babi Yar) are set side-by-side with interminable accounts of daily life, bureaucracy and intelligence collection. The complete suppression of the second last chapter concerning his stay at his sister’s mansion would greatly improve the book.However, the bottom line is that this is a remarkable and very worthwhile book that helped me to understand the Nazis, the Jews and humanity in general. As I write, the very term humanity makes me pause, suggesting as it does the benevolence that I first thought his title referred to, because this book exposes the truth about humanity: that it is a thin bark of kindness masking a thick trunk of self-interest, voracity or at best indifference. The average Nazi, the average German soldier, the average Jew was no better or worse than the average one among us. They were just doing their job, unthinkingly, without the courage to say no. It’s happening today in Darfur and Baghdad. More tellingly, it’s happening in offices and clubs and everywhere people interact. Someone is in a position of strength and they wield it directly or through others to take advantage of yet others. The middlemen are just doing their job. Indeed, it is a matter of pride to them that they do it well.In a fabulous passage, Littell’s anti-hero explains the various motivations of the different departments concerning the evacuation of Jewish prisoners from Hungary. Nobody seems particularly anxious to mistreat them, but everyone has his own selfish reason to perpetuate their plight. Finally he describes a “young intelligent expert” in the Department of Food and Agriculture who supports the forced migration as it releases food supplies in Hungary for export to Germany. He is unconcerned that they would still have to be fed wherever they were sent to because:… that wasn’t his responsibility, the evacuation of the Jews was the solution to his problem, even if it became a problem for someone somewhere else. And he wasn’t the only one, this man, everybody was like him, I too was like him, and you, in his position, you also would have acted as he did.And as you read this you can’t help nodding in agreement. It’s true! You probably would have acted as he did. You probably do in your workplace or club.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There were times while I was reading this that I thought perhaps the vast amount of history could have been cut. A thousand-page novel...really? When is that actually necessary?
    Well, it is for this book.
    I had also thought at times that the dialog could have been trimmed up for pacing. But then I also considered that the author was handling the dialog that way for a purpose, and that eventually the purpose would be revealed. It was, in the last 100 pages when the protagonist retreats to his sister's house and spends a bizarre few weeks there in isolation.
    So, the two elements that I thought maybe could have been trimmed in the end revealed themselves as masterworks by the author. I don't want to say much more because, despite this being 1,000 pages long, there's actually not much I can detail without providing spoilers.
    Know this one thing: The most important revelation comes literally with the last sentence. The entire work...how the history is handled, that dialog, the protagonist's journey through the war as well as his personal events...all come together in that single masterful last sentence.
    This is a brilliant novel. Well worth the dedication to read all 1,000 pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "So what's the most atrocious thing you've seen? He waved his hand: "Man, of course!"Firstly I should point out that this is a great lump of a book, my copy was just short of a 1000 pages of closely written prose with some paragraphs extending over several pages. Thus has some similarities with some of the great Russian novels.This novel is a grim account following the course of the Second World War stretching from the horrors of the eastern Front to the diabolical massacres of the concentration camps and concludes in a wrecked Berlin as Russian forces enter the city to bring to an end Hitler's dream of a Aryan Empire. Controversially, the novel purports to be the memoirs of an ageing but unrepentant Nazi, Maximilian Aue, and is therefore history told from the executioners point of view rather than the victims.Somewhat strangely this book was originally written in French by an American living in Barcelona but it is obvious that Littell has done his research. It contains an impressive amount of detail, not just about events but of more trivial details like the insignia on the German uniforms so is undoubtedly ambitious.Perhaps what is most remarkable about the book is that it is told in such a matter of fact tone meaning that much of the appeal of this book is that it provides a cold and dispassionate eye on savage mass-murder. But it is not without its flaws IMHO. Firstly it feels unwieldy. Whilst some of the descriptions of the various atrocities and the madness within the Nazi hierarchy as Berlin begins to crumble are often excellent, however Littell is less convincing when it comes to the details of human behaviour. Max Aue is a member of the SS but what his role is exactly is less obvious. Before the war he was a jurist and is sent East to tackle the logistics of making the death camps more efficient. Whilst he doesn't personally take part in the most of the massacres he does little to prevent them either. He is assuredly a monster who performs monstrous acts. Consequently the book fails in its aim, stated in the first few lines, to demonstrate that we are all brothers, that the Nazi atrocities were not an aberration and that under similar circumstances we would act similarly. "There are always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons. I don't know, in any case human reasons. Those who killed are humans, just like those who are killed, that's what's terrible."However, what I really disliked about this book was the long sections about his homosexuality, how he hated and was hated by his mother and in particular how he is tormented by incestuous lust for his twin sister which at times felt really excessive. During the Fall of Berlin, Aue buggers himself with a stick. I am sure that this must have some sort of meaning but I have absolutely no idea what it was meant to be. Whatever its shortcomings, this is a serious attempt to explain the terrors of the Nazi regime and as such is worth tackling but be aware that it isn't an easy read but one at least that makes you sit up and think."Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lush storytelling that seems so authentic, so true, at times I forgot I was reading fiction. I just really loved this book. I had to read it twice--the first time I raced through to see how it would possibly end, then went back through and savored it. Beautiful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    OFFICE POLITICS IN HELLThe persistent question about the Holocaust is how Germany, such a cultured, civilized nation, could decide--in the 20th century, no less--that the life of the nation depended upon wiping out all of Jewry. Littell confronts this dichotomy through the person of his narrator, Max Aue.Aue is knowledgeable about and interested in art, literature, philosophy and, most of all, classical music. But he is also a mid-level SS functionary and a cog in the machinery of death. He observes and writes reports about the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings, and selections and crematoria in the death camps. He regularly meets with Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Albert Speer and other big names in the history of the Nazis' genocide.Aue suffers severe gastrointestinal illness from his field work, but he never connects it to the horror of what he observes. He believes in National Socialism and the Final Solution. When he becomes friendly with a linguist who tells him that Nazi racial science is utter hogwash, Aue responds that he has been given something to think about and wishes to return to the discussion, but he is saved from the necessity when his friend is killed. Instead, he continues to plod along in his career path and blandly reports it all to us in this lengthy novel.So what's it all about? I came to the conclusion that, in essence, this is a history of the management of the worst corporation ever. A corporation whose mission is the most spectacularly wrong-headed and horrific thing imaginable---but whose failure to achieve its goal is attributable to those most prosaic banes of so many companies: office politics and the Peter Principle. All the various functionaries spend most of their time squabbling with each other for position or to try to achieve whatever they think the Führer's will is. Since they are all petty men of limited imagination and intelligence, of course it's all a complete schweinerei, as Aue likes to call it.Does that mean this is another novel whose point is the banality of evil? Not exactly. Aue is not just some Aryan in an SS uniform. He is one screwed-up bizarro. He has a sexual fixation on his twin sister, with whom he had childhood incestuous relationship, broken up by his mother and stepfather. He often digresses from his tales of another lousy day at work into lengthy, hair-raising descriptions of violence, repulsive bodily functions and sexual perversions, real and imagined.Littell is not the first author to try to connect Nazism with sexually-related mental illness. It makes a sort of sense. It's somehow easier to understand the Holocaust if we tell ourselves that those Nazis weren't like normal people; they were a bunch of sickos. But I think this detracts from the story.Littell could lose all of the psychosexual and endless scatological stuff and have a much more powerful narrative. Aue's screwed-up psyche gets in the way of Littell's point that there is not, in fact, some bright-line difference between normal, ordinary people and those who can participate in unspeakable horrors. Littell does an excellent job of showing how Germans involved in the genocide become increasingly desensitized and brutalized. It's unfortunate that this, the most powerful part of the book, becomes obscured by Aue's psychosis and his escalating perversity, including a ridiculously over-the-top murder subplot.Still, despite its huge flaws, this is a tremendously ambitious book, well worth reading.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A monstrous account of the Holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi bureaucrat who participated in it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was actually a really good book! It's a daunting read, it's a huge book, but it's worth it! I read the book prior to watching the movie adaptation and although the movie was good, the book was better. The author goes into such detail it opens up the world in the reader's mind. You really feel like your there. And although the vampire child can be repulsive and cold, you can't help but feel bad for her and join on her side.It definitely give a different perspective on the typical vampire story. It's not like Twilight, but it's also not like Dracula. It's somewhere in between. The choice of having the main characters be so young and in some regards very innocent, was a good choice. I absolutely loved this book and couldn't put it down, even though it was huge. I definitely recommend reading the book before seeing the movie.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Kindly Ones is an incredibly ambitious book, taking in the whole scope of WWII from the Nazi invasion of Russia onwards, all through the eyes of Max Aue, as SS bureaucrat. And for the most part Littell pulls it off. He has constructed a story which actually keeps you invested as you swing between detailed historical events. But there are criticisms, as is inevitable with a story of this length and scope.The book seems a little unsure of what it wants to be. On one hand it is a thoroughly reseached piece of historical fiction (Littell spent 5 years traversing Germany, France and Eastern Europe to visit the locations in the book). On another it is a study of morality from an ancient Greek perspective. This leads to many references to Greek mythology (the title refers to a Greek myth) such as incest and matricide which often test the readers suspension of disbelief.There are also criticisms which could be made over some of the gratuitous descriptions, not of violence which is to be expected, but of mastubatory orgies and diarrhea episodes.For me, the biggest criticism, however, is that the opening chapter sets out the gambit that you are just like the narrator and that anyone could have found themselves in his shoes.But Aue is anything but ordinary. He has an incestous love for his twin sister to whom he has devoted himself leaving him, to all intents and purposes, gay. He hates his mother and has abandonment issues over his father. This makes it difficult to identify with him in an 'it could have been me' sort of way.But despite these criticisms I would recommend this book. It takes you right into the heart of some of the most hellish times and places in history, such as Stalingrad and the Battle of Berlin, and the prose is so descriptive as to have been compared to the realism of Tolstoy. You will, despite yourself, develop a connection with Max Aue as he kills and then tries to save Jews. Never out of his own convictions or sense of good or evil, but to accomplish his orders to the best of his ability.And that is perhaps the biggest triumph of this monumental piece of prose. I only wish I had the abilty to read it in it's original French.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My interest in the Holocaust led me to read Jonathon Littell’s novel and overall, I think it works well, as it did what it’s supposed to do (I believe) and get the reader to think about the Holocaust perpetrators on individual, human terms. What’s more, for all its shortcomings, the book consistently allures by putting one inside the mind of Max Aue, who sees the evolving horrors around him through unmovable, guiltless, and understated perception. There’s not much of a plot but a great book doesn’t need much turning to be successful (I’m thinking of Kerouac’s On The Road) and it is long (I estimate 385,000 words), but the simple prose and Mandell’s refined translation let one read fast.Littell obviously reveled in his own research but students of the holocaust will note nothing new with the horrid details. For instance, one memorable passage where Max leads a little Jewish boy to his execution (who wandered from the crowd) is a nicely done elaboration of an anecdote in Kuznetsov’s novel-account "Babi Yar". What does make The Kindly Ones as a keeper for your library, though, is the unworldly landscape (the jacket blurb uses “hallucinatory” –an accurate term that caught on with reviewers), to which Littell transports us through his relentless but subtle observation. As others have noted, moments of brilliance occasionally arise (early in the novel, where Max interviews an old man to determine if he’s Jewish and then has him executed, is as a finely crafted “short story” as you will read).Yes, it's very good but following 945 pages of subtle, engrossing, and intellectual narrative, we have developments (I count seven) that are so implausible and forced, it makes one question if it’s just been one large joke played upon the reader. Warning, plot spoilers follow: A group of rabid children kill Max’s driver while the SS officer Aue and his colleague helplessly watch. Max sadistically murders a male lover in a bathroom. During a medal ceremony in Hitler’s bunker, Max nearly bites the Fuhrer’s nose off. While arrested and being transported, Max is rescued by an errant Russian shell that kills nearly everyone but him. While again fleeing amongst the Berlin ruins, Max runs into a subway tunnel where he suddenly meets up with two detectives that have been pursing him throughout half the book. Here he is again magically rescued by a sudden Russian attack. Max stumbles upon and visits the office of an industrialist-acquaintance whose three amazonian women-servants casually lie murdered in the room. Max runs away to a zoo, but there one of the detectives catches up with him only to be murdered by Max's friend, Thomas, who also suddenly turns up. However, Max then kills that only friend he's had, perhaps just to wear his civilian clothes of escape. In addition to these final absurdities, the book does present a contradiction, of sorts, or perhaps faulty logic by the last line of the first chapter. Here Max states directly that he really shouldn’t be blamed because in the end, he’s very much like you (the reader). At least that's Max's opinion, (probably and hopefully not Littell's opinion). Of course, Max really isn't much like me, you, or even the average German of the 1940s. Yet, in the end, this really doesn’t matter, as it’s not a fundamental to enjoying and (learning from) the involving, haunting, and memorable narrative. In fact, the first chapter (really a prologue) is the weakest, as it’s little more than a Ripley’s believe-it-or-not kind of compendium of Holocaust death statistics.So, a good work, almost masterpiece of a first novel, (Littell’s youthful, punk science-fiction opus notwithstanding). I much anticipate his next book, whatever it may prove.