The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

“I won’t answer that your crimes are worse. I’ll simply tell you that if we can’t prove the validity of our hopes to someone who refuses to believe in the truth of Marxism, we can and we will concretely prove to you the inanity of your own. Your biological racism postulates that the races are unequal among themselves, that some are stronger and more valid than others, and that the strongest and the most valid of all is the German race. But when Berlin looks like this city”—he pointed his finger at the ceiling—“and when our brave soldiers are camping on your Unter den Linden, you’ll at least be forced, if you want to save your racist faith, to acknowledge that the Slavic race is stronger than the German race.”

We lost land, cities, men; all that can be replaced. But the Party didn’t collapse, and that was your only hope. Without that, you could even have taken Stalingrad, it wouldn’t have changed anything. And you could have taken Stalingrad, too, if you hadn’t made so many mistakes, if you hadn’t underestimated us so much. It wasn’t inevitable that you’d lose here, that your Sixth Army would be completely destroyed. But if you had taken Stalingrad, then what? We would still have been in Ulianovsk, in Kuibyshev, in Moscow, in Sverdlovsk. And we would have ended up doing the same thing to you a little farther along. Of course, the symbolism wouldn’t have been the same, it wouldn’t have been Stalin’s city. But who is Stalin, really?

The problem isn’t the people: it’s your leaders. Communism is a mask stuck onto the unchanged face of Russia. Your Stalin is a czar, your Politburo are boyars, or greedy and egotistical aristocrats, your Party cadres, the same chinovniki as the ones under Peter or Nicholas. It’s the same Russian autocracy, the same permanent insecurity, the same paranoia of the foreign, the same fundamental inability to govern correctly, the same substitution of terror for the common consensus, and thus for real power, the same unbridled corruption, in other forms, the same incompetence, the same drunkenness. Read the correspondence between Kurbsky and Ivan, read Karamzin, read Custine. The crucial given of your history has never been changed: humiliation, from father to son. Ever since the beginning, but especially since the Mongols, everything humiliates you, and all the politics of your ruling class consists not of correcting this humiliation and its causes, but of hiding it from the rest of the world.

For in this country of the humiliated, the czar, whatever his strength may be, is powerless, his will is lost in the muddy swamp of his administration, and he is soon reduced, like Peter, to ordering his minions to obey his orders; in front of him people bow, but behind his back, they steal from him or conspire against him; everyone flatters his superiors and oppresses his subordinates, everyone has a slave mentality, raby as you say, and this slave spirit rises to the top; and the greatest slave of all is the czar, who can do nothing against the cowardliness and humiliation of his people of slaves, and who thus, in his powerlessness, kills them, terrorizes them, and humiliates them even more. And every time there’s a real rupture in your history, a real chance to get out of this infernal cycle to begin a new history, you blow it: faced with freedom, the freedom of 1917 you were talking about, everyone, people and leaders alike, recoils and goes to the old tried-and-true methods.

In Germany, and in the capitalist countries, everyone says communism ruined Russia; but I believe it’s the opposite: it’s Russia that ruined communism. It could have been a fine idea, and who can say what would have happened if the Revolution had taken place in Germany rather than Russia? If it had been led by self-assured Germans, like your friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? For my part, I think it would have been a disaster, since it would have exacerbated our specific conflicts, which National Socialism is trying to resolve. But who knows? What is certain is that having been attempted here, the communist experiment could be nothing but a failure. It’s like a medical experiment conducted in a contaminated environment: the results can go straight in the trash.”

inside the main foyer, among the fragments of marble and shattered pillars, lay dozens of corpses; some nurse’s aides were carrying them up from the basements and stacking them until they could be burned. A horrible stench rose from the underground entrances, filling the lobby. “I’ll wait here,” Ivan declared, taking up position next to the main doors to roll a cigarette. I looked at him, and my surprise at his composure turned into a sudden, keen sadness: though I, in fact, had every chance of remaining here, he had none to get out. He was calmly smoking, indifferent.

I went to explore the upper floors. Here, too, there had been fighting: the walls had been drilled through to set up gun emplacements, and the hallway was strewn with empty cartridge cases and ammunition boxes; on a balcony, two Russian corpses, whom no one had gone to the trouble of taking downstairs, lay sprawled in their seats, as if they were waiting for the beginning of an endlessly postponed play.

A heavy cramp seized my stomach and I lowered my pants and crouched down, and already as the shit flowed, liquid, I was far away, thinking of the waves, the sea under the boat’s keel, two children sitting in the bow facing that sea, myself and my twin sister, Una, our gaze locked and our hands touching without anyone noticing, and our love even vaster and more endless than that blue sea or the bitterness and pain of the wounded years, a solar splendor, a voluntary abyss.

