Sunday Pages: "The Kindly Ones"

A novel by Jonathan Littell

Dear Reader,

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States, a ruling as radical as it was contemptible, I have thought a lot this past week about how Trump, in a second term as president and first as dictator for life, might exploit the 6-3 decision that gives him immunity to do whatever suits his malign fancy, as long as he calls it an “official act.”

(I know we’d rather not talk about Trump on this fine Sunday morning, but please bear with me.)

Given that Trump has declared his intention, numerous times, to assume dictatorial powers; given that the seditious Roberts Court has effectively handed him the sceptre and the globus cruciger; and given that the Republican Party, as currently constituted, has been purged of the disloyal, such that not a single current party member now in office would so much as lift a finger to prevent the death of our democracy, I took a stab at drafting a speech Donald might give on Capitol Hill on January 21, 2025, when he would request that Congress formalize his despotic power grab, thus making American autocracy very legal and very cool. It would sound something like this:

Ladies and Gentlemen of Congress! By agreement with the federal government, today the Republican Party and the Heritage Foundation have presented to you for resolution a notice of motion concerning a “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and Our Country.” The reasons for this extraordinary measure are as follows: under Joe Biden, the worst president in history, the Chinese Communist organizations seized executive power by means of a revolution. Thus a breach of the Constitution was committed.

The success of the revolution in a material sense protected these criminals from the grips of justice. They sought moral justification by asserting that I, Donald Trump, bore the guilt for the outbreak of January 6th. This assertion was deliberately and objectively untrue. In consequence, however, these false accusations led to the severest oppression of the entire American people…

The program for the reconstruction of the American people and the federal government is determined by the magnitude of the distress crippling our political, moral and economic life. Filled with the conviction that the causes of this collapse lie in internal damage to the body of our American people, the incoming Trump Administration aims to eliminate the problems which would, in future, continue to foil any real recovery. We will secure our border. We will drain the swamp.

The disintegration of the nation into irreconcilably opposite camps, which was systematically brought about by the false doctrines of Marxism, means the destruction of the basis for any possible peaceful coexistence. The dissolution permeates all of the basic principles of social order. The completely opposite approaches of the individuals to the concepts of State, society, religion, morality, family, and economy rips open differences which will lead to a war of all against all. Starting with the liberalism of the past century, this development will end, as the laws of nature dictate, in Communist chaos.

The mobilization of the most primitive instincts leads to a link between the concepts of a political theory and the actions of real criminals. Beginning with pillaging, arson in our cities, insecurity at the border, assassination attempts, and so on—all these things are morally sanctioned by Communist theory.

The stealing of the 2020 election, one unsuccessful attempt within a large-scale operation, is only a taste of what we would have to expect from a triumph of this demonical doctrine. When the media, particularly CNN and the failing New York Times, today attempts, true to the political lie advanced to a principle by Communism, to link America’s national uprising to this disgrace, this can only serve to strengthen my resolve to leave no stone unturned in order to avenge this crime as quickly as possible by having the guilty insurrectionists and their accomplices publicly executed! Neither the American people nor the rest of the world has become sufficiently conscious of the entire scope of the operation planned by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

It will be the utmost goal of my Administration to stamp out and eliminate every trace of this treasonous ideology, not only in the interest of the United States, but in the interest of the rest of the world.

Sure, that speech uses some fifty-cent words and higher-than-third-grade-reading-level phrasings that Trump would not be able to read off the teleprompter, but the overall gist of the remarks—I am here to take authoritarian measures to rein in the Communist Democrats and other threats to the country, including having my political rivals executed—is very much on brand for the Project 2025 vintage of MAGA.

Would it surprise you to learn that I did not write the above paragraphs, but merely swapped out a few German words for English ones, and sprinkled in some contemporary references? That excerpt is, as by now you might have guessed, the beginning of a speech Adolf Hitler gave to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933—the last day of the Weimar Republic—on the Enabling Act: the notorious piece of legislation that gave him dictatorial powers that led to the country’s total Nazification.

(I know we’d rather not talk about Hitler on this fine Sunday morning, but please bear with me.)

In Rough Beast, I argue that Trump is a liar, a criminal and Kremlin stooge, a corrupt exploiter of executive power, and a shitty president. We are, alas, past all of that. The temperature has been turned up like it’s downtown Fresno. With the immunity ruling, we have arrived at the Führer stage of things. Here is the introduction to Chapter 5 of my book, called “Enter Strongman”:

Donald Trump is a wannabe strongman. He’s an authoritarian at heart. He’s the Mussolini of Queens, an American Hitler. Donald Trump does not want to be the 47th President of the United States; Donald Trump wants to be the nation’s first dictator.

At this point, no serious commentator doubts this. The neocon dignitary Robert Kagan said as much in a Washington Post op-ed a month ago: “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

Mike Godwin, the Godwin who developed Godwin’s Law—that is, that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”—said that it is appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler: “[W]hen people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”

But by all means, let the pundit class continue its “Joe Must Go” crusade.

