Look on these horrors

The blood-soaked nightmares of an SS officer

Justin Beplace

Jonathan Littell

Les Bienveillantes

In a telling scene in the opening pages of Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, an SS officer named Max Aue is exposed for the first time to the aftermath of a massacre. In the wake of the German army's advance through the still smouldering city of Lutsk, he is shown corpses piled high in the courtyard of Lubart Castle - Ukrainian and Polish prisoners shot, apparently, by their Soviet guards. It is a sicken­ing sight: bloated bodies splayed across the stone-flagged square, the "immense" hum of blue-bottle flies swarming above the blood and excrement, a choking odour of death. With his handkerchief pressed to his face, barely check­ing an impulse to vomit, Max feels himself caught between an instinctive reflex to close his eyes and what proves to be the more powerful drive, the desire to look. Turning at last from the nightmare before him, he asks the accom­panying officer: "Have you read Plato?".

If this seems an unlikely response to human atrocity, it is worth stating that both the character of Max Aue, a cultivated doctor of law, and the novel itself, written as a first­person account of his wartime service at the centre of the Nazi machine, are untypical responses to that most profound atrocity of the twentieth century. The opening line of what is cast as Max's memoirs states his purpose simply: "Frères humains, laissez-moi vous raconter comment ca s'est passé", and for the next 900 densely packed pages he does just that, recounting, in scrupulous and dispassion­ate detail, how it happened. The account follows his career through early Einsatzgrup­pen actions in Ukraine (including the notorious Babi Yar massacre in Kiev), to his near-fatal stint on the front line at the Battle of Stalingrad, then to his Berlin-based desk job in the administration of the concentration camps, and culminating in an increasingly unhinged account of the fall of Berlin and a surreal encounter with the Fuhrer himself in the bowels of his bunker.

Littell's novel has been the sensation of this year's rentrée litteraire in France and it has just received both the Prix de l'Academie frangaise and the Prix Goncourt. The American-born author claims that the project was conceived as an attempt to understand, or more specifically "to interpret", the phenomenon of political mass murder (a subject brought into sharp focus by his years spent working as an NGO aid worker in Bosnia, Chechnya and the Congo) by approaching it from the point of view of the executioner, rather than the victim. While explicitly acknowledging his debt to historical works such as Raul Hilberg's three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews and Claude Lanzmann's monumental film Shoah, Littell has made clear his antipathy to the idea of writing a kind of "roman historique". In an interview with the French journal Telerama, he stresses that while the subject of his book is above all “le réel” it is not some abstract idea of the real that is at stake here, but something more palpable and textured, a reality replete with its own tastes, smells and sounds.

In this sense, Max’s unflinching inspection of the massacred prisoners, his desire to comprehend "cette chose incomprehensible, là, devant moi, ce vide pour la pensée humaine", merely restates the motive force behind the book itself. And yet his question "Have you read Plato?" points up some of the more troubling aspects of this remarkable but flawed novel, a work that gets caught between a documentary-style fidelity to History and the aesthetic demands of literature. The reference to Plato seems a clumsy thematic marker, an opportunity for Max to rehearse, some fifty pages later, certain philosophical reflections in his well-thumbed copy of The Republic on Leontius' feeling, when faced with the sight of executed bodies, of being torn between the desire to close his eyes and a longing to look on the horror before him.

As in Plato, Max's "passion" for looking is ultimately allied with reason, with a coldly burning rage to understand. At Babi Yar, he takes part in the systematic slaughter of Kiev's Jewish population. Dazed by the experience and dimly aware of its enormity - something beside which even the "boucheries démen­tielles" of the Great War pale by comparison - it seems to him that if he could only make sense of it then everything would become clear and he could finally rest. But he can't think; his thoughts reverberate in his head like the clatter of trains in the Metro. Pondering the reasons why he didn't simply request a transfer to Berlin, away from the daily slaughter of Einsatzgruppen campaigns, he trails off to an uncertain conclusion: "Sans doute n'avais-je pas encore compris ce que je voulais com­prendre. Le comprendrais-je jamais? Rien n'était moins sur". (Probably I had not yet understood what I wanted to understand. Would I ever understand it? Nothing was less sure.) At this point, he is reminded of a phrase of G. K. Chesterton's ("I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous"). As so often here, a literary or philosophical quotation provides an incongru­ous cap to inarticulate emotion: he quotes Proust in the heat of an argument with his twin sister, Una, in order to underline the inviolabil­ity of their incestuous relationship; later, after bluntly telling Max to accept the fact that their father is dead, Una recites Ariel's song in The Tempest ("Full fathom five thy father lies").

