A Fraught Subject. Two Novels on War and Genocide

© Silke Hesse 2013

A Fraught Subject: Two Novels on War and Genocide

Silke Hesse

I want to discuss two novels whose subject matter, the Holocaust, is more fraught and more contaminating than any other in our culture. Before I set out on this daunting task I need to orientate myself.

There can be no doubt that anything like the planned and brutal murder of millions of men, women and children must never happen again. No human being in the entire world could disagree, even though the fascination with this epoch of large-scale violence is widespread. But how do we prevent such horrors from reoccurring? For like the “war to end all wars”, the “massacre to end all massacres” has not had the effect we once thought it must have. There have been a surprising number of senseless wars since the Great War and far too many genocidal massacres: India in the wake of partition, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Rwanda and Burundi to mention but three. Let me concentrate on the genocides, though the link between war - certainly if one includes civil war - and genocide should not be overlooked. If nothing else, war can be a facilitator and a screen for genocide.

War is most often the result of political manoeuvres for power; citizens are then required to fight the wars their government starts, wars that modern technology has made horrifyingly unequal, abstract and brutal. Though they may have voted for their governments, they are rarely asked whether they agree with such a war; they are conscripted and must fight and die and accept the death of their loved ones; these will include women and children. The involvement of nations and their citizens in such wars is presented to the populace as heroic; there are, of course, always moments where individuals act heroically. Genocide is more selective; it is never heroic; its victims are almost always mingled in with the wider population and need to be identified and separated from the others with whom they have often been neighbours for years. Such selections require the personal involvement – quite often the hatred - of countless individuals. Why do groups of humans hate other groups of humans within the body of a nation to the very death?

A sense of injustice can be a powerful motivator, often aroused by the systematic violation of the right to equal and fair treatment by a certain caste within the nation. The threat to cultural self-expression and identity is another: to the liberty to be yourself and follow the faith and the customs of your choice. Then there is the threat to homogeneity, to national individuality and uniqueness, to fraternity. These are, incidentally, the three, often incompatible, human rights the French Revolution proclaimed. In the twentieth century, class warfare, sanctioned by ideology, led to the death of vast numbers of people within the Communist Block; religious differences set India and Pakistan upon each other as they still do Northern Ireland and Eire; ethnic differences perceived as race, often a largely imaginary category among peoples who have lived together for long periods of time, were dominant in Rwanda and also in Hitler’s Germany. (Jewish exclusiveness may actually have reminded Germans of the threatened identity of their recently unified, internationally ostracized and geographically borderless nation.) Anti-Semitism must be regarded as simply one version of racism, in itself no better or worse than others. But in specific situations and among individuals the three categories often all play a part: the Jews were also seen by many of their enemies as more prosperous and influential than the average German while a few anti-Semites probably still perceived their persistent refusal to recognize Christianity as the fulfilment and supersession of the Old Testament as a threat to the logic of their own faith. But rights, whether they be based on liberty, on equality or on fraternity, only become an obsession that can lead to mass murder if the nations concerned feel extremely threatened, politically and economically. It is prudent for the international community to help such states before they explode into violence; in practice, national interests and rivalries often prevent foresight.

How is one to treat countries and individuals guilty of genocide? While war is largely a matter of nations and their governments, who have the “monopoly on violence”, and is dealt with by means of peace treaties and their clauses, genocide always involves large numbers of individuals who know their victims, or at least know of them, and who choose to identify them, to contribute to their persecution or, at best, do nothing to prevent it. They may have been indoctrinated by politicians and ideologists, who are either subject to the same delusions or cynically using national divisions for their own purposes. They will then need to be “re-educated”, a task the Allied nations, in particular the USA and, in its own spurious way, the Soviet Union undertook in Germany after World War II. But in a modern state like Germany the actual contribution of an individual to genocide is often hard to quantify or evaluate, for the process of persecution is divided into countless small segments, many of which may seem harmless, and the actual killing is often done by soldiers recruited for war, under military command and jurisdiction, accustomed to the onerous duty of killing, and in situations where it is hard to rule out military necessity. (One would expect persecuted people to join the partisans.) Moreover, wherever possible, captive peoples, under threat of their own lives, tend to be forced to do the “dirty work”. Legal criteria can here provide no more than a rough guide, even though, as regards the generation of Nazi perpetrators, the war-crimes trials were probably the only reasonable response from the victors.

