Approaching the Holocaust from the Other Side.

Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Approaching the Holocaust from the Other Side. Bystanders and Perpetrators in Rachels Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

Supervisor: Dr. Phillippe Codde May 2011

Paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels – Nederlands” by Marieke Bentein

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Acknowledgements I could not have written this master dissertation without the help and support of several people and I want to thank all of them for helping me to realise this project. I especially want to express my gratitude to my promoter, Prof. Dr. Philippe Codde, who has been supportive of me from the onset and helped me to improve my thesis with his constructive remarks. I also want to address my acknowledgements to my parents for giving me the chance to study and for their emotional support throughout these four years. Thanks also to my friends, for listening to me and providing me with distressing coffee breaks and other welcome leisure time. I particularly want to thank the Chiro, for giving me enough positive energy every single weekend to go on for another week. I also want to thank Annelies Keysabyl for proofreading my thesis and for simply being there.

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................4 2. The Limits of Representation .................................................................................................6 3. Understanding the Perpetrator ..............................................................................................13 4. Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room.........................................................................................18 4.1 Seiffert’s Background as a Motivation for Writing? ......................................................20 4.1.1 A Double Identity ....................................................................................................20 4.1.2 A Third Generation Member ...................................................................................25 4.2 The Generational Influence ............................................................................................27 4.2.1 Working through Feelings of Guilt .........................................................................28 4.2.1.1 Helmut ..............................................................................................................28 4.2.1.2 Lore...................................................................................................................29 4.2.1.3 Micha ................................................................................................................31 4.2.1.4 A Redemptive "ovel..........................................................................................34 4.2.2 The Uncertainty of Knowledge ...............................................................................35 4.2.2.1 Helmut ..............................................................................................................36 4.2.2.2 Lore...................................................................................................................39 4.2.2.3 Micha ................................................................................................................42 4.3 Creating Distance ...........................................................................................................43 5. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones ......................................................................................46 5.1 Reception ........................................................................................................................46 5.2 Jonathan Littell’s Background........................................................................................48 5.3 The Holocaust Through the Eyes of Maximilian Aue....................................................49 5.3.1 Epistemological Limitations to Holocaust Representation .....................................49 5.3.2 Ethical Limitations to Holocaust Representation ....................................................59 5.4 Against a Redemptive Reading ......................................................................................69 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................73 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................75

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Approaching the Holocaust from the Other Side: Bystanders and Perpetrators in Rachels Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

1. Introduction More than half a century after the Holocaust, numerous publications on those horrifying crimes against humanity still appear regularly. Ever since the first years following the Second World War, victim testimonies have been of major importance. Holocaust novels almost solely focused on the Jewish victim identity and were equally focalised through the victims’ minds. Much of this ethical reticence – a refusal or inability to enter the perpetrator’s mind – may have been inspired by Claude Lanzmann’s famous strictures against “the obscenity of understanding” (1995) the Shoah. Since the early 1990s, however, novelists boldly dare to approach the Holocaust from the other side. Think for example of Jonathan Safran Foer, a third generation victim author who explored his survivor legacy in his debut novel Everything is Illuminated (2002). This narrative was not just important as a third generation novel, but also very much because it addressed the difficult notion of what Primo Levi coined the “gray zone” (1989: 42). He explained that victims were not always solely victims, but were sometimes forced into a perpetrating position. This shift from victims to perpetrators is even more clearly illustrated in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2001), and Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienviellantes (2006; The Kindly Ones, 2009). This paper will focus on those two novels – one written by a British-German author, the other by a Jewish-American novelist – to explore the dramatic shift in perspective that characterises some of the more exciting contemporary Holocaust novels. Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room presents the stories of three ordinary Germans whose lives have all been influenced, in different ways, by the Second World War. Helmut is unable to fight for his country because of a physical disability; Lore needs to look after her siblings after the war because her Nazi parents were sent off to punishment camps; and

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Michael, a contemporary German, starts investigating his grandfather’s Nazi past. Thus, Seiffert, herself of German origin, calls for empathy for the German victims, but in the meantime she also addresses the issue of guilt, especially as it is experienced from a thirdgeneration perspective. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones ups the ante even further when he gives a voice to a genuine perpetrator, Max Aue, a high-ranking Nazi officer. His first person narration takes us from Poland, to Ukraine, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, and finally to the last days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Littell introduces a Nazi monster who nevertheless – and quite problematically – manages to arouse some kind of sympathy in the readers. I will start by presenting the often debated problem of Holocaust and consequently offer an overview of the attempts that have been made at understanding the perpetrators. I will then examine how The Dark Room and The Kindly Ones answer to these discussions in different manners and to what extent they function as an antidote to the traditional victimfocussed approaches.

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2. The Limits of Representation The Dark Room and The Kindly Ones are very different in terms of representing the Holocaust. While Seiffert chooses an indirect approach, Littell confronts us with a dazzling detailed account. These different means of rendering the Holocaust are to be situated in a larger and long standing discussion about how the Holocaust can or should be represented. The Shoah is both historically and morally an “event at the limits” (Friedländer 1992: 3). It was an atrocity in human history without any comparable precedents and its magnitude keeps on puzzling contemporary researchers. While many critics have argued that the Holocaust cannot be represented, an impressive number of works on the Holocaust have appeared nonetheless and new work keeps appearing every day. Thomas Trezise, in an essay considering the unspeakability of the Holocaust, correctly indicates that the question is “not whether but how it [the Holocaust] should be represented” (2001:6, original emphasis). Many scholars have looked into this problem of representation. In the discussion on Holocaust depiction, we can distinguish between epistemological and ethical limitations. If we consider the first limitation, Dori Laub’s statement that the Holocaust was “an event without a witness” (Laub 2004: 65) immediately comes to mind. Laub argues that there are no witnesses to the Holocaust because “[n]ot only, in effect did the Nazis to exterminate the physical witnesses of their crime; but the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims” (65). Laub goes on to explain the latter part of his argument: [I]t was inconceivable that any historical insider could remove herself sufficiently from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain a fully lucid, unaffected witness, that is, to be sufficiently detached from the inside so as to stay entirely outside of the trapping roles, and the consequent identities, either of the victim or of the executioner. No observer could remain untainted (…). [I]t was also the very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” (Laub 2004: 66, original emphasis)

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We should, however, not perceive Dori Laub as totally pessimistic about the possibility of bearing witness. He is very much engaged in deriving testimonies from Holocaust survivors, but he is drawing our attention to the problems that surround witnessing. In “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle” (2004), he presents us with his reflections on the process of testimony. I will not go any further into this, as I will be dealing with perpetrator perspectives rather than with victim perspectives and Laub focuses especially on survivors. It is, however, important to remember that Laub pointed out that the perpetrator is also affected by “the trapping roles” (66) and can thus neither be a witness, even if we leave aside the fact that the Nazis were essentially trying to conceal the evidence of their crimes. There is a third category besides the victims and the perpetrators, which is that of the bystanders. But the bystanders cannot either provide us with complete knowledge because they simply never had a full picture of what was happening, or they simply did not want to know. The problematic status of the perpetrator –or the bystander- as a witness will be dealt with in the discussion of both The Dark Room and The Kindly Ones. There is thus clearly an epistemological limit to representing the Holocaust. The victims cannot function as witnesses, nor can perpetrators or the bystanders. This lack of knowledge might be partially solved by turning to fiction. Ruth Franklin states that “[w]e need literature about the Holocaust not only because testimony is inevitably incomplete, but because of what literature uniquely offers: an imaginative access to past events, together with new and different ways of understanding them that are unavailable to strictly factual forms of writing” (Franklin 2011: 13). This statement, however, has evoked negative responses from many scholars. This leads us to the second, ethical, limitation of representing the Holocaust. There are different sides to this limitation. First of all, many scholars consider whether we can use any genre to write about the Holocaust, or whether there are boundaries that should not be crossed. In this respect, we will consider Berel Lang, who is notorious for denouncing any fictional account of the Shoah. Secondly, there can be ethical limitations on the project of 7

understanding victim and perpetrator experiences. For this question, we will turn to Claude Lanzmann and his notion of the “obscenity of understanding” (1995: 200), which entails a refusal of understanding the perpetrator. To this refusal, we can connect the taboo surrounding the representation of the victimization of Germany. I will, however, not discuss this topic in the current section, as it will be dealt with in the part on Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room. Finally, there is also a discussion whether or not the Holocaust should be represented as a unique event. For this last point, I will discuss Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory. Many debates about the representation of the Holocaust from an ethical point of view depart from Adorno's famous aphorism that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Ruth Franklin observes that his maxim has often been misquoted and she also notes that the argument has been used by many critics in their battle against artistic translations of the Holocaust (2011: 2). Berel Lang, for example, is one of them. Although he stresses that the Holocaust can be represented, he believes that the possible discourse are clearly limited. He states that “[c]laims that the Holocaust was ‘indescribable’ or ‘ineffable’ have been common; often such claims are themselves figures of speech” (2000: 5) and that “[w]e hear it [the Holocaust] referred to as unspeakable, and we usually hear afterward a fairly detailed description of what is unspeakable, that description intended, of course, to prove that the designation was warranted” (18). As I just mentioned, we should, however, not put forward Lang as a critic who believes that the Holocaust can be represented in any type of discourse. While he correctly states that utterances about the unspeakable nature of the Holocaust are to be taken figuratively and that Auschwitz can be represented, he goes against any imaginative, fictional account of this event. He “privileges the historical over the aesthetic discourse” (11); in representing the Holocaust, “[h]istory has the last word” (39). He defends the notion of “nonrepresential representation” (13), a “representation of the events that occurred without mediation but also without bringing the events themselves once again to life” (13). There 8

should thus be no mediation, no human imagination before the facts are rendered; only the most literal rendering of the facts is allowed. Lang is here defending historical discourses and speaking out against imaginative discourses such as the ones we find in novels. He argues against the latter discourse because “the ‘facts’ […] might otherwise have spoken for themselves, and […] do not depend on the author’s voice for their existence” (69). In Lang’s defence of a factual discourse, we already notice how epistemological and ethical aspects are inevitably tied up in the discussion of representing the Holocaust (see also Friedländer 1992: 9). For Lang, it is ethically unacceptable to narrativize the facts. In his discussion, he is implicitly and explicitly (Lang 2000: 41) addressing Hayden White’s notion of emplotment. White states that differences in narratives, in discourses are to be found in different “modes of emplotment” (1992: 40). He states that any representation of facts in a narrative is inevitably emplotted, meaning that as soon as we start talking about facts, we construct a story. This story can be for example a figurative narrative, but a historical narrative is no less a story; the facts are no less emplotted in a literal account than in an imaginative account. According to White, there is no problem in using the latter to represent the Holocaust, because “unless a historical story is presented as a literal representation of a real event, we cannot criticize it as being either true or untrue to the facts” (40). There are thus clearly oppositional perspectives on whether or not we can translate the Holocaust into imaginative accounts. There are of course also points of view that seek a middle-ground position. Ruth Franklin, who stresses that we need imaginative accounts, brings to mind Elie Wiesel, who said that we should “stop insulting the dead” (Wiesel, quoted in Franklin 2011: 5) by presenting fictional representations of the Holocaust. She does not, however, explain that Wiesel is only talking about strict representations. In his foreword to Daniel Stern’s Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die a novel that tells the story of two Holocaust survivors- Wiesel repeated again that “Auschwitz denies art and places itself beyond language” (1994, x). He applauded Stern’s book nonetheless, because it “does not take place there [in Auschwitz], but here” (x). With this 9

statement, he refers to the fact that Stern is only dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust and does not try to access the universe of the concentration camps. So although Wiesel at first sight states that no fictional accounts of the Holocaust are acceptable, he actually argues that you can write literature about the Holocaust, as long as you keep the Holocaust itself at a distance. A similar idea is uttered by W.G. Sebald, one of the most influential German writers of Holocaust fiction: “I don’t think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. It’s like the head of the Medusa: you carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it, you’d be petrified.” (Sebald, quoted in Franklin 2011: 185). We will further on see that while Rachel Seiffert clearly keeps a distance in her novel, Jonathan Littell seems to do exactly the opposite. The second ethical limitation – after the one on representation – concerns our understanding of victim and perpetrator experiences. Franklin points to the difference between the dominant academic approach and the dominant popular approach. While the first discourse will denote the Holocaust as “basically knowable”, the second will describe it as “mystical” and “not knowable” (2011:4). This last approach thus sets a limit to a contemporary understanding. While there are thus epistemological limits with respect to victims -we cannot understand because we lack the knowledge-, there are ethical limits with respect to perpetrators -we should not understand. Erin McGlothlin also explains this double limitation in her work on second generation Holocaust literature by referring to an idea of Dan Bar-On, from his book The Indescribable and the Undiscussable: Reconstructing Human Discourse After Trauma (1999). She says that “both poles of the experience of violence resist incorporation into conventional discourse: the trauma of the victim on account of its indescribability, and the violation and brutality of the perpetrator by virtue of its undiscussability” (McGlothlin 2006: 6). As I am focussing on the latter pole of experience, I will not elaborate on the victim experience. As has been said, Claude Lanzmann’s notion of the “obscenity of understanding” (1995: 200) is important in the discussion about the 10

representation of the perpetrator experience. For Lanzmann, “[t]here is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” (Lanzmann 1995: 204). He is not interested in the experience of the perpetrator, in attempts at explanation because it “would become obscene to try, precisely, to bridge the gap [between their life, their childhood and their identity as a perpetrator]” (1995: 212-213). Dominick LaCapra critically approaches Lanzmann’s refusal of understanding, stating that he replaces a Bilderverbot by a “Warumverbot” (LaCapra 1998: 100). LaCapra correctly points out that we should be able to pose the why question: “A great deal –perhaps everything- depends not on whether one poses the why question but on how and why one poses it” (1998: 103). He argues that we should not pose the why question with the expectation that we will reach complete understanding (103), but that we should not refuse to pose the question either (109). According to LaCapra, there is an additional possible approach to the why question; “[t]his approach requires the active recognition that any account representation, narrative, understanding, explanation, form of knowledge- is constitutively limited, notably when it addresses certain phenomena” (107). He situates Lanzmann in this approach rather than in the approach that completely refuses attempts at understanding.1 So we should in fact understand the obscenity of understanding as the obscenity of total understanding. We can pose the why question as long as we are aware that we cannot reach fully satisfying answers. I believe this is the correct way to go about Holocaust understanding and consequently about representation. This approach is a shared feature of both novels that I will be discussing, even though they arrive at this conclusion following very different paths. As a final remark on the problems surrounding Holocaust representation, I want to touch upon the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Both in academic and in popular discourses, the 1

He quotes Lanzmann to prove that we can indeed align Lanzmann with this approach: One must know and see, and one must see and know. Indissolubly. If you go to Auschwitz without knowing anything about Auschwitz and the history of this camp, you will not see anything, you will understand nothing. Similarly, if you know without having been, you will not understand anything either. There must therefore be a conjunction of the two. This is why the problem of places or sites is capital. It is not an idealist film that I made, not a film with grand metaphysical and theological reflections on why all this happened to the Jews, why one killed them. It’s a film on the ground level, a film of topography, of geography. (Lanzmann, quoted in LaCapra 1998: 108)

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Holocaust is often emphasised as a unique event in human history. Saul Friedländer states that the Holocaust is an “event at the limits” (1992: 2) because “it is the most radical form of genocide encountered in history” (3). The problem is not so much that the Holocaust is perceived as a unique event - because it is, and we should not lose sight of that-, but that its unique nature would disable any comparisons to other traumatic instances because recalling other traumas would reduce the capacity of remembering the Holocaust. In his recent book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) Michael Rothberg, however, has accurately pointed out that we should not look at memory as a competition -which privileges the remembrance of one trauma over another-, but as being multidirectional: “Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory –as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources- I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and as borrowing; as productive and not privative” (2009: 3). In terms of representation, this means that we should be allowed to draw parallels to other traumas or violent events in history.

