The Kindly Ones
Ratings7
Average rating4.3
Fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in graphic, disturbingly precise detail from the dark and disturbing point of view of the executioner rather than the victim. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad, at Auschwitz and Cracow; he visits occupied Paris and lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself.
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I'm not rating this because I only got to p. 73. I'm not tough enough to read this book, although I would like to be able to. The narrator, Dr. Aue, is a fascinating character who has enough self awareness to describe his getting involved with the Nazis as being drawn in by the Devil, but who also deceives himself about his ability to cope with the atrocities he has committed. However, I can't cope with reading in harrowing detail about the atrocities, so I will leave this book for others to review.
It is a horrifying book, written beautifully.
Of course, you say, it is the story of an SS officer who happens to find himself in all the most violent areas under German occupation, seeing and often participating in some of worst aspects of the holocaust. Of course it is horrifying. But that is not all, it is also a horrifying character who is morally repugnant most of the time, but then sympathetic just long enough for us to become repelled by our own sympathy for him. The work drifts seamlessly and thus frighteningly from intellectual journeys into contemporary debates over race and ethnicity, to the depths of the scatological, psychotic, and incestuous.
I am impressed with the research and I recognize relatively recent scholarship on the Third Reich in this work. It is not repetitive in showing off its knowledge, but the author seems to have enjoyed exploring the background of a whole range of issues from the war in this work of fiction. Only in a section towards the end does the author seem to realize that he has slipped too far from his story towards a sort of historian narrator. He sometimes has his character correct himself when he notices it.