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read this novel over last summer - a bit of an odd choice for holiday reading. While I couldn't say that I 'enjoyed' it in the conventional sense of the word, I certainly found it interesting both in what Littell was attempting - the sheer scope and size of his research is mindboggling - and in the way he chooses to do it. He draws out the mythical thread of The Kindly Ones, in what is otherwise a work of brutal realism, in order to present the protagonist's mental decline. This is a major feature of the novel; Littel often uses his painstaking research to demonstrate the strangeness of Aue's world, for example when a colleague speaks for pages and pages about linguistics systems in the midst of chapters on atrocities. I did struggle with it as the narrative becomes more and more commandeered by Aue's descent into utter madness. The extremely unerotic sexual scenes and the fantasy episode make this a hard book to stick with until the end, which is inevitably disappointing. As the whole text is set out as a flashback, we're left wondering how he could possibly conceal this madness in his new life. The book becomes less about the reality of the Holocaust and more spiralling uncontrollably around the obsession of Aue with The Kindly Ones (no spoilers, but if you know what they are you can probably guess). He develops a sort of fatalistic idea of his approaching judgement, which is in his mind not for the thousands of innocents he has helped to kill but for a far more personal crime. We simultaneously condemn him for his blindness and wonder if, as a projection, it is another unpleasant effect of his circumstances - leading us again to question how far he's responsible for his own actions.I've given it 3 stars because, while it is thought-provoking, I honestly don't know who I could recommend this book to, if at all. I don't think it's something I'd read twice. It leaves you feeling that it's fallen short somehow, that justice is not done - but the same is true of history.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    At nearly 1,000 pages and with paragraphs that run to several pages, this was a very difficult book to read. The author, though of American heritage, lives in France and originally wrote the book in French where it won numerous awards and was highly praised. I really wanted to read this book but found it such heavy going that I ditche...d it after getting through about half - and I really never do that, if I start a book and get further than about 20 pages, then I'm committed and will finish it. The subject matter is distasteful (the story of an SS officer who was present at all the 'big' WWII moments - the initial Jewish cleansings, the siege of Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Birkenau and he even meets Hitler) but I also just didn't 'get' what the author was aiming for. I think the point of the book was to demonstrate how 'anyone can do anything' given particular circumstances. Littell is not an apologist for the Nazis but he does make the point that war is drudgery, boredom, terror, orders and the gradual desensitising of human feeling - but I get that, I didn't need to read this novel to understand that and I'm not sure who would. I found it interesting that UK reviews praise the book highly while US ones have tended in the opposite direction. I think the translation is part of the problem but it's also a book that once you start to think about it, the coincidences are too much, the failings and depravities of the narrator are too obvious while at the same time the narrator's obvious cultural and intellectual background are also used too often to drive home the message - anyone can do anything. The author has a lot of promise but apparently he wrote the book freehand in a matter of weeks (albeit after years of research) and it shows
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Written in the form of the memoir of an SS officer, I would characterise this not only as a narrative of the gritty horror of war, but also an attempt to explain (and I think it "explain" rather than "justify") how ordinary people can get caught up in perpetrating something as horrific as the holocaust.It does not dwell on "only obeying orders", but rather on someone who, as a committed Nazi, believes that unpleasant actions, even things which he may disagree with personally and believe to be wasteful and misguided, may be necessary during a time of total war. It is compounded by the aura of the Fuhrer and his claim to represent the Volk. It is made worse by the inhumanity of war. At a time when life is so cheap, particularly on the Eastern Front, soldiers routinely commit such acts of brutality and inhumanity that performing a few more (or a few million more) hardly seems to matter.The narrative deals with more than the killing of Jews. Quite early on many categories of Germans were killed (mentally ill, elderly, etc) to get rid of useless mouths to feed. Behind the lines in eastern Europe people were killed because they might become, or support, partisans and saboteurs. The narrator recognises that not all, in fact not even a majority, pose a threat, but in the fog of war who has the time to really investigate? Easier to kill them all. At times he questions the issue, but not on what might be considered moral grounds. Wouldn't some of the overrun populations be more use to their conquerors if they were assimiliated rather than exterminated? What a waste that so many healthy concentration camp inmates were killed or died due to poor conditions and ill-treatment when Germany was desperate for slave labourers in its armaments factories. No such sympathy for the useless women, children and elderly, though.It's a long book (over 900 pages of small print) and at times it is hard going, not only because of the horror of the subject but also because the writing is a bit turgid in places. There are also long philosophical discussions, some of which are interesting but others not so, and rambling dream sequences when he is wounded, sick or unstable. I'm not really sure what their relevance is, nor that of his relationship with parents and sister, unless it is to emphasise how mad people become in that sort of war situation.It ends as Berlin falls to the Soviet army, with an unexpected twist right on the last page. All in all excellent, albeit not light, reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Written in the form of the memoir of an SS officer, I would characterise this not only as a narrative of the gritty horror of war, but also an attempt to explain (and I think it "explain" rather than "justify") how ordinary people can get caught up in perpetrating something as horrific as the holocaust.It does not dwell on "only obeying orders", but rather on someone who, as a committed Nazi, believes that unpleasant actions, even things which he may disagree with personally and believe to be wasteful and misguided, may be necessary during a time of total war. It is compounded by the aura of the Fuhrer and his claim to represent the Volk. It is made worse by the inhumanity of war. At a time when life is so cheap, particularly on the Eastern Front, soldiers routinely commit such acts of brutality and inhumanity that performing a few more (or a few million more) hardly seems to matter.The narrative deals with more than the killing of Jews. Quite early on many categories of Germans were killed (mentally ill, elderly, etc) to get rid of useless mouths to feed. Behind the lines in eastern Europe people were killed because they might become, or support, partisans and saboteurs. The narrator recognises that not all, in fact not even a majority, pose a threat, but in the fog of war who has the time to really investigate? Easier to kill them all. At times he questions the issue, but not on what might be considered moral grounds. Wouldn't some of the overrun populations be more use to their conquerors if they were assimiliated rather than exterminated? What a waste that so many healthy concentration camp inmates were killed or died due to poor conditions and ill-treatment when Germany was desperate for slave labourers in its armaments factories. No such sympathy for the useless women, children and elderly, though.It's a long book (over 900 pages of small print) and at times it is hard going, not only because of the horror of the subject but also because the writing is a bit turgid in places. There are also long philosophical discussions, some of which are interesting but others not so, and rambling dream sequences when he is wounded, sick or unstable. I'm not really sure what their relevance is, nor that of his relationship with parents and sister, unless it is to emphasise how mad people become in that sort of war situation.It ends as Berlin falls to the Soviet army, with an unexpected twist right on the last page. All in all excellent, albeit not light, reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I never thought I would want to read a 1,000 page (more or less) first-person novel about a Nazi who basically sees the Holocaust in terms of the bureaucratic nightmares it causes. But I cannot put it down.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the most daring books I ever read. Of course it had terrible details, but they are not just there to shock. Littell shows his readers what WWII was like; raw, harsh and inhumane. It is very disturbing to find out that at some points I could feel with the main character. But that is exactly Littells point. It makes you think what you would do in situations like that. Would you be a good person, or would you save your own face, at any cost. Very interesting and thought-provoking.Yes, there are words to describe what happened in those days and Littell found them. Excellent! And I thought the ending was amazing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    [The Kindly Ones] by [[Jonathan Littell]] (2006,2009)This nearly 1000 page tome is everything you've probably heard about it: gruesome, disgusting, repulsive, difficult to take. It is also gripping, intelligent, informative, insightful, and well-written. It is the story of World War II through the eyes of Max Aue, SS officer. Aue is with the Nazis when they invade Poland; he's at Babi Yar and the Battle of Stalingrad; he's with Eichmann at the concentration camps; he's in Hungary near the end of the war when the Germans proposed "blood for trucks;" and he's in Hitler's bunker in April 1945. When we meet him, in present time, he is a well-respected French lace manufacturer with a past no one questions. He is also unrepenetant.Aue is a cultured and intelligent man, but never a sympathetic character. His personal life mirrors the depravity of the war--he is sexually obsessed with his twin sister and acts out this obsession in homosexual affairs. His mother and stepfather are brutally murdered. And, as you may have read elsewhere, there's a lot of diarrhea, blood, vomit and guts.When Aue is not on the frontlines, he is a bureacrat--a clear manifestation of the banality of evil. His job involves such things as determining how much food a concentration camp inmate should get daily. What is the optimal amount of time to keep a concentration camp inmate alive so as to maximize the benefit of his labor vis a vis the cost of his upkeep? Should Jews get less food than other types of prisoners, since they are destined for execution anyway?There are also endless discussions with "racial anthropologists," linguists, and other experts as to what circumstances make a person or group of people Jewish, which would almost be silly if these weren't life or death matters for the people under discussion. There's even the discussion among the starving soldiers at Stalingrad as they consider cannibalism on whether they should eat a dead Russian or a dead German. If they eat the meat of a Slav or a Bolshevik, won't they become corrupted? On the other hand, wouldn't it be dishonorable to eat a German?Aue is clearly a psychopath. I don't know if all SS officers were psychopaths, or whether some were just temporarily insane. This book isn't The Diary of Ann Frank. You will know whether you can stand to read something like this or not. If you can stomach it, and you want to try to understand how and why the Germans did what they did, it is a book you should read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Middle-aged French intellectual Jonathan Littell caused a sensation in 2006 with his infamous The Kindly Ones (finally published in the US for the first time in 2008), a thousand-page historical novel which attempts to take the most complicated look ever at what turned a bunch of otherwise boring, middle-class Germans into amoral monsters during the Nazi period of the 1920s through '40s (which, by the way, turns out to mostly be the same things that turned a bunch of otherwise boring, middle-class Americans into amoral monsters during the Bush years), chief among these reasons the culture of endless brutal public violence that was perpetuated in those days, said endless violence of which Littell faithfully reproduces in his own book, which is what mainly caused its infamy in the first place. But as I quickly realized when starting to make my way through it myself a few weeks ago, Littell could've actually accomplished this in a tight 300-page manuscript if he wanted; so what this doorstop mostly turns out to be instead is an insanely exhaustive examination of the jumbled bureaucracy that held Nazi Germany together, containing thousands upon thousands of offhanded references to the hundreds of sub-divisions within the party's executive structure and military setup, none of which are explained within the text itself but rather in a dense glossary at the end of the book. Seriously, Littell, you're freaking killing me here.Also, Littell made the unfortunate decision to make our everyman narrator the perpetrator of a whole series of ultra-prurient sexual fetishes as well, references to which the narrator is constantly dropping into his recollection here of the war years, as casually as if he were discussing the weather (take for example his nostalgic reminisces about the solo nighttime forest wanderings he used to be able to take as a child, before mentioning that the main reason he treasures them is because he was able to indulge in his habit of auto-erotic asphyxiation without any interruptions); and this not only dilutes the book's main message (that most evil acts in history are not committed by inherently evil people, but rather normal people put into evil circumstances), but is also something I personally found profoundly offputting and completely pointless as well. The good parts of this book really are good, don't get me wrong, just that they're miniscule and surrounded by dozens of pages of needlessly disgusting or yawn-inducing fluff; and that's why I gave up on The Kindly Ones less than 200 pages into it, and recommend that you not even start it at all.Out of 10: 5.4
