The human stain

‘Oh my human brothers let me tell you how it happened,’ begs SS officer Max Aue, the narrator at the beginning of Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust novel The Kindly Ones. It is a book about the nature of evil. Simply memorialising the Holocaust, Littell says, always through the mouth of Aue, has relegated the killers to sub-human status. Littell challenges the reader to empathise with the Nazis, because Europe’s most grotesque trauma was perpetrated by the most civilised of men.

Aue is strikingly human. If nothing else he is a study in pretentiousness, with an adolescent impulse to impress. He alludes to Stendhal, Flaubert, Lermontov and Edgar Rice Burroughs at any opportunity, and he is thrilled to ‘adore’ French chamber music and imagines he shares the sensibilities of Rimbaud.

Pan-European cultural references aside, Aue’s political identity is National Socialist – he is a convinced racial supremacist. Dancing on the mezzanine between fact and fiction, Littell drops Aue around the political and cultural landscape of 1930s and 1940s Europe.