But what then? To lose a war and accept the consequences for one’s nation is an unfortunate fate; a collective to which one belongs but from which one is also separate as an individual is punished and the consequences may be felt for several generations. One can be an honourable or dishonourable loser; war-time killing is acceptable if certain conventions have been adhered to. But genocide is, at least legally, a matter of individuals and their participation in killings for which there are no sanctioning conventions. Once the actual perpetrators of such crimes have died, however, their guilt too should have died; and once their prejudices have been eliminated, compensation attempted, and governments have changed, the nation should be considered rehabilitated.  In some countries, genocides have even been responded to by “Truth and Reconciliation” commissions rather than punitive “War Crimes” tribunals; thus in South Africa or Rwanda. But what happens if war and genocide can not be disentangled? In Germany Anti-Semitism was a madness that gripped a vulnerable generation and the guilt lies with them. Among their modern German descendents, there is probably less racism of any kind than in most other countries of the world. Post-war German governments and citizens have made sure of that.

What should we learn from the German episode of genocide, so unexpected in a well educated and civilized European nation? That the population of a whole nation can be subject to paranoiac criminal insanity? That not just Germans but other peoples too can erupt into genocidal madness? We need to understand the pressures that are likely to induce such outrages and the best ways of preventing or controlling outbreaks of violence. Rather than emphasizing the uniqueness of German persecution of the Jews with designations like “Holocaust” in place of “genocide” and “anti-Semitism” for “racism”, and rather than linking it irrevocably to the “German” psyche, we should guard against it as something that could happen again in any stressed nation. If we are honest with ourselves, even we Australians with our civilized democracy excluded and cruelly persecuted the indigenous members of our nation for more than a century and a half.  

But are we entitled to ignore the interpretation of these events by their victims, the Jews, to ignore their vocabulary of anti-Semitism, Holocaust and German depravity in order to draw attention to the universal implications? Each of us will have to make this choice for himself. For some of us, the victims should be entitled to their exceptional status as the uniquely persecuted – this they certainly were - and once again chosen people, rewarded for their suffering with an incontestable entitlement to the Holy Land of their ancestors and the right to wage war to retain it, just as their ancestors did, in spite of the volatility of the Middle Eastern region. To others of us, with different priorities, the wider implications would seem of greater significance. But it is important that both approaches should be permissible choices, though it is understandable if a nation like Australia, still grappling with her racist past, should prefer the Holocaust version which diverts attention from her own failings. It is also understandable if the victor nations prefer the vocabulary of exclusiveness which discourages scrutiny of their post WWI provocations of Germany. Whichever approach we take, twentieth century German history and its implications must never be forgotten. Those concerned with genocide will welcome any attempt at deeper understanding. Those who have chosen to defend the Holocaust version will ward off potential reinterpretations in favour of reverence, myth and dogma and the continuity of Biblical history right into the present. The two books I intend to discuss will be of interest only to the first of these groups; it is to be hoped that they will not offend the second. But we have to remember that things that cannot be talked about openly are most easily forgotten.

The first of the books I wish to discuss was published fifteen years ago. A talented but immature work, it aroused extreme reactions from two groups of critics. The first overdid the praise by giving the book important awards; the second overdid the condemnation and forced it into shameful retreat. Helen Demidenko/Darville’s novel is entitled The Hand that Signed the Paper, thereby drawing attention to what, in the author’s view, was the bureaucratic and governmental source of the evils to which her heroes contributed. It tells the story of the narrator’s uncle, aunt and father, siblings from a Ukrainian peasant family. They were children during the years of Stalin’s and Kaganovich’s brutal collectivization programme which led to devastating famines. In their bid to create a uniform, Russian-dominated culture, the communists had suppressed Ukrainian nationalism and crushed any form of resistance; dead Ukrainians could be replaced by more amenable Russian colonists. Stalin had also outlawed all religious practices and the Ukrainian language, and he had forced children into Komsomol schools where they would be estranged from their families and indoctrinated. For the Kovalenkos, born into a peaceful, modestly prosperous and proud farming community, communism was experienced as an unmitigated evil, out to destroy everything and everyone they held dear. In the village and at the school, its two most powerful and uncompromising representatives had been Jewish women. Thus, when the Germans invaded, the siblings and their compatriots welcomed these as liberators and allies against communist Russia. The two teenage boys, Vitaly and Evheny, were soon happily supporting the German persecution of the Jews; this also put food in their stomachs. The girl, Kateryna, in turn, allowed herself to be seduced by a prominent SS man. She too welcomed the liquidation of Jews. Many years later her hatred has not abated, nor has she revised her view that it was ‘the Jews’, rather than certain functionaries who happened to be Jewish, who were primarily responsible for the cruelties of communism. Almost all Ukrainians, she believed, welcomed their destruction:

… everyone knew what was going on [at Babii Yar]. Even the Jews and communists knew, but now it was too late for them. […] The hands of people who had always been oppressed grew wild. Communists had told them to ‘grow this’ and they had done so. Communists had said ‘give us your crops’ and they had meekly complied. When the men were beaten stupid in the streets, the women would patch them up and watch them drink their spirit sadly away. Then they would be beaten themselves. By drunken husbands. By communists. Even their children were a type of punishment, because they kept dying. So now the hands that had gently nurtured seedlings into growth gripped and tore. (65)