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Kindly Ones, the title of the novel, refers to the Greek goddesses of justice and vengeance. The story in some ways parallels the Greek story of Orestes, but this is not a Greek tragedy, it is a human one, born of the 20th century. In Greek tragedy one looks for the fatal flaw of the character which will lead to his inevitable downfall. But Dr. Maximilian Aue, like most of us, has more than one flaw. Dr. Aue is human caught in human times. His faults are common human faults, fear, ambition, desire for love. In a calmer world or a calmer time Dr. Aue could have led a normal life, but he lived in Nazi Germany, a time when moral strength could easily have led to death; his weaknesses, human weaknesses, kept him alive and made him a participant in the events of the time.Littell's novel is a long sometimes harrowing read. It is not the type of book one should read if one carries the novels one is reading into their dreams, as this book can only cause nightmares. In the opening chapter, which takes place close to the present time, Dr. Aue states that part of the problem of our understanding of those horrific times, is that we monsterize the perpetrators and see only the victims as human. But Aue argues that the perpetrators were equally human, that what happened was entirely done by humans to humans. There are so many novels that have come out of World War II and the Holocaust that it seems hard to justify another. But this novel is important, not because it relives well-known events, but because it vividly portrays how a regular person can be drawn into such evil. The world we live in sees too much in black and white, in the privileged world in which we live we don't have to make decisions like he did. We too easily say what was done was wrong, and indeed it was, but we don't truly know how we would react if we were in the same circumstances, and that, more than anything else is what Littell is trying to get us to understand. This seems to be the type of book that you either love or hate. I have read good reviews of it, and I read the reviews of people who hate it. It was a bestseller in France where first came out, but Barnes & Noble didn't even carry it, and if you look for on their website isn't there. I found it completely by accident while browsing a small independent bookstore in Millerton New York. If you decide to read it you can find it online through Amazon but I would encourage ordering it through a local independent.Jonathan Littell is an American who was raised and educated mostly in France as it says on the dust jacket. He has worked for humanitarian agencies which him for brought him to places of conflict and he has seen the effects of war and genocide. He understands that we cannot deal with what we are unwilling to accept. We too easily say I would never do that, we too easily condemn without understanding, and while condemnation is necessary so to is understanding. With that in mind Dr. Aue tells his story completely, from beginning to end, with no holds barred. Littell is trying to force us to face the fact that the decisions made by Dr. Aue might too have been made by us. It is the cumulative effect of many small decisions that lead Dr. Aue down his path. In the end we must still condemn him, but we also begin to understand him.Dr. Aue is an educated man, he has a degree in law, is well read in the classics of literature, and in philosophy. He is an intellectual National Socialist; he believed in the cause of his party, in the unification of the German people, and the need for expansion. He is also a homosexual. One night when he is arrested in an area known for homosexuals to congregate he is offered a way out by a friend. This friend offered him a position working for him in the SS. It is a position where he is an observer and analyst. He collects data, offers observations, and draws conclusions. It is an easy choice for him to make, but it is only a first step down a path that Germany is leading its people. A number of the reviews that I've read of this work compare it closely with War and Peace, however, the proper Russian novel to compare it to would be Crime and Punishment. This famous work by Dostoyevsky focuses mostly upon the single character of Raskolnikov; and Littell's novel focuses entirely on Dr. Aue. The Kindly Ones is a psychological novel in the same sense as Crime and Punishment. However, while Raskolnikov's issues are eventually resolved Dr. Aue’s spiritual crisis is of a different nature, and his fear of being caught stays with him for the remainder of his life, until finally enough time has passed he feels free enough to tell his tale as not as a justification or rationalization, but rather as an accusation, challenging the reader—would you have acted any differently?Shortly after the war with Russia begins Dr. Aue finds himself in the middle of the Aktion, that is the beginning of the extermination of the Jews. In observing the men who were ordered to carry out the killings he noticed several different types of soldiers: those who refused, those who enjoyed it, those who managed to get through carrying it out, and those who by carrying out went insane. Dr. Aue finds himself occasionally having to carry out some executions, and while in the short term he seems able to deal with it, in the long term he finds himself physically and psychologically breaking down. As a new commanding officer is brought in he recognizes that the state of several of the officers under his command is clearly unsound and Dr. Aue finds himself transferred to a facility where he is able to somewhat recover."From the very beginning, things weren't as I would have liked them: I had resigned myself to that a long time ago (yet at the same time, it seems to me, I never accepted things as they are, so wrong and so bad; at the most I finally came to acknowledge my powerlessness to change them). It is also true that I have changed. When I was young, I felt transparent with lucidity, I had precise ideas about the world, about what it should be and what it actually was, and about my own place in that world; and with all the madness and the arrogance of youth, I had thought it would always be so; but the attitude induced by my analysis would never change; but I had forgotten, or rather I did not yet know, the force of time, of time and fatigue. And even more than my indecision, my ideological confusion, my inability to take clear positions on the questions I was dealing with, and to hold it, it was this that was wearing me down, taking the ground away from under my feet. Such a fatigue has no end, only death can put an end to it, it still lasts today, and for me it will always last."This novel carries many allusions to Greek literature, and like a story in a Greek tragedy, we know the outcome, and the outcome is not nearly so important as how we get there. One reviewer claimed that Dr. Aue's homosexuality was due to his unfulfilled love for his sister; I find this a rather simplistic view as it completely ignores the parts of the book dedicated to Dr. Aue's youth and education, and what he had to endure that time, as well as his own nature and tendencies. Whether or not Aue would have been homosexual had he had a different childhood are irrelevant. It is part of who he is, and in part shapes his story. Toward the end of the book Dr. Aue finds himself alone in the Villa belonging to his brother-in-law and sister. His insanity at this point has completely overcome him and he destroys the inside of the Villa in a rather disgusting manner. And while some reviewers read this as an excuse for Littell to entertain a disgusting type of exhibitionism, again I find that a simplistic view. You can argue that Littell carried it to an extreme and may have drawn it out longer than is necessary, but to deny that there is any meaning in this part of the novel is to deny the role that culture plays in the story itself. Dr. Aue is an educated and cultured individual, and for him to carry out the destruction that he does represents not only his own emotional turmoil and insanity but the insanity wreaked all over Europe by National Socialism; thus Dr. Aue's unhealthy relationship with his sister and brother-in-law can represent what became of German culture and the relation of Germany and the rest of European culture during the second world war.It is impossible for a single review to even begin to cover this novel with anything approaching completeness. It is almost 1000 pages long, and is very dense reading. There is little doubt in my mind that at some point in the future scholars will dedicate themselves to completely studying this work. I will also recommend that this book that this book be regularly taught at the college level in order to help knock young people out of their complacency and black and white thinking. “There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity….”
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book was a slog. It showed the inside of the mind of a man engaged in some of the most brutal acts you could imagine. I remember one reviewer saying it was like a Nazi "Zelig", and he was right. The protagonist, an SS officer, is difficult to like, but Littell did a magnificent job getting inside his head and letting us explore the perversion all around him,and making the perverted seem absolutely normal. It was very long, and when I got through, I wasn't sure that I had done anything but be voyeur to acts and people that I'd just as well rather not met, even on a page. I remember thinking at the beginning of the book that it really was the masterpiece the Prix de Goncourt said it was -- making the inhuman human. By the end, I have to admit I had lost my initial enthusiasm as Dr. Aue ambled through his life as the implementer of the endlosung - the Final Solution.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I hated this book so much that I stopped reading it; a thing I almost never do. I agree with the main premise that terrible things are done by ordinary people but I can only take so much decription of all the terrible things done!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    After reading a review, I was so ready to love this book. Alas I read about 90% of it, and was let down from my high expectations. The book is really a historical fiction, not a contemporary novel or thriller. It follows Dr. Aue through his progression and wartime life as an SS officer. It includes atrocities he witnessed, heard about, and occasionally participated in. It included his own musings on morality both much later and mostly concurrent with the events. It dips into just about every form of atrocity, depravity, crime and non-normative life choice. It is not for the faint of stomach.How could the book have been better? First, it could have been a little more taut--they could have cut 40 pages of troop and SS movements through Poland and Russia. Second, the introduction/first section, at first abstruse, becomes a wonderfully well-written intriguing psychological venture--but then that voice disappears and never returns as it plunges almost immediately into the war. Almost like having an appetizer that's better than the entree, speaking as one not enamored especially of WWII historical fiction. Third, it does have, as mentioned elsewhere, construct and other issues with the story of the parent crime tying in with the basic story, and some more relationship parts of the book seem unrealistic. On the positive side, this is perhaps a very realistic look into the life of an SS officer, and seems very well researched.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read the reviews of this book in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian, and immediately went to the book store and bought it. I have now read about 500 pages. The book is brilliant and I have already given it a 5 because I cannot imagine how it could be any better. The story is written as a memoir in the 1st person. The narrator, Dr Max Aue, is an SS officer in Germany during the second World war. There are so many aspects of this book that could be discussed in a review. For example, I could write in awe of the linguistic analysis of the languages of the Caucasus by the character (not the main character who is Dr Aue), Leutnant Voss. I was fascinated. This is not merely an intellectual excercise by the author. The debate becomes very real when Voss argues with his superiors, asserting that a Caucasian mountain tribe of about 6.000 people are not Jewish and hence should not be slaughtered. This book is almost 1,000 pages and it is not a light read. Before paying the full price for a newly published book, most people need to consider whether they will actually read it. I have some tips for anyone who is struggling with this vast historical epic. Reading is a private thing and don't be shy about using any aids which will enhance your enjoyment of the book. I am exposing mine in this review. In the first 50 pages of the book I made some notes of the characters who were introduced rapidly and I got out a map to keep with the book. There is a glossary at the back of the book which should be read in detail before starting the book but you don't need to memorize it. As the terms come up and you don't remember them, flip to the back but you really only need to do this for the first part of the book and then you will recognize the most important terms. There is also a Table of German Ranks with approximate American Equivelants at the back. I don't like flipping back and forth too much and I made a list of the most important glossary items and used it as a bookmark. A more efficient method might be to photocopy the glossary and keep it with the book. I don't mean to imply that this book needs to be studied rather than read as an exciting novel. It is an exciting novel but if you are confused about the characters and have lost track of the geography you will tire of the book. There is no need to consult any history books or other sources. Mr Littell's book contains all the history you need and is according to the experts flawlessly researched. I will write more later and keep you up to date.Other recommended and related books in my library:Nine suitcases by Bela ZsoltIf Not Now, When? by Primo LeviStalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Antony BeevorA Writer At War: Vasily Grossman with the Red army: 1941-1945House of Meetings by Martin AmisForest of Souls by Carla BanksHunger by Elise Blackwell