That summer, we remained in Antibes, but on Saturdays and Sundays we would go to a house rented by Moreau, near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, by the sea. There our games spilled into the fields, the pine woods, and the nearby maquis, vibrating with the chirping of the crickets and the buzzing of the bees in the lavender, whose odor overlapped the scents of rosemary, thyme, and resin, mixed too, near the end of the summer, with that of the figs we would devour to the point of nausea, and then, farther away, the sea and the chaotic rocks that formed this jagged coast, up to a little sloping island that we reached by swimming or by rowboat.

In our sovereign delirium, we had invented a code that allowed us, in front of our mother and Moreau, openly to suggest precise gestures and actions. It was the age of pure innocence, superb, magnificent. Freedom possessed our narrow little bodies, thin and tanned; we swam like seals, dashed through the woods like foxes, rolled, twisted together in the dust, our naked bodies indissociable, neither one nor the other specifically girl or boy, but a couple of snakes intertwined.

As time went by, the settings changed, but the pavane of our love continued to mark its own rhythm, elegant or furious.

We also nestled in the long empty closets built beneath the large sloping roof of the chalet, tall enough to stand up in, but where we stayed sitting or lying down, slithering, snuggled against each other, skin against skin, slaves of each other and masters of everything.

I had lost all notion of time and of the technical details of our collective agony.

When I walked onto the stage I was so possessed by hatred and love and the sensation of my young virgin’s body that I saw nothing, heard nothing; and when I moaned Oh my Orestes, your death is killing me, tears streamed from my eyes. When Orestes reappeared, I screeched, possessed by the Erinyes, vociferated my injunctions in that beautiful, sovereign language, Go on, then, one more blow, if you still feel the strength, I cried, encouraging him, urging him to murder, Kill him quickly, then expose his body: let his gravediggers be whatever creatures find him. And when it was over, I didn’t hear the applause, didn’t hear the words of Father Labourie who was congratulating me, I was sobbing, and the butchery in the House of Atreus was the blood in my own house.

The temperature, after the brief thaw at the beginning of the year, had plummeted catastrophically—it must have been twenty-five or thirty below. The meager fires lit in empty oil drums weren’t enough to warm the wounded; even in town, the soldiers had to wrap their penises in cloth to piss, a stinking rag, preciously guarded in one’s pocket; and others took advantage of these occasions to hold out their hands, swollen with frostbite, beneath the warm stream.

The sunlight was truly splendid, it chiseled each detail of the jagged façades.

In a mirror, I looked for the first time at my face: to tell the truth, I didn’t recognize anything in it, I didn’t see how this mosaic of such diverse features held together, and the more I considered them, the more foreign they became. The white bands wrapped around my skull at least prevented it from bursting open, that was already something and even a considerable something, but it didn’t help my speculations make any progress; this face looked like a collection of pieces that fit together well enough but came from different puzzles. Finally, a doctor came to tell me that I was going to leave: I was healed, he explained, they couldn’t do anything more for me, I was going to be sent elsewhere to regain my strength. Healed! What a surprising word, I didn’t even know I had been hurt. In fact, a bullet had gone through my head.

This precise scientific information filled me with astonishment: so, these unusual and mysterious sensations had a cause, an explainable and rational one; but even with an effort, I couldn’t manage to connect the sensations to this explanation, it seemed hollow to me, contrived; if this was really Reason, then I too, like Luther, would have called it Hure, a whore; and in fact, obeying the calm, patient orders of the doctors, Reason raised its skirt for me, revealing that there was nothing beneath. I could have said the same thing about it as about my poor head: a hole is a hole is a hole.

But if these doctors so sure of their science were to be believed, a hole went right through my head, a narrow circular corridor, a fabulous, closed shaft, inaccessible to thought, and if that were true, then nothing was the same again, how could it have been? My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself around this hole.

I liked the well-regulated life on this beautiful, bare, cold island, all grays, yellows, and pale blues; there were just enough sharp edges to cling to there, to keep from being carried away by the wind, but not too many, so you didn’t risk getting scraped.

“You’re indulging in misplaced idealism. I see that your shot in the head hasn’t set you right. You should be happy to be alive.” Happy to be alive? That seemed as incongruous to me as rejoicing at being born.

These communiqués, which were delivered to us in the common rooms over little loudspeakers, were introduced by the overture to Bach’s cantata Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott; but the Wehrmacht used the arrangement by Wilhelm Friedmann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s dissolute son, who had added three trumpets and a kettledrum to his father’s austere orchestration, an ample enough pretext, by my lights, to flee the room each time, thus avoiding being drugged by the flood of lulling euphemisms, which sometimes lasted a good twenty minutes.

I don’t like uniforms much, I had to admit that I cut a dashing figure, and it was a joy to stroll about town like this, my cap a little askew, my gloves held negligently in my hand; seeing me, who would have thought that I was actually nothing but a bureaucrat?