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Born in New York in 1967, the Gen X son of the American novelist Robert Littell, Jonathan Littell spent his formative years in France, returned to the U.S. for some high school, and went back to France to get his baccalauréat. After graduating from Yale, where he finished his first novel, he worked for seven years at a humanitarian aid outfit called Action Against Hunger. He spent time in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and the Congo DR, and saw some stuff.

Suddenly inspired to write a novel about the Third Reich, he quit his job in 2001 and spent the next year and a half doing research. He devoured scores of books about Nazis and the Eastern Front. He traveled to battle sites in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Poland. He toured the concentration camps. And then he spent the next three and a half years writing, in French, his novel, which was published in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes.

The book, a fictional memoir of a bisexual Nazi Schutzstaffel officer, was an immediate literary sensation. It won a bunch of prestigious awards in France—enough to convince the French government to grant Littell citizenship—and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, far exceeding his meager expectations. Reviewers tripped over themselves praising it. Les Bienveillantes was favorably compared with War and Peace, and Littell with Tolstoy—hallowed ground for any novelist, but especially a young American one.

There was a frenzy to buy up the English rights, which HarperCollins acquired for, reportedly, the princely sum of a million dollars. Charlotte Mandell did her usual superb job with the translation. Les Bienveillantes was released in 2009 as The Kindly Ones—the (meh) title an allusion to the Erinyes, or Furies, of Greek myth.

Sales in the United States were not brisk. And it’s not hard to figure out why. The book is 975 pages long—even longer than the current Nazi tome making all the waves, Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. Its seven chapters are named for types of baroque dance. Littell is stingy with the paragraph breaks. Nothing on the cover hints at the contents inside—or, indeed, at anything at all. A beach read this ain’t.

Not only that, but American critics were not kindly ones to The Kindly Ones. The New Republic’s Ruth Franklin called it “one of the most repugnant books I have ever read.” In Time, Lev Grossman said that the novel’s violence “makes Saw look like Dora the Explorer.” Over at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani questioned the “perversity” of her French counterparts, calling the book “[w]illfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent.” That led to an impassioned rebuttal from the novelist Michael Korda, who wrote to Kakutani: “You want to read about Hell, here it is. If you don’t have the strength to read it, tough shit. It’s a dreadful, compelling, brilliantly researched, and imagined masterpiece, a terrifying literary achievement, and perhaps the first work of fiction to come out of the Holocaust that places us in its very heart, and keeps us there.”

Tracking this literary dust-up, I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. At the time, my first novel was being published by an imprint of HarperCollins, so I was able to wangle a free copy (Littell’s book deal was worth approximately one million dollars more than mine, so I didn’t feel too bad). I read the book, cover to cover, all 975 pages, and I can report that the critics were all correct. The Kindly Ones is not for the faint of heart; the novel is indeed repugnant, repellant, willfully sensationalistic, violent in the extreme, dreadful, and a veritable travel guide to Hell. It is also one of the best books I’ve ever read.

As a writer of longform fiction—including a 700-page fake memoir about the Byzantine Empire—I simply cannot fathom producing something like this: so long, so dense, with such exquisite detail, about characters and historical events of such horror. And for someone of my generation, born long after the end of the war, to have written such a work is beyond impressive. How could Littell have done this? Artistically, and also constitutionally? There is not enough sage in the world to cleanse one’s soul after immersing oneself in that ugly Third Reich world, and I found myself hoping the guy was okay.

The protagonist and narrator, Maximilien Aue, is not just a bisexual Nazi SS guy; he’s also a murderous, incest-enjoying scumbag; a true monster. Over the top? Sure, but, like, he’s a staunch Nazi. We are expecting, what, a children’s birthday party clown? In researching the book, Littell sought to imagine what he would have done, had he been part of the Third Reich—and, particularly, the apparatus that carried out the Final Solution. Who does something like that? Why? How do they not realize its moral wrongness? Or do they realize it and rationalize it away?

The length and wordcount density of The Kindly Ones, I would argue, mirrors the vastness of the war on the Eastern Front: too big; impossible to wrap one’s brain fully around. There are lulls in the novel, just as there are lulls in the foxhole, but there are also passages that stand with anything ever published. In one section, Aue participates in a scholarly debate about whether certain Jews of the Caucasus region are ethnic Jews or merely later converts. The impossibly high stakes of the determination—if they are the former, they will be sent to the extermination camps; if they are the latter, they will be permitted to live—are exceeded only by the pedantic nature of the proceedings. For these Nazi eggheads, it is purely an intellectual exercise. The participants may as well be arguing about why Anna Karenina leapt in front of the train—the banality of evil on full display. There is an exquisite passage in which Aue extols the gay man, much maligned as too effete to be of use on the battlefield, as Great Warrior, going back to Alexander the Great and the characters in The Iliad to illustrate his point. And you will not find a more accurate, and thus harrowing, depiction of the incomprehensibly brutal Battle of Stalingrad. I only read the book once, 15 years ago, and I still recall these passages with clarity.

