The Kindly Ones (Littell Novel) - Background

Background

The title Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) refers to the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies, The Oresteia written by Aeschylus. The Erinyes or Furies were vengeful goddesses who tracked and tormented those who murdered a parent. In the plays, Orestes, who has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon, was pursued by these female goddesses. The goddess Athena intervenes, setting up a jury trial to judge the Furies' case against Orestes. Athena gives the casting vote which acquits Orestes, then pleads with the Furies to accept the trial's verdict and to transform themselves into "Most loved of gods, with me to show and share fair mercy, gratitude and grace as fair." The Furies accept and are renamed the Eumenides or Kindly Ones (in French Les Bienveillantes).

Littell said that a possible one-line description of the novel would be "The intimate memoirs of an ex-Nazi mass murderer." When asked why he wrote such a book, Littell evokes a photo he discovered in 1989 of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Soviet partisan hanged by the Nazis in 1941. He adds that a bit later, in 1992, he watched the movie Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, which left an impression on him, especially the discussion by Raul Hilberg about the bureaucratic aspect of genocide.

In 2001, Littell decided to quit his job at Action Against Hunger and started research which lasted 18 months, during which he went to Germany, Ukraine, Russia and Poland, and read around 200 books, mainly about Nazi Germany, the Eastern Front, the Nuremberg Trials, and the genocide process. In addition, the author studied the literature and film archives of World War II and the post-war trials. Littell worked on this novel for about five years. This book is his first novel written in French and his second novel after the science fiction themed Bad Voltage in 1989.

Littell said he wanted to focus on the thinking of an executioner and of origins of state murder, showing how we can take decisions that lead, or not, to a genocide. Littell claims he set out creating the character Max Aue by imagining what he would have done and how he would have behaved if he had been born into Nazi Germany. One childhood event that kept Littell interested in the question of being a killer was the Vietnam War. According to him, "My childhood terror was that I would be drafted and sent to Vietnam and made to kill women and children who hadn't done anything to me."

Whereas the influence of Greek tragedies is clear from the choice of title, the absent father, and the roles of incest and parricide, Littell makes it clear that he was influenced by more than the structure of The Oresteia. He found that the idea of morality in Ancient Greece is more relevant for making judgments about responsibility for the Holocaust than the Judeo-Christian approach, wherein the idea of sin can be blurred by the concepts such as intentional sin, unintentional sin, sinning by thought, or sinning by deed. For the Greeks it was the commission of the act itself upon which one is judged: Oedipus is guilty of patricide, even if he did not know that he was killing his father.