Waiting for the Barbarians (39 page)

The surprise—and also a key to understanding the outrage Littell’s book has provoked, and the reasons for its successes and its failures—is the way in which these structures are meant to tackle the large themes suggested by his Aeschylean title. For it is, in fact, the historical structure that is meant to shed light on the problem of human nature; while it is the mythic-sexual element—and above all, if I am reading
Littell’s complex allusion to a much more recent revision of the Orestes myth correctly, those explicit and even pornographic sexual scenes—that are meant to explore the nature of crime, atrocity, and justice.

The conflict between civilization and the ugly energies that civilized institutions seek, and often fail, to contain is a tension that stands at the center of any discussion of the moral implications of the Holocaust—a tension that can be seen reflected at the level of individual psychology, too. For the question of how it could have been possible for a country with Germany’s superior cultural achievements to have also created Auschwitz inevitably raises, as well, the related question of how individual Germans (or Poles, or Ukrainians, or Latvians, or Lithuanians, or Frenchmen, and so forth)—who, for the most part, saw themselves as reasonable, normal people, and indeed led normal-looking lives throughout the war, apart from their participation in the crimes—could have perpetrated horrors which, perhaps naively, perhaps self-servingly, we like to refer to as “inhuman.”

But in a passage that typifies a provocative aversion to sentiment that is likely to alienate some readers, Littell’s protagonist disdains any use of the word “inhuman” when talking about Nazi atrocities. Here, Aue recalls the case of a soldier who, he learns, had originally joined the police force because “it was the only way to be sure I could put food on the table,” and had ended up as part of a unit given the horrific task of liquidating hopelessly wounded soldiers—German soldiers—at the collapsing Russian front:

The singular achievement of Littell’s novel is the way in which he brings us uncomfortably close to the thinking of people whose careers took them from police work to euthanasia, and worse. The twist is that while Aue tries to get into the mind of an ordinary, working-class man like Döll, Littell very persuasively illumines the thoughts of Aue himself. And why not? He is a well-educated and indeed sensitive person, musical, literate, cultured, who far from being monstrously indifferent to the crimes he sees perpetrated and that he himself is called on to commit, spends a good deal of time reflecting on the questions of guilt and responsibility that a self-aware person could be expected to entertain. Littell makes a point of having Aue—at least at the beginning, before he collapses into his garish
Götter-dämmerung
—refuse to acquit himself of responsibility, the defense that became the notorious byword of the war-crimes trials:

“My duty and … it had to be done,” of course, begs the question of the morality of the duty to Nazi ideology. The character’s fierce
attachment to the “absolutes” of ideology is meant to be explained by the book’s mythic/sexual elements, by that landscape of psycho-sexual aberration: a psychologizing cliché that many critics have dismissed. But I think that there is something to Littell’s interest in showing us a picture of ideology in action, of what things look like once ordinary and even thoughtful people begin to help carry out ideologies that may well look appalling to others—Manifest Destiny, Iraq, the West Bank.

It’s for this reason that Littell keeps reminding us that Aue himself is disgusted by the overt sadists he encounters, rightly objecting that “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.” Anyone who has studied the Holocaust will recognize the bitter wisdom in this statement; its history is peopled with soldiers and civilians, Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Dutch and Frenchmen, who went to church on Sunday, worried about their health, took care of their sick wives, fretted about their raises and promotions, slapped their children for lying or cheating, and spent the occasional afternoon shooting Jewish grandmothers and children in the head. While some will denounce Littell’s cool-eyed authorial sympathy for Aue as “obscene”—and by “sympathy” I mean simply his attempt to comprehend the character—his project seems infinitely more valuable than the reflexive gesture of writing off all those millions of killers as “monsters” or “inhuman,” which allows us too easily to draw a solid line between “them” and “us.” The first line of the novel takes the form of Aue’s unsettling salutation to his “human brothers”: the purpose of the book, one in which it largely succeeds, is to keep alive, however improbably, that troubling sense of kinship.

How Littell accomplishes this aim is worth considering, and brings us to the question of his novel’s style and technique—one that has
often been raised by his detractors. It is true that at the level of words and sentences, Littell’s style is unremarkable, even pedestrian—his translator, Charlotte Mandell, has produced an admirably fluid English version that is more pleasing to read than the French. This novel invariably goes off the tracks when the author strives for writerly effects. Sentences such as “My thoughts fled in all directions, like a school of fish in front of a diver” or “I emerged from the war an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame, like sand crunching in your teeth” are all the more wince-inducing for the success with which Littell so often conveys the drearily everyday chitchat, the gossip about promotions and orders, of his military milieu.

