Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

What a curious sensation, suddenly finding myself, after such a journey, with nothing to do! I had finished the Blanchot a long time ago; I opened the treatise on ritual murder only to shut it again right away, surprised that the Reichsführer could take an interest in such drivel; I had no private affairs to attend to; all my files were in order. With my office window open onto the park of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, sunny but already a little dried out by the August heat, my feet up on my sofa, or else leaning out the window to smoke a cigarette, I reflected; and when immobility began to weigh on me, I went down to take a walk in the garden, strolling through the dusty gravel lanes, greatly tempted by the pockets of shady grass. I thought about what I had seen in Poland, but for some reason I couldn’t explain, my thinking skimmed over the images and came to rest on the words. The words preoccupied me. I had been wondering how much the differences between German and Russian reactions to mass killings (differences that caused us finally to change our method to make the thing somehow easier, while the Russians seemed, even after a quarter century, to remain unmoved by it) had to do with differences of vocabulary. The word Tod , after all, has the stiffness of a clean, already cold, almost abstract corpse, the finality in any case of the after-death, whereas smiert’ , the Russian word, is as heavy and greasy as the thing itself. What about French, in that case? That language, for me, remained dependent on the feminization of death by Latin: What a difference finally between la Mort and all the almost warm, tender images it gives rise to, and the terrible Thanatos of the Greeks! The Germans had at least preserved the masculine ( smiert’ , it should be said in passing, is also feminine). There, in the brightness of summer, I thought about that decision we had made, the extraordinary idea of killing all the Jews, whoever they might be, young or old, good or bad, of destroying Judaism in the person of its bearers, a decision that had received the name, now well known, of Endlösung : the “Final Solution.” But what a beautiful word! It had not always been a synonym for extermination, though: since the beginning, people had called for, when it came to the Jews, an Endlösung , or else a völlige Lösung (a complete solution) or also an allgemeine Lösung (a general solution), and according to the period, this meant exclusion from public life or exclusion from economic life or, finally, emigration. Then, little by little, the signification had slid toward the abyss, but without the signifier changing, and it seemed almost as if this final meaning had always lived in the heart of the word, and that the thing had been attracted, drawn in by it, by its weight, its fabulous gravity, into that black hole of the mind, toward the point of singularity: and then we had passed the event horizon, beyond which there is no return. We still believe in ideas, in concepts, we believe that words designate ideas, but that’s not necessarily true, maybe there aren’t really any ideas, maybe there’s really nothing but words, and the weight peculiar to words. And maybe thus we had let ourselves be led along by a word and its inevitability. Within us, then, there would have been no ideas, no logic, no coherence? There would have been only words, in our oh so peculiar language, only that word, Endlösung , its streaming beauty? For, really, how could one resist the seduction of such a word? It would have been as inconceivable as resisting the word obey , the word serve , the word law . And perhaps that, at bottom, was the reason for our Sprachregelungen , quite transparent finally in terms of camouflage ( Tarnjargon ), but useful for keeping those who used these words and expressions— Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), abtransportiert (transported onward), entsprechend behandelt (treated appropriately), Wohnsitzverlegung (change of domicile), or Executivmassnahmen (executive measures)—between the sharp points of their abstraction. This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our bürokratisches Amtsdeutsch , as my colleague Eichmann would say: in correspondance, in speeches too, passive constructions dominated: “it has been decided that…,” “the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,” “this difficult task has been carried out,” and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reassuring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, since by the special usage that our National Socialist language made of certain nouns, one managed, if not completely to eliminate verbs, at least to reduce them to the state of useless (but nonetheless decorative) appendages, and that way, you did without even action, there were only facts, brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment, like the Einsatz , or the Einbruch (the breakthrough), the Verwertung (the utilization), the Entpolonisierung (the de-Polonization), the Ausrottung (the extermination), but also, in a contrary sense, the Versteppung , the “steppification” of Europe by the Bolshevik hordes who, contrary to Attila, razed civilization in order to let the grass grow for their horses. Man lebt in seiner Sprache , wrote Hanns Johst, one of our best National Socialist poets: “You live in your language.” Voss, I was sure, would not have denied it.

