Kommissbrot: Jonathan Littell's Glossary

καὶ μὴ τὸ δεινὸν πᾶν πόλεως ἔξω βαλεῖν.

Aeschylus

As one would expect with a bestselling novel, Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), the fictitious memoirs of Sicherheitsdienst veteran and war criminal Max Aue, has been translated into many languages.¹ There is one language, however, into which the novel cannot reasonably be translated, and that is the German language. The problem lies in the huge number of Germanisms scattered throughout the French original. Macaronic sentences such as "Le lendemain matin le Standartenführer Blobel réunit ses Leiter . . ."² illustrate how a gritty mixture of French and German characterizes the novel's diction. The German words planted in the text mostly hail from military contexts—"Feldgrau," "Abwehr," "Befehlsnotstand"—but there is also a fair sprinkling of administrative jargon from the mass murderer's handbook, such as "Genickschuß," "Häftlingskrankenbau," "Blockältester," "Durchkämmung," "Sonderbehandlung" and, of course, "Endlösung."³ Nazi key words like "Volk," "Weltanschauung," "Übermensch," and "Heimat" rub shoulders with such civilian words as "Strichjungen" and "Kellerkinder" as well as everyday ones including "Schnaps," "Jawohl," "meine Herren," "kein Problem," "Schweinerei" and "Tchüss" [!]. Occasionally German-French hybrids such as "les Feldgendarmes" or "le Moral de la Wehrmacht" occur, as do German loan words long established in the French language, for example, "la schlague."

In the French first edition some of these words were misspelled. German reviewers were all too happy to pounce on unfortunate blunders such as "Liebstandarte" or "Kommissarbrod."⁴ The latter certainly is rather a sinister slip-up, since it has "Kommissbrot" (army bread) overlapping with Hitler's "Kommissarbefehl." As with many of Littell's Germanisms, there is a certain historical irony about his use of "Komissbrot," because the Latinism "Kommiss" (army) probably found its way into German via French. It originally referred to army food supplies collected from the civilian population by military "commission." The soldiers' coarse bread then came to be used as a metonymy for the military as such, so that strictly speaking, "Kommissbrot" is a tautology. The reason I am going into all this is that throughout the book, Littell's narrator, Max Aue, is plagued by serious eating disorders and a dysfunctional digestion. Towards the end of the book he begins to indulge in coprophagous fantasies. I would take all that as a hint at more general problems with distinguishing inside and outside, excretion and incorporation—of mental processes such as memory and fantasies, too—or, to put it in psychoanalytical terms, with projection and introjection. Interestingly, these problems—and this will be my subject in the following pages—are reflected in the way the text deals with its Germanisms. Some of these are collected in an annex to the book, outside the narrative, in a glossary offering a kind of "Nazispeak for Beginners."⁵ There is also a synopsis of the hierarchies of the Wehrmacht, the SS, the German police force and the French army. I will argue that Littell's Germanisms serve an affective function as vehicles of mental exorcism and incorporation. I will discuss this twofold function as deriving at least to an extent from the rhetorical status of foreign words, which, borrowing the term from the Ancient grammarians, one could refer to as barbarisms. I will then draw a link between this lexical surplus and what I consider the crucial gap in Littell's text: the Kindly Ones—that is, the Greek goddesses known as Erinyes or Eumenides—lend the novel its name, but in the text itself they are absent. What I would like to demonstrate is that the novel has no place for the Furies; they cannot be anything but absent. One of the dreadful deities' functions, however, is assumed by the novel's Germanisms, which literally haunt the text. I will argue that in this sense—and in this sense alone—the book replaces the Greek monsters with German lexical monstrosities.

1. Barbarisms

The rather shrill debate around Les Bienveillantes was sparked off by the graphic, if not to say pornographic, descriptions of mass murder and erotic fantasy which seek to invade the reader's mind. At a deeper level, the general outcry can...