On the German Reaction to Jonathan Littells

Les bienveillantes
Klaus Theweleit
The Jewish Twins
Monsieur Coutard, are there any rules in lmmaking? Non, Monsieur le
directeur, there arent, the cameraman Raoul Coutard says in response to
the director Jerzy in Jean-Luc Goddards Passion (1980)one of the rst of
a series of Goddard lms that breaks practically every rule in lm and rede-
nes what lm can be or could have been were it not made by those loutish
rule followers who kill the art form.
1
Are there rules in literature, Mrs. Radisch? Of course, rings out the
answer from Die Zeit and the feuilletons of several other German papers, but
only for a book whose reputation, coming from the West, across the Rhine,
oppresses us; a book that has been reviewed and discussed everywhere, about
which people have made up their minds, before the German publisher has
even released it; a book that gets a quick red card; a book that proves that no
one in France, where this trash sold eight hundred thousand copies, has any
idea of those most German affairs like the mass murder of World War II and
the intentional annihilation of European Jews on the part of Nazi Germans.
A cry rings out like thunder: Nice try, Mr. Littell!
New German Critique 106, Vol. 36, No. 1, Winter 2009
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2008-019 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.
21
1. This section of the essay originally appeared as Die jdischen Zwillinge, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, February 24, 2008, lesesaal.faz.net/littell/article.php?aid=34&bl=%2
52Flittell%252Frezensionen.php.
22 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
What has the poor soul done? He lets the German policies of war and
extermination from 1941 to 1945 unfurlat 1,381 pages, a bit too liberally,
grantedthrough a rst-person narrator who appears under the name of Max
Aue, SS-Obersturmbannfhrer (lieutenant colonel).
2
He calls the whole thing
a novel and lets the German tales of murder tell themselves through the per-
spective and in the language of a high-ranking perpetrator, using the real
names of several gures from the period. From a historical perspective, he
seems well informed. The members of the SS who appear and the events that
Littell describes all existed. And yet: from the perpetrators perspective? The
possibility of empathy? Is one allowed to do that? Not here, where were
used to rules, to books written from the victims perspectives; where we have
rules that weve patiently learned to appraise and to appreciate.
The fact that Littell has researched his story well is acknowledged all
around. But an outcry rings out: The man cant write! How ghastly! Mostly
from Iris Radisch. She nds that the French critics who treat Littell far friend-
lier than she has have been taken in by the failure of the novelits huck-
sters attitude, its kitsch, its pornography, the Nazi blather.
3
Besides this, she
nds that the nocturnal plants of French academic discourse havent done
anything to come to a solution of the painful question: what did, exactly, turn
our grandfathers into murderers?practically an instance of journalistic
racism in the European Union. (They just dont understandour painful
questionsthose academic nocturnal plantsFrench! Rise into the light of
German thought!)
Radischs two pages of invective closes with the following: Why should
we, for heavens sake, nonetheless read the work of an idiot who writes ter-
ribly, is saddled with sexual perversions, and who is disposed to elitist racial
ideology and an ancient belief in destiny? Right on! For heavens sake, why
should we? The idiot! Raging Radisch has sure settled it. Her text so offends
even the smallest courtesies of writers and reviewers that one has to ask one-
self: what is so dangerous about the agony of reading in itself? When I stum-
ble across a book that itself stumbles, then I dont read fourteen hundred pages
of it: I put it down after fty pages and leave the discussion of it to some-
one else.
2. Les bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) was published in Germany as Die Wohlge sinn-
ten, trans. Hainer Kober (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2008). Hereafter cited by page number. The U.S.
edition will appear as The Kindly Ones (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
3. Iris Radisch, Am Anfang steht ein Missverstndnis, Die Zeit, February 14, 2008, www.zeit
.de/2008/08/L-Littell-Radisch.
Klaus Theweleit 23
What Were You Expecting?
A problem troubled me the entire time I read the book. From the moment I
heard the announcements for this booka Jewish author in the body of an
SS killerI knew: this was going to be awful. And I also knew: Im going to
have to read it. And it was awful. Not the rst sentence: Allow me, my fellow
men, to explain to you how it wasa gesture that I read as an appeal to Call
me Ishmael, the rst line of Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick, and that I liked.