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The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell

The Kindly Ones

A Novel

Jonathan Littell

Translated by Charlotte Mandell

For the dead

Contents

Toccata

Allemandes I and II

Courante

Sarabande

Menuet (en Rondeaux)

Air

Gigue

Appendices

Glossary

Table of German Ranks with Approximate American Equivalents

About the Author and the Translator

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

TOCCATA

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you’ll retort, and I don’t want to know. And it certainly is true that this is a bleak story, but an edifying 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 little luck you’ll have some time to spare. And also, this concerns you: you’ll see that this concerns you. Don’t think I am trying to convince you of anything; after all, your opinions are your own business. If after all these years I’ve made up my mind to write, it’s to set the record straight for myself, not for you. For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then time passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae—what do we do with such an appalling realization? Suicide, of course, is always an option. But to tell the truth suicide doesn’t tempt me much. Of course I have thought about it over the years; and if I were to resort to it, here’s how I’d go about it: I’d hold a grenade right up against my heart and go out in a bright burst of joy. A little round grenade whose pin I’d delicately pluck out before I released the catch, smiling at the little metallic noise of the spring, the last sound I’d hear, aside from the heartbeat in my ears. And then at last, happiness, or in any case peace, as the shreds of my flesh slowly dripped off the walls. Let the cleaning women scrub them off, that’s what they’re paid for, the poor girls. But as I said, suicide doesn’t tempt me. I don’t know why, either—an old philosophical streak, perhaps, which keeps me thinking that after all we’re not here to have fun. To do what, then? I have no idea, to endure, probably, to kill time before it finally kills you. And in that case, writing is as good an occupation as anything else, when you have time to spare. Not that I have all that much spare time; I am a busy man, I have what is called a family, a job, hence responsibilities; all that takes time, and it doesn’t leave much to recount one’s memories. Particularly since memories are what I have quite a lot of. I am a veritable memory factory. I will have spent my whole life manufacturing memories, even though these days I’m being paid to manufacture lace. In fact, I could just as easily not write. It’s not as if it’s an obligation. After the war I remained a discreet man; thank God I have never been driven, unlike some of my former colleagues, to write my memoirs for the purpose of self-justification, since I have nothing to justify, or to earn a living, since I have a decent enough income as it is. Once, I found myself in Germany on a business trip; I was meeting the head of a big lingerie company, to sell him some lace. Some old friends had recommended me to him; so, without having to ask any questions, we both knew where we stood with each other. After our discussion, which went quite well, he got up, took a book down from his shelf, and handed it to me. It was the posthumous memoirs of Hans Frank, the Generalgouverneur of Poland; it was called Facing the Gallows. I got a letter from Frank’s widow, he said. She had the manuscript, which he wrote after his trial, published at her own expense; now she’s selling the book to provide for her children. Can you imagine that? The widow of the Generalgouverneur!—I ordered twenty copies from her, to use as gifts. And I advised all my department chiefs to buy one. She wrote me a moving letter of thanks. Did you know him? I assured him I hadn’t, but that I would read the book with interest. Actually I had run into Hans Frank once, briefly, maybe I’ll tell you about it later on, if I have the courage or the patience. But just then it would have made no sense talking about it. The book in any case was awful—confused, whining, steeped in a curious kind of religious hypocrisy. These notes of mine might be confused and awful too, but I’ll do my best to be clear; I can assure you that they will at least be free of any form of contrition. 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. Also, I’m not writing to feed my widow and children, I’m quite capable of providing for them. No, if I have finally decided to write, it really is probably just to pass the time, and also, possibly, to clear up one or two obscure points, for you perhaps and for myself. What’s more I think it will do me good. It’s true that I have been in a rather glum mood of late. The constipation, probably. A distressing and painful problem, and a somewhat new one for me; it used to be just the opposite. For a long time I had to go to the toilet three or four times a day; now, once a week would be a blessing. I’ve been reduced to taking enemas, a repulsive procedure, albeit effective. Forgive me for wearying you with such sordid details: but I do have a right to complain a little. And if you can’t bear this you’d better stop right here. I’m no Hans Frank, and I can’t stand mincing words. I want to be precise, as far as I am able. In spite of my shortcomings, and they have been many, I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink, and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

