Category Archives: Reading

Sitting beneath a convalescing cat, held fast by his bulk, I was kept still long enough to finish The Kindly Ones.  At last!  What a rich and strange text, one that has divided reviewers since its appearance in France in 2006 and its English translation in 2009.  It will come as no surprise that I googled reviews of the book – if only to decipher the meaning of the book’s last line and title.  The Kindly Ones.  The New York Times Book Review cited its reference to the third play in Aeschylus’ Trilogy, “the kindly ones” being the dreadful Furies turned house-cat by Athenian law.  The book does end with a state of law, but I couldn’t tell you who became domesticated in the process; there is no happy ending here, for anyone.

Even if it is perceived that Dr. Max Aue has “got away with murder”, he is clearly tormented by his own Furies, even when he claims forgetfulness.  The Furies eat their way out of him.  They consume him from within.  There is, ultimately, no redemption for Dr. Aue – and should there be?  Though “The Good Nazi” was given to Albert Speer’s biography, I would have thought this would be a more fitting title.  But, to be fair, titles are not my strong suit.  Check my CV.  But surely, rather than the taming of inner demons through adherence to state law, this book is about how good men can do evil things.  Which leads to the next question, of course.  Is Dr. Aue a good man?  Can you be a good Nazi?

Dr. Aue was certainly an effective Nazi.  He was good at being a Nazi.  Which is not the same thing as being good.  Dr. Aue loves classical music, which serves as shorthand for his culture, his refinement, his class.  But even his love of music abandons him in the end, when he destroys a musician for reminding him of beauty.  So, it is not that he is a good man; in fact, he commits a catalogue of sins.

But by Nazi standards, then, as a good Nazi he also believes himself to be a good man, because he cares more than most.  The last third of the book finds him investigating the camps, from their “hey dey” to their evacuations.  He cares more than most by expressing his concerns about overcrowding, diets, hygiene, hypothermia.  But still, he does nothing.  He is no hero in this tale, but he believes, to the end, that he is redeemed by his own commitment to the Nazi cause, a commitment that only abandons him at the very end.

Aue disdains men who do the work of Nazis without the philosophy.  This is summed up in an encounter with Doll, “a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his innermost being he didn’t entirely agree?  If he had been born in France or America, he’d have been called a pillar of society and a patriot; but he was born in Germany, and so he is a criminal.  Necessity, as the Greeks knew already, is not only a blind goddess, but a cruel one too.”  He explains his belief that man is neither naturally good nor naturally evil, ill-equipped to judge the heart of man.  “Doll killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law.   What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities?”  Aue is aware that law began with God, that Thou Shalt Not Kill is always set aside in times of war, as it is “just to kill the enemy of one’s people.”  “So for a German, to be a good German means to obey the laws and thus the Fuhrer: there can be no other morality since there would be nothing to support it.”  (And Dr. Aue needs a lot of support – staff, privilege, beds, liquor.  All that he wants and needs he is furnished with – but it is never, never enough.)  “What man alone, of his own free will, can come to a decision and say, This is good, that is evil?  How outrageous that would be, and how chaotic too, if everyone dared to act that way: if every man lived according to his private Law.”  Thus, he sets up the argument that no good Nazi can be tried alone.  All of Germany must be tried in total, for all of Germany followed the same law, uniformed or no.

This really is a most fascinating book.  Nearly every third page is folded down for reference.  You could open the book anywhere and start a blog post.  But I return to my initial query, lest my blog run the length of The Kindly Ones.  I want to get under the skin of fascism, to understand how it is made acceptable to a smart individual and a smart culture to so wholeheartedly embrace and enact a very bad idea.  I’m less convinced in the book’s writing than in the book’s ideas; if you are interested in the philosophy and practice of Nazism, I can’t think of a better place to start.

And so, back to the history books.  For I have a trip to Berlin planned, to place my Good Nazi into her own landscape, to see for myself what does -and does not – remain of her world.

A supervisor on one of my first ever jobs told me I had trouble with transitioning.  That may sound a fair comment, but I need to point out that the workplace was a fast food counter in Disneyland and the supervisor was commenting on my inability to move from pouring sodas to scooping fries with sufficient speed or good humour.  I think, considering I was a teenager, that I was not nearly sulky enough.  However, this woman (who perhaps, even now, is supervising the serving of fat and salt in a theme park near you) and her words are with me.  Was she right?

