I read this in 2011 and wrote a lengthy review at the time, so may as well post it here.

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Reading this book was a very intense experience, which I'm now going to ramble about. 'The Kindly Ones' is an account of the second world war told in the first person by an SS officer, so be warned that it is not what you would call pleasant. I suppose there may also be spoilers, although I will avoid any details that would in my view affect the experience of reading it yourself.

I hardly know where to start. This novel is as dense, intense, and horrifying as any I've ever read. It has been translated from French and includes quite a lot of German terms (all relating to the SS and its activities). The sentences are long, the paragraphs interminable and abrupt-ending. All this adds to the sense that you are in the head of the narrator, Dr. Max Aue. The book is his memoir and revolves so closely around him as to feel claustrophobic. No character he encounters has any real depth, nor clear motives. The reader experiences the second world war through Aue's eyes and other senses. By the end, I felt as if I knew him, much better than I wanted to and too well to be able to make any unequivocal judgement about him.

At the start of the novel, Dr. Aue is at pains to point out to the reader that he is just like us, an ordinary man who did horrible things due to circumstance. He is articulate and persuasive, presenting the point that in war men not only lose their right to live, but also their right not to kill. However even at the very start, when we know nothing of his life, there is a deeply unsettling undercurrent to this. For one thing, we know he was in the SS. For another, he drops hints and describes physical ailments which seem like manifestations of deep psychological disturbance. I initially read this introductory chapter then put aside the book for a few weeks to read five others. None of them were bad, but when I came back to this it was as if I was drinking black coffee after nothing but glasses of water. I finished the remaining 800 pages in just over a week.

As the novel unfolds, you follow Aue across Europe as he is sent to undertake various bureaucratic tasks. Because, essentially, he is a bureaucrat. In point of fact, this novel is enough to give you a phobia of bureaucracy. Aue is not a soldier, he is an intellectual who claims that in another life he would have been happy writing literature and playing the piano. His tasks as an SS officer largely involve writing reports, the macabre horror of which lies in their implications. Whilst in the Ukraine, he is tasked with determining whether a race of so-called 'mountain Jews' are Jews according to the Nazi definition. This involves quite a bit of data-gathering, the consultation of experts, and ultimately a conference. The implication remains unspoken - if his report decides that this group are in fact sufficiently Jewish to meet the definition, they will all be killed. To Aue, this is a purely academic matter, and it irritates him that different groups within the occupying German force try to sully his endeavour with political machinations. He has no interest in the fate of the Mountain Jews after he makes his report; that is someone else's job.

That is horrifying enough. Later in the book, he is given a much more shocking task - to inspect the concentration camps and determine how to make their inmates more productive as workers. By this point, the Nazis are starting to lose the war and a contradiction is emerging; slave labour can only be used to help the war effort as long as the slaves are kept alive. Different government ministries have different aims (production, destruction) with overlapping jurisdictions. But ultimately the whole infrastructure has been put in place primarily to ensure that the Jews, criminals, gypsies, Poles, and political dissidents die as quickly as possible. Aue writes many reports on how greater productivity could be wrung from the concentration camps, but is constantly frustrated by the inability of his superiors to implement his ideas. By this point, he tells us, it is too late and events have their own momentum. A more stark illustration of the principles of political economy would be hard to find. The depictions of the concentration camps are horrific, as you might expect, yet it is still more unsettling to hear them framed as administrative complaints, with the constants deaths a mere inefficiency. One character who stuck in my mind was a judge determined to bring a number of concentration camp administrators to justice for corruption; they stole money, clothes, etc from the camp's victims. He is presented as a principled man, outraged that the perpetrators are stealing German state property. The fact that these items were stolen from Jews and other camp inmates, who were then killed, he doesn't even think to address. Again, someone else's job.

It is the contrasts, I think, that make The Kindly Ones so disturbing. The banality of meetings with functionaries and report-preparation, when compared with their genocidal subject matter. In addition, the contrast of methodical bureaucratic procedure with chaotic madness, which constantly hovers at the edge of events and at times completely subsumes them. Aue is an unreliable narrator, apparently oblivious to or uncaring of his mental instability. There are periods when illness or memory tips him into utter insanity and melodramatic perversion. Not for nothing did this novel win a Bad Sex award. In another setting, his hallucinations and obsessions could seem laughable, perhaps pathetic. In context, they add to the terrible atmosphere of a society that has gone horribly wrong and is trying to repress the fact. Moreover, they make the narrative strikingly tense and unpredictable; the reader already knows with the benefit of hindsight that Germany is going to lose the war.