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3. Understanding the Perpetrator Despite Lanzmann’s argument about the obscenity understanding, numerous attempts at understanding perpetrators have been made. Many of these explorations have by now reached a mainstream public. I will discuss Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil” (1963), Christopher R. Browning’s concept of the “ordinary men” (1992), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s notorious ideas on “Hitler’s willing executioners” (1996), Robert J. Lifton’s research on Nazi doctors and the well known Milgram Experiment. As a literary detour, I will also outline Richard Crownshaw’s ideas on the ethical possibilities of the figure of the perpetrator in novels. One of the most quoted ideas relating to the Nazi perpetrators is evidently Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” (1963). She first introduced the notion in Eichmann in Jerusalem : a report on the banality of evil (1963). In this book, Arendt reports on Adolf Eichmann’s trials and concludes that Eichmann was not at all an anti-Semitic psychopath, but was essentially characterized by a great ordinariness. In this work, she does not really give a clear definition of her notion of the banality of evil, but she does so in a later essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture”: I spoke of “the banality of evil” and meant with this […] the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness. […] However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic. […] [Evil] can spread over the whole world like a fungus and lay waste precisely because it is not rooted anywhere. … It was the most banal motives, not especially wicked ones (like sadism or the wish to humiliate or the will to power) which made Eichmann such a frightful evil-doer. (Arendt 1971: 417) Arendt thus deconstructs the image of the demonized perpetrator. She is not trying to excuse Eichmann for his crimes, but she emphasises that we need to be aware that we could all become Eichmanns under a totalitarian regime. Although her analysis has met with much

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resistance at first, almost all scholars have by now accepted her argument that the Nazi perpetrators were frighteningly normal (Novick 2000: 137). Christopher R. Browning introduces a similar idea in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). It is interesting to quote a passage where he explains a potential objection to his study, because it addresses some of the limits of understanding that I have just discussed: Another possible objection to this kind of study concerns the degree of empathy for the perpetrators that is inherent in trying to understand them. Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policeman in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader -both were human- if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving. (Browning 1992: xix-xx, emphasis mine) Browning thus explicitly states that he wants to move beyond the idea that it is obscene to understand. In his study, he wants to explore and try to understand the actions of a reserve police battalion that had to liquidate Jewish communities and ghettos in Poland. His conclusion was that all these perpetrators were in fact “ordinary men” (1992). There quickly appeared an alternative to Browning’s work. In Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust (1996), Daniel J. Golhagen presents a different narrative, emphasising especially that the Germans were not reluctant to become killers. In a presentation on his book, Goldhagen summarises his assertions and states that “in their willingness to kill, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were like other mass killers” (1996: 1). He makes three arguments. First of all, he asserts that “Hitler’s and the Nazis’ eliminationist, indeed exterminationist, antisemitism was but a variation on the pre-existing dominant cultural theme” (1). He does, however, also emphasise that this anti-Semitism is to be looked upon in a historical and cultural context and that “[i]t has nothing to do with some immutable German national character” (2). Secondly, he argues that “[t]he German

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perpetrators, namely those who themselves killed Jews or helped to kill them, willingly did so because they shared a Hitlerian view of Jews and therefore believed the extermination to be just and necessary” (1). Finally, he boldly pleads that “the vast majority –not all, but the vast majority- of ordinary Germans during the Nazi period were prepared to kill Jews” (2). Golhagen is here making bold statements and makes the Holocaust into a purely German business. While his ideas were received well at first, most scholars now disapprove of his analysis. Robert Jay Lifton is also important with regard to the exploration of the Nazi perpetrators. In his work The "azi Doctors (1986), he first and foremost looks for an answer to how the Nazi doctors rationalized what they did, but he indicates that we can transfer this to other Nazi perpetrators. He wants to “understand more about how Nazi doctors — and "azis in general — came to do what they did” (Lifon 1986: 4, emphasis mine). In his introduction, it becomes clear that many people had the same prejudices about his study as Browning has outlined: “Their argument was that Nazi evil should merely be recognized and isolated rather than make it an object of study, one should simply condemn it. Psychological study in particular, it was feared, ran the risk of replacing condemnation with ‘insight’” (Lifton 1986: xi). He reacted by saying that “[t]o avoid probing the sources of that evil seemed to me, in the end, a refusal to call forth our capacity to engage and combat it. Such avoidance contains not only fear of contagion but an assumption that Nazi or any other evil has no relationship whatsoever to the rest of us — to more general human capacities.” (xi-xii). Essential in Lifton’s analysis of Nazi doctors is the concept of “doubling” (Lifton 1986: 416), which is “the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self” (416). Lifton emphasises that doubling entails the choice for evil, because Nazi doctors –and nonmedical Auschwitz personnel (424)- could transfer their conscious to their “Auschwitz self” (420) and could therefore avoid feelings of guilt. Nazis thus had a double conscious. On the one hand, they had a conscious that fit their personal self for whom killing 15

was simply wrong. On the other hand, the conscious of their Auschwitz self saw the killing as a task that had to be performed. For the doctors especially, Lifton argues that they entered a “healing-killing paradox” (429). This was a paradox that resulted from their doubled self. The Auschwitz self managed to maintain some sense of morality through the principle of “humane killing” (432). Nazi doctors could convince themselves that they were for example controlling typhus by “sending typhus patients or potential carriers to the gas chambers” (432). I will return upon this morality within the Nazi ideology in my discussion of The Kindly Ones. A final exploration of the perpetrator’s mind is to be found in Stanley Milgram’s experiment on the “obedience to authority” (Milgram 1974), better known as the Milgram Experiment. Milgram called for participants for his experiment by stating that he wanted to research the consequence of punishment in the process of learning. The participants were divided into tutors and students. This division, however, was only a show as the students were always actors who knew about the true nature of the experiment. They were told that the so called student had to learn a list of word pairings by heart. The ‘tutor’ consequently had to question his ‘student’ partner, distributing electrical shocks that gradually increased in strength when mistakes were made. The electrical shocks were obviously not real and the ‘student’ actor only pretended to be in pain. Milgram performed different versions of this experiment and the results showed that a disturbingly high number of participants were willing to distribute highly painful shocks to the ‘student’, especially when a supervisor – acting as the figure of authority- reminded them that they had to continue the experiment. With this controversial experiment, Milgram has demonstrated how easily we can put our conscience aside in obeying an authorative figure. He conducted this experiment to gain a better insight in the obedience to authority in general, but argues that his result can be applied to Nazi perpetrators (1974: xii), because “[t]he essence of obedience consist in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions” (xii). 16

All these scholarly approaches try to shed some light on the figure of the perpetrator. Next to these theoretical approaches, we should also devote some attention to the academic approaches to Holocaust literature. Richard Crownshaw remarks upon a shift in memory studies. While Holocaust literature tended to entail an over-identification with the victims and therefore a universalization of the victim figure, novels now start to approach the Holocaust from the other side. Crownshaw argues that a “strategic identification with perpetrators” (2011) might function as a antidote to this “tendency to over-identify with the victim/witness” (2011). Crownshaw is, however, aware that this identification with the perpetrator’s perspective can become a “universalized memorative gesture” (2011) as well, simply reproducing “another set of unmediated identifications, leaving both victim and perpetrator unexamined” (2011, original emphasis). This paper will explore how The Dark Room and The Kindly Ones fit in this discussion.

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4. Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room Die dunkle Kammer ist eine Epochenbilanz von unten, Erinnerungsliteratur, die vor Augen führt, was auf den Familienfotos der Großeltern nicht zu sehen ist: wie das Menschsein mit dem Schuldigwerden zusammenhängt, die Trauer mit der Erbitterung, das Misstrauen mit der Angst. Diese wache Erzählerin erlaubt sich ein Mitleiden, aber keine Mitleidsdramaturgie, Verunsicherung, aber keine Verharmlosung. Vor allem macht sie uns klar, dass Totschweigen ein Tätigkeitswort ist. (Finger 2011)

In The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert cautiously creates a narrative for those people ‘from the other side’ who have been denied a voice so often. The novel consists of three separate novellas that each explore the impact of the Second World War on three ordinary Germans. None of the characters were directly connected to the war but all are nonetheless deeply affected by it. The first story is that of Helmut, a young German who cannot fight for his country during the Second World War because his right arm is physically disabled. Instead, he joins the photography shop of Gladigau, who teaches him the art of photography. Helmut captures life in Berlin through his lens but he is unable to interpret correctly what he sees. At the end of the war all Germans who are still able to fight are called for a last battle and Helmut finally gets his chance to defend his country. Although it is clear to the reader that they are fighting a lost battle, Helmut declares this to be the “best time of his life” (Seiffert 2002: 60). The second story is set immediately after the war and it deals with Lore, a young girl who needs to look after her siblings when her Nazi parents are sent off to prison camps. Her mother told the children to go to their grandmother in Hamburg. It is, however, very hard to travel across Germany because the country has been divided into zones and it is illegal to cross the different districts without papers. Having no other alternative, the children embark on this dangerous journey with very little money and without any means of transportation. During their travels they meet Thomas, who helps them and guides them to Hamburg. The final story tells us about Michael -or Micha, as his wife calls him-, a young man living in contemporary Germany. After discovering that his grandfather was a member of the Waffen-

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SS, he goes on a quest for knowledge. His search takes him to Belarus, where he meets Kolesnik, an old man who tells him everything he knows about the German invaders and who eventually confesses his own complicity in the murder of the Jews in the village. This collection of novellas recounting the Second World War from the German side has been received positively, in Great Britain as well as in Germany. It has been nominated for several awards, including the Man/Booker and Guardian First Book awards (France 2004). Garan Holcombe called it an “ambitious work, poignant and subtle” (2004) and acknowledges that Seifferts novel “finds that in the vast moral morass of 20th century ideology, no-one can emerge entirely without shame” (2004). The German critics responded equally positively to her exploration of questions of guilt and responsibility, as can be seen in the epigraph by Evelyn Finger. The positive reactions suggest that it is no longer a taboo to write about German victimization. This taboo, however, still seems to influence Seiffert’s writing as her novel consistently keeps a distance to the events of the Second World War. I will discuss this further on. For the sake of completeness, we should, however, also mention that there have been negative reactions as well, for example by Martin Chalmers, a British critic, who insisted that no new insight is being offered and that Seiffert uses “Nazism simply as decor” (2001). He calls her book “lifeless” (Chalmers 2001) and says that “nothing is revealed” (Chalmers 2001). However, this response seems to be the exception and Chalmers is overlooking the value of revealing nothing. Because, as Finger stated, one of the qualities of The Dark Room is its refusal to answers the questions it evokes: “Rachel Seiffert stellt ihre Fragen weder, um sie mit Schutzbehauptungen, noch um sie mit Schuldzuweisungen zu beantworten, sondern um anzudeuten, wie schwer es ist, ohne Antworten leben zu müssen“ (2011).

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4.1 Seiffert’s Background as a Motivation for Writing? 4.1.1 A Double Identity Although the value of the authorial intention has often been questioned, it appears that Holocaust novels are a separate category. Froma I. Zeitlin draws attention to Seiffert’s mixed identity as a motivation for writing her novel (2006: 218). I will explore how her German identity prompted her to represent the German victimhood, while her British identity complicates her goal because it lies at the origins of her shame of being German. While her introduction of German characters –as being part of the perpetrating nation- breaks with the traditional victim-focussed discourse, her difficult emotional connection prevents her from breaking with the dominant approach which grants readers an easy position. She is struggling with her legacy and seeks for a sense of redemption. I will argue further on that the novel has a redemptive quality. Seiffert was born in Oxford in 1971 to a German mother and an Australian father. She grew up in Great Britain and was bullied there at school for being a Nazi (Zeitlin 2006: 218). This would very much shape her sense of identity: “as a child I had a vague feeling that being German was bad. Being a German meant being a Nazi, meant being evil” (Seiffert, quoted in Holcombe 2004). So Seiffert on the one hand grew up with the Anglo-Saxon image of the stereotypical evil Nazi, but on the other hand, she also became familiar with narratives of German suffering: “I think in common with many Germans or people with German families, I grew up with stories like Lore’s, or hearing about the bombing in the cities which Helmut experiences” (Seiffert, quoted in Zeitlin 2006: 218). This paradoxal and insecure position is evident if we look at The Dark Room. While Seiffert bravely tackles German victimhood, her careful approach of the subject, as reflected in the indirect style, very much reflects that she is ashamed of being German. I will elaborate on Seiffert’s indirect style further on.

