Jonathan Littell has written a remarkable novel, expertly translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell, out of the gaps in the historiography of the Final Solution and the war on the Eastern Front. He insinuates his narrator, an SS officer named Max Aue, into a series of actual events, running from the massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar in 1941, through the doomed German assault on Stalingrad the following year, to the Third Reich’s ultimate ignominy in the Führer’s bunker in Berlin in April 1945.
My review of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones appears this week in the New Statesman.