The sequences in which Aue encounters front-line fighting are characterised by mayhem and insanity, which fits with the non-fiction accounts that I've read. On the other hand, such first-hand accounts ('With the Old Breed', 'Band of Brothers', etc) always emphasise the close bonds of soldiers, that sustain them in terrible conditions. There is none of that in Aue's world. His relationships are probably best described as complicated; too much detail might spoil the plot. Comradeship seems alien to him, he loves only one person and likes very few. Those he does form connections with frequently leave or even perish. This isn't surprising given his job and the war, but also seems to reinforce his underlying madness. He avoids people, pushes them away, damages them. Has the war and the SS warped him, or was he already damaged and thus ended up where he did? The disjunct between personal and professional is a matter to ponder. In his job, Aue is controlled and precise, whereas his personal life is very much the opposite. Nevertheless, a certain callousness pervade both.

In the latter half of the book, I toyed with thoughts of Aue as a metaphor for all Nazi Germany. This is a comparison he makes himself at one point, but it's not a simple one. He knows himself to be responsible for murdering many people, both with his own hands and tacitly through report-writing, but refuses to regret or feel guilt. The institutional edifice in which he found himself made it unthinkable to do other than as he did, or to believe other than that it was necessary for Germany. As the war is lost, he saves himself and starts afresh. This brings us to the title. The Kindly Ones are the Furies of Greek myth; you might remember them from the Sandman series. Also known as the Erinyes, they personify vengeance for horrible crimes, specifically the murder of family members. In the novel, two detectives are clear personifications of the Furies, pursuing Aue through the increasing chaos and violence of war until he finally escapes them at the end. I was shocked by own ambivalence about this; the writing is such that you feel Aue's desperation at the pursuit of the avenging detectives. They are surely right to pursue him, as he has committed terrible crimes, some of which he won't even admit to himself. Yet you feel Aue's claustrophobic sense of needing to escape, from his pursuers, from the chaos of war, from his past. The reader is invited to understand him, I wouldn't go so far as to say sympathise, and to despise his Furies.

There's so much more I could say, but I'm out of practise at literary analysis and 975 pages of complex prose could provoke an endless stream of thoughts. To conclude, what is truly amazing about this novel, to me, is that it feels honest. It may be fiction, but Dr. Max Aue is a convincing character and the big events that he describes happened. If a particularly articulate mid-ranking SS officer were to write his memoirs, who can say that they wouldn't have this tone?

Why did I read this novel? Because a couple of years ago I came across a review of it, in the London Review of Books I think, which stuck with me until I saw it in the library. Like many, I find the horrifying parts of recent history fascinating, and I feel a hunger to try and understand why terrible things happened. There's truth in the old saw that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, in my view. Surely this is why the rise of Hitler and the Nazis is taught so intensively in GCSE and A-level history? The Holocaust happened within living memory, when my grandparents were my age. Other crimes against humanity have happened before and since, but this one holds particular sway over the British psyche, I think. Perhaps because it happened so nearby? I'm not a historian and shouldn't speculate.

'The Kindly Ones' has no easy answers. I could unequivocally condemn Max Aue as a criminal, a murderer, and a monster, but what would that achieve? How did he come to commit such crimes? Were his actions any worse than those of his peers? How did norms of behaviour become so extreme and horrifying at that time? Can we blame the abstraction of war, as Aue seems to? How much can political leaders take the blame for individual action? Pondering this reminds me that so much current fiction, TV, and films, unwittingly or otherwise trivialises violence and death. For a novel entirely suffused with both, 'The Kindly Ones' most definitely does not.

It takes great writing to confront you with so many fundamental questions. 'The Kindly Ones' is relentless, horrifying, and stunning; I will carry on thinking about it for a long time.

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'The Kindly Ones' has indeed stayed in my mind. I'll re-read it one of these days. ( )

Lido em junho 2024, duas coisas me incomodaram, 1 - as descrições explícitas e desnecessárias das relações sexuais do personagem e 2 - dois capítulos com os sonhos do personagem, também confuso e "sobrando" no contexto do livro. ( )

Vyprávění přesvědčeného nacisty a důstojníka SS Maximiliena Aueho nás provede několika různými dějišti druhé světové války, na frontu, do okupovaných oblastí i do zázemí. Text je koncipován jako Aueho fiktivní memoáry sepsané dlouho po válce., Aue se v nich neobhajuje, nýbrž se snaží po svém vysvětlit, jak a proč funguje jedno malé kolečko v příšerné smrtící mašinérii.

Wow! An extremely well written, horrible story of Max Aue, an officer in the German SS during WWII. (1941-45) An awful story but I couldn't quit reading it! It was written so beautifully. Max narrates his experiences and they are so believable (except he was at every important battle and knew so many 'important' people). ( )

When the The Kindly Ones came out a few years ago in France it sold millions and won some of Europe's most prestigious literary awards . I was surprised therefore, to read so many negative reviews when it was recently released here in the U.S.
It seems people either loved it or hated it. Well add me to the list of those who loved it ! Yes, its dark, depressing, and in places, deranged to the point of perversion. But that's what makes it so fascinating. And I have no doubt, that in the future, this novel will be known as one of the seminal masterpieces of modern literature. ( )