The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  The next day, I went to the editorial office of Je Suis Partout. Almost all my Parisian friends worked there or gravitated around it. This went back quite a long way. When I had gone to Paris to take my preparatory classes, at seventeen, I didn’t know anyone. I was attending Janson-de-Sailly as a boarder; Moreau had allocated a small monthly allowance for me, as long as I got good grades, and I was relatively free; after the carceral nightmare of the three preceding years, it would have taken a lot less to turn my head. But I behaved, I didn’t do anything stupid. After classes, I would dash over to the Seine to hunt through the booksellers’ stalls, or else join my friends in a little bar in the Latin Quarter, to drink cheap red wine and set the world to rights. But I found my classmates a little dull. Almost all of them were from the upper middle class and were getting ready to follow blindly in their fathers’ footsteps. They had money, and they had been taught very early on how the world was made and what their place in it would be: the dominant one. Toward workers, they felt only scorn, or fear; the ideas that I had brought back from my first trip to Germany—that workers were just as much a part of the nation as the middle class, that the social order had to be arranged organically for the advantage of all, not just a few of the well-off, that workers should not be oppressed but rather offered a life of dignity and a place in this order so as to counter the seductions of Bolshevism—all that was foreign to them. Their political opinions were as narrow as their feeling of bourgeois propriety, and it seemed to me even more pointless to try to discuss with them fascism or German National Socialism (which had just, in September of that year, won a crushing electoral victory, thus becoming the second largest party in the country and sending shockwaves across the victors’ Europe) than to talk about the youth movement ideals preached by Hans Blüher. Freud, for them (if they had even heard of him), was a sexual maniac, Spengler a mad, monomaniacal Prussian, Jünger a warmonger flirting dangerously with Bolshevism; even Péguy they found suspect. Only a few students on scholarship from the provinces seemed a little different, and it was mostly toward them that I gravitated. One of these boys, Antoine F., had an older brother at the École normale supérieure, which I had dreamed of attending, and it was he who took me there for the first time, to drink rum toddies with his brother and his dorm mates and discuss Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whom I was just discovering. This Bertrand F. was a carré, or “squared”—a second-year student; the best study rooms, with sofas, engravings on the walls, and stoves, were mostly occupied by cubes, or the “cubed,” third-year students. One day, passing by one of these rooms, I noticed a Greek inscription painted on the lintel: IN THIS CARREL WORK SIX FINE AND GOOD MEN (hex kaloi kagathoi)—AND A CERTAIN OTHER ONE (kai tis allos). The door was open, so I pushed it and asked in Greek: “So who is this other one?” A young man with a round face raised his thick glasses from his book and answered in the same language: “A Hebrew, who doesn’t know Greek. And you, who are you?”—“Another too, but made of finer stuff than your Hebrew: a German.”—“A German who knows Greek?”—“What better language to speak with a Frenchman?” He burst out laughing and introduced himself: he was Robert Brasillach. I explained to him that I was in fact half French, and had lived in France since 1924; he asked me if I had gone back to Germany since, and I told him about my summer trip; soon we were chatting about National Socialism. He listened attentively to my descriptions and explanations. “Come back whenever you like,” he said at the end. “I have some friends who will be happy to meet you.” Through him, I discovered another world, which had nothing to do with that of the civil servants in training. These young people cultivated visions of the future of their country and of Europe that they argued about bitterly, while also drawing on a rich study of the past. Their ideas and interests burst out in all directions. Brasillach, together with his future brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, was a passionate student of the cinema and had me discover not only Chaplin and René Clair but also Eisenstein, Lang, Pabst, Dreyer. He brought me to the offices of L’Action française, in their printing house on the Rue Montmartre, a fine narrow building with a Renaissance staircase, full of the din of the rotary presses. I saw Maurras a few times; he would arrive late, around eleven at night, half deaf, bitter, but always ready to open his heart and vent his spleen against the Marxists, the bourgeois, the republicans, the Jews. Brasillach, at that time, was still completely under his spell, but Maurras’s stubborn hatred for Germany formed an obstacle that I couldn’t overlook, and Robert and I often quarreled about it. If Hitler reached power, I asserted, and united the German worker with the middle class, once and for all countering the Red Peril, and if France did the same, and if the two together managed to eliminate the pernicious influence of the Jews, then the heart of Europe, both nationalist and socialist, would form, along with Italy, an invincible bloc of common interests. But the French were still bogged down, floundering in their petty shopkeepers’ interests and their backward-looking spirit of revenge. Of course, Hitler would sweep aside the unjust Versailles clauses, that was a pure historical necessity; but if the healthy forces of France could on