The Kindly Ones: A Novel

This is one of my favourite books at the moment. It was so good I had to read it twice. We hear about the Holocaust from the victims' perspectives all the time, so this book - even though it is a novel (though it is very well researched) - provides a little balance by describing the world of the perpetrator. This is a very honest book. Littell said he tried to think about how he would think and behave if he was a young adult in Nazi Germany. What we end up with is a very detailed (nearly one thousand pages) account from the Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine, through detailed accounts of the languages of the Caucasus, to Stalingrad, Auschwitz and the destruction of Berlin.

It is overlong in parts, and there are some fantastical bits (eg the dreams). The longest part is the discussion concerning whether certain mountain people in the Caucasian mountains are Jewish. But I read it carefully as it makes it clear what was involved in the various bogus classifications the Nazis employed (believing they were sincere and scholarly) to identify the classes of people they could murder. But this is part is still only a tiny proportion of this huge novel of over 900 pages. It is the story, I suppose, of a man who went through a period of insanity resulting from his military confrontations of true horrors. This novel should convey the suffering of Ukrainians in particular (although many were perpetrators) and of Russia as a whole as he travels slowly from Germany to the Caucasions via many of the atrocity areas, through Stalingrad, and back to Germany via the horrors suffered in Poland in particular.

A tour through the worst excesses of the Third Reich in the company of SS officer Maximilian Aue, a would-be minor intellectual, and a moral degenerate. Apparently this book has been much criticised in Germany for its inaccuracies - an important thing to bear in mind, because to an English reader in the 21st century, these inaccuracies are not apparent. The main preoccupation of the book is the Holocaust, from the death squads in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to the Concentration Camps in Poland and elsewhere. These parts are every bit as disturbing as you would expect. You might think with so much depravity on show the author would not need to add more, but late on we're treated to Au's imaginary incestuous relationship with his twin sister, exploring ever more graphic depictions of perversity. Thus, it may seem incongruous to complain of boring passages in a book that contains so much horror, but large parts are devoted to the grotesque racial theories of Nazism as Aue and his comrades attempt to establish whether this or that mountain tribe in the Soviet Union are really Jews. This is hardly stimulating for modern readers who find little to distinguish this ideological prevarication from bestiality. Furthermore, as the Third Reich descends into chaos towards the end of the war, endless pages are devoted to the bureaucracy of a regime that can't stop murdering people long enough to train them to be useful to the German war effort. It's difficult to really gauge this novel; I have already drawn attention to doubts on accuracy, and then there is the problem that unlike many novels, entertainment is hardly the point. If taken at face value, then it importantly draws attention to the intellectuals who were behind the Nazi theories; these people were not monsters in the popular sense, they did not drool or scream, they were well educated and refined in their cultural preferences, although those preferences were deformed by their beliefs. I think it may take years for a work of this length to really permeate the imagination, and only then will a more informed opinion as to its truth worth gradually evolve.

Just over halfway thru this book ie >500 pages. Disagree with many reviews . Really finding it interesting although formatting and chapters unusual. A few bits I have skipped thru where author gets in bit too much detail or theory but not too much. Good to get a different view point on these issues. Side story is to say the least unusual. Pity the author as not written other novels as I would definitely read. Recommend anyone interested in Eastern Europe theatre WW2 and Stalingrad

***WARNING: SPOILERS*** (not that you don't know how WWII ends anyway) A friend of mine recommended this book to me, and asked me If I thought that the book attempts to answer that question of how a thing such as the holocaust could have happened, or basically views it as impossible to explain. I think Littell answers the question of "responsibility," but in an unusual way. That is to say, that the question the book is examining isn't the usual question one asks about how the holocaust happens. The "typical question" that is asked is how normal, "civilized" people could engage in such abnormal savage acts. I think this question is an important one, and is addressed at length in other works- the best treatments are probably non-fiction, namely Browning's Reserve Police Battalion 101 and Arendt's The Banality of Evil. Max Aue, the narrator, addresses this himself, early on, on page 20. "If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody came 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...You might be a luckier person than I, but you're not a better person." People did it because they had to, in order for them and their families to survive and perhaps even prosper. Insofar as Little is interested in Arendt and Browning's formulation of the question of "cause" (and I think he isn't that interested) he seems to take the standard line. Even if such people "try to keep[their[ hands clean.. it is impossible. (p.305)" If this was what the book was addressing, then I think he could have stopped after page 20. But he didn't. Asking the question of why normal people behave the way they do when placed into these situations begs the large, more interesting, and more often ignored question of how such situations come about in the first place. How does a social architecture of such horror actually get built? The holocaust was a result of the interaction of Nazi ideology with reality, with "facts on the ground" so to speak. To concentrate on the actions of the einsatzgruppen but to ignore the ideology and world-view that had created the system within which they operated is to look at only half of the picture. Dr. Aue's problem is that he is a purely ideological creature, and that his national socialist ideology is self-contained and self referential, and therefore, within its own terms, true- as all such self-referential intellectual systems are. "...as in the middle ages, we were reasoning with syllogisms that proved each other. And these proofs led us down the path of no return. (p.122)" The actual results or outcomes of the intellectual framework of the ideology are secondary, not even relevant. "This terrible thing was also a necessary thing; and in that case we had to submit to that necessity. (p.1...