A German Nazi's French Recollections, as Imagined by an American: Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes

It seems somewhat counter-intuitive, given the shift in international letters, that the American-born Jonathan Littell would choose to write and publish a novel in French, and not in his native English, in 2006. After all, if Pascale Casanova is correct that we have entered a period in which Paris' long-held centrality in the world republic of letters is being increasingly contested by the rise of other cosmopolitan centers, and if "New York today is the unchallenged publishing capital of the world in financial terms,"¹ then why would Littell write Les Bienveillantes and not The Kindly Ones? Given the deliberately polemical and sensationalistic content of the novel, aimed clearly at attracting attention, why would Littell not write in the language that, as studies have indicated, typically produces the greatest number of international bestsellers?² What does French offer that English does not?

The simplest answer, and the one that Littell has suggested in interviews, is that he wanted to write in the language of his literary models: Bataille, Beckett, Blanchot, Flaubert, Genet.³ Writing in French connects him to the literary tradition he most admires and reveals an aspiration, ultimately, to follow in that lineage. Not insignificantly, the French language also distances Littell both from his one English-language publication that preceded Les Bienveillantes, a commissioned science fiction book for which he has expressed much retrospective embarrassment,⁴ and from the American political scene and way of life, which he does not hesitate to criticize enthusiastically.⁵

Echoing Pierre Nora's observation to Littell that "le fait que votre livre ait d'abord paru en France est capital" (Littell and Nora, 43), this article examines the stakes for Littell of writing in French, particularly insofar as language choice informs our reading of the novel. Les Bienveillantes has received far more praise in France than it has following its translations into German or English.⁶ Despite the consecration accorded by the 2006 Prix Goncourt, the Frankfurt book fair buzz, and the reported million-dollar translation rights deal with HarperCollins, sales in the US have not even approached the over 600,000 copies sold in France. With only 19,000 cloth and barely 1,500 paperback copies sold since its March 2009 release, according to Nielsen Bookscan, The Kindly Ones has disappointed US publishers hoping that American readers, like their French counterparts, would see beyond the daunting 1000-page size to be seduced by the novel's singularly controversial plot.⁷ One of the few fictional perpetrator narratives, reminiscent of Robert Merle's autobiography of Rudolf Höss in La Mort est mon métier (1953), or Hitler's self-defense in George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1981), Les Bienveillantes follows a former SS officer, Max Aue, as he meticulously details his rise through the Nazi ranks, offers first-hand accounts of Stalingrad and Auschwitz, graphically describes his incestuous feelings for his twin sister Una, and evasively recounts his ambiguous role in the murder of his mother and stepfather. Whether perceived as an inventive and historically vivid page-turner, or a highly disturbing work of sensationalist schlock, the novel does not tend to invite a dispassionate reading.

The success of Les Bienveillantes in France can perhaps be attributed—invoking Marc Fumaroli's praise—to the country's readiness for this new epic and apocalyptic style of writing; or it might owe to the French's not having yet caught up with the Germans' nuanced historical understanding of perpetrators and the Holocaust, as one German historian, struggling to comprehend the French fascination with such a book, suggests in his passionate critique.⁸ One could even make the case that, at a time when Paris is ceding dominance in the international literary marketplace to English-language publishing centers, the French particularly relished the idea that an American would choose their language to compose and publish a work of epic proportions. (The Spaniard-turned-French writer Jorge Semprun's hyperbolic estimation, "ce n'est pas le livre le plus important de l'année, mais...