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It is remarkable that Seiffert’s image of German identity differs to a great extent from that of other Germans today. Bodo Mörhäuser explained that the different generations of Germans after the Second World War all have different attitudes:

The first generation wanted to be silent about Auschwitz because Auschwitz had hurt their pride. The second generation wanted to talk about Auschwitz because it explained their shame of being Germans. The third generation does not accept Auschwitz as the centre of a moral code, and insists that they are proud to be Germans. Each new generation has a clear distinction about the taboos of the preceding ones and digs them out. (Mörshäuser 1992: 114 quoted in Castles 2000:159)

Stephen Castles, who uses this quote in his research on racism in contemporary Germany, explains this quote further. He remarks that the first generation remains silent to hide its complicity, the second generation – the 1968-generation - breaks the silence and is ashamed of being a German and that finally the third generations questions “the orthodoxy of many of its parents and teachers” and “reassert[s] a German nationalism based on achievement and ability, even if this means a reinterpretation of the past” (Castles 2000: 159). For this generation, “being ‘normal’ means either suppressing the past or reinterpreting it as something no longer shameful” (159). This perceived attitude of contemporary Germans –i.e. the third generation- certainly does differ with what Seiffert said. She is not at all proud to be a German. Her different attitude appears to be a consequence of her double identity, of living as a German in Great Britain; of being a descendent of a perpetrating nation living among the Allies. We should also note that the image presented by Mörshäuser and Castles is not representative of the different generations within Seiffert’s novel either. The problems of different generations are especially thematized in the third novella, where it seems that the second generation does not want to talk about the past, while the third generation is ashamed and angry. I will come back to the concept of generation later on. Seiffert’s motivation for writing seems strongly connected to her contradictory position. She feels guilty for being a German, but at the same time, she wants to talk about the 21

German suffering, which she knows via stories that her family has told her. However, the issue of the representation of German victimhood is not solely connected with Seiffert’s double identity. German suffering simply is not an easy subject to represent, as it is interwoven with a problematic history. We should credit Seiffert for her brave attempt to break through this tabooed representation. We have slowly become aware that we should no longer look at individuals of a nation as embodying a stereotype. Indeed, just as not all Americans are obese, not all Germans are Nazis. It is thus unjust to deny Germans a voice because they are inhabitants of a perpetrating nation. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner, in their Victims and Perpetrators: 1933-1945 : (Re)presenting the Past in Post-unification Culture rightly point out that “[a] binary understanding of the roles of victims and perpetrators as a schematized understanding of national histories prove inadequate for vast segments of Europe’s population in light of the complexity of individual experiences” (2006: 9). Because of this awareness, the victimization discourse of Germans is nowadays increasingly acceptable –if it is presented with an awareness of Germany’s role as a perpetrator (which has not always been the case). To write about German victimhood has long been unacceptable mainly because this was associated with right-wing politics, whereby German refugees were weighed against the murdered Jews (Assman 2006a: 190). Aleida Assman explains that this is why “this rhetoric has indeed become a taboo” (190). Besides the association with revisionism, narratives of German victimhood have also been blocked by the members of the second generation, who were not willing to listen to the sufferings of their parents, but who tried to pin all guilt on them (192). The stories have, however, been kept alive in different generations of German families (189). It seems that they are being heard again, and Assman states that the “reorientation of memory goes hand in hand with the shift from second to third generation” (193). Helmut Schmitz points out another important factor for this shift. He states that W.G. Sebald’s lectures Luftkrieg and Literatur in 1997 were of major importance (2007:7). In those 22

lectures, Sebald stated that “post-war German literature had failed to inscribe the experience of the air war into collective memory” (2007:7). The lectures finally started the spread of the notion of German suffering. There is, however, some discussion about the importance of these speeches and their truthfulness. Novels on the air raids on Germany had already been written (Vees-Gulani 2006: 337) and Sebald’s lecture are said to be “confused, unbalanced, and contradictory” (Vees-Gulani 2006: 343). Yet even if the lectures are indeed not so central to this shift, we should still look at them as indications of the changing mentality in Germany. Suzanne Vees-Gulani, after a fierce criticism on the lectures, still concludes that they are important because they underline the “dominant concerns” (2006: 35). Schmitz further observes that the topic of wartime suffering has been absent because of the long-lasting tension between public and private memory, stating that “while public memory is dominated by images of Nazi crimes, private and family memory predominantly communicate experiences of suffering, hardship and heroism” (2007: 4). Assman and Schmitz are evidently not the only ones to point out this shift in attention. Brad Prager also observes that novelist and historians no longer solely look at “the attempted elimination of European Jewry” (2005: 75), but now also look at the “horror of mass bombings” (75). While Prager does not situate this memory of suffering in the familial realm, Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner highlight this characteristic by contrasting collective memory and private memory. Along the same lines as Schmitz, they state that “collective memory prioritizes the Holocaust and NS crimes, [while] the private remembering of families focuses on suffering of family members in the war” (Pfister and Skinner 2006: 19). Similar to Assman, we can say that the private memory slowly gained importance within the third generation and that this allowed for a narrative of German suffering. The third generation is thus trying to discover its identity via its family history. This search is a difficult balance between feelings of shame and anger on the one hand and an attempt at understanding on the other hand, as we will clearly see in the third novella 23

in The Dark Room. Some will still claim that Germany is trying to deny its guilt by focussing on its victimhood, but Assman correctly points out that “it would be wrong to interpret any reference to suffering as a strategy to avoid, or even to deny, guilt” (196), because “[i]t is not a question of either/ or; of this memory of German guilt over that memory of German suffering” (198). This recalls Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory. As explained above, memory should not be a competition; we can remember and commemorate the German victims without privileging those victims over the Jewish victims and equally without denying the German guilt. So the generations of Germans born after the Holocaust can now address German suffering, but they should still explore its legacy of guilt. Or, as Ruth Franklin puts it: “[t]he second generation certainly has a responsibility to try to understand the crimes of its parents, but it is not guilty of them” (Franklin 2011: 205). Although the Holocaust is virtually absent in The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert does not ignore the national memory of guilt, which is notably present in Michael’s narrative. I will come back to this further on. Along the same lines as the attention given to German suffering, Seiffert also nuances the notion that people had to be convinced anti-Semites to support their country’s policy. Zeitlin also comments on this feature of The Dark Room: “There is no need for characters to profess a heartfelt ideological commitment to Nazi goals that justifies a Goldhagen-like indictment of a pervasively radical antisemitism” (2006: 216). She illustrates this by referring to Helmut as well as to Helmut’s parents. Helmut desperately wants to fight for his country, but certainly not because he is a convinced anti-Semite. Anti- Semitism is not even hinted at in this novella. It is his physical disability that seems to be at the origins of his patriotism. This is the very reason why he is not approved for military service and it explains his craving for defending his country. He wants to be part of it, like any other German male. Zeitlin describes it as “a desire to affirm an identity he cannot fully claim” (216). This may also be an explanation as to why his patriotism and his belief in victory never end. He has constructed 24

his own kind of ideology and sticks to that image, even when it becomes clear that Germany will lose the war: “He speaks the Führer’s rhetoric through the train doors and windows; fate and bravery and the glory of the Götterdämmerung, string alongside the refugees. Some people spit, some curse or cry, others agree, still others join in” (61). This is also why his part in the laughable defence of Berlin’s last days is described as “the best time of his life” (60). He is finally able to act towards his imagined identity. While Helmut’s story might be labelled as exceptional, the story of his parents seems to reflect upon a more general phenomenon. They join the Nazi party, but this changes little to their lives. Seiffert describes the events in one single sentence, like any other ordinary event: “Helmut’s parents join the Party; the Führer joins the family portraits on the wall above the sofa” (Seiffert 2002: 17). No reason is given; it is presented as the normal course of life. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones will present an equally nuanced image of anti-Semitism and its importance as a motivation to join the Nazi Party via the character of Max Aue. I will discuss this in great detail further on.

4.1.2 A Third Generation Member Seiffert is undoubtedly a member of the third generation after the Holocaust. The concept of generations and of inherited trauma is not a new one, or a least not on the victim side. Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust, which appeared in 1979, was of major importance for this concept. She “set out to find a group of people who, like [her], were possessed by a history they had never lived” (Epstein 1979: 5). Her book made the world aware of a distinct group that had a particular relationship to the Holocaust. This group consisted of children of survivors, who inherited trauma from their parents. Dina Wardi has also worked with this group of survivor children and she has shown that “they [must] fill an enormous emotional void [...] [and] also construct the continuation of the entire family history by themselves, and thus create a hidden connection with the objects that perished in the Holocaust” (Wardi 1992:

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30). She therefore calls them “memorial candles” (30). By now this group is widely known as the “second generation” and it has become common knowledge that the traumas of previous generations can rub off on following generations. Marianne Hirsch pointed out, however, that not only the offspring of victims, but also the descendants of perpetrators are affected by trauma (Hirsch 2008: 105). This feeling is very much reflected in Seiffert’s quote that has been previously mentioned: “as a child I had a vague feeling that being German was bad. Being a German meant being a Nazi, meant being evil” (Seiffert, quoted in Holcombe 2004). As a member of the third generation she can no longer simply be called traumatized, but she still has a apparent obsession with the Second World War: “if you’re German or if you’re Jewish, you can’t get away from that century. And I’m German” (Seiffert, quoted in Zeitlin 2006: 218). This idea that the following generations have some kind of obsession with the past, has been phrased by several others as well. Erin McGlothlin, for example, argues that “[t]he children of the victims and perpetrators alike grew up with the simultaneous presence and absence of Holocaust memory in their everyday family lives, and thus feel profoundly stamped by its legacy” (2006: 8). So she is also expanding the notion of the second generation from a perspective of solely victim offspring to a perspective from both sides (14). Although McGlothlin is only talking about the second generation, she does include a quote by Eric Santner, who says that “legacies – or perhaps more accurately: the ghosts, the revenant objects – of the Nazi period are transmitted to the second and third generation [...]” (Santner, quoted in McGlotlin 2006: 19). Eva Hoffman –who famously designated the second generation as the “hinge generation” (2005: xv)- states that “[t]here was a historical horror between us [herself and a second generation German]; but we were distinctly not enemies. Indeed, we were looking at the horror from a similar point of view – if from opposite ends of the telescope” (109). She is thus very much acknowledging that the descendants of perpetrators are struggling with similar problems as the offspring of victims: “We have had to struggle, from our antithetical positions, with the very same past” (118). 26

Being a second or third generation member, either German or Jewish, thus seems to have a strong influence on the formation of one’s identity. Rachel Seiffert is, however, British as well as German and her double identity accounts for her “divided loyalties” (Zeitlin 2006: 218). We clearly see this reflected in her writing. As I have explained, Seiffert one the one hand looks into the question of collective guilt and a collective feeling of shame in Germany, but on the other hand, she also provides a narrative to the German victims. The notion of the third generation is especially important with regard to knowledge. I will combine this concept with Marianne Hirsch’ concept of postmemory to explore the problem of knowledge in The Dark Room further on. 4.2 The Generational Influence I have already argued that Seiffert’s membership of the third generation is part of her motivation for writing The Dark Room. The concept of generations clearly structures the novel, as it presents us with three different generations. However, the notion is also problematic to some degree when we apply it to the novel. First of all, I will consider the question whether Helmut qualifies as a first generation member. Secondly, Seiffert presents a different generational picture than what I have described earlier. While most critics point out that the second generation of perpetrator offspring breaks the silence and looks for answers, this task is here reserved for the third generation. We see this in the third novella, as Michael’s parents –the second generation- try to keep silent, while Michael himself –the third generation- is desperately searching for answers. I will first focus on how the different characters deal with their personal feelings of guilt, as guilt is an important facet for the third generation members in Germany. After the question of guilt, I will address the question of knowledge, which is problematic in all novellas.

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4.2.1 Working through Feelings of Guilt Besides being part of a motivation for writing, the notion of guilt is also an important theme in The Dark Room. We can arguably see the novel as a reflection of Seiffert’s personal feelings. Zeitlin points out that “[t]he disparity between her feelings for her family and the Nazi legacy was not, and is still not, easy for her to resolve” (2006: 218). Seiffert does indeed insert the question of German guilt into the realm of family relationships. The tension between love for your family and notions of guilt is very strongly present in the last two novellas; Lore and Micha. Jonathan Heawood observes that the three novellas “are locked together in their systematic pursuit of the essence of Nazi guilt” (2002). Even though I do not agree with the idea that Nazi guilt has an essence or that Seiffert’s approach is systematic, Heawood correctly points out that the tales form a thematic unity by shedding light –even if it is only diffused light- on how different individuals deal with questions of guilt. I will not only address this juxtaposition of family relationships and guilt, but also the possibility of redemption that is hinted at in the novel.

4.2.1.1 Helmut

In Helmut the question of guilt is not conspicuously present -- at least not in the figure of Helmut. This may be connected with his problematic status as a member of the first generation. His status is problematic because he fails to understand what is happening around him and he can thus impossibly display any feelings of guilt. We can, however, wonder if he is truly unaware of the world around him, or if he is just reluctant to confront reality. Lifton pointed out that “most Germans of the Nazi generation were incapable of confronting their guilt because its dimensions would be too overwhelming” (1986: 446). Maybe we should consider the figure of Helmut as a reflection of this statement. I will discuss this problem in greater detail in the section on knowledge.

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In general, we can say that the guilt of the first generation is not thematized. As Green puts it, “the hellish universe of the camps” is left out (2001). That does not mean, however, that Seiffert is shying away from German guilt or responsibility. The narration clearly hints at feelings of guilt: “These people speak of punishment, and bring with them a faint sense of deserving. As they pass they tell tall of emaciation and ashes, of stinking smoke and pits full of bodies” (62). While this can still be categorized as people talking about the guilt of others, The Dark Room also points at the individual responsibility of Germans. Helmut’s father for example talks about new workers in his factory: “his father tell[s] of the new workers, come to the factory from all over Europe” (25). Although this utterance is rather vague, we cannot help but connect this statement to a Holocaust context. It seems to me that this is a clear reference to concentration camps inmates that were placed in factories as cheap labour forces. This allusion underlines the collective responsibility of the Germans. Although we cannot just say that this means that Helmut’s father feels guilty, we can argue that this -the mere fact that these labour forces are mentioned- shows Seiffert’s own feeling of responsibility and complicity.

4.2.1.2 Lore

As we move to the second novella, we move further in time. While Helmut’s story depicts Germany during the Second World War, this narrative presents us with an image of post-war Germany as seen through children’s eyes. It is again difficult to pinpoint to which generation Lore and here siblings belong. While they have lived through the war, they have only done so as children and from a distance. The same could be said about Helmut, but he clearly was no longer a child and he had a greater opportunity to know what was going on. Lore and her siblings are representatives of ‘the other side’ of what Susan Robin Suleiman calls “the 1.5 generation” (2002), which consist of “child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had

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an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews” (2002: 227). So the question is: can we say that Lore or her siblings are guilty or responsible if they, just as child survivors were “too young to have an adult understanding” (Suleiman 2002: 227)? I believe we cannot, although there are some troubling scenes in this account. After her mother burned compromising family pictures and uniforms, Lore is ordered to throw away the badges that would not burn in the stove. She does so without questioning the command. Moreover, when she sees that the Party sign is still visible on a badge she has thrown into the river, she retrieves the badge and tosses it into a bush further away. So she clearly realises that those things should be hidden, although she might not fully understand. This scene does suggest a certain complicity, although her actions are triggered by loyalty to her mother and not by a desire to hide evidence. During her trip to Oma, Lore will slowly gain knowledge. Juxtaposed with this knowledge, feelings of guilt seem to arise. I will further discuss Lore’s increasing knowledge in the following section. When she arrives at her grandmother, Oma seems to understand that Lore is troubled by the idea that her father might be guilty of horrendous crimes, and she tries to comfort Lore by announcing that her father was a good man, because “[s]ome of them went too far, child, but don’t believe it was all bad” (189). Further on, she also says “Everything has changed, Lore. But your father is still a good man” (211). In the familial realm, this simply is a grandmother trying to reassure her granddaughter by using euphemisms and even covering up the truth a little. This is not an exceptional occurrence, but it becomes troubling if we look at it in the historical context; the scene then becomes an instance of Holocaust denial. Lore’s narrative ends with a certain awareness of guilt and with a hint at redemption: Alone now, she takes the full force of the wind. Lifting first one hand and then the other from the railing, standing firm, facing out to the shore. Lore looks forward to the silence at Oma’s, to Wiebke’s smiles, and Liesel’s cake. She looks forward to when there will be no more ruins, only new houses, and she won’t remember any more of how it was before. 30

She stands on her own and the wind claws her skin, tears through her clothes. Lore doesn’t look down at the water, faces the far shore ahead. She unbuttons her coat and lets the wind rip it open, pounding in her ears. She stretches her mouth wide, lets the winder rush down past her lungs and fill her with its bitter chill. Lore hears and tastes and feels only air. Her eyes are closed, seeing nothing, streaming brittle tears. (216-217) Lore wants to forget everything what has happened and hopes to be cleansed by the wind. Although this clearly is a childish hope, we should look at it as a hopeful image. She is displaying a longing to forget, but she is at the same time acknowledging what horrors lie in front of her: she is facing “the far shore ahead”. After the harsh trip and her continual stoic attitude, she now closes herself off and allows the wind to carry her away, finally crying over everything she has seen. This could be the first step to redemption.

