Les Bienveillantes

infobox Book |
name = Les Bienveillantes
title_orig =
translator =


caption =
author = Jonathan Littell
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country =
language = French
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genre = Novel
publisher = Gallimard
release_date = 13 September 2006
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Paperback)
pages = 903 pp
isbn = ISBN 207078097X
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Les Bienveillantes" (in English : "The Kindly Ones") is a novel, in the form of historical fiction, written in French by the American-born author Jonathan Littell. It tells the story of a former SS officer who helped carry out massacres during World War II. The 900-page book was awarded two of the most prestigious French literary awards, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006. This book is the first novel written in French by Littell; he published an earlier science-fiction book "Bad Voltage" in 1989. [ [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451160142 "Bad Voltage"] , Roc (1989), ISBN 0451160142 at amazon.com]

Genesis

The title "Les Bienveillantes" refers to the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies, "The Oresteia" written by Aeschylus. The Erinyes or Furies were vengeful goddesses who tracked and tormented those who murdered a parent. In the plays, Orestes, who has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon, was pursued by these female goddesses. The goddess Athena intervenes setting up a jury trial to judge the case of the Furies against Orestes. Athena casting the tying vote which acquits Orestes, pleads with the Furies to accept the trial's decision and to transform themselves into

"Most loved of gods, with me to show and share fair mercy, gratitude and grace as fair."

The Furies accept and are renamed the Eumenides or "The Kindly Ones" (in French "Les Bienveillantes").

When asked why he wrote such a book, Jonathan Littell evokes a stunning photo he discovered in 1989 of a Soviet partisan, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who was hanged by the Nazis. He adds that a bit later he found and watched the movie "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann before reading well-known historical books dealing with this period ("The Destruction of the European Jews" by Raul Hilberg and "Les jours de notre mort" by David Rousset).

The writer says he wanted to focus on the thinking of an executioner and of origins of state murder. Littell claims he set out creating the character Max Aue by imagining what he himself would have done and how he would have behaved if he had been born into Nazi Germany. [citeweb |url= http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/988410.html |title=The executioner's song|author=Assaf Uni|work=Haaretz]

Littell worked on this novel for about five years. His research carried him to Caucasus, Ukraine, former Stalingrad, Poland (Lublin, Kraków) and Pomerania. In addition, the author studied the literature and film archives of World War II and the post-war Nazi trials.

tructure

Whereas the influence of Greek tragedies is clear from the choice of title, the absent father, the roles of incest and parricide, Littell makes it clear that he was influenced not only by the structure of "The Oresteia". He found that the idea of morality in Ancient Greece is more relevant for making judgements about responsibility for the Holocaust than the Judeo-Christian approach where the idea of sin can be blurred by the concepts such as intentional sin, unintentional sin, sinning by thought or sinning by deed. For the Greeks it was the commission of the act itself upon which one is judged: Oedipus is guilty of patricide even if he did not know that he was killing his father. [ [http://www.lefigaro.fr/magazine/20061229.MAG000000304_maximilien_aue_je_pourrais_dire_que_c_est_moi.html Figaro interview (in French)] ]

Plot summary

The book is a fictitious autobiography, describing the life of Maximilian Aue, a former officer in the SS who decades later tells the story of a crucial part of his life when he was an active member of the forces of the Third Reich. In the book, Aue accepts his responsibility for his action in massacres of Jews, but most of the time he feels more an observer than a direct participant. Nevertheless, Aue remains a soldier.

