900-page French novel, American author, re WWII

[rich]

hope there is an english translation at some point

rich


On 9/29/06, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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