4.2.1.3 Micha

The final novella most clearly focuses on the struggle with feelings of guilt. Michael is looking for knowledge and obsessively wants to asses to what extent his grandfather was guilty of Nazi crimes. His attitude seems to fit in with second-generation experience rather than with the position of the third generation. I already referred to Mörshäuser’s analysis, who said that while the second generation wanted to talk about the atrocities of its parents, the third generation is proud to be German. Erin McGlothlin also points out that the “guilt is more directly connected with the parents’ own refusal to admit responsibility for their complicity in the genocide of the Jews” (2006: 24). So Michael, as a grandchild of a Waffen SS member, is in fact displaying a similar mindset as Rachel Seiffert herself. Michael is the first character who explicitly wonders about guilt. We could say that there is a linear evolution in the different narratives, from ignorance to a certain acknowledgement that something is not right and finally to an explicit awareness. Whether or not this is a positive evolution remains to be seen. Michael is very clear about what he

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believes to be the collective guilt of Germany. In a conversation with Mina, his girlfriend, he fulminates against the Holocaust education in Germany: Every year it’s the fucking same. The students read survivor’s accounts. Everyone cries these ‘we didn’t do it’ tears. [...] it’s perverse [...]. They identify with the survivors, with the victims. [...] Those are the words they are taught. [...] they should cry that we did this. We did this, it wasn’t done to us. [...] we’re related. It’s still us. (288-289) In this passage, Michael is not only talking about the culpability of the Nazis, but also about the responsibility of the third generation. This statement reflects arguments by several contemporary critics. Reinhart Koselleck, a German historian, points out the importance of a national dimension in Holocaust remembrance: “By no means may we [the German people] hide behind victim groups, specifically the Jews, as if by doing so we were entitled to a Holocaust memorial as other nations on the globe” (quoted in Assmann 2010: 101). Aleida Assmann recalls what several historians and pedagogues have argued: “what is needed is a constellation of different self-critical national memories reflecting the multi-perspectival quality of the Holocaust as an exemplary case of entangled history” (2010: 101). So it seems that Michael is in fact displaying an attitude that we should applaud because he is finally facing up to the collective guilt and responsibility of the Germans. But in his insistence on guilt, Michael is unable to construct a nuanced perspective and seems to lose touch with his family. He drives his girlfriend Mina crazy because all he does is try to find out about the past of his grandfather; he is angry with his sister because she does not think that their parents have to know about what their grandfather did; he is angry at Oma for covering up and therefore will not let her see his new-born child. It is obvious to the reader that this insistence on guilt is not the answer. Michael is thus consumed by a feeling of collective guilt, but at the same time, he transfers his individual feelings of guilt to Kolesnik. Zoe Green points out that Michael “refuses to pose for a photograph with him, transferring all his guilt and fear on to the old man” (2001). Kolesnik is an easy victim; he is very explicit about his own responsibility and 32

does not feel he deserves any forgiveness: “I think there is no punishment for what I did. Not enough sadness and no punishment” (356). However, I do not completely agree with Green’s argument that Micha fully transfers his feeling of guilt to Kolesnik. The gained knowledge about Kolesnik’s past is highly problematic for Michael, and he is unable to feel any sympathy towards him because of it, but it seems to me that this complicity also creates the possibility of confessing –even if only implicitly- his own feelings of guilt to Kolesnik. A few days after Michael has refused to pose with him, he goes back and admits who his grandfather was. Kolesnik remembers him and tells Michael that his grandfather, Askan Boel, also killed Jews and Belarusians. By admitting to his kinship with this Waffen SS member, Micha is thus also acknowledging his own guilt. This third novella also ends with a hint at redemption. While Michael at first refuses his grandmother to see his newborn daughter, Dilan, he goes to her apartment after his last voyage to Belarus. Kolesnik’s wife, Elena, had telephoned him, informing him that Kolesnik had died. Michael visits Belarus one last time to honour Elena’s husband, although he is not really fond of the idea. In Belarus, Elena makes him visit an open area in the forest, where a mass grave is hidden. Here, she confronts Michael with the traces of the massacres that his grandfather and her husband were part of. She is crying, but not so much because of her husband’s crimes, but because she has lost him and misses him. It seems that Michael now starts to understand her position and connects this to his grandmother, who also misses her husband, not as a Waffen SS member, but as a loving man. Although this realisation is never stated, this is not an impossible interpretation. As already mentioned, Micha was reluctant for his grandmother to meet her granddaughter, but his attitude has changed after his last visit to Belarus. He takes Dilan to the apartment of Oma and waves at her. This image which seems to represents an attempt at forgiveness is the last paragraph of the novel:

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Dilan waves. Micha can feel her weight shifting gently against his neck. Lets himself enjoy this moment, down here with his daughter, humming and waving, steadying herself with a small hand pressed on the top of his head. - Is she there, Papa? Micha’s eyes smart. Watery. Blurred vision against the blinding sky. - Yes. Can you see? - Yes. Dilan doesn’t sound too sure, but she keeps waving, and Micha keeps his eyes on the tiny speck of movement which comes in reply. (390-391) This is a hopeful image, of the young generation looking back at the war generation, waving. We should, however, also note that this is not an entirely straightforward ending either. Micha and Dilan do go to the apartment of Oma, but the novel ends before they actually go in; the narrative stops just before we can see the reconciliation between the different generations.

4.2.1.4 A Redemptive "ovel

The Dark Room thus very strongly implies that there is no easy way to deal with guilt. An obsessive insistence on these feelings clearly does not work –as we see in the figure of Michael, but it is at the same time made clear that you should not ignore this legacy either- as is clear in the unbelievability of Helmut’s ignorance. Seiffert is offering us different possibilities, but she only juxtaposes them; she refuses to favour a certain scenario, thus showing how difficult it is to deal with feelings of guilt. Yet if we look at the entire novel, it does have a redemptive quality. Green remarks correctly that the novel “shatters prejudices about ‘evil’, suggesting that it is harder to define and attribute than you might think and perhaps impossible to atone for” (2001:15). The redemption that the novel offers is transferred to the reader, who can read this contemplation of guilt without ever entering an uneasy position. It is important, however, that the novel does not end with a clear cut cleansing, thus suggesting that contemporary Germans should not feel purged after they have

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confronted their legacy. The answer to what would be the right attitude for third generation Germans is, however, unanswered. This again adds to the refusal of answering the difficult questions that arise when considering a Holocaust legacy. Still, The Dark Room overall has a redemptive quality and this stands in strong contrast with the troubled feelings that the reader of The Kindly Ones is left with, as I will explore later on in this paper.

4.2.2 The Uncertainty of Knowledge Belonging to the third generation is a status that is not only closely tied up with a notion of guilt, but also with a lack of knowledge. Members of the third generation are in fact looking for a past that is not their own and they can therefore not simply access this past. Marianne Hirsch explored this phenomenon at length and coined it “postmemory’ (1997: 22). She did so especially for the second generation, but we can translate her concept to the third generation.

Postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. […] Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (Hirsch 1997: 22).

Hirsch evidently is not the only critic to comment on this problematic position of the second and third generation. Eva Hoffman, for example, observes that the “second generation’s difficulty [is] that it has inherited not experience, but its shadows” (2005: 66). Rachel Seiffert is trying to access her German legacy, the memories of her family that have been kept alive from generation to generation, but she is faced with a historical gap. Because of this gap, knowledge can never be certain. Hirsch points out that “even the most intimate knowledge of the past is mediated by broadly available public images and narratives” (2008: 112, original emphasis). Seiffert turns this uncertainty of knowledge into an important

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theme in her novel. This uncertainty of knowledge is, however, not only presented from the postmemory perspective, but also as some kind of condition for any approach to the past. Seiffert tries to show that no perspective can ever offer a fully comprehensive view on the war. I wanted to show that no perspective on the war is ever complete. The question how much the German people knew and how guilty they were, can in my opinion not be answered unambiguously; you are talking about a massive web of not knowing, not wanting to know, feeling but not knowing, seeing but not grasping, grasping en subsequently push away. That the answer is impossible, does of course not mean that you should no longer formulate the question. Exactly the opposite, you should keep posing it.2 (Seiffert quoted in Somers 2001: 37, my translation). I have already argued that the exploration of guilt should be connected to the problematic status of knowledge. This idea will be borne out in the following analysis of the separate novellas. Each narrative proves that witnessing is problematic; that perception not always leads to straightforward knowledge. This is an idea that will be even more clearly present in The Kindly Ones.

4.2.2.1 Helmut

As Helmut is a first generation member, we should not look at his story as a reflection on postmemory, but knowledge is nevertheless a prominent theme in this novella. Helmut’s world is very much shaped by his lack of knowledge. He is either too ignorant or reluctant to know what is happening. His camera gives him a safe distance and allows him an alternative reality, in which he does not have to wonder about what is going on. It seems implausible, however, that he does not know anything of what is happening, especially because he for

2

This quote will have sounded differently when Seiffert originaly uttered it. It is derived from a Dutch article and I have retranslated it into English. This is the original quote: ,,Ik heb willen tonen dat geen enkel perspectief op de oorlog compleet is,' zegt Seiffert met een bijna verontschuldigend lachje. ,,De vraag hoeveel het Duitse volk wist en hoe schuldig het was, is volgens mij nooit eenduidig te beantwoorden; je hebt het over een enorm complex web van niet weten, niet willen weten, voelen maar niet weten, zien maar niet beseffen, wel beseffen en vervolgens wegduwen. Dat het antwoord onmogelijk is, betekent ondertussen natuurlijk niet dat je de vraag niet meer moet formuleren. Juist omgekeerd; je moet hem blijven stellen.” (quoted in Somers 2001: 37)

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example obsessively observes timetables of trains and the emigrating population. Yet, his ignorance can be interpreted as a double metaphorical comment. One the one hand, he may represent the “Wir haben es nicht gewusst”-attitude. When first generation Germans were accused of being collectively guilty, they often replied that they did not know what was going on (Schaap 2001: 749). This reply has been looked upon as unbelievable in post-war society and Seiffert does not shy away from this allusion. This is for example strongly implied in the scene where Helmut throws away the pictures he took from a deportation of gypsies. Helmut has witnessed a chaotic scene and tries to capture what he has seen on photograph: There are trucks and uniformed men, shouting and pushing. There are a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty people, some milling, some striding, some standing still. Helmut crouches behind a low wall and begins to take pictures. [...] There are more people watching. [...] The gypsies are divided and loaded into the trucks. [...] Helmut is afraid, exhilarated. His hands sweat and shake. He clicks and winds on and clicks again, photographing as quickly as the camera will allow: not quick enough. (36- 7) Helmut is here clearly a witness to a violent situation. The narrator also alerts us to the fact that “[t]here are more people watching” (37). Helmut is thus not the only one who observes this scene. Seiffert is here acknowledging that bystanders were not always as unknowing as they said. Helmut still shows no sign of understanding and it is as if he ‘happens’ to miss every chance at explanation. After taking pictures of the deportation, Helmut goes back to Gladigau’s shop, but does not speak to Gladigau about what he has seen, he does not even develop the pictures of the scene. When he comes home at night, he cries and is furious with himself because he failed to detain the chaos of what he has seen. He is thus not angry because of what he has seen, but because he did not manage to take good pictures of the scene. When he eventually does develop the pictures, he throws them away because they are too fuzzy. In that way, the last chance at a dialogue with other spectators is destroyed. Helmut is unaware of what happens; he is an “uncomprehending witness to the world that has largely excluded him” (Zeitlin 2006: 221). The very fact that there are so many missed ‘meetings’ that could have lead to knowledge, however, makes him a metaphor for a bystander who

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wishes to remain ignorant. We keep waiting for an illuminating moment for Helmut, but it never comes. On the other hand, his uncertainty is also representative for the fact that the Holocaust is “an event without a witness” (Laub 2004: 65). As has been pointed at earlier in this paper, Dori Laub explained that there are no real witnesses to the Holocaust because “the very circumstance of being inside the event [...] made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” (66, original emphasis). This second possibility is already more far fetched because Helmut is not inside the Holocaust and not even inside the battle. But Helmut can easily be interpreted as an allegorical character all together, because he does not really come to life; his description is reduced to the essential. We could see this as a failure of Helmut as a character, but I believe it adds to Seiffert’s discrete, indirect style of approaching her legacy. As a final remark on Helmut and knowledge, I also want to point at the gap in knowledge that exists between Helmut and the reader. Zeitlin already argued in favour of this “innovative angle of vision” (2006: 221). We are captured within Helmut’s focalisation throughout the entire novella and the narrator never elaborates on what is being focalized. This does not only contribute to Helmut’s ignorant attitude, but it also allows for some dark irony. A reader with even the slightest retrospective knowledge cannot help but “take a few suggestive hints that are shadowed beneath the radar screen” (Zeitlin 2006: 221). These hints include Helmut’s preoccupation with trains and the fact that he cannot raise his right arm above his shoulder –which immediately brings to mind the Hitler salute. This knowledge gap does not only exist between Helmut and the reader, but also between the narrator and Helmut as the focalizer. The narrator’s historical awareness seems to be similar to that of the reader and this creates an almost ironic distance with the character of Helmut.

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4.2.2.2 Lore

For Lore, knowledge is equally problematic. Her ignorance, however, is different from Helmut’s. While Helmut’s lack of knowledge borders indifference, Lore’s incapacity to understand what is going on is largely due to her age –she is still a child- and to the fact that her Nazi parents try to hide the truth from her. Lore’s quest reflects a contradictory involvement with knowledge. On the one hand, her voyage slowly deprives her of her childish ignorance that was characteristic for her at the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, her growing knowledge is accompanied by a mounting awareness of how much she does not know. Her “journey is a progressive initiation into uncertainty, moral confusion and an irretrievable loss of innocence” (Zeitlin 2006: 222). Her initial ignorance is clear in her belief that the war will be won soon, even after she and her family had to flee their house: “Over soon. You will see. Months fall by and nothing changes. She does her chores, adjusts herself to the waiting, the war will be won soon. Only a matter of time” (70, original emphasis). The italics suggest that these are the comforting words of her parents and she is now merely repeating them. Her childish innocence –and ignorance- is clearly stained when her mother orders her to throw away the swastika badges. Lore does not question her mother’s command and seems to be aware that the badges should disappear completely3 -for a reason that yet is beyond her understanding. It are other people that will strengthen her feeling that it is somehow wrong to be a German, to be a Nazi child. At the farm where they hide for a while, the farmer’s son tells Lore that the Americans are going to put her mother in prison, that her “Nazi whore mother [will be] locked up” (85). It is striking that Lore displays an attitude similar to her parents; she tries to keep the knowledge that she is slowly gaining from her younger siblings. The farm boy pushed Lore down after their argument and her younger

3

As I mentioned before, she throws the badges into the river, but retrieves them when she notices that the Party sign still shows and hides them in their neighbour’s bushes. (Seiffert 2002: 77).

