Comments (0)The Kindly Ones
April 17, 2009Barbara Pash
Associate Editor
Jonathan Littell (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell)
HarperCollins 2009, 992 pages (hardcover), $29.99
Max Aue, the protagonist in “The Kindly Ones,” is an SS officer who, Forrest Gump-like, turns up at all the big (for Nazis) events, from Babi Yar to the roundup of Hungarian Jews, from the evacuation of Auschwitz to the fall of Berlin. Aue tells his story in his old age, where he lives quietly in a French village and not, like so many of his colleagues, tried and hanged as a war criminal.
The publisher reportedly paid $1 million for these fake “memoirs” of an unrepentant Nazi whose career was going swimmingly until Germany lost the war. The book has caused a furor in the literary world. The winner of two prestigious French awards, it has been vilified and glorified. The New York Times book reviewer hated it, calling it “a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks” by a “psychopathic Nazi.” Admirers, on the other hand, have called it “a staggering triumph.”
The problem this reviewer had with the book was the mixing of historical fact and fiction. Other reviewers, by the way, had the same problem. Aue supposedly worked for Himmler, assisted Speer and knew Eichmann. He has opinions about them all and the gruesome events in which he participated, but how accurate are his accounts?
For one example, Aue claims that the einsatzgruppe to which he was assigned, which massacred Jews in the eastern areas the German Army conquered, initially killed only men. Then the order came to kill women and children, too. For another, Aue claims that success in the Final Solution, the extermination of Jews, depended on two things: the cooperation of the occupied country and the collaboration of the local Jewish community.
The title is misleading. None of the book’s characters are particularly “kindly,” a reference to a Greek myth. But this reviewer has to admit that she found the book fascinating. A unique exploration of evil and the justifications for it, the book was hard to put down.