Particularly because the author ironically takes it back in the very next sen-
tence: We are not your brothers, you will answer, we do not want to know
it. After reading this opening, one knows at the least that this author cant
belong to the ranks of the worst. But soon he plows into the Germans dirty
war in the Soviet Union, into the thirty-three thousand Jews shot by the Wehr-
macht at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev. And you dont want to read that. You
dont want to read that for exactly those reasons that Radisch lists: because
the language is so appalling, so appallingly simple: a dime-store novel, pulp
ction. Kitsch is what it amounts to, no matter how you look at it, at best a
glorication of the nobility of war la Ernst Jnger, rich with sexual fantasies,
the description of the ejaculation of those who have been hung, the involun-
tary defecation of those who have been shot; an ocean of ooze, sperm, blood,
and shit with SS men who take turns kissing a female partisan before they
hang herrevolting, macabre.
But honestly: what were you expecting? That wed get something told
in Thomas Manns detached style? Something more literarily polished? That
would have been a crime. I expected something awful and got something
awful, and I had to slog through seven hundred pages until I understood: this
works only if you write it this way, this works only in this exact style of writ-
ing, this works only in this pseudothinker style in which Dr. Max Aue (osten-
sibly) distinguishes himself from the average SS brute, all because one only
has to listen to Heinrich Himmlers October 1943 speech at Posen to under-
stand that this conglomerate of language that Littell producesand that
should and must cause the reader great paingets to the heart of the matter:
the noxious functioning of the German SS-intelligentsia as a self-proclaimed
cultural elite murdering in cold blood, their claimed role as a vanguard in
the creation of the New Man, an elite whose Nazi designs for utopia would
compete with the most primitive cyberfantasies of the worst science ction,
the cold bureaucracyin other words, alcoholism, the vulgar, the sexualized
dreams of violence that aim at dissolving the body: all of this nds its expres-
sion in the almost unbearable language of Littells book. A language that
24 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
doesnt attempt to produce a possible SS idiom but is synthesized, spanning
three poles: the precise historical research of perpetrators, the description of
psychological structures of perpetrators, as I attempted to do in Male Fanta-
sies and as can be seen in other books like Helmut Lethens Cool Conduct:
The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. This affective coldness as ana-
lyzed by Lethen as a distinguishing feature of the German-national mind of
the 1920s and 1930s appears again and again in Littells Aue, whose emotions
bubble over in his masturbatory fantasies, yet the efforts of the reader who
tries to nd the slightest surge of sympathy with one of the murdered Jews
will be in vain.
In no way is Aue turned into a hero or a kind of choirboy by Littell; on
the contrary, Littell reduces this gure again and again to the piece of lth
that Aue indeed is, and yet: this lth has streaks that typically carry other con-
notations in the German context: he thinks (a little), he loves music, especially
Bach, he would have rather become a pianist (he was too lazy), he is famil-
iar with the best vintages from all of the vineyards; he is, in many respects,
exactly what in Germany is gladly called cultivated. He has a doctor of laws;
Littell places great emphasis on providing the SS personnel in his novel with
their real academic titles: Dr. Best etc.
Why is this book so long? Littell resolved to schlep his readers through
the entire war in the East, through the camps, through all avenues of exter-
mination with a forcefulness that I have never experienced in any historical
work, Raul Hilbergs books excepted. I can understand when readers say that
they dont want to expose themselves to such a thing. This book can injure
its reader not because its writing is so poor but because it is so probing and
forceful. It occupies the reader who allows himself or herself to take it on.
Third Eye
I want to turn to a section of the novel that has hardly been discussed in any
editorial. It has to do with Aues twin sister, Una, who permanently appears
as a double in the novel: once as a lasting incestual fantasy in Aues head
after the real incest of her adolescence has nally been gruesomely ended
by her parents, and again as a grown woman, wife of the composer Berndt
x kll, a man who dislikes the Nazis and the SS, admires Arnold Schoen-
bergs music, and has contact with the conspirators of the plot of July 20, 1944.
Unaloved by Aue his entire life and yet separated from himleads Aue, in
an imagined dispute between himself and xkll, to say, I now know why
we have killed the Jews. The solution to the puzzle, in other words. And it
continues in Aues mind:
Klaus Theweleit 25
By killing the Jews, she said, we wanted to kill ourselves, to kill the Jews in
ourselves, to kill what our imaginations had made of the Jews. To kill the
well-fed bourgeois in us all, who counts his change, who chases after honor,
and who dreams of power. . . . For we never grasped that all of the traits we
ascribed to the Jewsunity, weakness, stinginess, greed, imperiousness,
and evilare, indeed, deeply German traits and that the Jews, therefore,
only exhibited these traits because they dreamed of being equal to the Ger-
mans, of being German, because they slavishly mimicked us as the epitome
of that which is beautiful and good in bourgeois life, the Golden Calf of
those who ed the severity of the desert and of the Law. Perhaps they have
only behaved as if; perhaps in the end they only took up these traits out of
courtesy, out of a kind of sympathy in order not to seem dismissive of us.