While it is plausible that young Ukrainians, who had suffered under the sweeping changes introduced by communism, might hold such views, it is worrying to think that as adults they still do, after years in Australia, and still more worrying that this doesn’t seem to concern the author. No doubt Helen Darville had talked to ‘New Australians’ who believed they had reason to hate ‘the Jews’, even if they weren’t her family, as her pseudonym Demidenko tried to suggest. It is altogether likely that there were many such passionate Jew-haters in Australia who had not been “re-educated” like the post-war Germans. It was something we Australians probably needed to know and take in hand, though that is hardly why Darville tells the story. 

In the Ukraine the Kovalenko youths had been angry victims, young and gullible; but they had also been perpetrators, mass murderers of Jewish people. Once settled in Australia they proved themselves to be hard-working and kindly husbands and family men, like their parents before them. Their memories of the war years seemed to come from another life. But with the first sentences of the novel, we receive the shocking news that the older of the brothers, Vitaly, has been charged with “war crimes”. Yet, though his niece, the author, had known for some time about the war-time activities of her uncle and father, the charges seem absurd to her. Not only to her and other family members, we are told, but to her landlady too, and perhaps to many Australians. The narrator, Fiona, now sets about collecting what will hopefully be exonerating material about the past. She does this in between studying and supporting a great variety of charities: proof of her own ethical credentials. At her request, her aunt Kateryna sends her hours of taped accounts about the communist suppression of the Ukrainians and of the sufferings of her family (her father arrested and deported or killed for helping fugitives, her mother and brothers labouring under the burden of impossible quotas, the baby dead from starvation). She tells of the pitiless reign of the Jewish communist doctor Judit in their collective and the cruel treatment Kateryna herself received at the Komsomol school from another Jewish woman. They are the only two Jews we meet.

Strangely, a letter from Judit to her mother is also available as documentary evidence. Other things the narrator Fiona tells with the vividness of a witness have no identifiable source. A third section of the “novel” may be based largely on the memories of Magda, Vitaly’s young war-time wife. It attests that he was a hard-working, kind and passionate husband all the while his day-time job was liquidating Jews at Treblinka, an activity which none of the villagers, whose economy was booming due to the patronage of the camp guards, appeared to be unduly concerned about. Presumably the narrator met Magda and heard her story when she eventually travelled to Treblinka but we are not told directly about this. Neither Vitaly or Fiona’s father, Evheny, have much to say about those times. Vitaly’s brief explanation of his recruitment by the Germans is plausible.

They told us we would be free, and that no one would kill us anymore. That we would not starve. That we would have our country. We believed them. I and my brother joined them early on. They gave us nothing like they promised: good food yes, clothes and things yes, but no country. No hope. They got us to do the shitwork that they didn’t want to do themselves. And then it was too late. If you disagreed with a German he shot you. So you did what you were told. In the morning they gave you so much drink you didn’t know what you were doing. During the day you drank more so you forgot. Then after a while you didn’t feel anything inside, nothing at all. You thought you were normal again but you weren’t. You can’t feel. You think you can but you can’t. (58)

What Vitaly tells here concerns only himself and how he was wronged. That those he liquidated were human beings is not part of his memory. In response to his niece’s question about remorse, he eventually concedes that he is trying to be sorry but that it takes time. (Hasn’t he had years to think all this over?) A stroke suffered after his indictment then aborts the trial and leads to a peaceful death. He “took the Church on his deathbed” we are told, though “he’ll have business to attend to in purgatory”, as one relation surmises. In her own mind the author seems to have solved the question of guilt: Vitaly and his people had been grossly abused by Jewish communists and he felt entitled to take revenge; he was, moreover, a young man and had a right to survive as best he could; he had grown up uneducated in turbulent times and had no understanding of politics or ethics, so he could easily be led astray; Ukrainians were treated as though they were savages by both the Russians and the Germans and so they eventually became savages; in spite of that, Vitaly was always a kind husband and a good worker; he had not asked to do the job at Treblinka he was made to do; all this had happened in another time and another world, a world of great disorder; and Vitaly himself obviously had no real sense of guilt.