Sometime ago, my wife brought home a black cat. She probably thought it would make me happy; of course she never asked my opinion. She must have suspected I would have flatly refused, so presenting me with the fait accompli was safer. And once it was there, nothing could be done about it, the grandchildren would cry, etc. But this was a very unpleasant cat. Whenever I tried to pet it, to show my goodwill, it would slip away to sit on the windowsill and stare at me with its yellow eyes; if I tried to pick it up and hold it, it would scratch me. At night, on the other hand, it would come and curl up in a ball on my chest, a stifling weight, and in my sleep I would dream I was being smothered beneath a heap of stones. With my memories, it’s been more or less the same. The first time I decided to set them down in writing, I took a leave of absence. That was probably a mistake. Things were going well, though: I had bought and read quite a few books on the subject, in order to refresh my memory; I had drawn up organizational charts, detailed chronologies, and so on. But with this leave of absence I suddenly had a lot of free time, and I began thinking. What’s more, it was fall, a bitter gray rain was stripping the leaves off the trees, and I was slowly overcome with dread. I realized that thinking is not always a good idea.

I should have known. My colleagues consider me a calm, collected, thoughtful man. Calm, certainly; but often during the day my head begins to rage, with the dull roar of a crematorium. I talk, I hold conversations, I make decisions, just like everyone else; but standing at a bar with my glass of Cognac, I imagine a man coming in with a shotgun and opening fire; at the movies or at the theater, I picture a live grenade rolling under the seats; in a town square on a public holiday I see a car packed with explosives blowing up, the afternoon festivities turned into carnage, blood filling the cracks between the cobblestones, gobbets of flesh splattered on the walls or smashing through the windows to land in the Sunday soup, I hear cries, the groans of people with their limbs torn off like the legs of an insect plucked by a curious little boy, the bewilderment of the survivors, a strange, earsplitting silence, the beginning of a long fear. Calm? Yes, I remain calm, whatever happens, I don’t let anything show, I stay quiet, impassive, like the empty windows of burned-out cities, like the little old men on park benches with their canes and their medals, like the faces of the drowned just beneath the surface of the water, never to be found. I couldn’t break this terrifying calm even if I wanted to. I’m not the sort of man who loses his nerve at the drop of a hat, I know how to behave. But it weighs on me too. The worst thing is not necessarily those images I’ve just described; fantasies like these have lived in me for a long time, ever since my childhood probably, or in any case long before I actually ended up in the heart of the slaughterhouse. The war, in that sense, was only a confirmation, and I have gotten used to these little scenarios, I take them as a pertinent commentary on the vanity of things. No, what turned out to be so disturbing, so oppressive, was to have nothing to do but sit around and think. Ask yourselves: You, yourselves, what do you think of, through the course of a day? Very few things, actually. Drawing up a systematic classification of your everyday thoughts would be easy: practical or mechanical thoughts, planning your actions and your time (example: setting the coffee to drip before brushing your teeth, but toasting the bread afterward, since it doesn’t take as long); work preoccupations; financial anxieties; domestic problems; sexual fantasies. I’ll spare you the details. At dinner, you contemplate the aging face of your wife, so much less exciting than your mistress, but a fine woman otherwise, what can you do, that’s life, so you talk about the latest government scandal. Actually you couldn’t care less about the latest government scandal, but what else is there to talk about? Eliminate those kinds of thoughts, and you’ll agree there’s not much left. There are of course other moments. Unexpectedly, between two laundry detergent ads, there’s a prewar tango, Violetta, say, and in a great surge you see the nocturnal lapping of the river and the Chinese lanterns around the open-air dance floor, you smell the faint odor of sweat on a joyful woman’s skin; at the entrance to a park, a child’s smiling face reminds you of your son’s just before he started to walk; in the street, a ray of sunlight pierces through the clouds and brightens the broad leaves, the off-white trunk of a plane tree: and suddenly you think of your childhood, of the schoolyard at recess where you used to play war games, shouting with terror and happiness. You have just had a human thought. But this is a rare thing.

Yet if you put your work, your ordinary activities, your everyday agitation, on hold, and devote yourself solely to thinking, things go very differently. Soon things start rising up, in heavy, dark waves. At night, your dreams fall apart, unfurl, and proliferate, and when you wake they leave a fine, bitter film at the back of your mind, which takes a long time to dissolve. Don’t misunderstand me: I am not talking about remorse, or about guilt. These too exist, no doubt, I don’t want to deny it, but I think things are far more complex than that. Even a man who has never gone to war, who has never had to kill, will experience what I’m talking about. All the meanness, the cowardice, the lies, the pettiness that afflict everyone will come back to haunt him. No wonder men have invented work, alcohol, meaningless chatter. No wonder televisions sell so well. I quickly cut short my leave of absence, it was better that way. I had plenty of time left to scribble, at lunchtime or in the evening after the secretaries had gone home.

A brief interruption while I go and vomit, then I’ll continue. That’s another one of my numerous little afflictions: from time to time my meals come back up, sometimes right away, sometimes later on, for no reason, just like that. It’s an old problem, I’ve had it since the war, since the fall of 1941, to be precise, it started in the Ukraine, in Kiev I think, or maybe Zhitomir. I’ll talk about that too probably. In any case, I have long since gotten used to it: I brush my teeth, down a little shot of alcohol, and continue what I was doing. Let’s get back to my memories. I bought myself a stack of copybooks, the large ones, quadrille-ruled, which I keep in a locked drawer at my office. Before, I used to jot my notes down on index cards, also quadrille-ruled; now I’ve decided to start all over and forge ahead. I’m not really sure why. Certainly not for the edification of my progeny. If at this very moment I were suddenly to keel over, from a heart attack, say, or a stroke, and my secretaries were to take the key and open this drawer, they’d have a shock, the poor things, and my wife too: the index cards alone would be more than enough. They’d have to burn every last scrap quickly to avoid a scandal. It would be all the same to me, I’d be dead. And in the end, even though I’m addressing you, it’s not for you that I am writing.

My office is a pleasant place to write, airy, sober, peaceful. White, almost bare walls, a glass cabinet for samples; and across from my desk a long bay window that looks out onto the factory floor. Despite the double-glazed glass, the incessant clatter of the Leavers looms resonates through the room. When I want to think, I leave my work table and go stand in front of the window; I gaze down at the looms lined up below, at the sure, precise movements of the workers, and let myself be lulled. Sometimes I go down and stroll among the machinery. The room is dark, the filthy windows are tinted blue, since lace is fragile and sensitive to light, and this bluish light soothes my mind. I like to lose myself for a while in the monotonous, syncopated clanking that fills the space, a metallic, obsessive two-step beat. The looms always impress me. They are made of cast iron, were once painted green, and each one weighs ten tons. Some of them are very old, they stopped being made a long time ago; I have the spare parts made to order; after the war, electricity replaced steam power, but the looms themselves haven’t been touched. I never go near them, to keep from getting dirty: all these moving parts have to be constantly lubricated, but oil, of course, would ruin the lace, so we use graphite, a fine black powder dusted over the moving parts of the mechanism with an old sock, swung like a censer. It turns the lace black and coats the walls, as well as the floor, the machinery, and the men who supervise it. Even though I don’t often get my hands dirty, I know these great machines well. The first looms were British and a jealously guarded secret; a few were smuggled into France just after the Napoleonic Wars by workers fleeing the excise duties. They were modified to produce lace by a man from Lyon, Jacquard, who added a series of perforated strips to them to determine the pattern. Cylinders down below feed the thread upward; in the heart of the loom, five thousand bobbins, the soul, are slotted into a carriage; then a catch-bar (the English term has been carried over into French) grips and sets this carriage swinging front to back, with a loud hypnotic clapping. The threads are guided laterally, according to a complex choreography encoded within some five or six hundred Jacquard strips, by copper combs sealed onto lead, and are thus woven into knots; a swan’s neck carries the rake up; finally the lace appears, gossamer-like, disturbingly beautiful under its coat of graphite, slowly rolled onto a drum, fixed at the top of the Leavers.

