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Description
Les Bienveillantes, by Jonathan Littell; Editions Gallimard, 2006, 25 [euro].
IT IS HIGHLY DISTURBING to see the fall of the Reich and the Holocaust through the eyes of an unrepentant SS officer. We are used to Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz taking us down that terrible path and to fusing with the narrator. But this is different. In Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, we giddily view events through the other end of the telescope. At one point, two Jews are hurried past so as not to disturb a garden party taking place alongside the Auschwitz camp fence. The shots that kill them are barely heard. So it is understandable that Les Bienveillantes hit France at the end of August last year like a bombshell and continues to do so, even now that the book has carried off two of the season's major prizes, the Acadrmie Francaise and the Goncourt.
France is going through a period of historical rethinking. Nicolas Sarkozy, now France's newly-elected President, but at the time Minister for the Interior, drew up a bill to redress the balance on colonialism. In the old days, it had been all good. Then it had been all bad. Now we needed a law to tell us that in fact it was a curate's egg. Uproar ensued. It was voted out.
Then a bill on Armenian genocide denial was passed; it could prevent European entry discussions with Turkey taking place on French soil. For historians that was enough. They signed a petition pleading for history to be left to them and for politicians to concentrate on the present. Enough of repentance legislation for events that cannot be undone and which only research and time can clarify or heal.
So who is this Jonathan Littell who has taken the... |
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