Littell's characters are never lost for words, least of all Max, for whom the memoir serves as a kind of proxy relief from the constipation he has come to suffer from, after long years of vomiting and diarrhoea. While blood and excrement continue to flood his fevered dreams, choking him in a rising tide of filth, his daylight scribblings are a means of recuperating and controlling these unconscious flows. If he takes pains to put everything down it is not, he assures us, for our benefit, but for his own "hygiene mentale", just as when one has eaten too much sooner or later it becomes necessary to "évacuer les dechets". And so the narrative follows its own kind of peristaltic rhythm, with long - and barely digestible - passages of dry descriptive prose periodically convulsed by Max's "évacuations": the surreal horror of Babi Yar, luridly explicit fantasies of sodomizing his sister, injury-induced hallucinations in the wake of Stalingrad, fevered rantings from his sick bed in Berlin, and through all these the great rivers of blood, sperm and shit commingling in his recurrent nightmares.

In an interview with Samuel Blumenfeld in his m Le Monde, Littell remembers asking himself the following question at the outset of his project:"What would have become of me if I had been born German in 1913, rather than American in comet 1967?". The question remains rhetorical, for Les Bienveillantes does not give us an answer, but Max's opening address to the reader - "Frères humains" - is a deliberate provocation, insinuating that if it was only what Chancellor Kohl called "the grace of late birth" that saved many radical Germans of his generation from taking part in atrocities, then we might all contemplate with a sober eye the contingencies of historical fate. And yet what begins as an understandable mistrust of metaphysical explanations - of deploying concepts like "evil" to limit the fallout of the Holocaust conceived as a singular historical event - can quickly lead to a kind of fatalism bordering on the self-exculpatory. Having professed to disdain the hypocrisy of contrition and with "nothing to justify", Max begins, with more than a strain of self-pity, to reflect on his own powerlessness in the greater scheme of things. In another life things might have worked out differently, he writes towards the end of his account, but he never had any real choice, only "une certaine marge de manoeuvre, mais restreinte, à cause de fatalités pesantes".

Such "fatalités pesantes" are the central structuring principle of Les Bienveillantes, which recasts the historical rise of German National Socialism and Nazi war crimes as a family drama in the mode of Greek tragedy. In Aeschylus' Eumenides ("les bienveillantes" in French), Orestes is pursued by the Furies after murdering his mother Clytemnestra and thereby avenging her assassination of Orestes' father, Agamemnon. Like Orestes, Max holds his mother responsible for the death of his father. This is unjustified; the father abandoned them in Max's infancy, leaving them to fend for themselves. Yet his mother's later decision to move in with a Frenchman, Moreau, is a wanton act of betrayal in Max's eyes, burying the memory of their father and sacrificing her children so as "to give herself to a stranger". Like Orestes, Max returns to his mother's home (now in Antibes) after an absence of eight years, and in a fit of madness kills both her and Moreau with an axe. Crucially, he has no memory of the killings. Nor do we, as readers, witness the act, but only its aftermath and the clear weight of evidence pointing to Max.

It does not take long for the trail to be picked up by a pair of German police officers, and the relentless efforts of Clemens and Weser to bring him to justice are a source of increasing torment for Max. These modern-day Furies are the book's most memorable creations; although their role appears incidental to the main story, they are at the centre of its moral and thematic concerns. Just as in Camus's L'Etranger, Meursault's final condemnation is somehow tied to his failure to mourn his dead mother, the issue of Max's guilt for the death of his mother becomes, by subtle shifts, inseparable from wider questions of individual culpability in state-sponsored mass murder. "Au fond," thinks Max while chopping wood on the morning of his mother's death, "le probleme collectif des Allemands, c'etait le même que le mien; eux aussi, ils peinaient à s'extraire d'un passé douloureux, à en faire table rase pour pouvoir commencer des choses neuves" (In essence, the collective problem of the Germans was the same as mine; they too were struggling to extract themselves from a painful past, to wipe the slate clean in order to start anew). It is thus, he reasons, that they had arrived at "la solution radicale", or what he elsewhere describes as "une acceptation ferme et raisonnée du recours à la violence pour la résolution des problemes sociaux les plus variés".