Work in the factory runs according to a strict principle of sexual segregation: the men design the patterns, punch the strips, set up the chains, supervise the looms, and manage the supply racks surrounding them; their wives and daughters, even today, remain bobbin threaders, bleachers, menders, taperers, and folders. Tradition runs strong. Our tulle makers, up here, are something of a proletarian aristocracy. Apprenticeship is lengthy, the work delicate; a century ago, the weavers of Calais came to work in buggies, wearing top hats, and called the boss by his first name. Times have changed. The war ruined the industry, despite a few looms kept working for Germany. Everything had to be started again from scratch; whereas before the war four thousand looms used to operate, today, in the North, only about three hundred are left. Still, during the postwar boom, tulle makers were able to buy themselves cars before many a banker did. But my workers don’t call me by my first name. I don’t think my workers like me. That’s all right, I’m not asking them to like me. And I don’t like them either. We work together, that’s all. When an employee is conscientious and hardworking, when the lace that comes out of his loom doesn’t need much mending, I give him a bonus at the end of the year; if someone comes to work late, or drunk, I punish him. On that basis we understand each other.

You might be wondering how I ended up in the lace business. Nothing particularly marked me out for commerce, far from it. I studied law and political science and received my doctorate in law; in Germany the letters Dr. jur. form a legal part of my name. Yet it must be said that circumstances played a part in preventing me from making use of my diploma after 1945. If you really want to know, nothing truly marked me out for law, either: as a young man I wanted above all else to study literature and philosophy. But I was prevented from doing so; another sad episode in my family romance—maybe I’ll come back to it at some point. But I have to admit that when it comes to lace, law is more useful than literature. Here’s what happened, more or less. When it was all over, I managed to slip into France, to pass myself off as a Frenchman; in all the chaos, it wasn’t too difficult. I returned along with the deported, we weren’t asked many questions. It must be said that I speak perfect French; that’s because I had a French mother; I spent ten years of my childhood in France, I went through middle school there, then high school, preparatory classes, and even two years of university, at the ELSP, and since I grew up in the South I could even muster a Provençal drawl, but in any case no one was paying attention, it was a real mess, we were greeted at the Gare d’Orsay with some soup, some insults too—I should say that I hadn’t tried to pass myself off as a camp inmate, but as an STO worker, and the Gaullists didn’t like those too much, so they roughed me up a little, the other poor bastards too, and then they let us go, no Hotel Lutetia for us, but freedom at least. I didn’t stay in Paris, I knew too many people there, and not the right ones, so I wandered around the countryside and lived off odd jobs here and there. And then things calmed down. They soon stopped shooting people, and then they didn’t even bother putting them in jail anymore. So I started looking around and I ended up finding a man I knew. He had done well for himself, he’d managed the change of regime without a hitch; being a man of foresight, he had taken care not to advertise his services on our behalf. At first he refused to meet me, but when he finally realized who I was, he saw that he didn’t really have a choice. I can’t say it was a pleasant conversation: there was a distinct feeling of embarrassment to it, of constraint. But he clearly understood that we had a common interest: I, to find a job, and he, to keep his. He had a cousin up North, a former broker who was trying to start up his own business with three Leavers bought off a bankrupt widow. This man hired me as a salesman; I had to travel and find customers for his lace. This work exasperated me; I finally managed to convince him that I could be more useful to him in management. I did indeed have quite a bit of experience in that field, even though I could make even less use of it than of my doctorate. The business grew, especially in the 1950s, when I renewed my contacts in the Federal Republic and succeeded in opening up the German market for us. I could easily have gone back to Germany then: many of my former colleagues were living there peacefully; some of them had served a little time, others hadn’t even been charged. Given my record, I could have resumed my name, my doctorate, claimed my veteran’s and disability benefits, no one would have noticed. I would easily have found work. But, I said to myself, what would be the point? Law didn’t really interest me any more than business, and I had actually come to acquire a taste for lace, that ravishing, harmonious creation of man. When we had bought up enough looms, my boss decided to set up a second factory, and he put me in charge of it. I have kept this position ever since, and will until I retire. In the meantime, I got married, rather reluctantly I must admit, but up here, in the North, it seemed necessary, a way of fitting in and consolidating my situation. I picked a woman from a good family; she was relatively good-looking, a proper sort of woman, and I immediately got her with child, to keep her busy. Unfortunately she had twins, it must run in the family, mine, I mean—one brat would have been more than enough for me. My boss lent me some money, I bought a comfortable house, not too far from the sea. And that is how the bourgeoisie finally made me one of its own. It was better that way. After everything that had happened, I craved calm and predictability above all. The course of my life had crushed the bones of my childhood dreams, and my anguish had slowly smoldered out, from one end of German Europe to the other. I emerged from the war an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame, like sand crunching in your teeth. So a life in keeping with all the social conventions suited me fine: a comfortable strait-jacket, even if I often contemplate it with irony, and occasionally with contempt. At this rate, I hope someday to reach Jerome Nadal’s state of grace, and to strive for nothing except to strive for nothing. Now I’m becoming bookish; another one of my failings. Alas for saintliness, I am not yet fully free of desire. I still honor my wife from time to time, conscientiously, with little pleasure but also without excessive disgust, so as to guarantee the peace of my household. And every now and then, during business trips, I go to the trouble of renewing some of my old habits—but mainly as a matter of hygiene, so to speak. All that has lost much of its interest for me. The body of a beautiful boy, a sculpture by Michelangelo, it’s all the same: they no longer take my breath away. It’s like after a long illness, when food has lost all taste; what then does it matter if you eat chicken or beef? You have to feed yourself, that’s all. To tell the truth, there isn’t much that has kept an interest for me. Literature, possibly, but even then, I’m not sure if that’s not just out of habit. Maybe that’s why I am writing these memoirs: to get my blood flowing, to see if I can still feel anything, if I can still suffer a little. A curious exercise indeed.

When it comes to suffering, though, I ought to know a thing or two. Every European of my generation could say the same, but I can claim without any false modesty that I have seen more than most. And also people forget so quickly, I see it every day. Even those who were actually there hardly ever use anything but ready-made thoughts and phrases to talk about it. Just look at the pathetic prose of the German writers who describe the Eastern Front: putrid sentimentalism, a dead, hideous language. The prose of Herr Paul Carell, for instance, a successful author these past few years. It just so happens that I once knew this Herr Carell, in Hungary, back when he was still called Paul Karl Schmidt and, on behalf of Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry, wrote what he really thought, in vigorous, effective prose: The Jewish question is no question of humanity, and it is no question of religion; it is solely a question of political hygiene. Now the honorable Herr Carell-Schmidt has brought off the considerable feat of publishing four insipid volumes about the war against the Soviet Union without once mentioning the word Jew. I know this, I’ve read them: it was tedious work, but I’m stubborn. Our French authors, the Mabires and others like him, are no better. As for the Communists, they’re the same, only from the opposite point of view. So where have they all gone, the ones who used to sing, Boys, sharpen your knives on the sidewalk curbs? They keep quiet, or else they’re dead. We babble, we simper, we flounder through an insipid morass made of words such as glory, honor, heroism—it’s tiresome, no one says anything anymore. Perhaps I’m a bit unfair, but I dare to hope that you understand me. The television bombards us with numbers, impressive numbers, in the seven- or even eight-figure range; but who among you has ever seriously stopped to think about these numbers? Who among you has ever even tried to count all the people he knows or has known in his life, and to compare that laughable number with the numbers he hears on television, those famous six million, or twenty million? Let’s do some math. Math is useful; it gives one perspective, refreshes the soul. It can be a very instructive exercise. Be a little patient, then, and pay attention. I will consider only the two theaters of operations where I played a role, however minute: the war against the Soviet Union, and the extermination program officially referred to in our documents as The Final Solution of the Jewish Question, die Endlösung der Judenfrage, to cite that fine euphemism. On the Western fronts, in any case, the losses were relatively minor, a few hundred thousand here or there at most. My starting figures will be somewhat arbitrary: I have no choice, since no one agrees on them. For the total Soviet losses, I’ll stick to the traditional number, the twenty million cited by Khrushchev in 1956, while noting that Reitlinger, a respected British author, finds only some twelve million, whereas Erickson, a Scottish scholar who’s just as reputable if not more so, comes to a minimum figure of twenty-six million; thus the official Soviet number neatly splits the difference, give or take a million. As for the German losses—in the East alone, that is—one can take as a starting point the even more official and Germanically precise number of 6,172,373 casualties between June 22, 1941, and March 31, 1945, a figure compiled in an internal report of the OKH (the Army High Command) that surfaced after the war, but one that includes both the dead (more than a million), the wounded (almost four million), and the missing (i.e., dead plus prisoners plus dead prisoners, some 1,288,000 men). So let us say for the sake of simplicity two million dead, since the wounded don’t concern us here, including, thrown in for good measure, the additional fifty thousand or so men killed between April 1 and May 8, 1945, mainly in Berlin, to which we still have to add the roughly one million civilians believed to have died during the invasion of eastern Germany and the subsequent population movements, giving us, let’s say, a grand total of three million German dead. As for the Jews, you have a choice: the traditional number, even though few people know where it comes from, is six million (it was Höttl who said at Nuremberg that Eichmann had told him this; but Wisliceny asserted that Eichmann had said five million to his colleagues; and Eichmann himself, when the Jews finally got to ask him the question in person, said somewhere between five and six million, but probably closer to five). Dr. Korherr, who compiled statistics for the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, totaled up close to two million as of December 31, 1942, but acknowledged, when I discussed the matter with him in 1943, that his baseline figures were unreliable. Finally, the highly respected professor Raul Hilberg, a specialist in the matter and one who can hardly be suspected of holding a partisan stance, at least not in favor of the Germans, reaches, after a dense, nineteen-page demonstration, a final count of 5,100,000, which more or less corresponds to the opinion of the late Obersturmbannführer Eichmann. So let’s settle for Professor Hilberg’s figure, which gives us, to summarize:

Now for the math. The conflict with the USSR lasted from June 22, 1941, at 03:00, until, officially, May 8, 1945, at 23:01, which adds up to 3 years, 10 months, 16 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute, or, rounding off, to 46.5 months, 202.42 weeks, 1,417 days, 34,004 hours, or 2,040,241 minutes (counting the extra minute). For the program known as the Final Solution, we’ll use the same dates; before that, nothing had yet been decided or systematized, so Jewish casualties were for the most part incidental. Now let’s average out one set of figures with the other: for the Germans, this gives us 64,516 dead per month, or 14,821 dead per week, or 2,117 dead per day, or 88 dead per hour, or 1.47 dead per minute, on average for every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year for 3 years, 10 months, 16 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute. For the Jews, including the Soviet ones, we have about 109,677 dead per month, which is 25,195 dead per week, 3,599 dead per day, 150 dead per hour, or 2.5 dead per minute, over the same period. Finally, on the Soviet side, that gives us some 430,108 dead per month, 98,804 dead per week, 14,114 dead per day, 588 dead per hour, or 9.8 dead per minute, for the same period. Thus for the overall total in my field of activities we have an average of 572,043 dead per month, 131,410 dead per week, 18,772 dead per day, 782 dead per hour, and 13.04 dead per minute, every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of the given period, which is, as you will recall, 3 years, 10 months, 16 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute. Let those who smirked at that admittedly somewhat pedantic extra minute please consider that it is worth an additional 13.04 dead, on average, and imagine, if they can, 13 people from their circle of friends killed in 1 minute. You can also calculate the length of time it takes to generate a fresh corpse: this gives us on average a dead German every 40.8 seconds, a dead Jew every 24 seconds, and a dead Bolshevik (Soviet Jews included) every 6.12 seconds, or on the whole a new dead body on average every 4.6 seconds, for the entirety of said period. You are now in a position to carry out, based on these numbers, concrete exercises of imagination. For example, stopwatch in hand, count off 1 death, 2 deaths, 3 deaths, etc., every 4.6 seconds (or every 6.12 seconds, or every 24 seconds, or every 40.8 seconds, if you have a marked preference), while trying to picture them lying there in front of you, those 1, 2, 3 dead. You’ll find it’s a good meditation exercise. Or take some more recent catastrophe that affected you strongly, and compare the two. For instance, if you are an American, consider your little Vietnam adventure, which so traumatized your fellow citizens. You lost 50,000 troops there in 10 years: that’s the equivalent of a little less than 3 days and 2 hours’ worth of dead on the Eastern Front, or of some 13 days, 21 hours, and 25 minutes’ worth of dead Jews. I obviously am not including the Vietnamese dead; since you never speak of them, in your books or TV programs, they must not count for much to you. Yet you killed 40 of them for every single one of your own dead, a fine effort even compared to our own, and one that certainly speaks for the value of technical progress. I’ll stop there, we could go on forever; I invite you to continue on your own, until the ground opens up beneath your feet. As for me, no need: for a long time already the thought of death has been closer to me than the vein in my neck, as that beautiful phrase in the Koran says. If you ever managed to make me cry, my tears would sear your face.

The conclusion of all this, if you’ll allow me one more quotation, the last one, I promise, is, as Sophocles said so well: Not to have been born is best. Schopenhauer has written roughly the same thing: It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on Earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer. Yes, I know, that makes two quotations, but it’s the same idea: in truth, we live in the worst of all possible worlds. Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our lesson, it won’t happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our lesson? Are you certain it won’t happen again? Are you even certain the war is over? In a manner of speaking, the war is never over, or else it will be over only when the last child born on the last day of the war is safely dead and buried, and even then it will live on, in his or her children and then in theirs, till finally the legacy will be diluted, the memories will fray and the pain will fade away, even though by then everyone will probably have forgotten, and all this will have long gone to gather dust with all the other old stories, those not even fit to frighten children, much less the children of the dead or of those who wish they were, dead I mean.

I can guess what you’re thinking: Now here’s a truly bad man, you’re saying to yourselves, an evil man, a nasty piece of work in every respect, who should be rotting in prison instead of wasting our time with the muddled philosophy of a barely half-repentant former Fascist. As to fascism, let’s not confuse the issue, and as for the question of my legal responsibility, don’t prejudge, I haven’t told my story yet; as for the question of my moral responsibility, let me offer a few considerations. Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No one asks you for your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit. You might object that killing another soldier in combat is not the same thing as killing an unarmed civilian; the laws of war allow the one but not the other; as does common morality. A good argument, in theory, but one that takes no account of the conditions of the conflict in question. The entirely arbitrary distinction established after the war between military operations like those of any other conflict and the atrocities carried out by a minority of sadists or psychopaths is, as I hope to demonstrate, a soothing fantasy of the victors—the Western victors, I should specify, since the Soviets, despite all their rhetoric, have always understood what was what: after May 1945, having tossed a few bones to the crowd, Stalin couldn’t have cared less about some illusory justice; he wanted the hard stuff, cash in hand, slaves and equipment to repair and rebuild, not remorse or lamentations, for he knew just as well as we that the dead can’t hear our crying, and that remorse has never put bread on the table. I am not pleading Befehlnotstand, the just-obeying-orders so highly valued by our good German lawyers. What I did, I did with my eyes open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may have been. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame? What I am saying holds true even if you accept the artificial distinction between war and what the Jewish lawyer Lempkin baptized genocide; for it should be noted that in our century at least there has never yet been a genocide without a war, that genocide does not exist outside of war, and that like war, it is a collective phenomenon: genocide in its modern form is a process inflicted on the masses, by the masses, for the masses. It is also, in the case in question, a process segmented according to the demands of industrial method. Just as, according to Marx, the worker is alienated from the product of his labor, in genocide or total war in its modern form the perpetrator is alienated from the product of his actions. This holds true even for the man who places a gun to the head of another man and pulls the trigger. For the victim was led there by other men, his death was decided on by yet others, and the shooter knows that he is only the last link in a very long chain, and that he doesn’t have to ask himself any more questions than does a member of a firing squad who in civilian life executes a man duly sentenced under the law. The shooter knows that it’s chance that has appointed him to shoot, his comrade to guard the cordon, and a third man to drive the truck; at most he could try to change places with the guard or the driver. Another example, taken from the abundant historical literature rather than from my personal experience: the program for the destruction of severely handicapped and mentally ill Germans, called the Euthanasia or T-4 program, set up two years before the Final Solution. Here, the patients, selected within the framework of a legal process, were welcomed in a building by professional nurses, who registered them and undressed them; doctors examined them and led them into a sealed room; a worker administered the gas; others cleaned up; a policeman wrote up the death certificate. Questioned after the war, each one of these people said: What, me, guilty? The nurse didn’t kill anyone, she only undressed and calmed the patients, ordinary tasks in her profession. The doctor didn’t kill anyone, either, he merely confirmed a diagnosis according to criteria established by higher authorities. The worker who opened the gas spigot, the man closest to the actual act of murder in both time and space, was fulfilling a technical function under the supervision of his superiors and doctors. The workers who cleaned out the room were performing a necessary sanitary job—and a highly repugnant one at that. The policeman was following his procedure, which is to record each death and certify that it has taken place without any violation of the laws in force. So who is guilty? Everyone, or no one? Why should the worker assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The same goes for every facet of this immense enterprise. The railroad switchman, for instance, is he guilty of the death of the Jews he shunted toward the camp? He is a railroad employee who has been doing the same job for twenty years, he shunts trains according to a schedule, their cargo is none of his business. It’s not his fault if these Jews are being transported from Point A, across his switches, to Point B, where they are to be killed. But this switchman plays a crucial role in the work of extermination: without him, the train of Jews cannot reach Point B. The same goes for the civil servant in charge of requisitioning apartments for air-raid victims, the printer who prepares the deportation notices, the contractor who sells concrete or barbed wire to the SS, the supply officer who delivers gasoline to an SP Teilkommando, and God up above, who permits all this. Of course, you can establish relatively precise degrees of legal responsibility, which allow you to condemn some while leaving all the rest to their own conscience, assuming they have one; it’s even easier when the laws get written after the fact, as at Nuremberg. But even then they were sloppy. Why hang Streicher, that impotent yokel, but not the sinister von dem Bach-Zelewski? Why hang my superior Rudolf Brandt, and not his superior, Wolff? Why hang the interior minister Frick and not his subordinate Stuckart, who did all his work for him? A lucky man, that Stuckart, who only stained his hands with ink, never with blood. Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did. With less zeal, perhaps, but perhaps also with less despair, in any case one way or another. I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception, any more than I was. If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person. Because if you have the arrogance to think you are, that’s just where the danger begins. We like to contrast the State, totalitarian or not, with the ordinary man, that insect or trembling reed. But then we forget that the State is made up of individuals, all more or less ordinary, each one with his life, his story, the sequence of accidents that led him one day to end up on the right side of the gun or the sheet of paper while others ended up on the wrong side. This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It would be a little naïve to think that way; allow me to suggest you spend a little time in a bureaucracy, even the Red Cross, if you need convincing. Stalin, by the way, conducted an eloquent demonstration of my argument, by transforming each generation of executioners into the victims of the following generation, without ever running out of volunteers. Yet the machinery of State is made of the same crumbling agglomeration of sand as what it crushes, grain by grain. It exists because everyone—even, down to the last minute, its victims—agrees that it must exist. Without the Hösses, the Eichmanns, the Goglidzes, the Vishinskys, but also without the railroad switchmen, the concrete manufacturers, and the government accountants, a Stalin or a Hitler is nothing but a wineskin bloated with hatred and impotent terror. To state that the vast majority of the managers of the extermination processes were neither sadists nor sociopaths is now a commonplace. There were of course sadists and psychopaths among them, as in all wars, and these men did commit unspeakable atrocities, that’s true. It is also true that the SS could have stepped up its efforts to keep these people under control, even if it actually did more in that line than most people realize. And that’s not easy: just ask the American generals what a hard time they had of it in Vietnam, with their junkies and their rapists, smoking dope and fragging their officers. But that’s not the problem. There are psychopaths everywhere, all the time. Our quiet suburbs are crawling with pedophiles and maniacs, our homeless shelters are packed with raving megalomaniacs; and some of them do indeed become a problem, they kill two, three, ten, even fifty people—and then the very same State that would without batting an eye send them to war crushes them like a blood-swollen mosquito. These sick men are nothing. But the ordinary men that make up the State—especially in unstable times—now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you’re not convinced of this, don’t bother to read any further. You’ll understand nothing and you’ll get angry, with little profit for you or for me.

