The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It Begins and Ends in Bad Politics

It is possible for human beings to justify all behaviour, no matter how irrational and cruel. Because this is so, some philosophers justify their view that moral norms must lie outside of human control, that there must be a God who knows what good behaviour is. This justification is also irrational and frequently just as cruel.

As for example when the philosophers and theologians of Nazism preached radical anti-Semitism based on universal genetic imperatives of tribal competition. Inhumanity, therefore, is what human beings are good at. As one of Littell's characters has it, "... there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity." This from a man whose job it was to kill wounded German soldiers who were of no further usefulness.

Nevertheless, irrationality and cruelty have to be arrived at incrementally. One's political and legal culture cannot be radically altered too suddenly lest irrationality and cruelty become obvious and rejected as such. It takes time to create new, not to say contradictory, social attitudes. War is a tried and true method for cultural change. War is preceded by exclusionary politics to prepare the collective psyche. War then has its own inevitable agenda of escalating brutality. The aftermath of war requires its own victims. These are supplied by another sort of exclusionary politics. The definition of justice, a reliable barometer of social norms, invariably changes to accommodate the times. Littell has Adolph Eichmann summarise the situation: "...politics change people."

The Kindly Ones is a fictional exploration of the process of radical cultural and political change in Germany from the 1930's to the 1950's. The protagonist and narrator, Max Aue, is a gay SS officer. This irony is compounded by the fact that he is a lawyer and classically educated into a culture of civility and reflective empathy. He writes like a German Vassily Grossman: not to defend but to merely describe his actions and motivations. Slipping slowly from unconcern to acceptance to assimilation to diseased monster, Max isn't German or inherently psychotic or evil; he is Everyman.

It is as Everyman that Max plays a role in the Final Solution for the Judaism of Eastern Europe - in fomenting 'retribution' of Jews by Poles and Ukrainians, in the Einzatsgruppen, whose job it was to murder all Jews found in Russian territory conquered by the Wehrmacht, and in the preparation and supply of victims for the death camps. The scenes depicted are well rehearsed in many other books on the Holicaust.

Littell's take is innovative only because it is created from the point of view of the murderers, capturing their experiences and mental states as the war is prepared for, progresses, and ends. What they see is the terror of their own lives in the dystopia they have created. Meditating briefly on Auschwitz, Max muses, "Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?" The camps are the source of a new German culture: "a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations."

Max knows he is participating in a war like none before, "... when the State is democratized —then all of a sudden war becomes total and terrible ..." Only modern democracy is capable of the atrocities of war on a scale which would not have been tolerated in any other form of government. The democratic state has powers of coercion over its own citizens that could never be claimed by any monarch.

Democracy also possesses the cultural force necessary to turn evil into good through purely social sanctions. The murderer of wounded soldiers, for example, "...killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities?"

Judging by the evidence of the 20th century, democracy uses its powers more frequently and with less cause than any other form of government. Democracy inhibits conscience and promotes evil just as effectively as the alternatives. In fact by legitimatising greed for reputation and ambition for power, democracy provides a welcoming framework for their development. This is one of the principle messages of the book. A message as relevant in the age of Trump and Putin as it was in the age of Hitler and Stalin. There may be no Cosmic Organizer but there should be at least a few resistors who can stand against the flow of insanity that pops up from time to time in democracies. As Max knows, "The past is never over."

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