It continues in Unas speech. We, on the other hand, we Germans, have dreamed
of being Jews, of being pure, indestructible, bound to a law, different from all
the others, to be in the hand of God. At stake, in other wordsand not just at
this point in the text, eitheris the question of who Gods chosen people are, a
claim that both Jews and Germans share in Littells narrative. But there can-
not be two chosen peoples. There can be only one, the strongerthe Aryans,
Nazi Germany, us. The othersno matter how much we are fascinated by
them and envy themhave to go.
Littells book handles this affective-intellectual symbiosis of the Ger-
man with the Jewish of the twentieth century in many ways: a symbiosis
that, given the requirement of the torn physicality of the Germans in this sym-
biosis, could be solved only through violence, just as many German youths
of the pre-Nazi era could master their symbiosis with the body of their moth-
ers only through militarizing their own body, through affectively annihilating
the mothers body. Aue exhibits this exact trait in his relation to his mothers
body. Aues openly perceived hate toward his mother exists above all because
she ejected him from his one truly happy symbiosis, that with his twin sister
in the womb, all because her water brokein other words, because the two
were born. This is his mothers crime. The fact that Aues only real happiness
was to be found in the shared paradise in the interior of his mothers body is
practically a theme of Littells book. Incest meant above all Aues union with
Una in his mothers body.
Take Your Seat
Una continues her dialogue in Aues ever more drunken thoughts:
Neither did Berndts friends grasp it at all. They thought that the massacre
of the Jews had no great meaning, and that through the fact that Hitler had
26 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
murdered the Jews, they could charge him with the crimeor Himmler, a
few insane murderers, even you. But theyre just as responsible for it as you
are, for they, too, are Germans, and because they, too, carried out the war
so that this Germanyand not another Germanywould win. The worst of
it is that if the Jews make it out of this alive, if Germany goes under and the
Jews survive, then they will forget what it means to be a Jew. They will
want, more than ever, to be a German.
Aue: And suddenly my hallucinations from the armory came back to me:
the Fhrer as a Jew with the prayer shawl of the rabbis and the leather cultic
object in front of a multitude of listeners, none of whom took notice of this
fact besides me.
Aue explains this ability, perhaps a burden, to see things that no one
else seesthe Fhrer as a Jew, for examplethrough the bullet wound in
the head that he received and barely survived at Stalingrad. In such moments,
Aue describes the entry wound, which he can feel with his nger, as his
third eye, the third eye of primitive man. (Gottfried Benn also dreamed of
the third eye in his essay The Construction of Personality around 1930.) A
delirium in which Aue sees Adolf Hitler as a fanatical, washed-up German,
one who attempts to copy all things Jewish; just as in the novels that again
and again focus on the real similarity between Nazi Germans and German
Jews, as well as the monstrous jealousy of these Germans of the preemi-
nence of the Jews, who attempt to appropriate the Germans themselves; the
Germans, who attempt to rob the Jews of themselves by banishing them and
killing them.
All of this has a parallel in the novel, since something similar is true of
the relation of the Nazi Germans to the Bolsheviks. Their preeminence, too,
in intellectual and organizational rigor is thematized throughout Littells
work. This nds its full expression in Aues long dispute with an imprisoned
Soviet commissara dispute that reminds one of Dostoyevskys Grand Inquis-
itor. The Soviet commissar takes the SS man to task for how his Nazis copied
every possible element of Marxism and the Soviet state, remade it, and per-
verted it. Why, he asks, have the Nazis taken revenge on the Soviets by trying
to exterminate them?
The author of the views of the third eye in the novel is, of course, more
Littell with his historical and analytic knowledge than his protagonist Aue.
A question: why arent such sections of Littells novel mentioned in discus-
sions of the book? Too heated, too dense? More of the same usual German
repressions?
Klaus Theweleit 27
Theres another twist to this discussion in Aues nal SS assignment:
Himmler orders him to investigate problems in the concentration camp net-
work and to nd a way to make better use of the workforce of deported Jews
for Albert Speers industrial war machine. When Aue arrives at the camp, he
is greeted by Commandant Globocnik: If I understand the Reichfhrers
note correctly, you must be one of those pains in the ass who wants to rescue
the Jews under the pretext that were using them as a workforce?
Aue does not contemplate the rescue of the Jews. He thinks about
increased rations for those capable of work to improve their daily work output.
He breaks down when confronted with the stupidity, the brutality, and the
greed of the leadership of the concentration camps. Inquiries were led against
Globocnik, Hss in Auschwitz, and others; relocations were demanded; and
so on in real life. We have Himmlers words from his Posen speech in our ears:
Every SS man who gains even one Reichsmark from Jewish assets will be
ruthlessly shot. As if. Mountains of les documenting just such breaches pile
up around Aue, ordered by Himmlers own investigatory commission. Virtu-
ally every one of these SS ofcers would have to have been shot according to
the rules: they had behaved like Jews; they stole, they embezzled, they took
bribes, they enriched themselves. Even Himmler himself was guilty of the
highest crime, of treason, by taking up secret peace negotiations with the
Allies in early 1945. Aue is aware of this. And on the books nal page Aue
kills his best friend, the SS man Thomas Hauser: not out of the lust to kill but
to obtain the documents of a French foreign worker that Aue knows to be in
Hausers bagpapers that Aue needs for his postwar existence in France.
The book ends like a grindhouse lm, coarse and trivial.
And yet: the qualities of the German man, which in this case are also the
qualities of the German woman, would like a bit more literary quality, please.
As the historian Ulrich Herbert, a respected academic scholar, reminds us of
the state of research: Mr. Littell doesnt add anything new to research on the
period. D, take your seat. Littell only describes the state of research, and that
of the 1960s, at that, writes Herberta claim that exceeds the bounds of
decency. Littell as a writer gets an F. More from Herbert: I nd the book bor-
ing, the characters wooden, the history overly constructed and sensationalized.
And I also have the impression that it is not suited for a serious debate about
Nazi perpetrators and Nazi crimes. Off to the garbage bin it is (hes just a lit-
erary ash in the pan, this Littell). But Im not so sure whether the structural
master race that the historian Gtz Aly would like to unconditionally chain
to the activists of 68 these days would be just as easily, perhaps even more
appropriately, found elsewhere in public Germandom today.
28 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
Whose SS Man?
German literary criticism . . . confounded by Littells novel is how the Frank-
furter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung paraphrased my criticism of the German
reaction to Les bienveillantes.
4
Some distinctions are in order here. Not all
reviewers followed Radisch in regarding Littell (a forty-year-old American
who writes in French) as a bad writer: an idiot who offers nothing new
and pushes pornographic male fantasies on his reader.
Littells Les bienveillantes is a magnicent book, even if it also is one
of the most violent in all of world literature. . . . Not for one moment does
the thought occur to someone that the author frivolously aestheticizes the
violence and horror of his work, writes Andreas Isenschmidt in the Neuer
Zricher Zeitung.
5
In the most thorough discussion of the book to date, Wolf-
gang Schneider of Deutschlandfunk has found it necessary that the reader
allows him or herself to board the train of thought of the committed killer
as he or she reads the book:
Littell ably toes the line between alienation and empathy. Max Aue belongs,
on the one hand, to the elite of the SS, but he is, on the other hand, close
enough to us to allow us a certain identication. He is surrounded by SS
men, who are either too narrow-minded or fanatical for us to identify with.
Arguments between these SS men and Aue are not infrequent, and it is here
that we inevitably nd ourselves on Aues side.
6
I felt the same way as I read Les bienveillantes.
The claim on the part of several reviews that no one could allow him-
self or herself to be thrown in with Aues lot seems like a defense reaction to
me. Littells art, his renement, stems from allowing the reader to see that a
part of Aues rationality bears a similarity to that which reigns in the lan-
guage of todays public sphere and of news reportage. One becomes ensnared
in Aues SS garbage just as one is ensnared in the coldness of news shows.
(This, by the way, is why its for the best that the news shows cant proclaim
anything forbidden.)
The signicance of this book: Littell shows that the annihilation of
the Jews can only be understood in connection with military operations,
4. This section of the essay originally appeared as Wem gehrt der SS-Mann? die tagezeitung,
February 28, 2008.
5. Andreas Isenschmidt, Ein SS-Mann bekennt, Neuer Zricher Zeitung, February 17, 2008,
www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/ein_ss-mann_bekennt_1.672450.html.
6. Wolfgang Schneider, In der Seele eines Tters, Deutschlandfunk, February 24, 2008,
www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/buechermarkt/743748.
Klaus Theweleit 29
according to Schneider. Littells rst three hundred pages may be read as the
obituary of the legend of the innocent Wehrmacht. The same three hundred
pages that many critics claimed made them nauseous and want to throw the
book in the corner. Several of those who did not give in to temptations reached
entirely different conclusions by the time they nished the book. Volker Wei-
dermann, for example, writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszei-
tung: A horror book, gruesome, kitsch, brutal, perverse, and obscene . . . I
hated this book from the rst sentence. Yet how does he end his review?
Its almost unbelievable that after all the pictures that youve seen of this
horror, after all the lms you know, all the books youve read, that after every-
thing, it is still possible to be disturbed. Jonathan Littell has succeeded at let-
ting the past sink its teeth into the reader.
7
Indeed, and poison fangs at that:
reading this book hurts.
Bettina Schulte of the Badische Zeitung had similar thoughts. This
novel, she wrote, is a monster. An unashamed impertinence. Yet turn to the
conclusion: One has to assume that Littell wrote this novel out of a sense of
obligation to the truth, in the name of the dead to whom the novel is dedicated.
Bold words. And if one wants to do justice to the Eumenides, the original bien-
veillantes, one has to take those words seriously. Quite the ip-op of opin-
ions here. It is both a stroke of genius and a piece of garbage, writes the old
warhorse Klaus Harpprecht. Not too differently from Britta Bode in the Welt
am Sonntag, he continues: Littells novel, in its exactitude and commitment
to the historical search for sources, bears the marks of an immense effort and
an energetic will to truth, and nevertheless it rings false. Harpprecht doesnt
explain his nal comment. He does add, however, that Littell does give young
readers a greater impression of the horror of the war and the annihilation of the
Jews than entire libraries and Guido Knoppized television ever will.
8
The commentary of Claude Lanzmann, editor of Le temps moderne and
the nephew of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, follows similar lines.
Every new comment Lanzmann makes takes him farther and farther from
his initial disavowal of the novel. Jorge Semprn, who championed Littells
book among the jury for the Prix Goncourt, sardonically remarked that Lanz-
mann didnt have a copyright on the Shoah. Lanzmann indirectly conrmed
7. Volker Weidermann, Das Verbrechen im Kopf, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung,
February 17, 2008, www.faz.net/s/Rub79A33397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913/Doc~EDF4C3E
6A65B64335B656147D65C13286~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html.
8. See Britta Bode, Die Stimme des Schlchters, Welt am Sonntag, February 17, 2008. Guido
Knopp is a German producer of documentaries about the Third Reich that have been criticized as
sensationalistic, as too uncritical of the Wehrmacht, or as infotainment.
30 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
Semprn when he said, The only people who can completely understand this
book are Raul Hilberg and me.
9
The only men who really understand the
Shoah, who can assess the work Littell devoted to Les bienveillantes. And now
that Hilberg is dead, to whom else are we to turn?
Most of the contributions to the Reading Room that the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung posted online show the same result: an unprecedented and
worthy innovation. Hubert Spiegel, Lorenz Jger, and Patrick Bahners put
together a list of the central questions about Littells novelIs it just another
Holocaust novel, or something entirely new? How historically accurate is Max
Aue? Was such a gure even possible in the Third Reich? Fact or Fiction? Is
the novel considerate enough of the contemporary historiography? How can
we explain the monstrous success of the novel in France? Why does art so
often sexualize National Socialism?and posed them to a panel of experts,
who answered in a casual exchange; readers could comment on the discussion
electronically. The panel consisted of, among others, Herbert, Jrg Baberowski,
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, the literary historian Frank-Rutger Hausmann,
the Germanist Helmut Kiesel, Harpprecht (alive during the period), and the
media theorist Lutz Hachmeister. The number of questions provided the oppor-
tunity for many changing perspectives on the novel.
Besides Herbert, who quickly threw away his copy of Littells book
(and never reported back), all of the panelists took advantage of the opportu-
nity to varyand correcttheir points of view on Les bienveillantes. Read-
ing the discussion, which has been active since the fall of 2006, I can see
two prevailing themes: the relation of the reviewers to France and the ques-
tion However well or poorly Les bienveillantes is written, is this literature?
