"The Kindly Ones" by the French-American writer Jonathan Littell extends to 1400 or an infernal panorama of the Nazi genocide. So far there has been no book that an offender has made the protagonist and perspective center of a text about the Holocaust. It was read at least for the publication of the book 2006 (German, 2008) in the announcements. Whether that is true or not, The honored with the Prix Goncourt author has created the "Kindly Ones" a literary work about the Holocaust, is second to none.
novel describes the career of the fictional characters Dr. jur. Maximilian Aue - lawyer, homosexual member of the SD of the SS, most recently with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel - from its own perspective, as a kind of autobiographical narrative, which rises in large blocks of text in historical events, but always by direct contact of the reader to the narrative present is tied back. Littell sends his narrator into the midst of the scenes of war and genocide. As a member of group C of the Security Police and SD under Otto Rasch, he is part of the killing machine, who fell in Ukraine 1941/42 tens of thousands of victims. Criminal Moves into the cauldron of Stalingrad lives floodplain in response to the 6th Army at. The sober descriptions were the conditions at Stalingrad, where a ragged and starving army mostly frozen and eaten by vermin is one of the strongest passages in the book. Aue escaped badly wounded and moved to the boiler after a long convalescence to the height of his Nazi career. In the Service of the Reich leader SS Heinrich Himmler inspects and analyzes it to the world of work, concentration and extermination camps whilst operating in the tension of the complicated interests fighting between the supporters of the rapid physical destruction, and those who in the face of imminent military defeat of the labor force exploit the intended deportees.
Researched they have been released by perlentaucher.de an overall view of the reviews in early 2008 in the national profile, the largely negative tone of this meeting is immediately apparent. This was particularly critical of the realistic style and his propensity for pornographic depiction of excessive violence and fecal body functions, the lack of a specific literary work-up and the lack of plausibility of the character of the protagonist Max Aue. Whose motives and driving factors remained despite the escalating width of the text basically in the dark.
These are weighty objections to the quality of the book, which I think for the most part irrelevant. What annoys is less the sexual obsessions of the protagonists themselves - be they heterosexual, homosexual or incestuous - but rather the persistent suggestion that these things might have to do with the offense by Aue. The situation is complicated by the plausibility of the character drawing. Certainly will be disappointed, who hopes that this lit a perpetrator character and its operation is made tangible. Where the motivation is not pure careerism, it remains controversial. Aue - even an intellectual with a sensitive musical and literary education - questions the ethnic and racial theory ridiculed the rabid anti-Semite with their delusional and crude bacteriological metaphors. Nevertheless, its floodplain occupied senior posts in the destruction apparatus is not only mindless obedience, but also with the ambition to fulfill the tasks entrusted to it as possible. One may, based on the individual character are trivial. In the larger context, the contradictions, however, add in a picture that the Holocaust will not consider more complex than monolithic, but as a highly contradictory interplay of instances, skills and interests - but always - murderous consequences.
Now the history of scientific research since the Nazi years engaged in nothing more than just that 12-year total events make in its ramifications and Zerfaltungen transparent. And "The Kindly Ones" is saturated to the brim with the historical knowledge and this historiographical discourses. There should be no releases of the Nazi research that Littell is unknown. The precise detail of the book is researched to death. This applies not only to those events, but also explicitly outlines approaches to research, explanatory models and biography. Larger space, for example, Otto Ohlendorf, SS-group leader and commander of the task force dedicated to D, or even Adolf Eichmann. Very present example, the perpetrator mentality Research in the footsteps of Christopher Browning: The self-pity of those who carry out mass shootings every day and go over mountains of corpses. How very difficult but the task we have to meet. Present is out of Michael Wildt described, aspiring, career-oriented, Objectivity unifying ideology, extremely young generation, has recruited from the Reich Security Main Office the leadership corps. The list could go on, the work of the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF), over the almost impenetrable undergrowth organization of the Nazi state to the economic exploitation interests of the SS economic empire of the later war years. Littell has with the "Kindly Ones" a kind of expansive and meticulously crafted prose historical research.
This literary works as text and recovery is interesting. The problem is that "The Kindly Ones" almost beyond range, which has already amassed the science as a status quo of knowledge. To maintain a proper law as literature, the text would produce an added value where it orders only scientific discourses, models and perspectives, and known role prose narrative and groups - one might ask with good reason. And yet out of the text-mad monstrous plan of the Nazis, all Jews to kill the German access area, in a way in mind, which extends at least in prominent passages in their suggestive power of the description arsenal of scientific texts. One example is the Posen speech by Heinrich Himmler, those infamous lectures in which he expresses the murder of Jews in unusual candor and directness and Argue about the crimes as a historical necessity. Here it is possible Littell well to intensify the nervous atmosphere, was held in October 1943 these words are: The conscious production of complicity and complicity should present the Gauleiter and SS officers give to understand that all bridges Previous demolished and that a defeat had to be synonymous with the end of everyone of those present, whose signature would be now to see the genocide crimes.
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