I was still waiting for my summons from the Reichsführer when the English resumed their massive strikes on Berlin, with considerable vigor. It was August 23, a Monday, I remember, late at night: I was at home, in bed, but I probably wasn’t asleep yet, when the sirens went off. I was tempted to remain lying, but already Frau Gutknecht was banging my door. She was bellowing so loudly you could scarcely hear the sirens: “Herr Offizier! Herr Offizier!…Doktor Aue! Get up! The Luftmörder ! Help!” I pulled on a pair of trousers and unlocked the door: “Well, yes, Frau Gutknecht. It’s the RAF. What do you want me to do?” Her jowls were trembling, her cheeks were pale, and she was crossing herself convulsively, muttering: “Jesus-Mary-Joseph, Jesus-Mary-Joseph, what are we going to do?”—“We are going to go down into the shelter, like everyone else.” I shut the door and got dressed, then calmly went downstairs, locking my door against looters. We could hear the flak thundering, especially to the south and near the Tiergarten. The building’s basement had been turned into an air-raid shelter: it would never have survived a direct hit, but it was better than nothing. I threaded my way through the suitcases and legs and settled into a corner, as far as possible from Frau Gutknecht, who was sharing her terrors with some neighbors. Children were crying anxiously, others were running between the adults, some wearing suits, others still in their bathrobes. Just two candles lit the basement, little quivering, trembling flames that registered the nearby explosions like seismographs. The alert lasted for several hours; unfortunately, it was forbidden to smoke in these shelters. I must have dozed, I think no bombs hit our neighborhood. When it was over I went upstairs to go back to bed, without even going to look in the street. The next day, instead of taking the U-Bahn, I called the SS-Haus and sent for Piontek. He reported that the bombers had come from the south, from Sicily, probably, and that it was mostly Steglitz, Lichterfelde, and Marienfelde that had been hit, although some buildings had been destroyed at Tempelhof and all the way to the zoo. “Our boys used a new tactic, Wilde Sau , they called it on the radio, but they didn’t really explain what it was, Sturmbannführer. Heard it works, and we shot down more than sixty of their planes, the bastards. Poor Herr Jeschonnek, he should have waited a little.” General Jeschonnek, the Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe, had just committed suicide, because of his service’s repeated failures to prevent the Anglo-American raids. Even before crossing the Spree, Piontek had to make a detour to avoid a street blocked by rubble, the ruins of a building rammed by a bomber, a Lancaster, I think: its tail was sticking out of the ruins, desolate, like a ship’s stern after a shipwreck. Thick black smoke hid the sun. I ordered Piontek to drive me to the southern part of the city: the farther we got, the more buildings were still burning, and the streets were full of debris. People were trying to pull their furniture out of gutted homes to pile it in the middle of streets flooded by fire hoses; mobile field kitchens were serving soup to lines of shocked, exhausted, soot-covered survivors; near the fire trucks, shapes were lined up on the sidewalks, sometimes with a foot, bare or still wearing a pathetic shoe, sticking out from under a dirty sheet. Some streets were barred by streetcars toppled onto to their sides by the force of the explosions or blackened by fire; power lines trailed on the pavement, trees lay crushed or remained standing but bare, stripped of all their leaves. The neighborhoods most affected were impassable; I had Piontek turn around and return to the SS-Haus. The building itself hadn’t been hit, but nearby impacts had blown out the windows, and broken glass on the steps crunched beneath my feet. Inside, I met Brandt in the lobby, looking terribly excited, animated by a glee that was rather surprising in the circumstances. “What is happening?” He paused for an instant: “Ah, Sturmbannführer, you don’t know the news yet. Great news! The Reichsführer was appointed Minister of the Interior.” So that was it, the changes Thomas was talking about, I thought while Brandt rushed into the elevator. I walked up the stairs: Fräulein Praxa was at her place, made up, fresh as a rose. “Sleep well?”—“Oh, you know, Sturmbannführer, I live in Weissensee, I didn’t hear anything.”—“All the better for you.” The window in my office was intact: I had gotten into the habit of leaving it open at night. I thought about the repercussions of the news announced by Brandt, but I lacked information to analyze it in detail. A priori, it seemed to me, it wouldn’t change much for us: although Himmler, as chief of the German police, was technically subordinate to the Minister of the Interior, he was actually completely autonomous, and had been since 1936 at least; neither Frick, the outgoing minister, nor his Staatsekretär Stuckart had ever had the slightest influence over the RSHA or even the Hauptamt Orpo. The only thing over which they had kept control was the civilian administration, the civil servants; now that would also revert to the Reichsführer; but I couldn’t believe it was a major issue. Obviously, to have the rank of minister could only reinforce the Reichsführer’s hand against his rivals: but I didn’t know enough about the struggles at the top to gauge this fact to its full extent.