Indeed, the large success of the book, the way in which Littell draws us into Aue’s mental world, has much to do with a striking technique he employs throughout, which is to integrate, with more and more insistence as the novel progresses, scenes of high horror (or scenes in which characters coolly discuss horrific acts or plans) with quotidian, even tedious stretches, conversations about petty military intrigues and official squabbling and so forth that go on and on, thereby weaving together the dreadful and the mundane in an unsettlingly persuasive way—the tedious somehow normalizing the dreadful, and the dreadful seeming to infect the tedious. In one characteristic passage, fairly early on, the topic of conversation among a group of officers yo-yos between extermination policy and the quality of the roast duck with apples and mashed potatoes that they’re eating. “ ‘Yes, excellent,’ Oberländer approved. ‘Is this a specialty of the region?’ ”

At first these juxtapositions horrify, and you may resent what feels like a striving for shocking effects. But then you get used to them—the sheer length and banality of the “everyday” stretches (of which there are far too many: some readers will give up) numbs you after a while. This is, of course, the point: Littell has written a Holocaust
novel that renders evil just as banal as we have so often been told it is—which is to say, not “banal” in the sense of boring or ordinary, but
banalisé
: rendered quotidian, everyday, normal.

Many dozens of pages of such juxtapositions, the murderous politics and the roasted potatoes, prepare Aue (and the reader) for the imperceptible slide down a moral slope that, in Littell’s hands, becomes eloquently literal. In one of the scenes that critics have denounced as “pornography of violence,” Aue finds himself literally slipping among the dead in the steep gullies at Babi Yar:

Here again, the moral shock comes almost less from the details of the killing field than from that climactic, disorienting juxtaposition of extremity and normality: the unbearable scene of mass murder, a merely unpleasant memory from a vacation in Spain.

By the middle of the novel, the thoughtful anguish that accompanied his earlier exploits—an anguish always quashed, in the end, by Aue’s fanatical allegiance to Nazi ideology and war aims, even after
the brilliantly evoked catastrophe at Stalingrad, one of the novel’s great set pieces—has disappeared:

The work in question, it’s worth noting, is his service in the “economic” area, to which he has been assigned after he’s noticed by Himmler: “economic,” as the war starts turning against the Germans, means trying to squeeze greater efficiency from slave laborers, a task that, because he now has to look at prisoners as workers who need to be fed and clothed and housed, eventually puts Aue in the bizarre position of having to value the lives of the Jews he had been obediently killing before. Here again, Littell’s meticulous attention to persuasive details, the petty jockeying for position, the exasperated complaints about efficiency and waste—the way in which, finally, the use of the words “my work” in the sentence “Only my work engaged me” bespeaks moral enormities—make Aue’s collapse unnervingly accessible to us.

The success of the novel’s first large element (the historical/documentary narrative) in allowing us to grasp the mentality of someone in whom civilized values yield to base acts—in whom the Erinyes triumph over the Eumenides, so to speak—depends on maintaining that accessibility, on our continued sense that Aue is a “human brother.” This success is disastrously diminished by the novel’s second major structural element, one to which Littell is obviously attached: the
overlaying of the
Oresteia
parallel, with its high intellectual allure and literary allusiveness. (It’s just the kind of thing that Aue himself would appreciate.) And yet as the novel progresses and the Aeschylean parallels, at first rather submerged (the occasional reference to the disappearance of the warrior father, Aue’s intense resentment of his mother’s remarriage to a lesser man), become unmistakable (the weird emotional twinning with the sister, the matricide and pursuit by the agents of law and justice), what gets lost is precisely any sense of Aue as a human brother.

For as appalling as the descriptions of actual atrocities are in this book, they pale in comparison to the willfully repellent fantasies that are the atrocities’ counterparts on the novel’s Oresteian plane. What kind of kinship can the ordinary reader be expected to feel with a character who—apart from those basic “Greek” ingredients of incest, matricide, and homosexuality—becomes increasingly violent, dissociated, and deranged as his tale reaches its spectacularly lurid ending, a narrative climax marked by fantasies such as this one: