Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Sources of Illustrations
- Series Editors' Preface
- Introduction: “Having Your Nazi Cake and Eating it”
- 1 Nazi Noir: Hardboiled Masculinity and Fascist Sensibility from Ambler and Greene to Philip Kerr
- 2 The Fascist Corpus in the Age of Holocaust Remembrance: Robert Harris's Fatherland and Ian McEwan‘s Black Dogs
- 3 ‘Fascism’ as Excess and Abjection: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones
- 4 The Good German: The Stauffenberg Plot and its Discontents
- 5 ‘Operation Kino’: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as Meta-cinematic Farce
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘Fascism’ as Excess and Abjection: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Sources of Illustrations
- Series Editors' Preface
- Introduction: “Having Your Nazi Cake and Eating it”
- 1 Nazi Noir: Hardboiled Masculinity and Fascist Sensibility from Ambler and Greene to Philip Kerr
- 2 The Fascist Corpus in the Age of Holocaust Remembrance: Robert Harris's Fatherland and Ian McEwan‘s Black Dogs
- 3 ‘Fascism’ as Excess and Abjection: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones
- 4 The Good German: The Stauffenberg Plot and its Discontents
- 5 ‘Operation Kino’: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as Meta-cinematic Farce
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Jonathan Littell's epic novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones, 2006) consists of the memoirs of the fictitious Franco-German SS-Obersturmgruppenführer Dr. jur. Maximilien Aue. It focuses on his deployment as an SD intelligence officer on the Eastern Front, in the Caucasus, at Stalingrad, with the mobile Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine, and at Auschwitz. A Zelig figure of the war in Europe, he meets various historic and imagined characters, talks to French collaborators in occupied Paris, survives the siege of Berlin and an encounter with bands of Nazi Werewolves (roaming teenage guerrilla fighters), before he vanishes into anonymity in the chaos of the early postwar months. His memoirs relay in graphic detail persecution, murder and genocide, war crimes, battle scenes and sexual encounters. Interlaced with these events are revelations about his incestuous relationship with his twin sister Una, many passive homosexual experiences, and (possibly) his murder of his parents. After the war, Aue leads a quiet existence as a family man and director of a lace manufactory in the North of France.
The Kindly Ones was short-listed for six French literary prizes and garnered the two most prestigious ones, Le Prix Goncourt and Le Prix du roman de l'Académie française. It won praise from filmmaker Claude Lanzman and historian Pierre Nora; the Spanish Holocaust survivor and novelist Jorge Semprun endorsed it with superlatives. Yet there was no shortage of reviewers who denounced the novel as kitsch, pornographic, and exploitative in its attitude towards war and Holocaust.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Our NazisRepresentations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film, pp. 93 - 124Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013