900-page French novel, American author, re WWII

[pynchonoid]

http://www.signandsight.com/features/976.html
The banalisation of evil
Michael Mönninger on Jonathan Littell's scandalous and
sensational first novel

The bomb of this year's literary autumn in Paris was
dropped by an American Jew of Lithuanian origin who
lives in Spain, is married to a Belgian and writes in
French. As soon as Jonathan Littell's novel "Les
Bienveillantes" (Gallimard) appeared, French magazines
started flipping out, drawing comparisons with
Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (Nouvel Obs), with Vassily
Grossman's "Life and Fate" (Express) and even with
Oresteia (Point).

Even if the distinction between criticism and
advertising was a bit blurred, the sensation was
deserved. The 39 year old debut author describes World
War Two and the Holocaust from the perspective of a
German SS man. The last attempt to do something in
this vein was in 1952 with the much acclaimed novel
"Death is my trade" by French author Robert Merle
based on the recordings of Auschwitz commander Höß.
But since then, the French post-war literature of war
horror has constituted primarily the stories of
victim's suffering.

Littell writes the fictitious biography of a former SS
officer but lines it with so many historical details
and personalities from the Nazi era that the novel has
something of a semi-documentary historical work. This
is not just he story of a wartime fate but rather an
epochal panorama told with incredible narrative force
over the course of 900 pages of small print.

A masterpiece or the product of craziness? Before the
French pick up the book, they already know everything
there is to know about the author, thanks to the many
interviews he's given. Born in New York, he is son of
a respected Newsweek journalist and spy novel author.
He came to France as a child. Following his
Baccalaureate in Paris, he went on to study literature
at Yale and to translate classics such as Blanchot,
Genet and de Sade. After, he travelled to war regions
in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, China and Africa
with the aid organisation "Action contre la faim." In
2001 he was ambushed in the north Caucasus, escaped
wounded and decided to take a break in order to be
able to see his two children grow old.

Since then, Littell has been working on his epic. He
considers the spark to have been Michael Herr's book
on Vietnam and Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. In his
research, he talked to survivors, visited Russian,
Polish and Ukrainian archives, studied analysis of the
Battle of Stalingrad and the Caucasus campaign. He
fought through the literature of the Nazi era and
wrote his work by hand in 120 days.

Littell recounts that, while working in the former
Yugloslavia and Rwanda, he saw no end of horror but
always reached the same conclusion: "The butchers
never speak- and if they do, their words are hollow."
Thus he invented the SS officer Max Aue, a doctor in
law and cultured man who killed not out of a sense of
fun and perversion, but for ideological reasons. Aue
doesn't talk because he has a bad conscience, but
because he wants to relieve himself in old age.

The title "Bienveillantes" comes from the goddesses of
revenge in Greek mythology, the Furies that, out of
fear, are called bienviellantes, well-wishers. In the
preface, Littell adopts the tone of antiquity: "Be
happy that you were born in a time in which women and
children are not being killed and you are not being
asked to kill other people's women and children. You
have been lucky, but you are no better of a person
than me. If you think that, and get arrogant, that's
where the danger begins."

Aue is obsessed with the absolute, which for him is
not god but the nation. Genocide makes no political or
economic sense, but rather acts as some kind of great
ritual sacrifice: it unites those who commit it and
prevents them from ever returning to what they once
were. The mass killing is made possible by the
disinhibition of the bureaucratic chain of command
that Aue describes, not along the lines of Hilberg or
Arendt, more the Marxist alienation of the worker from
his product. The streets, he says, are full of
psychopaths and sadists. "But they are harmless. The
real danger is in the normal person." He recognises
this banalisation of evil in Stalin's fighters and the
French soldiers in Algeria. He puts the question to
them all: "Neither a Jewish child that died in the gas
chambers, nor a German one that died in the fire
bombing played a role in the war. Why does everyone
believe the butchers, that their deaths are necessary
and justified?"

Aue's path through the eastern front begins in Poland,
where fat field marshals debate head verses neck shots
over snaps and standard bearers despair because they
"so many Jews don't get shot, just ploughed under."
Aue meets Heydrich, Himmler, Eichmann and Höß whose
bad breath he finds repellent, nothing else. He
escapes the "kettle" at Stalingrad and inspects the
extermination camps, discussing technical problems and
nutritional issues. He never dirties his own hands. He
treats the most imploring victims with the politesse
of a hotel porter, his disgust of the blood orgies is
only evident in his chronic diarrhoea.

In the violent scenes, where skulls burst and bone
shards fly, Littell takes great pleasure in violating
historiography's visual conventions, according to
which the greatest horror is described from a
distance. He develops an aesthetics of horror which,
contrary to the French critics, have less to do with
Stendhal's directness than with the horror film genre.

It's not just mother-killer Aue's homosexual,
incestuous disposition that makes the novel scandalous
kitsch in places. It's the poetics of horror that turn
a very talented contemporary author into a
pornographer of violence. While in France, the
fictionalisation of the Holocaust has been a taboo
since Claude Lanzmann, in Germany, the sensationalism
of history fell into disrepute with Daniel Goldhagen.
But now German publishers are competing with
astronomical sums for Littell's novel which is both a
scandal and worth reading.

*

This article orginally appeared in Die Zeit on
September 21, 2006.

Michael Mönniger is the Paris correspondent of Die Zeit.

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