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brothers come to help her, inquiring afterwards why he pushed her. Lore does not tell them what the farm boy has said, but replies instead: “How should I know, Jüri, he’s just a stupid boy” (86). There is a constant struggle in Lore; she has to juxtapose the new information with the image she has of her parents. An uncanny feeling that they have done something wrong is growing inside her, but she still chooses to believe the comforting utterances of her mother. After her mother has announced that she has to leave and that Lore has to lead her siblings to Oma, Lore asks her mother: “Are you going to prison?” (87). Her mother replies that she is going to a camp and not to a prison, because a prison is “for criminals” (88). When she takes off with her brothers and sisters, none ask her about the camps, but Lore has to comfort her own mind: “The war is lost. The Americans have camps, not prisons. For people like Mutti who haven’t committed crimes” (89, original emphasis). She is here again repeating the comforting words of a parent, but we cannot help but feel that she no longer believes them herself. During their journey, ever more instances shatter Lore’s childish perception of the world. When she is looking for food in a village, she is confronted with pictures of the camps. We are presented with a description of the pictures but not with a description of Lore’s feelings. Zeitlin argues that this narrative strategy gives the story power (2006: 223). The second novella indeed never leaves the child’s perspective, “leaving us to interpret the impact of what she sees and hears in all its immediacy” (Zeitlin 2006: 223). The reader evidently knows that these are camp pictures by the description: “a man lying against a wire fence. He is wearing pyjamas with the jacket open, and Lore can see his ribs” (104). This is a similar characteristic to Helmut’s narrative, but it is more genuine. We know that Lore is trying to come to terms with what she has seen, because the narrative returns to these photographs twice. The double return signals again how she oscillates between comforting ignorance and an uncanny awareness that she is somehow the “wrong kind of German” (Green 2001). The first time the pictures are mentioned again is when Lore overhears a conversation between two young men, discussing whether or not such pictures are a “set-up” (175). Lore tells them 40

that she has seen the pictures as well and that they thought the people on them were dead. One of the men then reassures her that “[t]hey’re actors, Americans. Or some of them are dummies, models. The ones that look the most dead” (176). This is of course a strong reference to Germans who refused to take up their responsibility, but what is more interesting is how Lore deals with this false information. A while later, she sees two women looking at camp pictures in the newspaper and asks them: “Those are the American actors, arent’t they?” (202). She was looking for a comforting explanation and therefore chose to believe that the pictures are a set-up. Through the character of Lore, Seiffert thus acknowledges that many Germans chose to be ignorant. But while she is acknowledging this, she also makes the reader wonder about this mechanism by attaching it to a child. This is a very powerful strategy; we can understand that Lore holds on to the false explanations because she is a child, while we would deny any understanding if similar statements were uttered by adults. Her comforting explanation is, however, totally shattered by the two women. One of the women tells her the truth and shows pictures of Nazis, of “bad men [that] are in prison now” (203). When the women leave, Lore takes the newspaper to look at the pictures. While she only quickly looks at the camp photographs, she studies the portraits of the Nazis in great detail: “She looks closely at the clothes, the eyes, noses and jawlines. Some were Vati’s uniform, none have Vati’s face” (203). We are again not confronted with how Lore interprets this, but we can assume that Lore is now finally starting to realise just what her father, her country, has done. This becomes clear when Jüri asks Lore to describe how their father looks like, because he cannot remember. Instead of depicting their father as he is, she “describes a man […] to replace the one who has been burnt and buried and bombed” (213). It seems that Lore has decided to accept that Vati was not only a loving father figure, but also a Nazi, the wrong kind of German. I especially believe this because she does not longer cling to the comforting explanations that her peers provide. A few days before, when she asks her grandmother why her parents are in prison, Oma replies by saying: “They did nothing wrong. […] Everything 41

has changed, Lore. But your father is still a good man” (211). We could expect these utterances to come back in italics, as the comforting words that were spoken by her father or her mother. But they do not, Lore has stepped beyond her childish ignorance. This does not mean that she now fully understands everything, but she is at least prepared to look for the truth instead of comfort.

4.2.2.3 Micha

Michael, finally, is a ‘third generation perpetrator’ who tries to unravel the truth about his Nazi grandfather, but he is faced with a family unwilling to talk about this past. Because of the distance in time toward the Holocaust, Michael has the historical knowledge that Helmut and Lore lacked. This historical knowledge, however, makes Michael only more frustrated because he does not know his family history. His family “didn’t talk about the war, the Holocaust; they didn’t really talk about the past at all” (228). It is only when his grandmother casually mentions that his grandfather was Waffen SS, that Michael, an adult already, goes to the library to look for information. Micha is at first thus only a witness to documents; his access to his grandfather’s past is mediated, which is a typical position for second or third generation members. Instead of asking his grandmother for an account, he obsessively keeps returning to the university library, reading almost every book he finds on the Holocaust. It seems that he is too ashamed to tell anyone what he is doing, even his wife: “He tells Mina that he’s planning lessons for next term. He is afraid to tell her what he’s really doing. In case he finds Opa Askan in one of the books, in case he stops before he finds him. Either. Both” (237). A while after he has told Mina nonetheless, he goes to Oma to ask her some questions about Opa, but he fails to pose all his questions. Oma tells him that Opa has written her letters, but that he burnt them all when he came back. He wants to ask her why he burnt them, what they said, etc., but “Micha can’t ask Oma. He is too afraid” (256). He did ask where Opa Askan has fought. Oma told him it was a small town in Belarus and Micha sets out on a 42

journey to this town, hoping to find some clarification of his grandfather’s Nazi past. He visits a museum, hoping he will find a picture of his grandfather, but he does not. Via a museum attendant, he gets in touch with Joseph Kolesnik, a man who lived in the village during the Occupations. He hopes that Kolesnik will be able to tell him if his grandfather participated in the murder of the Jews. The old man does not remember his grandfather, but assures Micha that he has participated in the murder, because he remembers everyone who did not, because there were so few who refused. Michael thus never really receives more information than he already had. 4.3 Creating Distance Rachel Seiffert is clearly struggling with her German legacy, and we see this reflected in her careful approach of the subject. She creates a distance in her novel in different ways. First of all, the Holocaust itself is entirely left out; we are only presented with characters who are affected by the Second World War. Secondly, Seiffert only presents us with questions and juxtaposed scenarios and never gives us an answer or never even suggests that one of the presented scenarios is better than another. Thirdly, the style is indirect in a double manner. One the one hand, the story is drained of almost every historical reference. This is remarkable for a Holocaust novel, because these novels tend to have a “documentary impulse” (Zeitlin 20065: 216), which adds to the authenticity and helps to “foreground the fragmentation and randomness” of the reality (216). In Helmut’s story, for example, history is present, but merely as a background. The rise of the Third Reich is only mentioned in passing: “puberty and the Third Reich arrive” (12). As mentioned before, there are also clear hints for the readers, but these never rise above their implicit status. On the other hand, the style itself is very indirect. Garan Holocombe positively remarks on this feature: With a sparse language Seiffert builds her poetry through the accumulated rhythm of simplicity. Seiffert has described her job as a writer as ‘taking things out.’ Hers is the opposite of the inflated style that is so often deemed literary by critics and prize judges. In ‘Helmut,’ the first novella in The Dark Room, Seiffert takes on us on a 20-year 43

journey in a single sentence: ‘life between the wars is harsh: food plain, luxuries, scarce, living space small.’ This is a rare skill, and one to be cherished. (2004) Holcombe is not the only one who mentions her sparse language. Zeitlin calls it “a dispassionate, objective, even quasi-documentary style that, for the most part, precludes editorial comment or prescriptive judgements” (2006: 223). We have already touched upon the fact that we are almost never granted an insight in the emotions of the characters. Next to this, the novel also abundantly uses free indirect speech, because of which it is often unclear who is speaking. In Helmut’ s novella, the speech is especially detached. Not only is there no direct speech whatsoever, but there is also almost no reported speech. Reported speech already creates a strong sense of distance, consider for example this passage: “The officer stops and turns back, explains to Helmut loudly and slowly that his notes would be dangerous in the wrong hands, and the passengers watch the scene” (23, my emphasis). This reported speech is already distant, but the use of free indirect speech even enhances the feeling of distance: “When Papi finally speaks, it is a relief. "o more wasting time at the station, in daydreams. He is not a child now, not a girl, he needs to start earning his place in the world” (17, emphasis mine). What Papi says is here thus just reported as a part of the narration. Next to the use of these two discourses, conversation is often only hinted at through the use of verbs of communication: “Mutti persuades Papi to let their son stay at home” (13). In the other novellas, there is much more directed speech. What all novellas share, however, is that everything is narrated through a limited third person perspective. This perspective is distancing in the sense that it does not invite the reader to identify with the characters. All these distancing features, however, do not mean that Seiffert is relativizing the Holocaust; she merely keeps a respectful distance and she is not trying to underline the German suffering. The Allied bombings are present in the story of Helmut, but they do not take up a substantial part of this narrative. Her careful approach has brought forth a subtle exploration of guilt and responsibility, acknowledging that there are questions that cannot be

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answered. The Dark Room has opened up the traditional Holocaust approach in a very peaceful manner. The Kindly Ones will go one step further through the introduction of a Nazi officer and this novel will prove to be anything but a peaceful contemplation.

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5. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" (Nabokov 2000: 9) 5.1 Reception While Rachel Seiffert’s careful approach to her German legacy has met with little resistance, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones created quite a stir. This was especially so because this fictional memoir controversially presents us with Maximilien Aue, a former SS – officer who chronicles his part in the Holocaust from a first person perspective. The reception of The Kindly Ones has reached no consensus whatsoever. I will consider the reception in France, in Germany and in the United States. In France, The Kindly Ones –or rather Les Bienveillantes- has generally been received with great enthusiasm. Jérôme Garcin in Le "ouvel Observateur for example praised the novel as an extraordinarily grand debut novel : “Jamais, dans l'histoire récente de la littérature française, un débutant n'avait fait preuve d'une telle ambition dans le propos, d'une telle maestria dans l'écriture, d'une telle méticulosité dans le détail historique et d'une telle sérénité dans l'effroi” (2006). The novel has has been equally celebrated by Samuel Blumenfeld in Le Monde des Livres, by Nathalie Crom in Télérama and by other reviewers. Shortly after the novel was published, it received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and the prix Goncourt, two prestigious literary awards. The novel’s success in France is reflected not only in the positive reviews and literary prizes it received , but also in its sales: over 600,000 copies have been sold in France. A more problematic reaction was to be expected in Germany. And indeed, there is no overall favourable consensus. Iris Radisch furiously cries out in Die Zeit that this novel is “kitsch” and wonders why anyone should read “dieses Buch eines schlecht schreibenden, von sexuellen Perversionen gebeutelten, einer elitären Rasseideologie und einem antiken

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Schicksalsglauben ergebenen gebildeten Idioten” (2008). After asking this question, she sneers at the French public, at her “chers amis français“ (2008), who clearly did want to read that work of the perverse idiot who cannot write. Michael Mönninger more positively calls The Kindly Ones „ein Skandal und lesenswert“ (2006). Klaus Theweleit reflects upon the German reactions to the novel and immediately ridicules Radisch’s reaction in his article. He points out that many critics opposed the novel because of the unbelievable character sketches (2009: 32) and because Littell is supposedly unburdening the Germans of their guilt (34). Theweleit also argues that many reviewers have to admit that, although it is an awful novel to read, this novel still succeeds at “letting the past sink its teeth into the reader” (Weidermann quoted in Theweleit 2009: 29). Richard J. Golsan has examined the different responses to The Kindly Ones in the United States, and he argues that the “reception of The Kindly Ones promised to be strongly negative, with a few exceptions” (2010: 175). And indeed, there have been several negative reviews, for example by Ruth Franklin, who states that “The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject” (2009: 38-9). She feels that this is “one of the most repugnant books I have ever read” (43). In a similar term, Melvin Jules Bukiet has called it a “repulsive first novel” and “narratively empty and intellectually incoherent” (2009). There have, however, been more positive reactions as well. Samuel Moyn, for example states that “The Kindly Ones earns its praise [the praise it has received in France]” (2009: 34). Susan Robin Suleiman is equally positive and declares that she has “read it to the end with a mixture of fascination and disgust toward its narrator, and admiration for the author who created him” (2009b). The very fact that there is no consensus whatsoever in the reception of The Kindly Ones already announces its greatness. It will prove to be a novel that resists a straightforward interpretation.

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5.2 Jonathan Littell’s Background Jonathan Littell is a Jewish French American, born in New York on 10 October 1967. His double identity is not decisive for writing his novel, as was the case with Seiffert, who tried to work through her German legacy. Neither France nor the United States were perceived as traditional victim or perpetration nations during the Second World War4. His French nationality is, however, important for his language choice. Although Littell is born in New York, he wrote The Kindly Ones in French.5 We could point to his Jewishness for an interest in the Holocaust, but his novel does not at all portray the Jewish victims. Littell himself says that his motivation came from the confrontation with perpetrators in his professional life (Littell in Blumenfeld 2006). He met those while he worked in conflict zones such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya for the French humanitarian group Action Against Hunger (Riding 2006). Littell stated that a quote by George Bataille, which he discovered after writing his novel, might be a good retrospective clarification for his inspiration: “Les bourreaux n'ont pas de parole, ou alors, s'ils parlent, c'est avec la parole de l'Etat" (Bataille, quoted in Blumenfeld 2006). Littell is thus intrigued by the wall of silence that surrounds the perpetrators and wants to break that wall, realising it is almost impossible to do so. He points out the impossibility of recreating their motivations by looking at what perpetrators have said, as their narratives are essentially empty and false. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men was for Littell one of the clearest examples that historians are unable to get at the motivation of the perpetrators: “Il arrive à une liste de motivations potentielles sans pouvoir arbitrer entre elles” (Littell quoted in Blumenfeld 2006). Littell solved this historical problem by presenting us with a fictional perpetrator who offers us the truth about Nazism. Because this is what 4

I am not stating that these states were not victimized during the Second World War - as France was occupied by the Germans, which led to the instalment of the Vichy regime, and the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor-, but rather that these nations are not generally perceived as a victim or perpetrator nation (as are respectively Israel and Germany). 5 Even though Littell has a double nationality, it is peculiar that he chooses French instead of his native language, which is a much more international language than French. Sara Kippur elaborates on this matter in her article “A German Nazi’s French Recollections, as Imagined by an American: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes” (2010).