Der Spiegel began the discussion early with skepticism toward France. The
country that has only managed to produce middling books for many years
has now, according to Michel Houellebecq, spawned a new and scandal-
ous international author. First came praise: The facts that Littell has spent
years reading in hundreds of books come gushing out of the memory of the
SS man Aueabout the Reich Head Security Ofce, the Einsatzgruppen
in the East, the functioning of the concentration camps, the obsessions of
Himm ler, to whose personal staff Aue belonged since 1943. Then came
criticism: The psychological transformation of the educated and well-read
academic Dr. Aue into a cold-blooded mass murderer has to strike one as
wanting, a fact that amounts to the failure of the major theme of Les bien-
9. Claude Lanzmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 28, 2006.
Klaus Theweleit 31
veillantes. According to the author of the Spiegel article, Roman Leick, the
reproducibility or understandability of Aues psychology forms the works
major theme:
Theres no doubt about the fact that Littell knows it all, but he also wants to
stuff everything that he knows into this novelwhich, by the way, weighs
more than a kilogram. His hero Aue is present at every major event of the
war . . . , seems to know everyone in the Nazi Reich, and is best friends
with collaborationist authors in France like Robert Brasillach and Lucien
Rebatet. This would make this Max Aue into an articial character, a per-
fectly unhistorical gure, according to historian Peter Schttler.
One would, in other words, blame the author of this novel of having produced
an articial character, a character who is therefore perfectly unhistorical.
Why does Leick cite such trash? Because he thinks along the same lines
when he objects, This book seems superuous in its most historically pre-
cise sections for the simple fact that it contains nothing new; one would be
better served by turning to Raul Hilberg or Saul Friedlnder. As for the more
poetic parts of the book, it all sounds so implausible, a puzzle with literary
citations, overtones, and allusions. This novelist allows himself some fun
with citations and allusions. What slander! No substance is the charge, but
for reasons that remain unknown. Leick closes his remarks: Well see if the
German publicwhich has grappled with the past more than its French
counterpartwill make a bestseller out of Les bienveillantes. For his part,
Leick would advise you mildly against it. As to whether the French public is
incomparably worse informed, I plead ignorance.
Not only Leick but also Herbert ascribed the novels success to the fact
that in France the historical connections between the Holocaust and the war
in the Soviet Union were less well known in a wider public context, to say
nothing of the ideological and cultural context of the leadership of the SS and
the security police. This is why Littells mix of a compilation of sources on the
Third Reich and speculation has had such a sensational effect in France, why
its seemed like something totally new. Simple and provincial, arent they,
those Frenchmen? They dont have a Herbert, so they needed a Littell. Harp-
precht on Aue writes, An intellectual, educated, cultivated, sensible, an aes-
thete. In all of his traits, Aue corresponds to a clich that the French could so
little detach themselves from than the British could from the romantically over-
hyped Red Baron. Heres a clich: the romanticized Kraut. That, how-
ever, is as chintzy as the SS uniforms and steel helmets that no gay cabaret in
32 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
Paris (or New York) could go without.
10
Radisch nds that the nocturnal
plants of French academic discourse havent done anything to contribute to
the solution of the painful question: what made our grandfathers into mur-
derers? Its painfulsomething those French nocturnal vegetables wouldnt
understand.
Bode: Littell is said to have searched for and found a gap in the mar-
ket, and then presented the clueless French with a horror novel about the
world war, which has now raked in millions for him. Not us! is the rallying
cry in the feuilletons of the Zeit and the Tagesspiegel; no, we Germans would
rather explain the Nazi years ourselves. As if German criticism felt itself
dispossessed by Littell, added Daniel Cohn-Benditrobbed of its hard-won
tasks of cultural hermeneutics.
As for the question Is it literature? Dirk Knipphals wrote in the taz,
The character sketches are the thing that doesnt work and what makes the
novel appear as though it lacked any center. An impression shared by many
reviewers. And? Of course the character sketch of Max Aue doesnt work
because thats not what was intended in the rst place. Littell uses his Aue to
depict as many facets of the Nazi regime, of the war, of the SS, of the extermi-
nation camps, of the cold violence, of the sexualized violence, of the bureau-
cracy as possible. He has to construct him to be multifunctional, not as a
character per se.