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, and of grasping this face behind each face of flesh and blood, beneath the smiles, through the palest, healthiest skin, the most laughing eyes. The disaster was already there and they didn’t realize it, since the disaster is the very idea of the disaster to come, which ruins everything long before term. At bottom, I repeated to myself with a hollow bitterness, it’s only the first nine months that you’re peaceful, and after that the archangel with the flaming sword chases you forever out through the door marked Lasciate ogni speranza, and you want only one single thing, to go back, then time keeps pushing you pitilessly forward, and in the end there is nothing, nothing at all.

There was nothing original about these thoughts, they could have come to the lowliest soldier lost in the frozen waters of the East, who knows, when he listens to the silence, that death is near, and who perceives the infinite value of each intake of breath, of each heartbeat, of the cold, brittle sensation of the air, of the miracle of daylight. But the distance from the front is like a thick layer of moral fat, and looking at these satisfied people, I sometimes felt short of breath, I wanted to cry out.

Lying on my bed in the darkness, I thought about the men of the Sixth Army: the evening took place at the beginning of March, the last units had surrendered more than a month before; the survivors, rotting with vermin and fever, must have been on the way to Siberia or Kazakhstan, at the very same moment that I was so laboriously breathing the night air in Berlin, and for them, no music, no laughter—shouts of an entirely different kind. And it wasn’t just them, it was everywhere, the whole world was twisted in pain, and people should not be having fun, not right away in any case, they should wait a little while, a decent amount of time should go by.

Mandelbrod looked at me with a seraphic smile.

The Jews were the first genuine National Socialists, for almost three thousand five hundred years they’ve been so, ever since Moses gave them a Law to separate them forever from the other peoples. All our great ideas come from the Jews, and we must have the lucidity to recognize it: the Land as promise and as accomplishment, the notion of the Chosen People, the concept of the purity of blood. That’s why the Greeks, degenerate, democrats, travelers, cosmopolitans, hated them so much, and that’s why they tried first to destroy them, then, through Paul, to corrupt their religion from within, by detaching it from the soil and from the blood, by making it catholic, that is, universal, by suppressing all the laws that served as a barrier to maintaining the purity of Jewish blood: food prohibitions, circumcision. And that’s also why the Jews, of all our enemies, are the worst, the most dangerous; the only ones who truly deserve being hated. They are our only real competitors, in fact. Our only serious rivals.

“Out of love and respect for your father, Max, I have helped you, I have followed your career, I’ve supported you when I could. You owe it to yourself to make him proud, both for his race and for your own. There’s room on this earth for only one chosen people, called on to dominate the others: either it will be them, as the Jew Disraeli and the Jew Herzl wanted, or it will be us. And so we must kill them down to the last one, extirpate their stock. Because even if only ten remain, an intact quorum, or if only two remain, a man and a woman, in a hundred years we’ll have the same problem, and we’ll have to do everything over again.”

The garden, which one reached by a few steps lined with stoneware flowerpots, stretched from the palace to the Europahaus, a plump modernist cube set down on the Askanischer Platz and contrasting oddly with the calm, sinuous volutes of the lanes laid out between the mulched flowerbeds, the little round fountains, and the still-bare trees on which the first buds were forming. No one was there.

“Look,” he finally went on, “for a lot of people, anti-Semitism is an instrument. Since it’s a subject that means a lot to the Führer, it has become one of the best ways to get close to him: if you manage to play a role in the solution to the Jewish question, your career will advance much more quickly than if you concern yourself, say, with Jehovah’s Witnesses or homosexuals. In that sense, you can say that anti-Semitism has become the currency of power of the National Socialist State.

I wanted to take an interest in nothing but positive things now: National Socialism still had a lot to build; that’s where I wanted to direct my energies. But the Jews, unser Unglück, kept pursuing me like a bad dream in early morning, stuck in the back of my head. In Berlin, though, not many were left: all the so-called protected Jewish workers in the arms factories had just been rounded up. Yet fate decreed that I would meet up with them in the most incongruous places.

In front of me, a group of people were discussing the speech, which they must have heard on the radio; I listened to them eagerly. “He blamed the Jews for everything again,” said a skinny man wearing a hat. “What I don’t understand is that there aren’t any more Jews in Germany, so how can it be their fault?”

Best, at that time, still liked to preach what he called heroic realism: “What counts,” he asserted, quoting Jünger, whom he read avidly, “is not what you fight for, but how you fight for it.” For this man, National Socialism was not a political opinion, but rather a way of life, a hard, radical one that blended a capacity for objective analysis with the ability to act. The highest morality, he explained to us, consists in surmounting traditional inhibitions in the search for the good of the Volk.