Demidenko’s book puts forward the somewhat startling proposition that the murderers of great numbers of Jewish people could have retained a kind of innocence, an innocence, perhaps, no different from that of the soldier who does his killer’s job as required. But it is difficult to get a sense of perspective in this novel, the main reason being that it has no consistent or meaningful point of view. There are times when it claims to be a documentary, as in the long passages where Kateryna speaks or when Judit’s mysteriously available letter is cited. In the third section one can sense an informer, presumably Magda, in the background though this is never confirmed and the narrator’s contribution remains unclear. But at other times the narrator (or is it the author?) seems to have the god-like freedom to slip into the lives and minds of even the most obscure of her characters. What is she simply making up and what is based on authentic sources? Why does she give us little vignettes about the priest who married, or about Sura the yellow man, or Nicolai Manchuk, of all of whom she can have no authentic knowledge? They tell us nothing of relevance to Vitaly’s guilt; alternatively, they also tell us nothing about the psychological state of a narrator who is trying to cope with the prospect of her uncle’s trial. They are gratuitous and contradict the logic of the story which does require reliable sources. They seem to have been written for no other purpose than to provide colour and entertain the readers. They come across as an author’s intrusions into her narrator’s world that reveal Darville’s uncertainty about the reasons why she is writing this novel.  Is it to entertain, or to seek the truth about the terrible past of her characters?

A similar ambiguity undermines her historical representations. The Hand that Signed the Paper is unequivocally a historical novel based on Ukrainian history; all its power derives from this setting. Thus we need to have confidence that it draws on reliable research and avoids inventions and exaggerations. It must, however, be obvious to any reader that Kataryna’s account, which provides most of the historical information we are given, is subjective and probably sensationalized. It draws on the memories of an angry child from a small village and of an adventurous teenager who needs to defend her choices. It is also recorded with the prospect of her brother’s war-crimes trial in mind. The bias of a character like Kataryna is legitimate; the wishful thinking of Fiona who is worried about her uncle is perhaps also understandable, though things would be easier if our narrator were trustworthy; but if she is not, we would expect the author to find a way of intervening in the interests of historical accuracy. There is, however, no such intervention, though the accusation of ‘Jewish’ responsibility for Ukrainian suppression, to take just the most unavoidable example, is based on obviously flimsy evidence. A cynical mind might presume that the author anticipated that a sensationalized account would attract more readers.

Novels stand and fall with the consistency of the point of view they adopt. A narrator who is personally involved in a serious story and an author whose main aim is to entertain are incompatible. If, as here, the point of view of a novel is not discernable and guiding, we lose our bearings and flounder. At this point we have little choice but to accept the narrator’s implied opinion that extermination camp guards can be basically decent people whom we should leave in peace, a naughtily incorrect message that ignores and thereby trivializes one of the most stupendous crimes in human history. The other alternative would be to throw away the book. Darville’s novel, and this is its artistic crime, simply wastes the enormous potential of the genre to guide its readers into seeking and finding enlightenment.

Yet, precisely its failings allowed The Hand that Signed the Paper to become a valuable diagnostic tool for our society. Not only did it expose the anti-Semitism rampant in certain ethnic communities. It demonstrated the cavalier attitude towards historical fact that some writers of fiction seemed to feel entitled to take. And it revealed the inability of Australians, safe on their isolated continent that had never seen war, to imagine the scale, the significance and the horror of the Holocaust. In the course of the scandal that developed around this novel, Helen Darville became a symbol of the callousness and the hubris of young Australians, and of the unwillingness of Australians in general to put themselves out and think beyond the interests and the cosy comfort of their families. (It is well known, that many of the most brutal camp guards were also family men and loving fathers.)

And yet Darville’s novel does make important and valid points. The most fundamental one is probably that people who are exemplary citizens in an ordered society can lose their moral orientation if thrown into circumstances of social chaos, particularly if they have been accustomed to think in collective terms of family, ethnicity, nation, faith or race rather than with a view to the sanctity of the individual. The second one is that adolescents, and conscripted soldiers often are adolescents, are particularly susceptible to acts of bravado, violence and irresponsibility and usually grow out of such behaviours, finding it hard, in later life, to understand why they acted as they did in those transitional years. The third is that people and nations who are systematically demonized as savages may well eventually turn into savages. The fourth is the bleak observation that revenge is one of the most powerful motivators of human behaviour and probably the one societies must work hardest to control. These are things we would do well to keep in mind when trying to assess individual responsibility for the horrors of the mid twentieth century.

Theodor Adorno’s widely cited statement that after Auschwitz it would be impossible ever again to write poetry, or even history, did not come true as a prophecy. But the sentiment it expressed holds true; apart from the memoirs of survivors, there is almost nothing of literary worth written about Hitler’s maniacal attempt to wipe out the Jews. For reasons of tact, but also to avoid sensationalization and sentimentalization and the other pitfalls of emotionally charged literature, we have come to accept that only those personally (or racially?) involved have a right to write about the Holocaust. The second book I intend to discuss breaks that rule; though the author does have a Jewish background, it is irrelevant for his novel. The book is Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, published in French under the title of Les Bienveillantes in 2006 and in the English translation of Charlotte Mandell in 2009. We are told in the blurb: “It won the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Goncourt, [...] the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature, and more recently the Cunhambebe award in Brazil. It has been a record-breaking bestseller in France, and also in Spain, Italy and Germany, selling over [a] million copies.” Littell’s novel does not come out of the post-Demidenko Australian culture of tactful reticence; it is, rather, a novel that has made it its business to shock its readers profoundly.