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Littell wants to offer us; a novelistic truth, but a truth nonetheless: “Je ne recherchais pas la vraisemblance, mais la vérité. Il n'y a pas de roman possible si l'on campe sur le seul registre de la vraisemblance. La vérité romanesque est d'un autre ordre que la vérité historique ou sociologique” (Littell in Blumenfeld 2006). 5.3 The Holocaust Through the Eyes of Maximilian Aue The main part of my analysis will consists of an examination of how The Kindly Ones touches upon several points in the discussion on the limits of representing the Holocaust I have outlined earlier. In light of the epistemological limits, I will address Aue’s status as a witness. For the ethical limitations, I will explain how the novel implicitly responds to the restrictions on rendering the Holocaust in different types of discourses; to the refusal to understand the perpetrator’s psyche; and to the claim that the Holocaust is a unique event. 5.3.1 Epistemological Limitations to Holocaust Representation From an epistemological point of view, Holocaust representation is very much limited because the Shoah has no true witnesses. Victims were unable to understand what was going on and their testimonies are always incomplete; bystanders did not know or did not want to know what was happening and the perpetrators were doing everything within their power to hide the evidence of their horrendous crimes. But then Maximilian Aue comes along, narrating his story in a discourse that is reminiscent of testimonial literature (Razinsky 2010: 175). This Nazi perpetrator testifies in great detail about his part in the Holocaust. He chronicles how he marched through Ukraine with the Einsatzgruppen, witnessed and participated in the Babi Yar massacre, was transferred to Stalingrad and evacuated back to Berlin after being shot in the head, how he was enlisted to Himmler’s personal staff to review the economic efficiency of the Arbeitseinsatz, looked into corruption by concentration camp staff and finally how he witnessed the final days of Berlin and afterwards escaped to France. It seems highly problematic to describe these events from a perpetrator perspective, especially 49

because this is a first person narration, which inevitably creates some sense of empathy. I will come back to this in the discussion of the limits on understanding. If we leave aside this problematic moral position, Aue appears to be the perfect –fictional- witness. Not only has he been present at about every site and event that was important during the Second World War; he is also narrating retrospectively, which gives him greater contextual and historical knowledge and which allows him a more detached perspective because of the temporal distance. Susan Rubin Suleiman even calls him a “reliable historical witness” (2009a: 5), also emphasising, however, that he is a fictional witness: “Littell’s Aue has qualities that only a fictional character can have” (5). Yet, we should consider that Dori Laub emphasises the “trapping roles” (2004: 66) and that “the very circumstance of being inside the event […] made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” (66, original emphasis). But again, Aue is a fictional character and he does seem able to escape the trapping role of perpetrator -- at least partially. He becomes an outsider in several ways. First of all, he is a spectator rather than a direct participant. His main job is to write reports, not to take part in any Aktion. Suleiman points out that this observer position creates a “small but crucial distance from what he describes” (2009a: 7). Aue describes horrifying scenes throughout the entire novel in a detached discourse and even takes the time to meditate about what he sees: Some Ukrainians took the two dead Jews by the arms and feet and threw them into the ditch; they landed with a loud splash of water, the blood streamed from their smashed heads and spurted onto the Ukrainians’ boots and green uniforms. Two men came forward with shovels and started cleaning the edge of the ditch, throwing clumps of bloody earth and whitish fragments of brain in to join the dead men. I went to look: the corpses were floating in the muddy water, some on their stomach, others on their backs with noses and beards sticking out of the water; blood was spreading out from their heads on the surface, like a fine layer of oil, but bright red; their white shirts were red too and little red trickles were flowing on their skin and in the hairs of their beards. [...] I thought about these Ukrainians: How had they gotten to this point? [...] What would they think of all this later on? (Littell 2009: 85-6, emphasis mine) This notion of observing is present throughout the entire novel. We already meet it symbolically in Toccata, the opening chapter, where Aue describes how he overlooks his lace fabric from a window in his office (Littell 2009: 8). Similarly, when Aue is present at 50

different scenes of massacre, he is clearly a spectator. Not only because he is to write reports, but also because he goes off to wander in the surrounding towns, as a tourist: “I didn’t actually have much to do in these other towns, but I was curious to visit them” (238-9). Aue’s touristic walks almost turn the scenes of atrocities into spectacle. Secondly, Aue’s homosexuality also turns him into an outsider. Homosexuality was not at all excepted in Nazi ideology –not excepted is an understatement; many homosexuals were persecuted and sent to camps. Ironically, it is exactly this feature that leads to Aue’s joining the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). When Aue is made suspicious because of his possible homosexuality, Thomas Hauser helps him to absolve the allegations against him, suggesting that he does this as a precondition to Aue joining the SD –although he denies this: “Do you really think the SD needs to resort to blackmail for its recruitment?” (73). Finally, the fact that Aue is writing retrospectively also turns him into an outsider. He is not writing during the events, which would be problematic for his position as a witness, as is emphasised by Laub: “the very circumstance of being inside the event […] made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” (2004: 66, original emphasis). His retrospective position endows him with a historical awareness, which will be important in the discussion about understanding the Holocaust and about its status as a unique event. I will return to these elements later on. Aue, one should note, is not the only one with retrospective knowledge; so is the reader. Aue therefore explicitly points out that he is aware of the reader’s knowledge: “I won’t expand any further on these visits: all these camps have been amply described in the historical literature, better than I could do” (629). Razinsky has pointed out that the large number of historical details that Aue refers to, contribute to Aue’s “testimonial authority” (2010: 183). Aue’s fictional authority is thus enhanced via history; in The Kindly Ones, “history serves fiction” (183). His retrospective position is distancing in another way – next to the creation of historical awareness. It also creates a feeling of distance in his description of the scenes he observes or went through. This is the meditating aspect I already 51

pointed at. The reflections that Aue makes in his narrative are clearly retrospective. We might argue that these meditations are just connected with his observing position, but that argument cannot stand. Consider for example the scene where Aue is forced to “finish off the wounded” and thus steps out of his role of observer and becomes an agent instead (Littell 2009: 128): To reach some of the wounded, you had to walk over bodies, it was terribly slippery, the limp white flesh rolled under my boots, bones snapped treacherously and made me stumble, I sank up to my ankles in mud and blood. It was horrible and it filled me with a rending feeling of disgust, like that night in Spain, in the outhouse with the cockroaches, I was still young, my father-in-law had treated us to a vacation in Catalonia, we were sleeping in a village, and one night I got diarrhea, I ran to the outhouse at the back of the garden, lighting my way with a pocket flashlight, and the pit, clean during the day, was swarming with giant brown cockroaches, they filled me with horror […]. (128-9) Both the description of the scene itself and of his childhood memory are clearly contemplated from a distant –retrospective- position. We could of course try to explain this as a memory that is triggered by the feeling of disgust. But this account is implausible. If this were a triggered memory, we would only be confronted with flashes of memory, only with the cockroaches in the outhouse, not with the entire contextualising story. Aue is thus both an insider of and an outsider to the Nazi system. Suleiman argues that this “structure of simultaneous belonging and distance […] defines his particular status as a perpetrator-witness” (2009a: 15). That he is at times still very much a complicit insider and heavily influenced by the trapping roles Dori Laub refers to, is evident in a scene where he describes inmates of Auschwitz, and he clearly states that he does not care for them, except as a possible workforce: I hardly looked at the Häftlinge, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. (851) Aue is thus distanced from the system in threefold way: he is an observer; a homosexual in an absolutely homophobic regime and he is narrating retrospectively. Suleiman argues that his distance towards the system not only makes him a reliable historical 52

witness, but also a moral witness. Because of his distance towards the system, Aue is able “to see it for what it is, both historically and morally” (2009a: 15). Razinsky similarly points out that Aue as a witness has an “ethical involvement of some kind” (2008: 79). What should be emphasized, is that Razinsky states it is an “ethical involvement of some kind” (79). Indeed, in the passages where Aue is displaying some sense of morality, this morality is almost always embedded in the Nazi system, despite his distance from it. Shortly before one of the very first Aktions that Aue will witness, he expresses his doubts: “I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren’t automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me” (43, emphasis mine). His doubts, however, do not so much concern the murder in general, but the murder of the “Jews of goodwill” (42). He is here referring to the fact that the Nazis have distributed posters demanding all Jews to report for forced labour and that the Jews that turn up are thus those “of goodwill” (42). There are similar examples throughout the entire novel. Let us consider one more instance. Aue is contrasted with Thomas Hauser, who represents the perfect embodiment of Nazi ideology. After having had too much to drink, Aue is fulminating about the war and the Holocaust. He is crying out that “[t]he murder of the Jews doesn’t serve any real purpose” (142). For a moment we believe that Aue will express true morality, but this illusion is immediately shattered when Aue goes on explaining that the Holocaust is a waste because “[i]t has no economic or political purpose” (142). We should not confuse this attitude with morality. He is only expressing his doubts within the system and is thus less fanatic than other Nazis, such as Thomas, who simply replies by saying “Max, […] you drink too much” (142) and urges him to keep such ideas to himself because they could get him into trouble. Aue will, however, become a moral witness later on. He is shot in Stalingrad and this experience leaves him with a hole that goes right trough his head. When Aue has recovered from his injuries, he describes how “the endless blackness of the world lifted. And with the magical return of the light, I saw things more clearly” (432). This does not only refer to the 53

fact that he is slowly regaining his vision, but also to the fact that he has gained a new kind of vision. The kind of vision, as we shall see, that allows him to see the truth of the Nazi ideology. He states this again and again in the immediate aftermath of his recovery: “My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself around this hole. But the only concrete thing I could say was: I have awakened, and nothing will ever be the same again” (436). He will also denote this hole a “third eye, a pineal eye […] gifted with the power of looking at the bare face of death” (443). I will come back to this third eye in the section on reliability, because the new world as represented through Aue’s new vision does not always seem very believable. As I have previously announced, we should examine how trustworthy Aue actually is. While Suleiman argues that Aue is a “reliable historical witness” (2009a: 5), his reliability is rather questionable. This questionability is twofold. First of all, Max Aue is not really a believable character6 and secondly, he does not seem very reliable as a narrator. I do therefore not fully agree with Suleiman’s statement. She is, nonetheless, already addressing the most problematic aspect with regard to reliability– the fact that Aue has killed both his mother and her lover and has no memory of this at all- and she wonders if this does not lessen “his authority as a witness to the Holocaust” (Suleiman 2009a: 18). She does, however, not change her analysis of the novel but simply states that she still struggles with this facet (18). In fact, while Aue wants to present himself as the perfect witness, the text undermines his narrative. Liran Razinsky correctly points out that “The Kindly Ones makes a serious attempt at the documentary project, gathering the smallest details while employing a broad perspective, but the text eventually becomes a mediation on the limitations of this project” (2010: 195). Aue has been identified as a totally unbelievable character by many critics. Ruth Franklin for example states that “Aue makes no sense psychologically” (2009: 42) and Iris

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While I do not perceive this as a problematic aspect of the novel, many critics do. This is reason enough to discuss his believability. Moreover, the construction of his character is too interesting to leave undiscussed.

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Radisch argues that “Max Aue muss kein Mensch sein, den es so gegeben haben könnte“ (2008) –for completion’s sake, we should mention that this is not what she considers problematic about the novel. Richard Golsan, in an article that considers the American reception of The Kindly Ones, points out that one of the aspects of the novel that is considered problematic is “the ubiquity of the narrator and therefore the implausibility of the novel itself” (2010: 178). Maximilian Aue indeed lacks credibility. He is a homosexual, matricidal, high placed philosophising intellectual who has been about everywhere, who does not only know many important Nazis such as Eichmann and Himmler, but also some important French collaborators and has some kind of guardian angel in the implausible figure of Thomas Hauser. His unlikeliness as a character does, however, not need to be problematic. Imaginative literature precisely allows the introduction of improbable characters. Suleiman has also argued that “Aue is hard to imagine as an actual person; he is even hard to imagine as a ‘believable’ character in realist fiction” (2009a: 16). I believe Aue simply cannot be a realistic -concealing- Nazi if the novel wants to make his testimony at least look truthful. As mentioned already, Jonathan Littell himself has pointed out that truth is more important that plausibility. But then what truth does Aue represent? Golsan brings to mind that some scholars see him as a “representative figure or plausible literary embodiment of Nazism” (Golsan 2010: 179). He refers for example to Samuel Moyn, who sees Max Aue as a kind of Nazi Zelig. Indeed, Moyn argues that “the novel’s true premise is […] that Aue […] stands for Nazism as a whole” (2009: 34). He proves his point by reminding us of the link that is established between his family history and Germany’s history. The novel indeed presents an interesting interweavement of these two narratives, as I will explore further on. Along the same lines, but with a slightly different perspective, Klaus Theweleit describes Aue as a “conglomeration ‘SS man’” (2009: 33). Aue is not a believable character because he has “[a]ll the possible ‘characteristics’ from the world of the SS” (33), which “Littell has extracted [from] hundreds 55

of personality traits from the biographies and literature on this kind of man” (33). These interpretations will be discussed again in light of the possible understanding that the novel portrays. While the unbelievability of Aue as a character is thus not problematic to his status as a fictional witness, his reliability as a narrator is. We have already examined the different ways in which Aue is distanced from the Nazi system and how he can be described as a reliable witness because of his double relation with the regime –as a Nazi, he automatically belongs to the system, but at the same time he portrays a critical distance. I now want to consider the reliability of his narration. From the opening page onwards, Aue wants his readers to believe that he will tell them exactly what happened: “Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened” (3). He furthermore repeatedly insists on the truthfulness of what he presents us. He does this for example after he has described an absurdly horrifying scene in Stalingrad of a soldier with his leg cut off, drinking his own blood. He ends this gruesome anecdote by telling us: “All this is real. Believe me” (407). This story already seemed implausible as Aue was narrating it, but the very fact that he emphasizes its truthfulness shows us that his discourse is (self-) deluding and makes the implausibility even greater. Implausibility is manifest in non-atrocious scenes as well. One of them is Aue’s description of Hitler as a Jew. During a speech of the Führer, Aue believes that Hitler is wearing “a large blue-and-white striped rabbi’s shawl” (467) and other Jewish religious objects. We find a similar, but grotesque, example, near the end of the novel. During the final days of the war, Aue personally meets the Führer because he is to be bestowed with the German Cross of Gold. Aue relates how his attention is caught by the nose of the Führer during the decoration ceremony and how he becomes obsessed with it and eventually, when “it was too much to take” (960), leans forward and bites Hitler’s nose. Aue is –as was to be expected- immediately seized by other officers in the room and taken to the crypt. This is a bizarre and entirely unbelievable account, but Aue assures us that, even while we may not 56

find a description of this episode in historical works, “it did take place” (961). These questionable episodes are, however, not the only reason to doubt the reliability of the narrator. He also forgets, represses or fails to register several important incidents. He forgets that Thomas has been shot in Stalingrad, fails to realise that he is the father of the twins he encounters in his mother’s house and most importantly is not aware that he has brutally killed his mother and Moreau. All these instances clearly undermine his reliability. I will argue that while some of these episodes may be interpreted as visions of a higher truth, others cannot and therefore indicate that Aue’s position as a witness is more problematic than seems at first. Laura Hodes points out that the head wound that Aue received in Stalingrad is the starting point of Aue’s unreliable narration (2011). And indeed, almost every example that I just presented –except the rather gruesome example of the soldier with his leg cut off- is to be situated after Aue was injured in Stalingrad. Hodes, however, also raises the possibility that some passages get at a deeper truth, as represented through Aue’s third eye7 -as Aue himself denotes the hole that is left in his head even after his recovery: “I had the feeling that the hole in my forehead had opened up a third eye, a pineal eye, one not turned to the sun, not capable of contemplating the blinding light of the sun, but directed at the darkness, gifted with the power of looking at the bare face of death ” (Littell 2009: 443). Immediately after his recovery and before Aue explicitly talks about this third eye, the possibility that Aue has become more than a simple observer is already raised: “slowly, the endless blackness of the world lifted. And with the magical return of the light, I saw things more clearly” (432). So the possibility is raised that

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This pineal eye is a allusion to Georges Bataille, a French philosopher whose influence clearly seeps through in the novel (Kippur 2010 , Razinsky 2008, Suleiman 2009). Bataille introduced his interpretation of the pineal eye in “The Jesuve” (1930). Benjamin Noys explains that “[t]he pineal eye is the fantasy of a blinding moment of vision at once ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ (2000: 35). Bataille is thus playing around with a certain kind of vision. I will, however, not try to fully explain Bataille’s thoughts on this matter, as this would lead us to far.