That’s the whole problem: so long as the Führer doesn’t intervene in person, everyone pursues his own personal policies. There’s no overall vision, and so no truly völkisch policies. The real National Socialists are incapable of doing their work, which is to direct and guide the Volk; instead, it’s the Parteigenossen, the Party men, who carve out fiefs for themselves and then govern them as they please.”

A Party man is someone who owes his career to the Party, who has a position to defend within the Party, and who thus defends the interests of the Party in controversies with other hierarchies, whatever the real interests of the Volk may be. The Party, in the beginning, was conceived as a movement, an agent of mobilization for the Volk; now it has become a bureaucracy like all the others.

That night I didn’t sleep at all, or only a little. The memories came brutally rushing back; unlike the ones that had welled up in great waves in Stalingrad, these were not solar, dazzling memories of the force of happiness, but memories already tinged with the cold light of the full moon, white and bitter.

Beneath her heavy, jet black hair, it looked almost translucent; the long blue veins were clearly outlined beneath her milk white skin. One of them started at the temple, touched the corner of her eye, then, in a long curve, crossed her cheek like a scar. I imagined the blood pulsing slowly beneath this surface as thick and deep as the opalescent oils of a Flemish master.

The sun was shining through the pines and bare oak branches; where the paths joined, little cherubs or nymphs stood on gray stone pedestals, superfluous and laughable.

“obstinate attachment to old promises is no virtue. The world changes, you have to be able to change with it.

“Those Luftmörder really have no shame,” I said. “They say they’re defending freedom and they kill women and children.”—“We’re killing women and children too,” she replied gently. Her words made me ashamed, but immediately my shame turned into anger: “We’re killing our enemies, to defend our country.”—“They’re defending their country too.”—“They’re killing innocent civilians!” I was turning red, but she remained calm. “The people you were executing—you didn’t catch them all with weapons in their hands. You too have killed children.” Rage was suffocating me, I didn’t know how to explain to her; the difference seemed obvious to me, but she was acting stubborn and pretending not to see it. “You’re calling me a murderer!” I shouted.

Her words were confused with my memories, my memories with my dreams, and my dreams with my most insane thoughts.

“There’s even one, just picture this, a fat Gauleiter’s wife dripping with diamonds, with a bluish permanent, who had the nerve to suggest, if someday it should become necessary, that I go find a handsome SS man to impregnate me. How did she phrase it? A decent, dolichocephalic, völkisch will-bearing, physically and psychically healthy man. She explained to me that there was an SS office that was in charge of eugenic assistance and that I could apply to it for help. Is that true?”—“So they say. It’s a project of the Reichsführer’s called Lebensborn. But I don’t know how it works.”

“My poor little brother,” she murmured. Laughing through my tears, I managed to say: “You call me that because you were born fifteen minutes before me, because it was your wrist they tied the red thread to.”—“Yes, but there’s another difference: now I’m a woman, and you’re still a little boy.”

I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.

I said to myself, that’s what it all comes to. They talk to you about love, but at the first opportunity, at the prospect of a nice happy bourgeois marriage, upsy-daisy, they roll onto their backs and spread their legs. Oh, my bitterness was immense. It seemed to me the inevitable end of an old story that pursued me relentlessly: the story of my family, which had almost always persisted in destroying any trace of love in my life. I had never felt so alone. When I recovered a little, I wrote her a stiff, conventional letter, congratulating her and wishing her all happiness.

“I don’t like that young Karajan much. He’s much too full of himself, too arrogant.”—“So you prefer Furtwängler, then?”—“There are rarely any surprises with Furtwängler. But he is very solid. Unfortunately, they don’t let him conduct Mozart’s operas anymore, and that’s what he does best. Apparently Lorenzo da Ponte was half Jewish, and The Magic Flute is a Masonic opera.”—“You don’t think it is?”—“It may be, but I challenge you to show me a German spectator who would realize it on his own.

Rameau and the great Couperin are still far too neglected. There is also a whole treasure trove of music for viola da gamba from the seventeenth century, still unexplored—but I’ve been able to consult some manuscripts. It’s superb. But the early French eighteenth century is truly a high point. No one can write like that anymore. The Romantics spoiled everything, we’re still struggling to emerge from it.”

Berndt doesn’t like Wagner.”—“That’s an understatement,” he went on. “I detest him. Technically, there are some extraordinary discoveries, some truly new, objective things, but that’s all lost in bombast, gigantism, and also the coarse manipulation of emotions, like the vast majority of German music since 1815. It’s written for people whose main musical reference is still basically the military fanfare. Reading Wagner’s scores fascinates me, but I could never listen to them.”

“Is there any German composer who finds favor with you?”—“After Mozart and Beethoven? A few pieces by Schubert, some passages from Mahler. And even there, I’m being indulgent. At bottom, there’s almost no one but Bach…and now, of course, Schönberg.”