To briefly summarize the story: Maximilian Aue’s war service takes him through Poland to the Ukraine where he is witness to, and briefly participant in, the first massacres of Jews at Babii Yar. He is then asked to determine scientifically whether a certain group of Georgians who profess the Jewish faith are to be considered racially Jewish and therefore candidates for extermination. He decides in their favour for scientific rather than humanitarian reasons. At some stage he is sent on a holiday by the Black Sea, intended as a psychiatric cure since he has not coped well with Babii Yar, but all he eventually requires is rest. Due to his politically insensitive scientific rigour, he is then given a punitive transfer to Stalingrad where the encircled and starving sixth German army is dying in terrible mid-winter squalor. There he receives a head wound. By a stroke of extraordinary good luck he is evacuated just before the end, regaining consciousness in Berlin. After some weeks of leave he is then appointed to a desk job in the city and for a while links up with Speer who is trying to slow down the extermination process and ameliorate the squalor of the camps so as to make use of the labour of inmates for weapons production. When the Germans enter Budapest, Aue is sent there to try to prevent the potential work-force in the camps being squandered in death marches. But he has no hope of success in the bureaucratic chaos of rival departments and commandants, though the mobilization of this workforce is now Germany’s only hope. In the final stages of the war, Aue experiences the destruction of Berlin in bombing raids. A concussion suffered during the collapse of a shelter gains him some more leave which he spends alone in a masturbatory orgy on his sister’s deserted property in Pommerania. Friends arrive to drag him out of his solipsistic inertia; his leave had long expired and the enemy is at his doorstep. They have to flee the Russian advance on foot; Aue and his minder, Thomas, eventually arrive back in Berlin. There Aue loyally continues his senseless and dangerous work in the face of the Russian capture of the city, grotesquely receives a decoration from the Fuehrer when there are almost no Nazis left in Berlin to decorate, and finally manages to escape to France where he had grown up, wearing the disguise of a forced labourer.

In many ways, Aue is a useful witness because his approach could almost be described as “objective”. He had come to Germany, where he was born, from France, where he grew up, in early adulthood partly because he was attracted to fascist ideas; but it was blackmail that forced him into the SD when he was discovered in a park frequented by homosexuals after an encounter with a man who was then shot dead by police. The alternative for him would have been a long prison term. We can assume that he was actually head-hunted with the help of Thomas, who knew him because he had worked with him and who continued to assist and protect him. Aue is a well educated and thinking person, dedicated to “the truth” even where this is likely to get him into trouble, an anti-Semite but willing to revise his views. He is intelligent and honest enough to see that everyone who contributes to the German war effort is as guilty or innocent of murder as the shooters at Babii Yar, who were in any case mostly Ukrainian Hiwis. He is an interested and sympathetic observer, choosing to stay in Russia even though he knows that he would probably have been returned to Berlin if he had requested this. By standards of normal decency, he is, on the whole, a decent person.       

Littell’s protagonist/narrator knows that most of the books written about WWII should never have been written. “Even those [authors] who were actually there hardly ever use anything but ready-made thoughts and phrases to talk about it. Just look at the pathetic prose of the German writers who describe the Eastern Front: putrid sentimentalism, a dead, hideous language.” (13) His narrator writes in the first place “to set the record straight for myself”: it is once again a memoir, this time by a perpetrator. Aue has no need to woo a readership, which is always a potential source of dishonesty; his earning capacity, he tells us, is quite adequate to support his family. The flagging attention spans of readers after the 200 page mark, their boredom with repetitiveness and ordinariness, their unwillingness to be confronted with scenes of horror for more than titillating moments, their discomfort with bodily functions such as vomiting, diarrhoea and constipation, even more so with sex and ugly sex, their impatience with philosophical ramblings, their desire to have information sorted and evaluated for them, and above all their inevitable moral expectations: these can all be ignored. Aue panders to none of these wishes and much of the time his book is no pleasure to read. Aue knows what he has daone; there is no place in his account for self-justification, but also none for remorse and guilt. He concedes: “These two exist, no doubt, I don’t want to deny it, but I think things are far more complex than that.” He emerged from the war, he tells us, “an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame”. Honesty is all he aims at, “truth”; he is determined that nothing should remain hidden in the recesses of his memory. His philosophy is: “the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink, and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.” It is thus not surprising that his account of the war becomes a vast tome of a thousand long pages. “A lot of things happened” during those years and human beings are “veritable memory factories”.

