It is Holocaust Memorial Day. Fictionalising the Holocaust has become something of a fashion in recent years — The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes in the orginal French) to name but three. The first two have been adapted for film, the third has not. Its author, Jonathan Littell, has refused to sell the film rights on the grounds that it would be impossible to adapt the book for the screen.
Littell’s statement is strange because The Kindly Ones is cinematic in scope. The action ranges from Stalingrad to Auschwitz, to bombed-out Berlin to the glamour of the Cote d’Azur; and the protagonist encounters all manner of Nazi, not just the monsters.
It would be more accurate to say that Littell’s vision of The Kindly Ones could not be filmed. A director would have to cut Littell’s baroque excesses, which undo the book’s premise (that evil is often committed by the most banal people) in any case. Littell’s SS officer protagonist is a psychopath by inclination, with scarcely credible sexual tastes — anything but banal.
This raises the question, should the Holocaust be fictionalised? It’s a delicate question, as the Australian novelist Amy T. Matthews found when she was writing her award winning book, End of the Night Girl. ‘I felt a great sense of anxiety about whether I had any right to fictionalise the Holocaust. A little voice in my head criticised every word I wrote. So I put the anxiety into the book.’
That anxiety is not universal. Yann Martel infamously declared that ‘Jewish people do not own the Holocaust” after critics tore into his novel, Beatrice and Virgil. Martel is right intellectually even if, emotionally, the Jews are first among equals. Martel’s problem is that Beatrice and Virgil is a truly rotten book — life’s too short to explain why, just take my word for it.
There is no worth in fictionalising the Holocaust badly. The Kindly Ones, despite its flaws, is not a bad book, far from it. The extensive description, in horrific technicolour, of man’s calculated inhumanity to man portrays historical truths about Nazism and the nature of evil — that it is not innate, that it has been added to the world by men. The book is crying out to be filmed. It’s a pity that the bewildering yet strangely poignant video above (in Norwegian) is practically all there is to go on.
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