If the events in Antibes seem a surprising, even implausible, development, and one completely out of character (how is it he recalls nothing of his actions?), it does suggest the extent to which Max is less a fully realized character than a puppet being jerked from on high; less an embodied agent moving through historical time than an abstract "interpretation" of history. Not only must there be a matricide, in these parallel tales of national and familial trauma, but that matricide must be "involuntary” if Littell is to stage the central dilemma in this drama: are we to be judged by our inten­tions or merely by our actions? Max, on consid­ering the typical case of Doll - a "special opera­tions" officer assigned to Sobibor - rehearses the philosophical arguments with his character­istic thoroughness, and arrives at opposing versions of justice: the Judaeo-Christian one, in which intention, or "will", bears on the issue of guilt, and the Greek one, in which the crime is judged solely by reference to the act. The former would lend succour to the Dolls of this world, who (argues Max) found themselves in positions they had neither willed nor desired; the latter would condemn them, like Oedipus, for their actions alone.

Through an elaborate subplot these alterna­tives are then staged as a family drama: under the laws of the land Max lacked the mens rea to inculpate him for the murder of his mother, but the Furies (in the form of Clemens and Weber) are incarnations of a Greek justice. In the end, the question is left open: like his Classical counterpart, Max escapes retribution at the hands of the Furies, even though, unlike Orestes, he never has to submit his case to judgement. Thus it is that he writes his memoirs all these years later, a successful post-war lace manufacturer, settled with wife and children somewhere in northern France.

There is a striking moment, towards the end of the novel, when Max momentarily breaks off his narrative with a kind of disgust: "Le 9 avril ... ah, mais a quoi bon narrer jour par jour tous ces détails? Cela m'epuise, et puis, cela m'ennuie, et vous aussi sans doute. Combien de pages ai-je dejà alignées sur ces péripéties bureaucratiques sans interêt?" (The 9th of April ... ah, but what's the use in relating all these details day by day? It wears me out, and then it bores me, and you too probably. How many pages have I already notched up on these bureaucratic incidents of no interest?). This great mass of incidentals - dates, meetings, reports, actions - do bulk large in the novel, and are drawn directly from the extensive historical documentation surrounding the Shoah. Yet the effect of such accumulation, as Littell well knows, can be disorientating and deadening in equal measure; hence the drive to shape the m material, to render it and interpret it in ways we that are not always evident. Commenting on the ever increasing mass of documentary evidence, Littell is reported in Telerama as saying "Chaque fait nouvellement établi suscite une nouvelle interprétation, mais cette interpretation se heurte toujours à un blocage, et 1'énigme ne cesse de s'épaissir" (Each newly established fact gives rise to a new interpreta­tion, but this interpretation always runs up against a kind of blockage, and the enigma continues to deepen).

The chief difficulty one encounters in Les Bienveillantes, however, is how far the particular aesthetic and formal concerns of literary writing can accommodate such subject matter. Max's family history, motifs of matricide and incest, and allusions to classical Greek drama are all integral elements of the work; and yet, leaving to one side the implications of using tragedy as a mode of recounting the rise of German National Socialism, ultimately the novel is condemned by the sheer historical weight of its subject to remain interpretive rather than creative. In Voyage au bout de la nuit, Celine's narrator writes from amid the human wreckage of war, "Tout ce qui est intéressant se passé dans 1'ombre, décidement. On ne sais rien de la véritable histoire des hommes" (In truth, everything of interest takes place in darkness. We know nothing of the true history of men). The tragedy of Les Bienveillantes is less that Max's history is not véritable (he is, after all, a literary figment) but that is it not vraisemblable. Progressing through the novel's blend of philosophy, history and Greek tragedy, it is hard to shrug off the feeling that May, one of the few invented characters in a book crowded with historical figures, is in the end little more than a cipher, an abstracted voice created, as Claude Lanzmann himself wrote in Le Nouvel Observateur, as "un ventriloque des livres d'Histoire".

 TLS 17 Nov, 2006