The Kindly Ones

Whoever said “War is Hell” knew whereof he spoke and, verily, The Kindly Ones – Jonathan Littell’s magnum opus about a fictional SS officer during the reign of the Third Reich – is a vision of Hell. And a horrifying blend of fact and fiction.

. . .

A word of caution at the outset: This is a book you perchance might want to read to appreciate the author’s artistry, or his virtuosity (as there can be no doubt that at least on some level this book is a masterpiece), or his grasp of history, or his understanding or “sense” of how things really were in Nazi Germany (or even merely as an intellectual challenge), but I assure you: This is NOT a book you will want to read for pleasure, or enjoyment, or entertainment.

This is a laborious and arduous read. And for oh-so-many reasons. This book will exact from you a hefty investment – one of time, of mental effort and of emotional fortitude.

The sheer size/volume of this book is staggering: 975 pages plus. My goodness, I can’t even imagine the undertaking necessary to conceptualize the framework of this complex story, let alone flesh it out and compose it in such painstaking detail, as it must have taken a year to simply type it! It is massive!

Mr. Littell is quite the adroit writer. (As well, Charlotte Mandell, who performed the translation of this tome into English from its original French, is to be commended.) This is a high school English teacher’s dream, inasmuch as the reader – even a “serious” one – will encounter words – in both English AND German, in fact – that will have him scurrying to consult Webster! The vocabulary and syntax are often formidable. I strongly recommend reading this book with a dictionary handy. No, TWO dictionaries: one for English, and one for German-to-English translations as there are italicized German words sprinkled liberally throughout. (Footnotes might have been helpful here or at least a German glossary in the back.)

Moreover, the sheer density of the prose is something to reckon with. Some passages go on for pages without a paragraph break; others go on for pages without so much as a period! The manner in which dialogue is conveyed is also rather unorthodox (and frankly sometimes confusing).

The titles and ranks of the various military personnel and organizations described will have any reader’s head spinning. This is where the glossary that does exist at the back of the book will come in handy. Your head will hurt trying to distinguish (and pronounce) the names of the various levels of military bureaucracy (and be forewarned, there is bureaucracy aplenty here!). The word obersturmbannfhrer, for instance, does not easily roll off the tongue (even when one is reading silently). And the reader will need a score card to keep track of the multitudinous characters that cross the protagonist’s path as he traverses Europe.

Finally, and most significantly, this book takes a great emotional toll owing to its subject matter and graphic depictions. There are some scenes that are so stomach-churning I had my regrets early on that I had even embarked on this read. One particularly jarring image, for example, describes a blood-splattered soldier laughing maniacally while he sits legless in the middle of the street after a bombing. There is a similar image much later on of another bombing victim (this one civilian) whose stockings remain intact, but whose head is missing from her torso. (The scenes that take place in Russia and in Auschwitz are things I don’t care to touch upon in this review; anyone even peripherally familiar with WWII can well imagine the atrocities.) Then there are the overly vivid (sometimes verging on the pornographic) descriptions of the main character’s various gastric upsets and, shall we say, perverse sexual inclinations. All in all, this book requires a strong stomach. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart, to be sure. When I finished this book my first instinct was to pick up a book of much lighter fare for my next literary excursion.

. . .

On to the story itself: The Kindly Ones tells the tale of one Maximilian Aue, a cultured, educated and not unintelligent young man who instead of following his heart to become an artist or musician throws his lot in with the Nazis and rises through the ranks. Despite his underlying talents, he is a deeply flawed individual with a complicated psyche who becomes more and more unbalanced and unhinged as the book reaches its shattering conclusion.

Over the course of this story the main characters military assignments take him from the killing fields of wintertime Stalingrad, to the allied bombing and decimation of Berlin, to the death-march during the evacuation of Auschwitz. (In the waning days of the war, when it looked to the Nazis that all was lost, they marched the inmates out of the concentration camp, not wanting their prisoners to fall into the hands of their Russian enemies.)

It is significant to note that as an SS officer, Maximilian never actually engages in murder (not in an official capacity anyway), but by his very position is complicit in the genocide that took place during this black time in human history.

The sickening rationalizations for this genocide, antisemitism and other barbarity are legion. There is one portion of the book which goes on for pages and pages and pages detailing the deliberations on the question of whether certain Jews living in the mountains of Eastern Europe (Bergjuden) qualify as true Jews worthy of being exterminated. The debate rages ad nauseum, and I do mean that literally.

There is another section, which takes place during the Auschwitz phase of the book also going on for multiple pages where various political/military personnel (including Aue, who is there more or less in the capacity of an efficiency expert) quibble over the most cost-effective way to keep the starving concentration camp workers alive just long enough to be most productive to the Reich as slave labor.

The protagonist is the quintessential sociopath in his lack of a conscience and his tepid post-war explanations. (There is no such thing as inhumanity, only humanity.) But I think where the author really did an outstanding job, in the course of telling the story of this particular individual Maximilian Aue, was his attempt to get into the Nazi mentality, something that most civilized human beings cannot comprehend.

One of the things that I took away from reading this book was a tremendous and overwhelming sadness contemplating the immense human and bureaucratic effort entailed in the slaughter of a people and in the destruction of a continent. All that human effort that could have been put into something positive for mankind channeled instead into something so nefarious. That to me is the greatest tragedy.

At the same time, one of the most uncomfortable aspects of this book lies in Aues assertion in the prologue (which in fact takes place after the war as hes looking back) that given the right circumstances, we are all capable of doing what he did.

This book is so multi-layered and multi-faceted that it provides much fodder for discussion. One analysis that I found of interest was the comparison/contrast between the Nazis (National Socialists) and the Bolsheviks, avowed enemies with something ironically in common: The author points out that the Russians make distinctions upon the basis of class, while the Nazis make distinctions on the basis of race. Regardless, I cant wrap my head around the Nazi declaration of the Jews as enemies of Germany (or later on their description as a resource of the Reich for the benefit of their slave labor.)

During all this heavy stuff, there are also various subplots to Aues tale concerning his twisted relationship with his sister, his homosexual lifestyle (notwithstanding his relationship with a woman by the name of Helene and in fact his later marriage to a different woman) and the brutal murder of his parents for which he is placed under investigation and pursued around Europe. There is, in my opinion, enough material contained here that any one of these subplots could have made for an entirely separate book.

The last two chapters of this book are like a descent into depravity. We have the main character traipsing through a war-ravaged and corpse-strewn landscape. And then we have an ending like a frenzied fever-dream with elements including a bizarre assault on Hitler himself (whom he meets during an awards ceremony in the bunker), his attempted escape through the flooded Berlin subway, the re-appearance of the two detectives who have been pursuing him for the murder of his parents, the never-saw-it-coming murder of his friend, and the final crescendo in the Berlin Zoo among dying and fleeing animals. It is impossible to distinguish between reality and hallucination; we suspect more of the latter (since Aue at an earlier point in the story sustained a serious head wound), but given the war-time context, whos to say. After all, to come full circle: War is Hell.

Im hard-pressed to place a rating on this book. It was no doubt a masterful piece of authorship (although I heartily agree with one of the oft-cited criticisms that it is way too long). I cant say I enjoyed this book, but I feel it is unfair of me to put a rating on Littells grand achievement in writing it.