Book Review: The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Harper Perennial, 2010, 992 pages, paperback, $16.99
John Demjanjuk is on trial in Germany, charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder, one for every person who died at Sobibor while he was a guard.
Ninety-year old Demjanjuk is almost the last of his kind. His fellow horror-show Nazi villains are passing from the earth, their thin ghosts slipping into the air like the smoke from lthe ast Chanukah candle on the menorah. World War II has begun its headlong spiral into history: so many dead, so much destruction, so many books and films. Truly, is there anything more to learn?
Nevertheless, more than half a century after Berlin lay in smoking ruins, a new voice has emerged to tell the familiar story. He is Dr. Maximilian Aue, a former SS officer now living under a false identity in France. A career officer, a lover of fine music, food and wine, Maximilian Aue was there, friends. I mean he was really there: Babi Yar, Poland, the Battle of Stalingrad, Auschwitz; he dined with Eichmann and Himmler, he schemed with Speer, and once, memorably, he stood at attention before Hitler himself.
Dr. Aue, however, is a fiction -- the creation of the American novelist Jonathan Littell. For his first novel, Littell set himself an extraordinary task: to live within the body of a human monster, to witness what a functionary of the SS officer class would have witnessed, to see and hear through him. In 2006, Littell published "The Kindly Ones" in French to tremendous acclaim in France (winner of the Prix Goncourt and Grand Prix du roman de l'Acad