Aue initially writes only for himself, but that does not imply that his book can be of no interest to readers. He introduces it as “a bleak story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play, I assure you” and tells us: “you’ll see that this concerns you”, for one thing because in different circumstances “you might also have done what I did”. What Aue hopes to provide is evidence, as unbiased as possible, that will allow us to re-examine our judgemental preconceptions.

There is, in the first place, the notion that the German armed forces, which included the SS and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) in which Aue served, were composed of willing recruits. Aue, for one, was blackmailed because under suspicion of “criminal” homosexual activities. Most German men were conscripted and then deployed as required. And according to the internationally accepted law of war, conscripts can be ordered to kill and be killed. But “who of his own free will would choose murder”?

Secondly, there is the widespread belief that the SS and SD units were composed mainly of “sadists and psychopaths”. Aue points out: “There have been hundreds of thousands of us whom you still judge as criminals: among them, as among all human beings, there were ordinary men, of course, but also extraordinary men, artists, men of culture, neurotics, homosexuals, men in love with their mothers, who knows what else, and why not? None of them was more typical of anything than any other man in any other profession.” Aue himself was a man of culture, a homosexual, and a man in love with his sister. “I lived, I had a past, a difficult and burdensome past, but that happens, and I managed it in my own way. And then came the war. I served and I found myself at the heart of terrible things, atrocities. I hadn’t changed, I was still the same man, my problems had not been resolved, even though the war created new problems for me, even though those horrors transformed me.” Though Aue was only once asked to “finish off” Jewish victims of a massacre, and completely lost his nerve doing so, he committed five murders in the latter half of the war. “I started out,” he tells us, “within the bounds of my service and then, under the pressure of events, I finally overstepped these bounds; but everything is connected, closely, intimately connected: to argue that if there had been no war I would still have resorted to such extremities would be impermissible.” (24)

Thirdly, there is the perception that it was always the SS and SD units that were responsible for the massacres. In reality, it was often men from the Wehrmacht or Hiwis from conquered territories, like the Ukraine, who did the dirty work. In war, men can rarely determine how they are deployed. “In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.” And whenever the Wehrmacht was not involved, it was only because others were available.

Fourthly, there is the belief that guilt rests with those who were deployed to do the killing. In reality, the process of extermination was one comprising countless small steps undertaken by countless different people, all essential for the war effort, some seemingly harmless. “Why should the worker assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The same goes for every facet of this immense enterprise. The railway signalman, for instance, is he guilty of the death of the Jews he shunted towards the camp?” It is the massive machinery of war that makes genocide possible. Even if some individual somewhere refuses to do his job, this can never hold up the entire enterprise for more than a brief moment. What work could a German do that would not ultimately support the war? If justice is to be meted out, Aue the lawyer suggests, it could only be according to the “unjust” Greek model, where intent is ignored and Oedipus must suffer the terrible consequences of unwittingly killing his father, though by Christian standards he was innocent.

Fifthly, there was the perception that war and genocide were always clearly distinguishable, the first permissible and even heroic, the second criminal. But in total war “there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by as much as a second: but in both cases the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame? “ Moreover, Aue tells us: “It should be noted that in our century at least there has never yet been a genocide without war, that genocide does not exist outside of war”.  

Sixthly, we have all heard that six million Jews were murdered by the Germans. Aue informs us that it may have been between five and six million; the numbers are approximate. During those same years 20 million Soviet citizens were killed while three million Germans died in the East: with adjustments 26.6 million human beings in all. Some were killed illegally, many of them legally. Is there any sense in such a distinction?

What does all this amount to? That it is not anti-Semitism, which has received so much attention, but the absurdities of war that we must avoid at all costs. “Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our lesson, it won’t happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our lesson? Are you certain it won’t happen again? Are you even certain the war is over? In a manner of speaking, it is never over […] it will live on…” Aue is not trying to justify his own actions. He simply wants the world to draw the right conclusions from the disaster of World War II, conclusions that we still don’t seem to be able to accept.