I suspect that I don’t need to explain, Dear Reader, why I have Nazis on the brain, three days after the Fourth of July 2024. A charismatic cult leader with a gift for public speaking, a micropenis, and a hatred of ethnic minorities riles up a third of the population, turning it against another third, while the remaining third smiles and nods and does what it is told. What’s the German word for “Yikes?” In the character of Maximilien Aue, I see Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, Christopher Miller, and Ric Grenell. And in Aue’s escape from consequences for his actions, I see Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and, of course, Donald Trump.

In the first chapter of The Kindly Ones, “Toccata,” in which he introduces himself to us, Aue takes aim at those who might cast themselves as his moral superiors. These are important passages to consider at any historical moment, because war affects people in unpredictable ways, but they feel eerily, unpleasantly relevant to the United States in 2024, as those of us who love democracy hope against hope that the “good Germans” in our midst will cast their votes against Hitler 2.0. We wait for them to wake up, but in Nazi Germany, remember, much of the population remained asleep—unwoke, as it were.

Aue says:

Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might have also done what I did. With less zeal, perhaps, but perhaps also with less despair, in any case one way or another. I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception, any more than I was. If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you may be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person. Because if you have the arrogance to think you are, that’s just where the danger begins. We like to contrast the State, totalitarian or not, with the ordinary man, that insect or trembling reed. But then we forget that the State is made up of individuals, all more or less ordinary, each one with his life, his story, the sequence of accidents that led him one day to end up on the right side of the gun or the sheet of paper while others ended up on the wrong side. This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It would be a little naïve to think that way; allow me to suggest you spend a little time in a bureaucracy, even the Red Cross, if you need convincing. Stalin, by the way, conducted an eloquent demonstration of my argument, by transforming each generation of executioners into the victims of the following generation, without ever running out of volunteers. Yet the machinery of State is made of the same crumbling agglomeration of sand as what it crushes, grain by grain. It exists because everyone—even, down to the last minute, its victims—agrees that it must exist. Without the Hösses, the Eichmanns, the Goglidzes, the Vishinskys, but also without the railroad switchman, the concrete manufacturers, and the government accountants, a Stalin or a Hitler is nothing but a wineskin bloated with hatred and impotent terror. To state that the vast majority of the managers of the extermination processes were neither sadists nor sociopaths is now a commonplace. There were of course sadists and psychopaths among them, as in all wars, and these men did commit unspeakable atrocities, that’s true. It is also true that the SS could have stepped up its efforts to keep these people under control, even if it actually did more in that line than most people realize. And that’s not easy: just ask the American generals what a hard time they had of it in Vietnam, with their junkies and their rapists, smoking dope and fragging their officers. But that’s not the problem. There are psychopaths everywhere, all the time. Our quiet suburbs are crawling with pedophiles and maniacs, our homeless shelters are packed with raving megalomaniacs; and some of them do indeed become a problem, they kill two, three, ten, even fifty people—and then the very same State that would without batting an eye send them to war crushes them like a blood-swollen mosquito. These sick men are nothing. But the ordinary men that make up the State—especially in unstable times—now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you’re not convinced of this, don’t bother to read any further. You’ll understand nothing and you’ll get angry, with little profit for you or for me.

That one line hits hard, as the kids say: “If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace.” That’s it. That’s everything, right there. That’s what we who know the danger of Trump and MAGA are so afraid of.

Littell ends the chapter this way:

Eckhart has written, An Angel in Hell flies in his own little cloud of Paradise. I always took that to imply that a devil in Paradise flies also in his own little cloud of Hell. But I don’t think I’m a devil. There are always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don’t know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that’s what’s terrible. You can never say: I shall never kill, that’s impossible; the most you can say is: I hope I shall never kill. I too hoped so, I too wanted to live a good and useful life, to be a man among men, equal to others, I too wanted to add my brick to our common house. But my hopes were dashed, and my sincerity was betrayed and placed at the services of an ultimately evil and corrupt work, and I crossed over to the dark shores, and all this evil entered my own life, and none of this can be made whole, ever. These words are of no use either, they disappear like water in the sand, this wet sand that fills my mouth. I live, I do what can be done, it’s the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!

What terrifies me, reading that passage today, is that he is right: Maximilien Aue, this agent of pure evil, is indeed not much different from anyone else. The circumstances of his age thrust him into a position where he had to make impossible choices and perform unspeakable acts in order to survive. How would we behave in his place? May none of us ever have to find out.

I said before that The Kindly Ones is a meh name for the book. A better title for Littell’s novel, I submit, would be this: Official Acts.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Lisa Graves, head of the watchdog group True North Research, and host of the Supreme Court podcast “Grave Injustice”:

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Audible

Again: Rough Beast is now available as an audiobook, narrated by Yours Truly:

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Photo credit: The Remorse of Orestes, where he is surrounded by the Erinyes, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862.