Functionally Homosexual
Littells answer to the question as to why he let Aue be homosexual was tell-
ing. For entirely practical reasons, he says. And not for sexual reasons. To
describe what he wanted to describe, Littell needed an aloof character, an
outsider. Whoever was involved in homosexual practices in the SS had to be
attentive at all times, had to watch what he himself was doing, what others
were doing. He had to develop an eye for everything. Beyond this, there existed
a streak of male homophilia, of homosexual practices in dozens of Nazi orga-
nizations; to depict this tension from a rst-person perspective, Littell had to
allow Aue, too, to take on these streaks. He is a homosexual for functional
narrative purposes.
For similarly narrative purposes, too, does Aue incestually love his twin
sister, Una. The theme of love for the mother becomes visible through this
obsession, through Aues fantasies that he could be Una. Aues rage at his
mother for having given birth to the two, not to mention the connection to the
10. Klaus Harpprecht, Die Zeit, February 14, 2008.
Klaus Theweleit 33
Oresteia, becomes groundable through this fact. None of these added char-
acter traits or narrative derivations are characterological; nothing in Aues
sexuality or sexualities is grounded on a psychic or individual level. Schulte
remarks, His homosexuality is a masking of the desire to be a woman.
Indeed, just as this wish is itself a masking of the wish to be violently pen-
etrated. Orgasms for Aue are deletions, blackouts of his consciousness; a
kind of death of his masculine body, the physical death (for others) stalwartly
scatters itself about.
The conglomeration SS man that Littell wants to depict and that Aue
represents behaves as though the difference between dead and living didnt
play any role for him. (Unless, that is, he had an unusual relationship to the
dead, as he does to the philologist Voss, his former conversation partner,
whom he cant forget.) Besides, Aue accepts death and killing, the interweav-
ing of sexuality and violence, without any second thoughts or scruples. Aue
is concerned only with kinds of bodies and organizations in which love
and death are martially and bureaucratically intertwined. One even thinks of
Wagner here.
Littell has extracted hundreds of personality traits from the biogra-
phies and literature on this kind of man in order to stitch them all into Aue.
The novel wouldnt have worked with an Eichmann, says Littell. Too much of a
father, too much of a bureaucrat, the contours of his personality too clear. This
strategy becomes clearer in light of the novels treatment of Hitler, who appears
only once in Les bienveillantes. And yet Hitler is omnipresent as the Fhrer in
the background. Littell has said that Hitler functioned like a pressure cooker
for the Germans, not as a specic character. Hitler bundled together the great-
est possible number of traits of the Germans and brought them to expression.
Both Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power and I in Male Fantasies treated the
gure of Hitler in this way (as did, it should be added, Joachim Fest). There is,
in other words, no person at the position of the total exertion of power, only the
total, bundled dirtbag.
This is precisely what Littell does in constructing Aue. All of the pos-
sible characteristics from the world of the SS must be pinned on him,
depending on the situation. That the novel lacks a real center because of this
fact, that it appears as nothing more than an empty series of events: well and
good. But why does a novel need to have a center? Why does a novel need
characters? Lieutenant Slothrop in Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow isnt
a character, either, but an articial gure led through an immense number of
bizarre situationsjust as Aue is led through Mittelbau/Dorato bring us
closer to the mysteries of German rocket construction.
34 German Reaction to Les bienveillantes
Not Psychologized
When Sigrid Lfer claims in Deutsche Welle that Littells book is a colos-
sal failure, she might be getting a bit ahead of herself. As a force of evil,
Aue is not described from the inside out, laments Lfer. She goes on to
blame Littell for claiming that the murder of the Jews was not a specically
German affair, for anthropologizing the murderous history, and for seeking
to remove the Germans burden as perpetrators.
11
But Littells achievement is
not to disburden the Germans but to potentially burden us all. There is a great
difference between the two.
Most of these calls for psychological characters, these furious demands
for literary quality, reveal the rather remarkable imprisonment of critics in
the novelistic aesthetic of the nineteenth century as executed from Honor
de Balzac to Mann. Max Aue is, however, not the middling hero of the his-
torical novel. He is, rather than any man with qualities, an artistic monstrosity,
stretched to the most improbable extreme. He is comprised in the claim that he
is no barbarian but forever a human being. Man himself is what is monstrous.
Translated by Timothy Nunan
11. Sigrid Lfer, Deutsche Welle, February 24, 2008.