The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

A bomb had struck the People’s Court in midtrial, they were trying Oberleutnant von Schlabrendorff, one of the conspirators from the OKHG Center; after the raid, they had found Judge Freisler stone dead, von Schlabrendorff’s file in his hand, his head crushed, they said, by the bronze bust of the Führer, which sat enthroned behind him during his ranting speeches for the prosecution.

It was almost warm out, the sky was gray, the snow was melting, dripping from the roof with a pleasant little sound on the flagstones of the terrace and, farther away, hollowing out little wells in the snowy layer at the foot of the walls.

Germany chose to follow this man. He wants his Götterdämmerung at all costs, and now Germany has to follow him to the end. Killing him now to save what’s left would be cheating, rigging the game. I told you, we have to drink the cup of sorrow to the dregs.

“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, but a power he pictures in the form of a Napoleon III or a banker, kill the petty, reassuring morality of the bourgeoisie, kill thriftiness, kill obedience, kill the servitude of the Knecht, kill all those fine German virtues. 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 Germans, it’s because they imitate us obsequiously like the very image of all that is fine and good in High Bourgeoisie, the Golden Calf of those who flee the harshness of the desert and the Law. 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. And we, on the other hand, our German dream, was to be Jews, pure, indestructible, faithful to a Law, different from everyone else and under the hand of God.

The immobility of the water, of the black forests on the other bank, gave this landscape a solemn, mysterious look, like a kingdom beyond life, yet still on this side of death, a land between the two.

“If I understand it correctly, it explains that the order of the city is incompatible with the insatiable pleasure of women.”—“I would say, rather, the excessive pleasure of women. But what you are proposing is a man’s morality. I believe that all these ideas—moderation, morality—were invented by men to compensate for the limits of their pleasure. For men have known for a long time that their pleasure can never be compared to the pleasure we endure, which is of a different order.”

There was Rameau’s Gavotte à six doubles, and by looking at the page the music immediately unfurled in my head, clear, joyous, crystalline, like the galloping of a purebred horse raced across the Russian steppe in winter, so light that its hooves just brushed the snow, leaving only the slightest of traces.

At the end of the meal in Berlin, von Üxküll had mentioned Rameau again. “You’re right to like that music,” he had said. “It’s a lucid, sovereign music. It never foresakes its elegance but remains bristling with surprises and even traps, it is playful, joyful with a gay knowledge that neglects neither mathematics, nor life.”

He had also defended Mozart in curious terms: “For a long time I had little regard for him. When I was young, he seemed to me a gifted hedonist, without any depth. But that might have been the judgment of my own Puritanism. As I get older, I’m beginning to think he may have had a sense of life as strong as Nietzsche’s, and that his music seems simple only because life, in fact, is rather simple. But I haven’t entirely decided yet, I have to listen some more.”

despite all the prohibitions and precautions, the inmates continued to have a sexual activity, not just the kapos with their Pipel or the lesbians among themselves, but men and women, the men bribed the guards so they’d bring them their mistresses, or slipped into the Frauenlager with a work Kommando, and risked death for a quick jolt, a rubbing together of two emaciated pelvises, a brief contact of shaved, lice-ridden bodies. I had been strongly impressed by this impossible eroticism, doomed to end crushed beneath the guards’ hobnail boots, the very opposite in its despair of the free, solar, transgressive eroticism of the rich, but maybe also its hidden truth, slyly and obstinately signifying that all real love is inevitably turned toward death and, in its desire, doesn’t take the body’s wretchedness into account.

For man has taken the coarse, limited facts given to every sexed creature and has built from them a limitless fantasy, murky and profound, an eroticism that, more than anything, distinguishes him from the animals, and he has done the same thing with the idea of death, but this imagination, curiously, has no name (you could call it thanatism, perhaps): and it is these imaginations, these forever rehearsed obsessions, and not the thing itself, that are the frantic driving forces behind our thirst for life, for knowledge, for the agonizing struggle of self.

I dined for the third time alone in this large candlelit room, solemnly, and as I ate and drank I was overcome with startling fantasies, the demented vision of a perfect coprophagic autarky.

All these endless thoughts were bristling with sharp angles, I gashed myself on them viciously, the hallways of this cold, oppressive house were streaming with the bloody shreds of my feelings; a young, healthy maid should have come and washed everything clean, but there was no more maid.

We hadn’t yet grasped the extent to which love lives in bodies, nests in their most secret folds, in their wearinesses and their weight too.

Only one thing was actually lacking to be a woman like her, a real woman, the mute e, in French, of feminine word endings, the extraordinary possibility in that language we shared of saying and writing: “Je suis nue, je suis aimée, je suis désirée.” It’s this e that makes women so terribly female, and I suffered inordinately from being stripped of it, it was a flat loss for me, even harder to compensate for than the loss of that vagina I had left at the gates of existence.

What is a hole, a void, then? It’s what is inside the head when thought dares to try to flee from itself, to separate itself from the body, to act as if the body didn’t exist, as if you could think without a body, as if the most abstract thought, the thought of the starry sky above and the moral law within, for example, were not wedded to the rhythm of the breath, the pulsing of blood in the veins, the grating of cartilage.

his legs apart, leaning against the turret, he straddled the cannon like a horse, absorbing the impacts of the tank with the ease of a Scythian rider guiding a nervy little horse with his heels.

The whole passage took a dozen seconds at most; they continued on toward Bad Polzin, leaving in their wake a wide band of wood shards mixed with blood and crushed flesh in pools of horse intestines. Long trails left by the wounded who had tried to crawl to shelter reddened the snow on both sides of the road; here and there, a man writhed, without any legs, howling; on the road there were headless torsos, arms emerging from a red, vile pulp.

The music was magnificent, the organ wasn’t very powerful but it echoed in this little family church, the lines of counterpoint met each other, played, danced with each other. But instead of pacifying me, this music only fueled my anger, I found it unbearable. I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head was empty of everything except this music and the black pressure of my rage. I wanted to shout at him to stop, but I let the end of the piece go by, and the old man immediately started the next one, the fifth. His long aristocratic fingers fluttered over the keys, pulled or pushed the stops. When he slapped them shut at the end of the fugue, I took out my pistol and shot him in the head. He collapsed forward onto the keys, opening half the pipes in a desolate, discordant bleat. I put my pistol away, went over, and pulled him back by the collar; the sound stopped, leaving only the sound of blood dripping from his head onto the flagstones.

The second week of April, the Philharmonic gave a final concert. The program, execrable, was entirely in the taste of that period—Brünnhilde’s last aria, the Götterdämmerung of course, and to end it all Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony—but I went all the same. The icy auditorium was intact, the chandeliers shone with all their lights; I could see Speer, from a distance, with Admiral Dönitz in the box of honor; at the exit, uniformed Hitlerjugend holding baskets offered members of the audience cyanide capsules: I was almost tempted to swallow one on the spot, in a fit of pique.

“It won’t be without risks,” he said laughing. “But what is? We got out of Stalingrad. You have to be clever, that’s all. You know that there are guys in the Gestapo who are trying to get themselves stars and Jewish papers?” He laughed again. “They’re having a hard time of it. There aren’t a lot left on the market.”

Aside from the whirring of flying mortar shells and distant explosions, the park was strangely silent. The Nebelkrähe, those hooded crows whose hoarse cries always resound through the Tiergarten, had all left, fleeing the constant shelling for a safer place: no Sperrkommando in the sky, no flying court-martial for birds. How lucky they are, and they don’t even know it.