Do I have trouble transitioning – where my writing is concerned?  How do you make your brain and your heart big enough for two books at once?  I can’t even read more than one book at a time.  Rewrites are stalled, holiday books are read, and so I return to my favourite Nazi, Dr. Max Aue, who shares his war in The Kindly Ones, which I last spoke of here: The next chunk of the book is titled Courante, meaning a baroque running dance that typically follows the Allemandes.

Courante finds Aue on a fast train and transfer from the Eastern Front to Stalingrad.  It is also a much faster chapter, driving Max through a variety of horrors that leaves him mad and hallucinating, as the relationship with his twin sister comes forward and is addressed directly in Sarabande, meaning a baroque suite featuring slow triple crotchets.  The sarabande might not be seen as a passionate music form, sayeth Wikipedia, but there is passion-aplenty once Aue is removed, convalescing, to Berlin.  (Spoiler alert)  The hallucinations of the siege in Stalingrad are revealed to be a near-death experience  – and thank goodness for that, I say, as the hallucinations were even getting to me!

Aue happily shows off his head wound throughout Sarabande, but what of his heart-wound?  Only the arrival of his twin reveals the extent of this damage, but she is unwilling – or unable – to do anything about it.  She has married and moved on; she has left him stuck in their shared childhood, emotionally infantile.  This explains some of the more bizarre fetishes and interests that Dr. Aue exhibits, but really, so far, so Nazi.  Meanwhile, cracks are beginning to show in the usually impeccable Max, whose Weltschmerz finds him threatening to shoot party guests in a hotel for daring to celebrate while, “the whole world was twisted in pain, and people should not be having fun, not right away in any case, they should wait a little while, a decent amount of time should go by.”  It is this rationale, of course, that makes the character fascinating.  We read about perpetrators of evil to learn how they justify their own actions, how they explain their decisions to make them acceptable.  We all do that, don’t we, evil or not?  It is the “not right away in any case,” that makes the statement so spooky – the appearance, the seemliness, is more important than the belief.

There is a particularly fascinating passage on whether Nazism arose from Zionism; the crafty Dr. Mandelbrod tells Aue that “the very term National Socialism was coined by a Jew… what’s more volkisch than Zionism?  Like us, they realized there there can be no Volk or Blut without Boden, without land, and so the Jews must be brought back to the land, Eretz Israel, purified of any other race.  Of course, those are ancient Jewish ideas.  The Jews were the first genuine National Socialists… ever since Moses gave them a Law to separate them forever from the other peoples.  All our great ideas come from the Jews, and we must have the lucidity to recognize it…the notion of the Chosen People, the concept of the purity of blood.”  Dr. Aue is more interested in the laws that will have to be rewritten following war, but his natural curiosity in the “Jewish Question,” as well as an inability to get a posting that he likes, finds him in a job where he must survey a number of death camps, as the book rolls into Meneut.  He believes it is his job to make them more “efficient”, which means to Max that fewer “workers” die unnecessarily.  It is hard to know if Max is being coy or ignorant at this point; he is kept in the dark by most of his superiors, including the mysterious Dr. Mandelbrot.  But that is also the point about the Nazis  – they all said, and perhaps believed, that they didn’t know anything.  That nobody joined up the dots.

Meanwhile, the hallucination/head traumas continue, and Aue spots a prayer shawl around the shoulders of Hitler, a tefillin on his forehead, the little tallith beneath his jacket.  Is this his “pineal eye” in overdrive?  Only time – and reading – will tell.

And really, a book like this can only be tackled in parts, in great chunks that could each be a stand-alone book.

“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”  So the book begins with Toccata, meaning a baroque musical composition usually for keyboard, perhaps the German klavier.  The opening chapter is as full-chorded and rhythmically free as any toccata, taking us from a lace factory in post-war France back through the memories of its owner, a former SS intelligence officer.  This flourish of a overture leads us into chapter Allemandes I & II.