The book is divided into several parts :;« Toccata »: In this introduction, we are introduced to the narrator and discover how he has ended up in France. He is the director of a lace factory, has a wife, children and grand children--though he continues his homosexual encounters when he travels on business. He hints of an incestuous love which we learn later was for his twin sister. He explains that he has decided to write about his experiences during the war for his own benefit and not as an attempt to justify himself, even though he insists that it took all kinds of men, good and bad, to make up the SS. He closes the introduction by saying, "I live, I do what is possible, it is the same for everyone, I am a man like the others, I am a man like you. Come along, I tell you, I am like you.";« Allemande I & II »: Aue describes his life as a member of one of the notorious Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine, particularly in the Crimea, and in the Caucasus. He describes in detail the open air massacres of Jews and Bolsheviks behind the front lines. Although he seems to become increasingly indifferent to the atrocities he is witnessing, he begins to experience daily bouts of vomiting and suffers a mental breakdown. After taking sick leave, he returns to his unit to discover that a hostile superior officer has arranged that he be transferred to Stalingrad in 1942.;« Courante » : Aue thus takes part in the last days of the battle of Stalingrad. As before, he is the soldier observer, the report writer rather than the combatant. In the midst of the chaos, violence and starvation, he manages to have a discussion with a Russian political commissar POW about the similarities between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks' world views and once again is able to indicate his intellectual support for Nazi ideas. He is seriously wounded in the head and is miraculously evacuated just before the German surrender in February 1943.;« Sarabande »: Convalescing in Berlin, Maximilian Aue is awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class by Heinrich Himmler himself for his heroic action at Stalingrad. While still on sick leave, he decides to visit his mother and step-father in Antibes, in Italian occupied France. Apparently, while he is in a deep sleep, his mother and step-father are brutally murdered. Aue flees from the house without notifying anybody and returns to Berlin.;« Menuet en rondeaux »: Aue is transferred to the Federal Ministry of the Interior headed by Himmler where he plays a managerial role for the concentration camps, struggling to improve the living conditions of those prisoners, selected to work in the factories as slave laborers, in order to improve their productivity. The reader meets top Nazi bureaucrats organizing the implentation of the Final Solution (i.e. Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höß, Himmler) and is given a glimpse of extermination camps (i.e. Auschwitz, Belzec); he also spends some time in Budapest just when preparations are being made for transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The reader witnesses the tug-a-war between those who are concerned with war production (Albert Speer) and those who are doggedly trying to implement the Final Solution. It is during this period that two SS police officers from the Kripo who are investigating the murders of his mother and step-father begin to visit him regularly, fury-like hounding and tormenting him with their questions which indicate their suspicions about his role in the crime.;« Air »: Aue visits his sister and brother-in-law's empty house in Pomerania. There, he engages in a veritable autoerotic orgy particularly fueled by fantasy images of his twin sister. The two SS police officers follow his trail to the house, but he manages to hide from them.;« Gigue »: Aue travels back to Berlin through enemy Soviet lines with his friend, Thomas who has come to rescue him. There he finds many of his colleagues preparing for escape in the chaos of the last days of the Third Reich, meets and is decorated by Hitler in the Führerbunker, escapes through the Berlin U-Bahn subway tunnels, and is finally rid of his police pursuers. He is finally faced by them, and blamed by the murdering of his family. However, his friend Thomas kill the last policeman only to be killed by Aue, who steals him the papers of a French conscripted worker. We know from the beginning of the book that his multilingualism will allow him to escape back to France with a new identity as a returning French man. The fact that he has managed to survive so many close calls and to escape successfully leads him to end the book with the statement: "The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes) had found me."But in the end, all is not explicitly laid out for the reader, for Littell, in the words of one reviewer, "excels in the unsaid." [ [http://quadrant.org.au/php/article_view.php?article_id=3440 Jacqueline Karp] ]

Characters

Maximilen Aue

He is a former Nazi SS officer. The book is written in the form of his memoirs. Maximilen Aue's mother was French (from Alsace), while his father, who left his mother and disappeared from their life in 1921, was German. Aue's mother remaries a Frenchman, Moreau, who is disliked by his stepson. After a childhood in France he goes to university in Germany. Aue is a cultured, highly educated, Classical music-loving intellectual. He speaks many languages fluently: German, French, Greek and Latin and holds a doctorate in law. Aue is bisexual which raises serious problems for him at times in homophobic Nazi society.

Una Aue / Frau Von Üxküll

Aue's twin sister for whom he has an incestuous attachment. She is married to Von Üxküll and although she appears only briefly in person, she dominates Aue's imagination, particularly with respect to sexual fantasies. She lives with her husband on his estate in Pomerania, but appears to be living during most of the period of the novel in Switzerland with him.

Berndt Von Üxküll

His sister's husband is a Junker from Pomerania. He is a composer who has kept his distance from the Nazis.

Héloïse Aue (Héloïse Moreau)

Max's mother, who believing her first husband to be dead, remarried Aristide Moreau. Max has not accepted that his father is dead has not forgiven his mother for remarrying.

Aristide Moreau

The stepfather of Max. There are vague intimations that he has links with the French resistance.

The twins, Tristan and Orlando

Mysterious twin children who live with the Moreaus but are also the concern of Aue's sister.

Thomas Hauser

Thomas is the closest friend of Max, and the only person that appears in one capacity or another wherever he is posted. Also an SS officer he is the Aue's main source of information about bureaucratic politics. He helps Max in a number of ways, both in advancing his career as well as rescuing him from his sister's house in Pomerania. He saves his life at the end of the novel.