Like most people, I never asked to become a murderer. If I could have, as I’ve already said, I would have gone into literature. Written, if I’d had the talent, or else perhaps taught, at least lived in the midst of beautiful, calm things, the noblest creations of the human spirit. Who, of his own free will, aside from a madman, would choose murder? And also I would have liked to play the piano. Once at a concert an elderly lady leaned toward me: You are a pianist, aren’t you?Unfortunately not, madam, I had to answer with regret. Even today, the thought that I don’t play the piano and never will play it suffocates me, sometimes even more than the horrors, the dark river of my past carrying me through the years. I literally can’t get over it. When I was a boy, my mother bought me a piano. It was for my ninth birthday, I think. Or my eighth. In any case before we left to live in France with that Moreau man. I had been begging her for months and months. I dreamed of being a pianist, a great concert pianist: cathedrals at my fingertips, airy as foam. But we had no money. My father had been gone for some time, his bank accounts (as I learned much later) were frozen, my mother had to fend for herself. But somehow she found the money, I don’t know how, she must have saved up, or borrowed; maybe she even whored a bit, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. She probably had ambitions for me and wanted to cultivate my talent. So on my birthday the piano was delivered, a fine upright. Even secondhand, it must have been expensive. At first I was dazzled. I took lessons; but my lack of progress quickly bored me, and I soon dropped them. Practicing scales was not what I had in mind, I was like all children. My mother never dared reproach me for my irresponsibility or my laziness; but I can see that the idea of all that wasted money must have gnawed at her. The piano stayed there, gathering dust; my sister was no more interested in it than I was; I no longer thought about it, and barely noticed when my mother finally resold it, most likely at a loss. I have never really liked my mother, I have even hated her, but this incident makes me sad for her. It’s also somewhat her own fault. If she had insisted, if she had known how to be stern when she had to be, I might have learned to play the piano, and that would have been a great joy to me, a safe haven. To play just for myself, at home, that would have been a delight. Of course, I often listen to music, and I take a keen pleasure in it, but it’s not the same thing, it’s a substitute. Just like my male lovers: the fact of the matter, I’m not ashamed to say, is that I probably would rather have been a woman. Not necessarily a woman living and functioning in this world as a wife or a mother; no, a woman naked, on her back, her legs spread wide open, crushed beneath the weight of a man, clinging to him and pierced by him, drowning in him as she becomes the limitless sea in which he himself is drowned, pleasure that’s endless, and beginningless too. But things did not turn out that way. Instead I ended up a jurist, a State security official, an SS officer, and then a director of a lace factory. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.

What I’ve just written is true, but it is also true that I have loved a woman. Only one, but more than anything in the world. Yet she was precisely the one I was not allowed to have. It is quite conceivable that by dreaming of myself as a woman, by dreaming of myself in a woman’s body, I was still seeking her, I wanted to draw closer to her, I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be her. This is entirely plausible, even if it changes nothing. I have never loved a single one of the boys I slept with, I just used them and their bodies, that’s all. Whereas with her, her love would have fulfilled my life. Don’t laugh at me: that love is probably the only good thing I’ve ever done. All this, you’re probably thinking, must seem a little strange coming from an officer of the Schutzstaffel. But why couldn’t an SS-Obersturmbannführer have an inner life, desires, passions, just like any other man? There have been hundreds of thousands of us whom you still judge as criminals: among them, as among all human beings, there were ordinary men, of course, but also extraordinary men, artists, men of culture, neurotics, homosexuals, men in love with their mothers, who knows what else, and why not? None of them was more typical of anything than any other man in any other profession. There are businessmen who enjoy fine wine and cigars, businessmen obsessed with the bottom line, and also businessmen who hide obscene tattoos under their three-piece suits and go to work with a rubber plug up their anuses: all this seems obvious to us, so why wouldn’t it be the same for the SS or the Wehrmacht? Our military doctors would find women’s underwear when they cut open the uniforms of the wounded more frequently than you’d think. To state that I was not typical means nothing. I lived, I had a past, a difficult and burdensome past, but that happens, and I managed it in my own way. And then came the war, I served, and I found myself at the heart of terrible things, atrocities. I hadn’t changed, I was still the same man, my problems had not been resolved, even though the war created new problems for me, even though those horrors transformed me. There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them; for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers. And one thing leads to another: I started out within the bounds of my service and then, under the pressure of events, I finally overstepped those bounds; but everything is connected, closely, intimately connected: to argue that if there had been no war I would still have resorted to such extremities would be impossible. It might have happened, but maybe not, maybe I’d have found another solution. You can never know. Eckhart has written, An angel in Hell flies in his own little cloud of Paradise. I always took that to imply that a devil in Paradise flies also in his own little cloud of Hell. But I don’t think I’m a devil. There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don’t know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that’s what’s terrible. You can never say: I shall never kill, that’s impossible; the most you can say is: I hope I shall never kill. I too hoped so, I too wanted to live a good and useful life, to be a man among men, equal to others, I too wanted to add my brick to our common house. But my hopes were dashed, and my sincerity was betrayed and placed at the services of an ultimately evil and corrupt work, and I crossed over to the dark shores, and all this evil entered my own life, and none of all this can be made whole, ever. These words are of no use either, they disappear like water in the sand, this wet sand that fills my mouth. 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!

ALLEMANDES I AND II

At the border they had set up a pontoon bridge. Just next to it, rising above the gray water of the Bug, the warped girders of the metal bridge the Soviets had dynamited lay in tangles. Our sappers had erected the new one in one night, we’d heard, and impassive Feldgendarmen, their crescent-shaped neck-plates reflecting the sun’s glare, controlled the traffic with self-assurance, as if they were still back home. The Wehrmacht had priority; we were told to wait. I contemplated the big lazy river, the quiet little woods on the other side, the throng on the bridge. Then it was our turn to cross and right on the other side there stretched out, like a boulevard, the wrecks of Russian equipment, trucks burned out and crumpled, tanks ripped open like tin cans, artillery carriages twisted like straw, overturned, swept aside, tangled up in an interminable burned strip made up of irregular heaps running alongside the road. Beyond, the woods gleamed in the splendid summer sun. The dirt road had been cleared but you could see traces of explosions along it, big oil slicks, scattered debris. Then came the first houses of Sokal. In the center of town, a few fires were still gently crackling; dust-covered corpses, most of them in civilian clothing, blocked part of the street, intermingled with ruins and rubble; and facing us, in the shade of a park, white crosses topped with curious little roofs formed a tidy line beneath the trees. Two German soldiers were painting names on them. We waited there while Blobel, accompanied by Strehlke, our supply officer, went to HQ. A sweetish smell, vaguely nauseating, intermingled with the acridity of the smoke. Soon Blobel returned: It’s fine. Strehlke is taking care of the quarters. Follow me.

The AOK* had set us up in a school. I’m sorry, a little quartermaster in creased field gray said. We’re still getting organized. But they’ll send you some rations. Our second in command, von Radetzky, an elegant Balt, waved a gloved hand and smiled: That’s no problem. We’re not going to stay. There weren’t any beds, but we had brought blankets; the men sat down on the little school chairs. There must have been about seventy of us. At night, we got soup with cabbage and potato, almost cold, some raw onions, and chunks of a black, gummy bread, which dried out as soon as it was sliced. I was hungry, I dipped it in the soup and ate it and bit into onions whole. Von Radetzky set the watch. The night passed peacefully.

The next morning, Standartenführer Blobel, our commander, gathered his Leiters together to go to HQ. The Leiter III, my immediate superior, wanted to type up a report, so he sent me in his place. The headquarters of the Sixth Army, the

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