The kindly ones
"Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened." So begins the chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. Max is 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. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad and at Auschwitz; and he lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goring, Speer, Heyrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself.A supreme historical epic and a haunting work of fiction, Jonathan Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and utterly original. Published to impressive critical acclaim in France in 2006, it went on to win the Prix Goncourt, that country's most prestigious literary award, and sparked a broad range of responses and questions from readers: How does fiction deal with the nature of human evil? How should a novel encompass the Holocaust?
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What Hacker News says
- I suggest you read “The Kindly Ones” by Littell. Or, for a smaller investment of time, “Just Revenge" by Dershowitz.
Putin is not even on the same axis as Hitler in terms of evil. I can only take your words to mean that you have no idea who Hitler was - making you, ironically, much closer to a Chamberlain than a Churchill.
The idea that intelligent people like you can draw such conclusions makes me unspeakably sad.
It reminds me of a passage in Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” in which he is shocked to see how, weeks before WWI, peasants in a French village cinema turn into a war hungry mob the moment the German Kaiser appears on the screen.
Quote:
> At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.
> The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder.
- The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. It’s an incredibly well researched historical fiction that explores bureaucracy and the darkness of human nature, particularly how intelligent, capable, ordinary, and deeply flawed people can be swept up into genocide and hypocrisy vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
It is revolting, offensive, sepulchral, demoralizing, profoundly human, and a cascade of other powerful emotions I couldn’t even name, all at the same time. During my first read through, I recall being angry and disgusted by it at several points. It would weigh heavy on my mind even days after I had set it down, and a few times I would be unable to help but sob uncontrollably at work, the gym, supermarket, etc. I went through a long stretch of deep depression after reading it. Ultimately, it triggered a long examination of some of my values, how I perceived and treated others, and some of the negative influences in my life, and lead to a lot of positive changes. Later read throughs felt much more profound and even beautiful.
- I’d call that statement either grossly uninformed or a disrespect to the victims of fascism, say, under Stalin or Hitler.
I can recommend a reading of “The Kindly Ones” to get a sense of what that word means.
- "Mein Kampf is worth at least a skim, because it demonstrates that Hitler was a human being."
Excellent phrasing. I think you would love "The Kindly Ones" by Jonathan Littell [1]. What an incredible book -- oh, and, being released in 2009, it also fits my interpretation of "Lindy".
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindly_Ones_(Littell_novel...
- Tangentially related: a high-regarded literary editor from my country told me that he seems to notice more text-level details when he is reading somebody's draft on an e-reader, as compared to working with a paper printout. I think I have had a similar experience myself.
+1 also on Gaiman's thoughts. I have done a lot of writing (professional level journalism, closet-level fiction). I almost always write a better first draft longhand -- probably because writing by hand is so much slower, you'll end up with a much more concise sentence.
From another perspective, I recently finished "The Kindly Ones" by Jonathan Littell. 900+ pages of Kafka-style wall of text -- but I often just couldn't put the book down. So stream of consciousness still seems to work from a reader's perspective, too; maybe computers do give some "oomph" to a writer who prefers this style, the kind of feverish way of writing. That said, "The Kindly Ones" is definitely a unique, remarkable, even incredible book; part of its power surely lays in the fact that Littell reportedly did some 10 years of research prior to writing it.
There have also been prolific and influential writers in the past who composed their drafts in pen shorthand. Iirc, in Europe, Astrid Lindgren was one (and I believe she was actually trained as a touch typist).
- As a psychologist, I can tell you that with only one card out of ten for the whole test, Goering shows signs of being a plain psychopath (knowing what he did of course) while Hesse does have very serious psychological issues (even if I didn't know what he did). The Rorschach is able to tell you at least that. A standard criminal can come out normal on the Rorschach and pretty much every other test you throw at him, but a guy who shoots up an elementary school will not come out normal on the Rorschach. In reference to crime vs. normalcy, with nazi's Germany as backdrop, there is the very good Jonathan Littell, "The Kindly Ones."