their side liquidate the corrupt republic and its Jewish puppets, then a Franco-German alliance would not only be a possibility, but would become an inevitable reality, a new European entente that would clip the wings of the British plutocrats and imperialists, and would soon be ready to confront the Bolsheviks and bring Russia back into the bosom of civilized nations. (As you can see, my German trip had served my intellectual education well; Moreau would have been horrified if he had known the use I put his money to.) Brasillach, in general, agreed with me: “Yes,” he said, “the postwar is already over. We have to act quickly if we want to avoid another war. That would be a disaster, the end of European civilization, the triumph of the barbarians.” Most of Maurras’s young disciples thought likewise. One of the most brilliant and caustic of them was Lucien Rebatet, who wrote the literary and film criticism in L’Action française under the name of François Vinneuil. He was ten years older than I, but we quickly formed a friendship, drawn to each other by his attraction to Germany. There were also Maxence, Blond, Jacques Talagrand who became Thierry Maulnier, Jules Supervielle, and many others. We met at the Brasserie Lipp, when someone had money in his pocket, or else at a restaurant for students in the Latin Quarter. We feverishly discussed literature and tried to define a “fascist” literature: Rebatet put forward the names of Plutarch, Corneille, Stendhal. “Fascism,” Brasillach said one day, “is the very poetry of the twentieth century,” and we could only agree with him: fascist, fascio, fascination (but later on, having become wiser or more prudent, he would confer the same title on communism).

  In the spring of 1932, when I passed my entrance exam, most of my friends from the ENS were finishing their studies; when the summer was over, they scattered throughout France, either to do their military service or to take up the teaching positions offered them. I once again spent my vacation in Germany, which was then in the midst of upheaval: German production had fallen to half the level of 1929, and Brüning, with Hindenburg’s support, was governing by means of emergency decrees. Such a situation couldn’t last. Elsewhere, too, the established order was faltering. In Spain, the monarchy had been overturned by a cabal of Freemasons, revolutionaries, and priests. America was almost on its knees. In France, the direct effects of the crisis were less felt, but the situation wasn’t rosy, and the Communists were quietly and methodically undermining things. Without telling anyone, I sent in my application for the NSDAP, Ausland section (for Reichsdeutschen living abroad), and was quickly accepted. When I entered the ELSP, in the fall, I continued to see my friends from the École normale and from L’Action française, who came up regularly to spend weekends in Paris. My classmates remained pretty much the same as at Janson, but to my surprise I found the classes interesting. It was also around this period, probably under the influence of Rebatet and his new friend Louis Destouches, who hadn’t yet become famous (his Journey to the End of the Night had just come out, b
ut enthusiasm hadn’t yet spread beyond the circle of initiates, and Céline still liked to spend time with young people), that I formed a passion for French keyboard music, which was just being rediscovered and played; with Céline, I went to hear Marcelle Meyer; and more bitterly than ever I regretted my laziness and casualness that had made me abandon the piano so quickly. After the New Year, President Hindenburg invited Hitler to form a government. My classmates trembled, my friends waited with bated breath, I exulted. But while the Party was crushing the Reds, sweeping aside the garbage of plutodemocracy, and dissolving the bourgeois parties, I remained stuck in France. A real national revolution was taking place in front of our eyes and in our own time, and I could only follow it from afar, in the newspapers and the newsreels in the movie theaters. France too was seething. Many people went to Germany to see things firsthand; everyone wrote about and dreamed of a similar recovery for their country. People made contact with the Germans, official Germans now, who called for a Franco-German rapprochement; Brasillach introduced me to Otto Abetz, von Ribbentrop’s man (at that time still the Foreign Affairs Advisor of the Party): his ideas were no different from the ones I had aired since my first trip to Germany. But for many, Maurras remained an obstacle; only the best acknowledged that it was time to move on beyond his hypochondriac vaticinations, but even they hesitated, his charisma and the fascination he exercised held them under his sway. At the same time the Stavisky affair exposed the police connections of corruption in government and gave Action Française a moral authority it hadn’t known since 1918. All that came to an end on February 6, 1934. Actually it was a confused business: I too was in the streets, along with Antoine F. (who had entered the ELSP at the same time as I), Blond, Brasillach, a few others. From the Champs-Élysées, we vaguely heard some gunshots; farther down, near the Place de la Concorde, people were running. We spent the rest of the night walking through the streets, chanting slogans when we met other young people. We didn’t learn till the next day that there had been several deaths. Maurras, to whom everyone had instinctively turned, had stood down. The whole affair had just been a damp squib. “French inaction!” foamed Rebatet, who never forgave Maurras. It was all the same to me: my decision was taking shape, and I no longer saw a future for me in France.

