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I’m reading Jonathan Littell‘s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones, English translation due in March 2009, De välvilliga in Swedish) and I like it – but what must be repeated over and over again is this: this is fiction! The descriptions of everyday life in Nazi Germany bear little resemblance to reality. As with Elie Wiesel‘s Night, and to a certain extent Anne Frank’s Diary, this cannot be seen as some kind of evidence or witness description of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, a lot of people will use it that way because the majority of the people in the Western hemisphere are brainwashed and cannot think rational thoughts when dealing with such a sensitive subject as the Holocaust.

However, what I wanted to touch upon is Littell’s real life opinions about Israel and the Holocaust. Littell, of Jewish background, seems to have a clear standpoint that I consider very sane. Hear him out, quoted from an article in Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper:

“My reading of what you call ‘Holocaust’ is also less Jewish and Judeo-centric than that of my father. I think that what happened was far broader than a narrow issue of ‘Germans killing Jews.’ The English word ‘holocaust’ is certainly the wrong term to describe what happened. It is a religious term, rife with non-historical meaning. I don’t think the word ‘shoah’ is any better. It’s a controversy among historians. Raul Hilberg described it as ‘the destruction of European Jewry,’ but he encountered criticism because that was also the Nazi terminology.

Ulrich Herbert calls it the ‘National-Socialist extermination policy,’ and I find that a far more accurate description because it also includes the extermination of the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the disabled and other minorities.”

Indeed, according to Littell, the “National-Socialist extermination policy” was “only one of the several big genocides that have happened in human history.”

But doesn’t the unprovoked nature of the destruction of the Jews, the underlying ideology, the apparatus that was created to implement it, its scale, make it exceptional in human history?

“I personally understand the arguments for the exceptionality of the Holocaust, but I don’t agree with them. The basic argument is that the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews, but I don’t see the difference between that and an extermination policy that was aimed – and implemented on a large scale – at groups such as the peasants in the Soviet Union or in Cambodia. Every genocide is exceptional.”

“I think the extermination of the Jews is a universal problem, I think it concerns everyone. Beyond that, I think that today the issue is being used for political purposes in Israel.”
[…]
It is political, a mechanism. It has no connection to what actually happened. The Holocaust, I think, is being exploited politically, in a way that the Nazi extermination policy against other groups – Russians, homosexuals, Gypsies – is not.”

Asked whether he thinks the Holocaust shapes Israeli actions today, he replies: “On the one hand, Israel is a country that underwent a serious trauma, and the Holocaust made it dramatically paranoid. But then there is also greed and land-grabbing and all that shit. That’s just inexcusable. I’m sorry, but this cannot be excused by traumas that occurred 60 years ago.”

Littell says Israel uses the Holocaust to justify “inexcusable” acts, by which he means the situation in the territories, and he likens the actions of the Israel Defense Forces to the behavior of the Nazis in the period before they came to power.

Would you really compare the two?

“No, we cannot compare: There is nothing like genocide in the territories, but they are doing absolutely atrocious things. If the government would let the soldiers do worse things, they would. Everyone says, ‘Look how the Germans dealt with the Jews even before the Holocaust: cutting the beards, humiliating them in public, forcing them to clean the street.’ That kind of stuff happens in the territories every day. Every goddamn day.

[…]
“Like how what the Americans are doing in Iraq is unacceptable. I’m not talking about the war but about torture and things like Abu Ghraib. Understanding the Germans of 60 years ago may make you feel that you’re not that far from it, as Americans or as Israelis. So maybe it will be possible to enforce our social mechanisms to prevent our societies, at least, from going completely off the wall.”

What should your Israeli readers do?

“I think the Israelis, instead of beating their breast, should take a long, hard look at what they are doing now. I am not saying that present-day Israeli society is comparable to Nazi society in World War II, but it is definitely one of the most crazed Western societies.”

“Look,” Littell sums up, in a delayed response to the question of his motivation and perhaps that of his protagonist as well, “Life is a question of a search for meaning – what’s it all about? Are we here to have fun? Make money? Have sex? No, clearly not. Then you have this whole religion thing. A lot of people find meaning in that – I don’t. I adhere to a point of view that says our existence is completely meaningless and completely absurd, and all the horrible things we do to each other are completely unjustified. And anyway, we are going to die. So the question is how you get through life if you accept this approach as the fundamental parameter. Personally, I sometimes find it pretty amusing, but most times it’s just grim. And I focus on the grim, because it’s there.”