So much for Maximilian Aue’s message. The author, Jonathan Littell, has his own set of messages which are focused impressionistically on the preconditions for the Nazi disaster. One of them concerns anti-Semitism. Littell gives us the spectacle of a group of highly trained experts trying to work out whether a community of Georgian Judaists is or is not racially Jewish and consequently subject to liquidation. At the same time the linguist Voss makes it clear to his surprised friend Aue that the notion of “pure race” is a nonsense: it does not and cannot exist. So what was anti-Semitism actually about? Squatting in his sister’s country house not long before the end of the war, Aue imagines Una, a Jungian psychologist, saying to him:

I know why we killed the Jews.[…] By killing the Jews, […] we wanted to kill ourselves, kill the Jew within us, kill that in us which resembles the idea we have of the Jew. Kill in us the potbellied bourgeois counting his pennies, hungry for recognition and dreaming of power, but a power he pictures in the form of a Napoleon III or a banker, kill the petty, reassuring morality of the bourgeoisie, kill thriftiness, kill obedience, kill the servitude of the Knecht, kill all those fine German virtues. For we’ve never understood that these qualities we attribute to the Jews, calling them baseness, spinelessness, avarice, greed, thirst for domination and facile malice are fundamentally German qualities, it’s because they’ve dreamed of resembling the Germans, of being Germans, it’s because they imitate us obsequiously like the very image of all that is fine and good in High Bourgeoisie, the Golden Calf of those who flee the harshness of the desert and the Law. Or else maybe they were pretending, maybe they ended up adopting these qualities almost out of courtesy, out of a kind of sympathy, so as not to seem so distant. And we, on the other hand, our German dream, was to be Jews, pure, indestructible, faithful to a Law, different from everyone else and under the hand of God. But actually they’re all mistaken, the Germans as well as the Jews. For if Jew, these days, still means anything, it means Other, an Other and an Otherwise that might be impossible but that are necessary. (874f.)

This is a thought-provoking interpretation of the madness of German anti-Semitism, one of many possible explanations. How can one fight or prevent something so elusive?

Through giving Aue a “heroic” Protestant German father and a bourgeois Catholic French mother and letting him spend his early years in Germany before receiving his education in France, Littell suggests a radical dichotomy between these two adjoining cultures that could lead to reactions of extreme hatred, as when Aue murders his mother and step-father without provocation.

The effects of World War I on German men of two generations is a topic that links in with Aue’s message. Like many of his generation, Aue grew up virtually without a father, though he has fleeting memories of a kind and caring man. The boy missed this male role model and blamed his mother for his loss, quite unfairly, as his sister later tried to tell him. She has meanwhile discovered that the father for whom Aue still mourns was a cold and heartless man, captain of a Freikorps, a man guilty of extraordinary cruelty towards captured women and children and reckless irresponsibility towards his own men and their cause, definitely not a worthy example for a young son.

The deep divisions between masculine and feminine cultures in the mid twentieth century, and the disadvantagement of boys who were expected to study for a job rather than for personal development (Aue would have preferred to do literature and philosophy or music, rather than law), who were also forced to sacrifice their own lives and destroy the lives of other human beings during war, while their sisters could study according to their needs and be peaceful and happy, is another topic Littell broaches. Aue’s sister, Una, whom he loves deeply but who is forbidden him and thus almost banished from the story, seems an ideal figure, a guiding but remote presence throughout the novel: caring, wise, beautiful and kind. If Aue had had the same opportunities as his twin, he too might have become an admirable person.

Aue’s sexual abnormality, which he himself makes no attempt to understand, is obviously of considerable interest to the author. We hear that the twins Max and Una, both lonely and resentful after their father had disappeared and their abandoned mother had eventually moved to France with a new partner, had a deeply loving and committed incestuous relationship in early teenage. When this was discovered, they were punished with separate confinement in strict Catholic boarding schools. This only confirmed their hatred of repressive bourgeois values. Aue’s relationship to his sister is complex; he loves her and has sworn loyalty to her as the woman of his life but he also envies her, desiring the role and body of a woman for himself. His love has become obsessive and his immature commitment rigid. It is impossible for him to form a relationship with another woman, so he seeks gratification in preferably casual encounters with male prostitutes. Sexual repression is a topic throughout the novel. Incest is outlawed by the Catholic Church. Homosexuality is outlawed under Hitler. After his second head injury, Aue spends weeks in his sister’s abandoned manor house, giving himself up to ever more sordid and aggressive self-gratification in an attempt to soil and destroy her loveliness and her privileged life. In a much earlier episode, the linguist Voss, Aue’s closest friend at the time, and Voss’ Georgian lover are shot dead by the girl’s father in defence of her virginity.

