Apocalyptic themes in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (2009)

Abstract

Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009) has had a particular intellectual and aff ective resonance in the post-Holocaust and the so-called post-traumatic national spaces in Europe, where the questions related to the erasure of the Jewish presence and its memory, as well as to displaced mourning and shame, have remained open and unresolved (see, for example, Ball). Both the endorsements and the critique of The Kindly Ones are thus inseparable from the public provocation of presenting “Holocaust pornography” and “Holocaust kitsch” (see Hussey). The suggestion here is that this provocation relates to the endowment of the main character, Maximilian Aue, with the status of a genocidal witness to the Holocaust as the end of the world (and hence an “apocalyptic witness”). That testimonial subject formation is inseparable from the anesthetization of violence and genocidal perpetration in the novel, as well as, more specifi cally, the psychic world of the protagonist framed by his complicated kinship relations, the operation of sexual desire in the novel, and the mythologization of his family history.