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Aue’s head wound allows him to see the truth of the Nazi ideology. We can for example apply this explanation to the scene where Aue sees Hitler as a Jew. Aue explicitly wonders if his “‘pineal eye’ was playing a trick on [him]” (467) or if the bullet “had […] truly opened a third eye, one that sees through the opacity of things” (470). Theweleit argues that this episode reflects the similarity between the Nazi Germans and German Jews, as the novel show us (26). There are indeed passages that reflect upon this, for example in Aue’s imagined discussion with his sister Una and her husband von Üxküll: “By killing the Jews”, she said, “we wanted to kill ourselves, kill the Jew within us, kill that which in us resembles the idea we have of the Jew. Kill in us the potbellied bourgeois counting his pennies, hungry for recognition and dreaming of power […]. For we’ve never understood that these qualities that we attribute to the Jews, calling them baseness, spinelessness, avarice, greed, thirst for domination, and facile malice are fundamentally German qualities, and that if the Jews show these qualities, it’s because they’ve dreamed of resembling the Germans, of being German […]. Or else maybe they were pretending, maybe they ended up adopting these qualities almost out of courtesy, out of a kind of sympathy, so as not to seem so distant […]”. (874-5) While some problematic passages can thus be justified as Aue’s visions of a deeper truth, others cannot. The most problematic aspect is of course that Aue is not aware of having killed his mother and Moreau. I believe that no matter how we look at this, this repression problematizes Aue’s position as a witness. This does not, however, lesson the value of the novel, which is not to be found in the epistemological facet, but exactly in questioning Aue’s very goal, which is to tell us “how it happened” (3). I will come back to the relevance of Aue’s repression of the murder in connection with the Oresteia references. Razinsky offers us another valuable insight with regard to Aue’s reliability as a witness. For Razinsky it are not the historical facts and dates that turn Aue into a reliable witness; he calls those “superfluous” (2010: 189). He argues that Aue’s “true witnessing […] is carried […] through forgetting” (189). In order to understand his statements correctly, we should consider the distinction between eyewitness and flesh-witness that Razinsky brings to mind: "While eyewitness accounts concern objective facts […] flesh-witness accounts have to do with the witness’ own (subjective) experience of being at the sense of action” (184). As 58

Razinsky noted, Aue embodies both modes of witnessing. I have already amply emphasised the factual accounts that Aue gives. While this accurate narrative could be reconstructed by consulting history books, Aue’s flesh-witnessing is intrinsic to Aue himself. The problematic passages are precisely where the novel diverges from historical account and, according to Razinsky, exactly these passages are valuable. The value of these passages lies in how they add to a refusal of a complete understanding of the perpetrator’s mind. I will come back to this further on. Razinsky also remarks that the distinction between facts and experience tend to disappear, even in Aue’s so called factual account. He brings to mind for example Aue’s sexualized manner of observing – as in his description of Auschwitz via “Frau Höss’ cunt” (628) and in his portrayal of the work in his lace factory, which, so he says, “runs according to a strict principle of sexual segregation” (9)- and his depiction of diarrhoea and vomiting. The latter is important because it proves that Aue is not merely an observer, but often horrified by what he sees. His subjectivity is always present in his account, as represented in the description of his bodily reactions. While The Kindly Ones thus sets out as a “documentary project” (Razinsky 2010: 195), it “eventually becomes a meditation on the limitations of this project” (195). Aue indeed tells us “how it happened” (3), but his account shifts from a factual account –that is already affected by his subjectivity- to a personal, embodied and problematic testimony of how he experienced or failed to experience what happened. 5.3.2 Ethical Limitations to Holocaust Representation From an ethical point of view, there are three elements that should be considered in relation to The Kindly Ones. First of all I will discuss how the novel answers to the limits considering the genre or type of discourse in which the Holocaust can be represented. Secondly, I will investigate if the novel portrays the Holocaust as a unique event or not. Finally, I will review how it engages with Lanzmann’s refusal to understand the perpetrator.

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If we reflect on the limits that have been set on the discourses to render the Holocaust, the most obvious feature of The Kindly Ones is evidently that it is a novel, a work of fiction. This is, however, not a boundary that is being crossed for the first time. Ruth Franklin correctly points out that “[e]very canonical work of Holocaust literature involves some graying of the line between fiction and reality” (2011:11, original emphasis). What sets this novel aside is the fact that it does not merely involve a greying of this line, but almost a juxtaposition of fiction and reality. The novel engages extremely in both factual and in fictional discourse. As mentioned above, the novel has a clear documentary impulse, as is evident in the amount of historical details. The discourse that Aue uses in these description is not at all reminiscent of the traditional euphemistic Nazi language. Robert J. Lifton, in his research on Nazi Doctors, argues that the Nazis had words to render “murder nonmurderous” (1986: 444). Aue explicitly talks about this and shows that he is well aware of the euphemistic nature of many terms that are used in the Nazi discourse8. Aue does not only reflect on the many euphemisms that were used by the Nazis, but also on the dominant use of the passive construction: “things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors” (631). Aue’s discourse is thus mostly objective, honest and detailed; it is a discourse that uncovers what Nazis tried to cover. While Lifton pointed at the euphemistic nature of Nazi language, Razinsky argues that excess and transgression were “part of the Nazi self-representations” (2008: 75). And indeed, excess and transgression are also a key part of Aue’s narrative. We are confronted with shockingly direct descriptions of violence; the text is full of explicit passages about diarrhoea, vomiting, and sexual perversion –the latter especially in the chapter “Air”9. This explicit style has been the subject of many negative reviews, but this style actually contributes to the novel’s worth. Readers of 8

This awareness is another example of Aue’s critical distance to the Nazi system which grants him historical reliability. 9 Many scholars point out that Littell is clearly indebted to Georges Bataille in his use of excess and transgression (Suleimain 2009a: 16; Grethlein 2010: 576). Razinsky, however, states that while the genre of the excess in normally connected with “a need for freedom” (2008: 73), Littell does not at all use the excess in this way.

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Holocaust novels have grown accustomed to victim narratives and many critics have argued that the countless victim narratives lead to an over-identification with and a universalization of the victim (Crownshaw 2011). We are growing too accustomed to Holocaust narratives and feel comfortable in our identification with the victim. Razinsky argues that this “has become part of dominant cultural discourse today: we are numb” (2008: 83). The excessive style in The Kindly Ones, however, prevents us from any comfortable or numb feeling. As stated above, The Kindly Ones also strongly engages in fictional discourse. The novel clearly uses intertextuality, acknowledging a certain distance to the facts that are described. Just as Aue’s character, the novel itself is portraying a position of similar belonging and distance – respectively via the factual accounts and via the use of intertextuality. The novel is a mixture of different genres, such as the historical novel, pornographic works, the literary memoir, and so forth. Littell also uses stereotypical figures of story-telling, such as the typical and somewhat comical detective duo, Weser and Clemens. The most important intertextual reference is to the Oresteia. Aue’s personal history is clearly a reflection of this well-known Aeschylus play. There are numerous literal references to this source. Thomas, for example, calls Aue his Orestes (57). I will come back to this when I consider the possibility of redemption for Aue. A second aspect to consider is how The Kindly Ones answers to the claim that the Holocaust is a unique event. I will not discuss this in great detail, but it is worth mentioning nonetheless, because it is to be expected that a Nazi will try to excuse himself by referring to other atrocities. And indeed, an example that seems to border on relativization is to be found already on the first pages of the novel. After an overwhelming analysis of the number of casualties on different fronts during the Second World War, Aue addresses the reader urging him to compare the numbers with the Vietnam War: “if you are an American, consider your

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little Vietnam adventure” (16)10. Such comparisons are, however, rare in the novel and Theweleit therefore correctly points out that Littell is not trying to “disburden the Germans but [is trying] to potentially burden us all” (2009: 24). We can find another example of this in a deeply dark humorous scene where Nazis make Jews dig their own graves, but come across mass graves of the Bolsheviks wherever they make the Jews dig. This scene reminds the reader that the Nazis were not the only ones who have engaged in mass murders. For the sense of completion, I should also mention that Debarati Sanyal describes The Kindly Ones as “a powerful illustration of what Michael Rothberg has termed “the colonial turn in Holocaust studies’” (2010: 61), claiming that “[t]he novel consistently reminds readers that Hitler situated his movement within the tradition of European imperialism” (2010: 60). I will, however, not go into this reading, because it does not really add to my analysis. Finally, we should address Lanzmann’s notion of the “obscenity of understanding” (1995: 200). Jason Burke states that “[t]he novel as a whole brilliantly shows how ‘ordinary men’ become killers” and that “The Kindly Ones reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever. Max Aue, the SS executioner, states the truth with typically brutal clarity: ‘I am a man like other men, I am a man like you’" (2009). Alan Riding similarly writes that Aue ““[a]ll in all [...]personifies Hannah Arendt’s famous notion — she applied it to Eichmann — of the ‘banality of evil’” (2006). These interpretations suggest that the novel would be exemplary of the obscene understanding that Lanzmann is fulminating against. While Maximilian Aue indeed wants his reader to understand him and wants to convince us that he is just like us, the novel shows us quite the contrary. I will argue that Aue is constructing a model reader, a reader who can understand him. Because

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Interestingly, this is not what the novel originally said. Debarati Sanyal explores how overlapping memories are represented in The Kindly Ones –or rather in Les Bienveillantes- and gives the same example to start her discussion: “si vous êtes français, considérez votre petite aventure algérienne” (Littell, quoted in Sanyal 2010: 57). Margerat-Anne Hutton states that the reference was made for “what will likely be the actual reader of Littell’s text” (2010: 12). She states that this is done so because Aue wants his readers to identify with him and therefore the translation needs to be adapted (2010: 12).

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understanding presupposes empathy, I will also discuss how empathy works in this novel. After I have explained Aue’s objective, I will demonstrate how he is constantly undermining his own discourse and how the novel therefore becomes a meditation on the impossibility to understand. The perspective of The Kindly Ones is for many critics one of the most problematic aspects of the novel. We are not just confronted with a Nazi perpetrator, but we are confronted with the narrative from that Nazi perpetrator from a first person perspective, which implies a larger degree of empathy than would be created via a third person narrator. Luc Rasson correctly points out that the reader is trapped in a “double bind” (2007: 50) with the narrator; the narrating perspective forces upon us a degree of intimacy with an authority we find morally unacceptable (50). This empathy is problematic because it makes the reader complicit. As my discussion has already shown and as Rasson argues, nothing in this novel is just black or white, nor is the empathic identification with the narrator. Sanyal argues that we enter a mode of “ ironic complicity” (2010: 48), in which we are urged to identify with the narrator and in which this identification is at the same time being undermined through irony. Wolfgang Schneider similarly claims that “Littell ably toes the line between alienation and empathy” (quoted in Theweleit 2009: 28). Both these statements acknowledge that we do identify with Maximilian Aue at least to a certain extent. While we are sceptic towards Aue’s claim that he is just like us, we cannot help but feel some sympathy towards him, especially if he is contrasted with other Nazis. When Aue sees Hauptsturmführer Turek assaulting a Jew horribly, he intervenes, crying “You’re insane! Stop that at once” (243). We are repelled by how Turek treats this Jew and we therefore strongly conceive Aue as the moral superior in this situation. Yet, it is important to note that he only stands up against the brutal conduct, not against the eventual killing. Our feeling of sympathy and empathy is thus always double. We can connect this to Aue’s above mentioned structure of belonging and distance. His morality is still very much part of the Nazi system and is therefore not straightforward. As I have 63

already argued, Aue displays a similar moral superiority –from our perspective- when he is contrasted with Thomas Hauser, who perfectly represents the Nazi ideology. There are, however, many instances that block such a feeling of sympathy toward the protagonist. First of all, and most obviously, the very fact that he is a Nazi sets us on guard. Secondly, Aue’s regression to an animal-like state in his sister’s house blocks any possible recognition. This chapter is an interlude to the Second World War narrative and is a description of how Aue is constantly masturbating and fantasising about having intercourse with his sister. Finally, and most importantly, he is not only a perpetrator in his public life, but in his private life as well. In this respect, we should not only think about the repressed murder of his mother and Moreau, but also about the crimes he committed in full consciousness. These crimes include the murder of an innocent man -because he is playing Bach while “National Socialism is collapsing” (932), the murder of Mihhaï, his lover -because he was openly flirting with him- and finally –and this is what shocks the reader most- the murder of Thomas, his best friend, so he can take his papers and flee to France. Aue commits all three murders at the end of the Second World War in a very short space of time. Once we have reached half of the novel –the point when Aue kills his mother and Moreau, Aue’s humanity slowly but clearly starts regressing. So while it appears at first that Maximilian Aue might be –as he tries to convince us of- somebody to whom the Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” (1963) might apply and somebody we might understand to a certain extent, it soon becomes clear that his evil is not banal at all and we therefore reject any identification with him. This oscillation between a tendency to identify with Aue and a total refusal to identify with him, is one of the strongest characteristics of the novel. Razinsky argues: we are numb, and showing us more suffering will only further alienate us from it, rather than create empathy […]. But Les Bienveillantes enables us to overcome this problem by forcing us to take a stand, by presenting the evil committed, and the resulting suffering, through the point-of-view of the perpetrating agent, and by negotiating a stance between identification with the perpetrator and rejection of such identification (2008: 83).