Aue’s sexuality is clearly his main problem. In the latter part of the novel, when he is already suffering from two head injuries and the many horrific experiences of war, Aue commits a series of impulsive murders. On leave, he visits his mother and step-father in the south of France for the first time in years; the relationship is uneasy but not hostile. On the last morning Aue wakes to find his stepfather on the kitchen floor, brutally murdered with an axe Aue himself had left there, and his mother strangled. His behaviour is strange. He had gone to bed naked. In the morning he doesn’t seem to remember what he has done or that he has left his blood-stained suit in the bath. He is horrified when he sees the corpses but he doesn’t call the police. He walks to the station, catches the train he had booked the previous day, and later, in Berlin, vehemently denies the murders when police question him. These are, of course, the parents that had separated him from Una. In the last stages of the war Aue shoots an elderly organist in a church near his sister’s property; the man would have reminded him of Una’s elderly composer husband, his rival for her love. Still later he strangles a man with whom he had on occasion had sex: a replacement of his sister unworthy of her. Eventually he even shoots Thomas, the hedonistic friend who was always surrounded by partying women and obviously had no problems with his sexuality. Thomas had saved Aue’s life on more than one occasion. He then escapes Germany by stealing Thomas’ disguise, an act of perfidy. Once safe in France, Aue enters into a marriage of convenience that will never compete with his ideal love. Though he does not kill Helene, the woman who nurses him throughout his illness and is prepared to marry him, the brutal truths he hurls at her have all the violence of a murder. If Aue had been in an Einsatzkommando he may well have killed Jews in the place of these people, though he may also have been too sane and too honest for this sort of subterfuge.

Alternatively: perhaps Aue didn’t just kill the enemies that thwarted his love, but the bourgeois in himself when he murdered his mother and stepfather, the homosexual in Mihaï, the aesthete escaping from his responsibilities in life in the organist, the cynical opportunist in Thomas. Or did he kill those he envied, the happy people, who seemed to be able to cope with life even under daunting circumstances, like the organist, Mihaï and Thomas, and even his elderly parents? Who knows whom we actually intended to kill once we have learned to solve our problems by killing.

Looking at things from another angle, Aue’s incestuous sexuality is almost a mirror image of the Nazis racist ideology which brooked no differences: it sought a utopia of identical twins, of blond men all looking the same, all wearing identical uniforms, a world in which women played no part. Aue’s preference is, of course, for the French version: his sister Una is a dark haired woman whom he wants to resemble, more than that, become, in a world without men. (It is likely that he is the father of her long concealed identical boy twins.)

In his impressionistic attempt to give us a sketch of the mental world of Nazism, Littell also draws attention to the prevalence of academics in the SD, the most ideological of Hitler’s army units. Nearly all of Aue’s colleagues have PhDs, and they try to determine matters of life and death for large groups of people with abstruse intellectual arguments rather than with common sense or compassion. Nazism’s alienation from real life, most evident in the concentration camp system as Aue encounters it in Hungary, that drives the realist Speer to distraction, is extraordinary and horrifying.

The Kindly Ones is basically a narrator’s novel, a narrator who is determined to present his memories without embellishments and interpretations, and convince us of the far-reaching conclusions he has drawn from them. The author therefore does well to be cautious with his own comments and suggestions. We take note of them but it would be wrong to develop them further.

In between Maximilian Aue’s earnest anti-war preface “Toccata” and Jonathan Littell’s impressionistic attempts to throw light on the spirit of that period, lies the vast detail of Hitler’s times, carefully researched, through which Aue makes his way. Aue too admits to having consulted a variety of historical works to assist him with chronology and detail before he began his task. We are spared very little. The horror and disgust and exhaustion we feel is probably as close as we will get to actually experiencing those times from the perspective of a German officer in Hitler’s army.

Littell’s final cryptic comment is the title he has given to his novel: The Kindly Ones. These words occur only once in the text, in the very last sentence of those thousand pages. It reads: “The Kindly Ones were on to me”, spoken by Aue as he prepares to flee Germany with its human and animal victims on the bridge behind him, to return to the bourgeois culture of France he once so detested. We are the kindly ones, we and all those others for whom the culture of cruelty and persecution that the Nazis imposed on Europe is anathema, we who want to force Maximilian Aue to justify his participation in such horrors, to admit his guilt and demonstrate his remorse rather than slipping back into anonymity and normality like a coward. We would like to be “onto him” though, on second thoughts, we probably have to admit that his ruthless exposé of Nazi times and his plea for peace will be of more use to the world than a judicial persecution could ever be.

I have chosen these two novels – one that should perhaps not have been written and another that, in my view, needed to be written – not because I want to explain away or trivialize the German genocide of Jews, but because I believe it still has vital lessons to teach us. I admit that I have a German background. Though none of my immediate family chose to stay in Germany during the Hitler period, I have throughout my life felt the hostility of Australians who identified with the victims of the war and the Holocaust. I have never complained of this. All the same, I think we should listen to Aue when he says: “always keep this thought in mind: you may be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person. Because if you have the arrogance to think you are, that’s just where the danger begins.”   

Bibliography

Darville, Helen The Hand That Signed the Paper. Allen and Unwin: St. Leonards, 1994.

Littell, Jonathan  The Kindly Ones. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. Vintage Books: London, 2010.