LIKE PICKING SCABS

I've been reading The Kindly Ones over the last couple of months. Jonathan Littell, an American, wrote The Kindly Ones in French and it was a phenomenal success welcomed by critics as the most important book for 50 years and won the Goncourt and Femina prizes. It sold more than a million copies across Europe before it was translated into English.


It is the Holocaust story told through the eyes of one of the Nazi executioners, an SS Obersturmbannfürher on the Eastern Front who is attached to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile execution squads whose task it was to kill Jews, partisans and other "undesirables" in the wake of the German advance.










Not surprisingly the subject matter has been controversial and there has been moral outrage at the hero of a novel being so reprehensible. It is though, strangely compelling. Max Aue, the central character is not merely a Nazi thug, he is a very well educated academic and civil servant with a doctorate in law. He is classically trained in arts, music, philosophy and literature and has a sensitive and aesthetic appreciation of history and culture. But, he is flawed. He is a person of his times having been seduced by the idealism of National Socialism and the belief in the dangers of Socialism and international Jewry. He has also had an incestuous affair with his sister, is implicated in the murder of his mother and is a secret homosexual.










The narrative traces Aue’s personal history with a backdrop of France and Germany through the 1920’s and 1930’s and the campaigns in Ukraine and Eastern Europe with stunning references to Stalingrad. The disturbing detail in the murder programmes carried out by the SS is made all the more horrible by the academic discussion and justification that goes on before and after the ‘Aktions’.


It has opened my eyes to the nature of violence and brutality as practiced by totalitarian regimes. Nazi Germany and the programmes against Jews and Russians was not and could not have just been perpetrated by criminals, thugs and mad military men. The principles of National Socialism, belief in the Volk and hatred of Jews was systemic and ingrained. The sheer scale of the murder programmes required efficient organisation and execution that came from academia, civil service, the judicial system and basically all facets of German society and government. No one was innocent or unaware. The cold-blooded calculation in all of this is scary. It shows how ordinary people become killers.


The first part of the book features an Einsatzgruppen eliminating ‘enemies’. Although there are murderers and sadists among the group most are seemingly normal. They become more and more brutalised and immune as the programmes go on. By the time Max Aue arrives at Auschwitz the immunity has reached its extreme. Extermination has been Industrialised and seen as a normal solution to "the Jewish Problem".





Throughout the novel there is detailed and interesting discussion of philosophy and music. Max Aue loves Bach, detests Wagner as do many of his associates, has an understanding of Schonberg, Stravinsky and Debussy and has discovered and appreciates Rameau and Couperin. Herodotus, Chekhov, Flaubert, Stendhal, Lermentov, Melville and Chesterton. Literature is discussed along with the views of Sartre, Jung, Freud, Kant, Hobbes, Nietzche and others. There are long sections on the histories of the Baltic, Ukraine, Poland and other Eastern countries that are insightful and interesting.


If you like history, philosophy, politics and music then this book is for you. You need to be prepared to be shocked and disgusted as well though with the most shocking revelation being the statement made by Aue the Nazi and executioner – “I am a man like other men, I am a man like you”.