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After having acknowledged that we can feel emphatic toward Maximilian Aue up until a certain point, I will now discuss how Aue tries to lure his reader into understanding him and thus how the novel answers to the different attempts that have been made at understanding the perpetrator. Jonathan Littell –in his defense of the novelistic truth that The Kindly Ones offers- argues that the theoretical explorations of the perpetrators fail to provide us with an answer: La question du bourreau est la grande question soulevée par les historiens de la Shoah depuis quinze ans. La seule question qui reste est la motivation des bourreaux. Il me semble après avoir lu les travaux des grands chercheurs qu'ils arrivent à un mur. C'est très visible chez Christopher Browning. Il arrive à une liste de motivations potentielles sans pouvoir arbitrer entre elles. Certains mettent davantage l'accent sur l'antisémitisme, d'autres sur l'idéologie. Mais au fond, on ne sait pas. La raison est simple. L'historien travaille avec des documents, et donc avec des paroles de bourreaux qui sont une aporie. A partir de là, comment construire un discours? (Littell in Blumenfeld 2006) We can thus expect that the character of Aue will not answer to any of these explorations. The previous analysis has sufficiently made clear that Aue is indeed not at all ordinary and that his evil is anything but banal. Littell also points out that scholars try to rationalize the perpetrators’ motivation via anti-Semitism or ideology. The novel makes clear that these explanations are just as invalid as the references to ordinariness or banality. While Aue frequently questions the Nazi ideology and the murder of the Jews, he still performs his part. The novel even shows the absurdity of racial purity. This is especially clear when a Nazi delegation forms a commission to investigate whether or not a population of Bergjuden are really Jewish -because they can only be killed if they are. The absurdity of the situation is clear in the following remark: “But if these people are not racially Jewish, it may be that they present no danger. The question is a delicate one and should be studied carefully” (291). The novel is thus ironically answering to some attempts that were made at understanding the perpetrator. Similarly, Littell plays around with Lanzmann’s notion of the “obscenity of understanding” (1995). Lanzmann has fulminated against an understanding of Nazi thought, for example via an exploration of childhood experiences: 65

Because what are we supposed to do with Hitler’s childhood? Maybe we will discover that Hitler had some problems with his mother, or father, and this will permit us to engender –harmoniously, if I can say so- […] the destruction of six million people, and many others. Well this is what I call obscenity, because there is such a discrepancy, such a gap between the originary scene in Hitler’s life, and the result. (1995: 206) It seems that Littell has inserted Max Aue’s family history –his father has left them; he does not like his stepfather at all and he had an incestuous relationship with his twin sister- as an ironic reference to Lanzmann, certainly not as a starting point for excusing his later behaviour. Even R.J. Lifton’s exhaustive study cannot be implemented on Max Aue. Lifton argues that Nazi perpetrators created some kind of professional double to be able to perform their tasks. For this double, for this Nazi self, killing is not wrong but is simply following orders. This professional double is contrasted with your private self that consciously knows that it is wrong to kill another human being. In the first half of the novel, we could still argue that Aue is indeed creating a Nazi self and that he even struggles with the creation of this double. We can see this struggle for example in how he handles his reports. At first, he truthfully reports what he has witnessed and writes not just that what his superiors would want him to write. But after Thomas has advised him to take some liberty with the truth in his reports, Aue no longer reports truthfully and thus gradually moves into his self-deluding Nazi self. At a certain point, his personal self breaks through his Nazi self and this tension is something Aue clearly cannot handle: When I came back she [a Jewish woman] was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprises incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out, I was a rag doll and didn’t feel anything, and at the same time I wanted with all my heart to bend over and brush the dirt and sweat off her forehead, caress her cheek and tell her that it was going to be all right, that everything would be fine, but instead I convulsively shot a bullet into her head, which after all came down to the same thing, for her in any case if not for me, since at the thought of this senseless human waste I was filled with an immense, boundless rage, I kept shooting at her and her head exploded like a fruit, then my arm detached itself from me and went off all by itself down the ravine, shooting left and 66

right, I ran after it, waving it to wait with my other arm, but it didn’t want to, it mocked me and shot at the wounded all by itself, without me; finally, out of breath, I stopped and started to cry. (130) Aue has recognized the humanity of the Jewess and this recognition applies to his personal self, which conflicts with the context of killing. This long run-on sentence shows what a problematic instance this is for Aue. His personal self wants to help the Jewish woman, but his Nazi self intervenes and shoots her and he eventually gets to the point of some sort of nervous breakdown, shooting around compulsively. So far Lifton’s analysis –and for that matter also Browning’s and Arendt’s analysiscan be applied to the protagonist. We can, however, not apply this pattern to Aue throughout the entire novel because Aue is not only a killer in his professional life, but also in his personal life. It seems that Aue loses his personal self when he is shot in Stalingrad. His professional self, that kills people without feeling guilty, now absorbs his entire personality. After he has recovered from his head wound, he goes to visit his mother and father and kills them both. This will be the first in a series of murders –his victims being, as mentioned above, the old man playing Bach, Mikhai and Thomas- that have nothing to do with following orders. We should, however, distinguish the murder of his mother and her lover with the murder of the old man, Mikhai and Thomas. While it seems that the latter instances can be explained via a change of character, via the absorption of his personal self in his Nazi self, making killing acceptable, the first instance requires a further look. While the reader soon realises Aue has killed his mother and Maurice, Aue insists until the very end of the novel that he did not commit this horrible murder; he seems to have repressed this act. We cannot explain this via the concept of doubling, because in that case, each self is still aware of what he or she is doing; the self is divided into “two functioning wholes” (Lifton 1986: 418). This seems to be rather a case of splitting. Suleiman also acknowledges that Aue as a narrator is characterized by “dissociation or splitting, whereby one part of the psyche ‘knows’ something that another part denies” (2009: 16). 67

It is also important to remember that Aue is reporting on all these events retrospectively and that he does not admit to any feelings of guilt. This implies that Aue is in the present still entirely absorbed by his Nazi self. The lack of reference to his personal crimes –or at least to the ones he committed consciously- indicate that Aue does not feel guilty for these acts either; he excuses himself fully in his capacity of a Nazi perpetrator. He does hint at the fact that he has crossed the borders, but immediately weakens his statement, reminding us that everything is connected: “I started out within the bounds of my service an then, under the pressure of event, I finally overstepped those bounds; but everything is connected, closely, intimately connected” (24). It has by now become clear that we cannot just fit Aue in an explaining frame. There are always certain mechanisms that apply to his experience, but, at the same time, there are also instances that contradict these mechanisms. Therefore, while Aue is trying to make his reader understand him, the novel actually portrays a complete refusal to such understanding. Sanyal also points this out: “His [Aue’s] own narrative monument does not dismantle this wall [that Littell talked about in his previously mentioned quote] by offering a coherent psychological or historical account of the perpetrators’ motivation” (2010: 53). In the same passage, she also refers to the universalized victim figure with whom the reader can easily identify. Crownshaw has ventilated his hopes for the figure of the perpetrator in literature as an antidote to this universalized victim figure (2011). I believe that the character of Maximilian Aue is very much the embodiment of such an antidote and this is a very admirable achievement of Littell as a novelist. Laura Hodes, in a review of The Kindly Ones, argues convincingly that we can find a passage in the middle of the novel that features as a “synecdoche for the entire novel” (2009). She signals the passage in which Aue has bought an essay collection of Maurice Blanchot and comments on his reading of some of the essays: “I was especially charmed by an article on Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Blanchot speaks of this impossible book […] this written equivalent of the universe, mysteriously, as a work that 68

presents the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions it raises” (500, original emphases). And this is indeed how we should read The Kindly Ones, as a work that while it seems to cover the entire Nazi universe, refuses to provide us with any answers. Max Aue himself unwillingly already admits this in the very first pages of the novel: “the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink and excretion, and the search for truth” (5, emphasis mine). While he has boldly stated that he will tell us “how it happened (3), he is here in fact already diminishing the strength of his utterance, indicating that truth only exists as a search and not as a solid entity. 5.4 Against a Redemptive Reading The Kindly Ones strongly goes against popularised redemptive perpetrator stories such as Schindler’s List –Steven Spielberg’s well known adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark- and The Reader –an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser. I have already argued that Maximilian Aue should be regarded as an antidote to the universalized victim figure and this implies that his narrative will not offer any redemption for the readers. Not only does this novel refuse a redemptive reading, it also argues against redemption for Aue or for Germany. The lack of redemption for the reader functions on two levels. On the one hand, “reading this book hurts” (Theweleit 2009: 29). We are presented with the very heart of darkness of the Holocaust. Razinsky correctly states that “the choice of the perpetrator’s perspective in the novel aims at the heart of the evil of the Holocaust by enabling us to better grasp the anonymous, objectifying nature of extermination” (2008: 78). On the other hand, we are unable to distance ourselves totally from the narrator and are made complicit with an evil that refuses to be explained. Maximilian Aue is, as has been often emphasised, looking for redemption and therefore sets out his narration as an apology. There is, however, a tension between what he

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sets out to prove and his actual discourse, that is essentially delegitimizing. Rasson argues that Aue is constantly undermining his own exposition as an “ordinary man” (2007: 55). I have already sufficiently explored this claim and it is clear that this attempt will indeed not offer any redemption for Aue. Aue is, however, looking for redemption via other means as well. Jonas Grethlein accurately indicates that “Max Aue uses the Oresteia to stylize himself as a tragic hero” (2010: 567). This is an attempt that will fail, for all the reasons that have already been addressed. It is nonetheless interesting to explore this facet of the novel because, as Maarten Van Buuren argues, in the connection of the macro history of the Second World War and micro history of Aue –that follows the structure of the Oresteia- lies a very powerful exploration of guilt (2007: 43). I have already mentioned that the novel is full of references to this play even before the structural similarities become clear. In Stalingrad, Aue reads Elektra and identifies strongly with Orestes in this play because the separation of Elektra and Orestes reminds him of his own separation from Una when their mother and Moreau had discovered their incest. Pondering about the play, Aue states that “the butchery in the House of Atreus was the blood in my own house” (411), which strongly anticipates his matricide. Almost immediately before the matricide, Aue makes a comparable anticipating statement and at the same time connects his own fate to that of Germany: “As I worked, I thought: in the end, the collective problem of the Germans was the same as my own, they too were struggling to extract themselves from a painful past, to wipe the slate clean so they’d be able to begin new things. That was how they arrived at the most radical solution of them all: murder, the painful horror of murder. But was murder a solution?” (526). In this way, a triple connection is established. The Greek tragedy of Orestes, Aue’s matricide and the Endlösung all become closely interwoven. As a true Orestes then, Aue kills both his mother and Moreau representing the father figure- and is therefore chased by two detectives all over Europe, just as the furies11 pursued Orestes. As both Van Buuren and Grethlein point out, the problem is 11

At the end of the play, Athena transfers the furies into Eumenides, or literally the ‘kindly ones’.

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that Aue never admits to the deed and the tragedy therefore remains incomplete and consequently any sense of catharsis is missing. The novel, however, ends with a hint at cleansing when Aue is reflecting on the cruelty of his existence: “I felt all at once the entire weight of the past, of the pain of life and of inalterable memory, I remained alone with the dying hippopotamus, a few ostriches, and the corpses, alone with time and grief and the sorrow of remembering, the cruelty of my existence and of my death still to come. The Kindly Ones were onto me” (975). We could read this as Aue who reflects on what horrible crimes he has committed and feels he deserves some kind of punishment, that he deserves to be pursued by the furies forever. The Toccata chapter, however, blocks this reading. We know very well that Aue is not punished for what he did. He survives the war, gets to live a fairly good life as a director of a lace factory and does not feel guilty: I do not regret anything: I did my work, that’s all; as for my family problems, which I might also talk about, they concern no one but me; and for the rest, I probably did go a little far toward the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was offbalance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me, I wasn’t the only one who lost his head, admit it. (5) Aue does thus not regret what he has done. When he is talking about his complex state of mind, he emphasises explicitly that he is “not talking about remorse, or about guilt” (7). But in the same breath, he states that “[a]ll the meanness, the cowardice, the lies, the pettiness that afflict everyone will come back to haunt him [someone who has gone to war]” (7-8, emphasis mine). If he does indeed not feel guilty, then at least he is still profoundly troubled by his memories of the war: Sometime ago, my wife brought home a black cat. (…) But this was a very unpleasant cat. Whenever I tried to pet it, to show my goodwill, it would slip away to sit under the windowsill and stare at me with it yellow eyes; if I tried to pick it up and hold it, it would scratch me. At night, on the other hand, it would come and curl up in a ball on my chest, a stifling weight, and in my sleep I would dream I was being smothered beneath a heap of stones. With my memories, it’s been more or less the same. (5-6) This image of the black cat conveys a strong sense of haunting, traumatic memories. Traumatic in the sense that he is unable to enter his memories in full consciousness, but that

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they are ever present in his dreams. We can derive two things from this statement. First of all, the traumatic aspect of his memory again adds to the questionability of his reliability. Secondly, these haunting memories can be interpreted as the furies that are still pursuing him. This does, however, not imply any sense of redemption, because Aue does not try to face up with his past completely. Aue’s numerous reflections on the Greek notions of punishment also go against a redemptive reading. In such a reflection on the Greek law, he actually implicitly argues against “any legal absolution for himself or for Germany” (Hodes 2009): Crime has to do with the deed, not the will. […] For the Greeks, it doesn’t matter whether Heracles kills his children in a fit of madness, or if Oedipus kills his father by accident: that changes nothing, it’s a crime, they are guilty; you can pity them, but you can’t absolve them — and that is true even if often their punishment is left to the gods, and not to men. From this perspective, the principle of the postwar trials, which tried men for their concrete actions, without taking chance into account, was just, but they went about it clumsily […], the Germans could feel they had been relieved of this burden, and were hence innocent: since the person who wasn’t tried regarded the one who was as a victim of bad luck, he absolved him, and at the same time absolved himself. (592-3). This blocks a redemptive reading because Aue is absolved of his crimes. He escapes the postwar trials or any other legal punishment. Aue thus escaped feelings of guilt in two ways. For his role in the Endlösung, he makes the same excuses as Germany and avoids posing the guilt question all together. He does not feel guilty for his crimes in the subplot either, because he either simply does not recall them or because he has committed them after his personal self and Nazi self had totally merged, because he was “off-balance” (5) toward the end.

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6. Conclusion This paper has presented two novels that can be situated within the recent, refreshing move that Holocaust fiction has taken. After numerous publications that focussed solely on the Jewish victim identity and were narrated from that victim perspective, we are now being confronted with narratives from the other side. This shift seems to radically disregard Lanzmann’s objections against understanding the perpetrator, but, as I have shown, both Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones eventually respect this particular limitation of Holocaust representation. Both Seiffert and Littell thus leave the victim-oriented frame, but they do so in a dramatically different way. Seiffert, as a GermanBritish author, leaves the traditional victim perspective to allow a voice to different generations of Germans that have been affected by the Second World War. I would, however, not state that her novel can function as an antidote to the dominant universalized victim figure. The Dark Room can be seen as a brave attempt at exploring feelings of guilt, but it does not exceed its status of being ‘brave’. It is a beautiful novel, but exactly because of this reason fails to attack the easy position that readers of Holocaust novels have taken over time. Seiffert succeeds in opening up our perspective to “the other side”, but she is merely replacing an easy identification with Jewish victims with an identification with German victims. This is, however, not a problematic identification because she keeps a respectful distance. Her German background gives her a sense of complicity and this is clearly reflected in her cautious handling of the subject. It seems that Seiffert’s emotional connection to the subject brings forward a subtle exploration of guilt and responsibility with a redemptive quality, but stops her from breaking the easy reading position that traditionally comes with Holocaust novels. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, however, distresses the reader in every possible way and shatters any possible redemptive reading. Maximilian Aue tries to lift all distance between the reader and himself, forcing the reader in an uneasy, almost complicit position.

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His discourse is apologizing and he tries to present himself as a universalized perpetrator figure through the notion of the banality of evil or by saying that he “is a man like other men” (24). This would prove that Crownshaw’s fear that an introduction of the perpetrator perspective again becomes a “universalized memorative gesture” (2011), but the discrepancy between the narrator’s premise –“I am a man just like you” (24)- and the novel’s eventual portrayal of the narrator stops such universalizing gesture. A closer reading proves that the understanding relationship that Aue wants to set up is undermined by a constant delegitimization of his discourse (Rasson 2007) and that the apparent directness and lack of distance is countered with a strong intertextuality. This novel drastically goes against any work that has appeared on the Holocaust so far and its introduction of the perpetrator perspective functions as the desired antidote to the universalizing discourse. So while both books in their own way show that a complete understanding of the Holocaust is impossible and refuse to answer all the questions they raise, only Littell’s novel finally manages to unsettle the reader. Maximilian Aue might not be a man like us, but he sometimes gets disturbingly close.

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