A Nazi Zelig: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones

Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones took France by storm in the fall of 2006, when it won the Prix Goncourt--the nation's most prestigious literary prize--and sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Commercial success fed the heat of scandal, which followed the book to Germany in 2008, vaulting it to the top of the bestseller list. The furor revolved around nothing less than the governing conceit of Littell's thousand-page roman-fleuve: the novel pretends to be the memoir of a Nazi SS officer who witnessed the different stages of the Holocaust as it was being perpetrated. The dispute over the book was another round in the cycle of Holocaust controversies that have marked time since the end of World War II with the regularity of a metronome. Tempestuous quarrels may have raised public consciousness about the Holocaust; but even so, subsequent battles over its representation can feel no less unseemly. "Silence over the murder, scandal over the books," George Steiner worried in response to one of the first such imbroglios, forty years before Littell's intentionally sickening but unquestionably brilliant success....