Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

Manchester University Press

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

12 Shit, blood and sperm

The Nazi perpetrator’s hallucinations and nightmares in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

Abstract

The chapter revisits Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit hotly contested novel, The Kindly Ones (2006), which retells the events of the Holocaust from the perpetrator’s perspective. The chapter focuses specifically on the nightmares and diurnal hallucinations experienced by Maximilien Aue during his service in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and during the post-war period. While it has been suggested that Littell’s descriptions of Aue’s dreams may be designed to enhance readerly identification with his novel’s abhorrent protagonist, the author’s mobilisation of images of Jewish suffering in communicating Aue’s progressive traumatisation has raised strong objections. To mitigate such criticism of The Kindly Ones, the chapter reframes Aue’s dreams with Cathy Caruth’s recasting of history as an entanglement of the perpetrators’ and victims’ traumas as part of her influential trauma theory. In this light, Littell’s representation of the perpetrator’s mental wounding can be seen as an effort to give a new and powerful voice to the pain of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims who, like Clorinda in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, analysed by Caruth, speak to us with a renewed and powerful voice through their killer’s trauma. In other words, the chapter argues that Littell’s potentially morally problematic representation of the perpetrator’s psychological injury has the potential to counter ‘Holocaust fatigue’ engendered by an oversaturation of victim-focused cultural and media representations of genocidal violence, including those of the Shoah.

Abstract

The chapter revisits Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit hotly contested novel, The Kindly Ones (2006), which retells the events of the Holocaust from the perpetrator’s perspective. The chapter focuses specifically on the nightmares and diurnal hallucinations experienced by Maximilien Aue during his service in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and during the post-war period. While it has been suggested that Littell’s descriptions of Aue’s dreams may be designed to enhance readerly identification with his novel’s abhorrent protagonist, the author’s mobilisation of images of Jewish suffering in communicating Aue’s progressive traumatisation has raised strong objections. To mitigate such criticism of The Kindly Ones, the chapter reframes Aue’s dreams with Cathy Caruth’s recasting of history as an entanglement of the perpetrators’ and victims’ traumas as part of her influential trauma theory. In this light, Littell’s representation of the perpetrator’s mental wounding can be seen as an effort to give a new and powerful voice to the pain of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims who, like Clorinda in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, analysed by Caruth, speak to us with a renewed and powerful voice through their killer’s trauma. In other words, the chapter argues that Littell’s potentially morally problematic representation of the perpetrator’s psychological injury has the potential to counter ‘Holocaust fatigue’ engendered by an oversaturation of victim-focused cultural and media representations of genocidal violence, including those of the Shoah.

Chapters in this book

  1. Front Matter i
  2. Contents v
  3. List of figures vii
  4. List of contributors viii
  5. Foreword xiii
  6. Acknowledgements xviii
  7. Introduction 1
  8. I Dream images 17
  9. 1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity 19
  10. 2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France 39
  11. 3 Dreams and thresholds 60
  12. 4 Condemned to oblivion 79
  13. ii Dreams as sites of resistance 97
  14. 5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann 99
  15. 6 The Third Reich of Dreams 120
  16. 7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom 139
  17. 8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peutêtre (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg 160
  18. III Violent states 179
  19. 9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 181
  20. 10 Dreaming the unthinkable 199
  21. 11 ‘My hell dream’ 220
  22. 12 Shit, blood and sperm 238
  23. Afterword 258
  24. Index 263
Dreams and atrocity
This chapter is in the book Dreams and atrocity
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526158086.00022

Chapters in this book

  1. Front Matter i
  2. Contents v
  3. List of figures vii
  4. List of contributors viii
  5. Foreword xiii
  6. Acknowledgements xviii
  7. Introduction 1
  8. I Dream images 17
  9. 1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity 19
  10. 2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France 39
  11. 3 Dreams and thresholds 60
  12. 4 Condemned to oblivion 79
  13. ii Dreams as sites of resistance 97
  14. 5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann 99
  15. 6 The Third Reich of Dreams 120
  16. 7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom 139
  17. 8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peutêtre (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg 160
  18. III Violent states 179
  19. 9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 181
  20. 10 Dreaming the unthinkable 199
  21. 11 ‘My hell dream’ 220
  22. 12 Shit, blood and sperm 238
  23. Afterword 258
  24. Index 263
Downloaded on 6.5.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7765/9781526158086.00022/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button