Not for the faint-hearted

‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed a false identity in order to escape ‘the rope or Siberia’. As Berlin falls to the Red Army he slips out of the city and makes his way to Paris disguised as a returning French STO, an enlisted worker.

But the war has reduced him to ‘an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame’. And so he decides to write his memoirs. What follows is a blow-by-blow account of a descent into hell, perhaps the least metaphorical hell invented by man: 1941, the Eastern Front, the Ukraine, Stalingrad, Auschwitz and the fall of Berlin. Max Aue does not justify what he saw or what he did, but he insists that he was simply ‘a man like other men’ and that those who had not committed his crimes had merely been luckier than he had been. ‘Because if you have the arrogance to think [that you are a better person than I am]’, he warns his readers, ‘that’s just where the danger begins’. In his case one thing lead to another: ‘I started out within the bounds of my service and then, under the pressure of events, I finally overstepped those bounds’.

Jonathan Littell, an American author who writes in French, has already enjoyed widespread success with this second novel. First published in France in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes, it won the Prix Goncourt and has sold over a million copies internationally. It has been compared to War and Peace and has similar scope and ambition, although a more appropriate title for this version would be War and War.