An allemandes is an instrumental Barque dance, a slow partnered dance of the 17th and 18th centuries, a piece of music following the prelude in a classical suite; it is also a German folk dance in triple meter, similar to the landler, for the Sound of Music fans among you.    Allemandes I & II is set in the Eastern Front.  In the dance, a line of couples extended their paired hands forward and paraded back and forth the length of the ballroom. Perhaps the ballroom of war was the Eastern Front, which the Nazis hoped to capture in the quick-step of their folk dance, seemingly surprised that the classic dance form took them backwards as often as forwards.  Or is this all a metaphor too far?  It is also the French name for German.

The protagonist, Dr. Max Aue, has a series of changing partners through Allemandes, a number of officers, academics and under-staff who become the objects of his desire, intellectual appreciation and/or lust.  Aue justifies his sexual proclivities by telling us that all officers and soldiers are at it – even in the trenches – and that from the Greeks onward all warriors were encouraged to strengthen the bonds of camaraderie through sexual coupling, as you would be unlikely to leave your lover on the battlefield.  There are dreams, memories and activities aplenty here for the staunchest SS-fetishist.  But I’m not writing about the SS or the Eastern Front.  Really, I’m not even writing about men.

But I am writing about Nazis and I am reading to understand their mindset.  We all have our racist moments, however we justify or explain them away.  Dr. Aue is no different.  Indeed, all of German academia was busy explaining their racism through the new science of Eugenics, while Aue’s colleague, Dr. Voss, attempts to prove who is Jewish and who is not along the Eastern Front through a study of their languages.  “Take German, for instance,” says Voss, “For centuries, even before Martin Luther, people claimed it was an original language under the pretext that it had no recourse to roots of foreign origin, unlike the Romance languages… Some theologians…even went so far as to claim that German was the language of Adam and Eve, and that Hebrew later derived from it.  But that’s a completely illusory claim, since even if the roots are ‘native’ – actually all derived directly from the languages of Indo-European nomads – our grammar is entirely structured by Latin. …”

SPOILER ALERT:  After Dr. Voss’s death, Aue is left to fight his corner in a discussion of a mountain people who are to be executed and and whether their language might prove that they are not acclimatized Jews.  While a female Nazi doctor asserts that no assimilation is ever entire, “Open the pinstripe pants of a Jewish industrialist and you’ll find a circumcised penis,” Aue is able to cast enough doubt on the peoples’ origins and migration patterns to delay the decision, so saving them.  And what are we to make of that?  Did Nazi intellectual SS officers really argue the fine points of their fascist philosophies to save people? To justify their actions?  To soothe their guilty consciences?  Certainly, Dr. Aue is awash with mysterious bouts of vomiting and he witnesses a number of SS and Wehrmacht officers coming unhinged at unmitigated violence.  Can Littell humanize the Nazi experience and belief system through Dr. Aue so that we can come to like him?  Understand him?  Or even forgive him?  Dr. Aue hasn’t actually murdered anyone himself… yet.  What will happen when he does?  Will there still be an attempt at justification?  The rules of war do not apply when the “enemy” isn’t armed.  WWII changed all the rules of war anyway.

I am hoping to understand the arguments used to justify racism and fascism.  I am from a city that is no longer a “white” majority and while it certainly doesn’t bother me, I wonder if it bothers others – others that I know.  People I would consider to be liberal.  Because it’s one thing to hold a liberal belief system; it’s another to live through such an economic downturn that you lose all perspective and you begin to fear “the other” – because bad things must be someone’s fault.  Our present crunch isn’t a patch on pre-Nazi Germany, but… you can see how public opinion responds to fear.  It always does.  Both sides interned their enemies during WWII out of fear; I grew up not far from a race track that housed interned Japanese-Americans – or anyone who “looked Asian.”  But less familiar, less understandable now, is that fear that the “otherness” of someone is a mystery, that you need to measure someone’s head or nose or pick apart their language to get to the root of who they are, as opposed to who they believe themselves to be.  Like a male terrorist hiding in a burka, WWII Nazis feared a Jew in Everyman, the Jew who “looked” German, who was “pretending” to be German, even if they had been there  for generations.  And this is where Littell’s book is relevant for me, when every woman in the internment camp is arrested for being German but there is no system for unpicking who is Austrian, who is Jewish, and who is acclimatized, who actually sees herself as British.  The fear was that every German was a potential Fifth Columnist, a potential spy, a Nazi, but none of this is straight-forward, and the fears shifted as often as the alliances as the war ground on.  And still we intern, even in our own “modern” war.