History as Fiction (as History)

May 16 10

My essay discussing The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell has appeared in the Jewish Quarterly.

I suggest that the book has been mis-read by many reviews:

Some reviewers have argued that because of the book’s opening (‘Oh, my human brothers’), this is a story about how any one could become a Nazi, but the book’s narrator, Maximilian Aue, is a monster, and has been one since long before the war. Forever scarred by the disappearance of his father and his childhood incest with his twin, he begins a make-believe relationship with his sister in which he eats her excrement and has sex with her in a torture chamber. When he is not inhabiting this fantasy, he is an unrepentant murderer who kills not just Jews and other ‘enemies of the Reich’, but both his mother and his best friend for no apparent reason — hardly an everyman.

You can read the full article here.

T. Koelb