Hélène Anders née Winnefeld

A young widow that Aue meets at the swimming pool in Berlin. When he is seriously ill, she comes to his apartment and nurses him back to health. While she is interested in him, he avoids physical contact. She leaves Berlin for her parent's house and writes asking if he intends to marry her. She does not appear again in the novel.

Dr. Mandelbrod

The mysterious Dr. Mandelbrod plays an important role behind the scenes as Aue's protector and promoter with high Nazi Party connections, particular with Himmler. He was an admirer of Max's father and grandfather. At the end of the book he is seen packing his bags to join the enemy, offering his services (and fortune?) to the Soviets.

SS police officers Weser and Clemens

A pair of Kripo detectives who are in charge of the investigation of the murders of Aue's mother and husband, they question and pursue Aue as if he were a murder suspect.

Historical characters
[
Theodor Oberländer, a military leader, was able to start a new political career after WWII.] Littell also introduces a number of historical characters:
*Important Nazi dignitaries: Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Reinhard Heydrich, Hans Frank, Rudolf Höß
*French and Belgian collaborators: Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Léon Degrelle.
*Other real characters in the book: Paul Blobel, Odilo Globocnik, Ernst Jünger, Arthur Nebe, Professor Theodor Oberländer, Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, Dr. Franz Six, Dr. Josef Mengele.

Reviews

Besides winning two of the most prestigious literary prizes in France, "Les Bienveillantes" was generally favourably reviewed in the French literary press. "Le Figaro" proclaiming Littell as the "man of year" [ [http://www.lefigaro.fr/magazine/20061229.MAG000000304_maxmilien_aue_je_pourrais_dire_qu_c_est_moi.html Le Figaro 2006-12-29] ] and the weekly "Le Point" stating: that the book “exploded onto the dreary plain of the literary autumn like a meteor.” Other reviewers compared it to "War and Peace", [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/books/07gonc.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=books&adxnnlx=1162999644-SnnH2MdsRX9LUquCftuXuA&oref=slogin&oref=slogin (quoted by Alan Ridings in the New York Times, 2006-11-07)] ] with the editor of the "Nouvel Observateur"'s literary section calling it a great book ("un très grand livre"). [ [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article616182.ece quoted by Charles Bremner in the Times 2006-10-28] ] [ [http://archquo.nouvelobs.com/cgi/articles?ad=culture/20061106.OBS8261.html&host=http://permanent.nouvelobs.com/&culture/20061106.OBS8261.html full French review, 2006-08-24] ]

Negative reviews raised issues such as style, one critic feeling that it is a step backward from the modern novel, a style belonging to the 19th century "as if Proust, Joyce, Hammett, William Faulkner et Robbe-Grillet had never existed." [ [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Bienveillantes#Les_critiques_n.C3.A9gatives translated quote from French wikipedia article] .] Others criticised it from a historical perspective: Peter Schöttler, a Franco-German historian, called the novel a “strange, monstrous book” that was "full of errors and anachronisms over wartime German culture," [ [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article616182.ece quoted by Charles Bremner in the Times 2006-10-28] ] and in "Le Figaro", French historian, Edouard Husson called the book a gigantic prank ("un gigantesque canular"). [ [http://www.lefigaro.fr/debats/20061108.FIG000000047_les_bienveillantes_un_canular_deplace.html Le Figaro, 2006-10-15] ]

After the book was translated into German, there was wide spread debate in Germany. [Those who read German can consult [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wohlgesinnten#Rezeption_und_Debatte Wikipedia German edition] ] Littell is accused of being "a pornographer of violence" [ [http://www.signandsight.com/features/976.html English translation] ] , another critic concludes: "Nothing in this book provides anything new, either in terms of style or content. [ [http://www.signandsight.com/features/1666.html English translation] ]

Awards and nominations

*Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française 2006
*Prix Goncourt 2006

References

*Karp, Jacqueline: Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell; Quadrant Magazine June 2007 - Volume LI Number 6 [http://quadrant.org.au/php/article_view.php?article_id=3440] Accessed 2007-12-4
*Hussey, Andrew: Guilty Pleasures; New Statesman 11 December 2006 [http://www.newstatesman.com/200612110046] Accessed 2007-12-10

External links

* [http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/outtakes/the_kindly_ones.htm None of Us is Immune from Becoming a Nazi] . Wu Ming reviews "Les Bienveillantes" (from Italian daily newspaper "l'Unità", September 30th, 2007 - English translation).