  It was actually Rebatet I ran into at Je Suis Partout. “Will you look at that! A revenant.”—“As you see,” I retorted. “Apparently you’re famous, now.” He spread his arms and made a face: “I don’t understand it at all. I even racked my brains to be sure I wasn’t forgetting anyone in my invectives. And in the beginning it worked: Grasset rejected my book because I insulted too many friends of the house, as they said, and Gallimard wanted to make some major cuts. Finally it was that Belgian who took me on, you remember him, the one who printed Céline? Result: he’s raking it in and I am too. At the Rive Gauche,’ when I went there to sign books, you’d have thought I was a movie star. In fact, the only ones who didn’t like it were the Germans.” He looked at me suspiciously: “Have you read it?”—“Not yet, I’m waiting for you to give me a copy. Why? Do you insult me too?” He laughed: “Not as much as you deserve, you filthy Kraut. Anyway, everyone thought you had died on the field of honor. Shall we go out for a drink?” Rebatet had an appointment a little later on, near Saint-Germain, and he took me to the Café Flore. “I always like to go stare at the dirty mugs of our official antifascists, especially the faces they make when they see me.” When he went in, in fact, people shot him black looks; but several persons also got up to greet him. Lucien, obviously, was enjoying his success. He wore a pale, well-cut suit and a slightly skewed polka-dot bow tie; a crest of disheveled hair crowned his narrow, mobile face. He chose a table to the right, under the windows, a little apart, and I ordered some white wine. When he began to roll a cigarette, I offered him a Dutch one, which he gladly accepted. But even when he smiled, his eyes remained worried. “So, tell me everything,” he said. We hadn’t seen each other since 1939, he just knew I was in the SS: I told him rapidly about the Russian campaign, without going into details. He opened his eyes wide: “You were in Stalingrad, then? Well, damn.” He had a strange look, a mixture of fear and desire perhaps. “You were wounded? Show me.” I showed him the hole, and he let out a long whistle: “You’ve got some luck, don’t you.” I didn’t say anything. “Robert’s going to Russia soon,” he went on. “With Jeantet. But it’s not the same thing.”—“What are they going to do there?”—“It’s an official trip. They’re accompanying Doriot and Brinon, they’re going to inspect the Legion of French Volunteers, near Smolensk I think.”—“And how is Robert doing?”—“Actually, we’ve sort of fallen out, these days. He’s become an out-and-out Pétainist. If he goes on like that, we’ll kick him out of JSP.”—“Has it come to that?” He ordered two more drinks; I gave him another cigarette. “Listen,” he spat out aggressively, “it’s been a while since you were in France: believe me, things have changed. They’re all like starving dogs, fighting over the scraps of the corpse of the republic. Pétain is senile, Laval is behaving worse than a Jew, Déat wants Social Fascism, Doriot National Bolshevism. A bitch wouldn’t be able to find her pups among them all. What we’ve lacked is a Hitler. That’s the tragedy.”—“And Maurras?” Rebatet made a disgusted face: “Maurras? Action marrane, they should call it. I gave him a rough time, in my book; apparently he was livid. And I’ll tell you something else: ever since Stalingrad, everyone’s bolting. The rats are jumping ship. You’ve seen the graffiti? Not one Vichyist who doesn’t keep a Resistant or a Jew in his house, as life insurance.”—“It’s not over yet, though.”—“Oh, I know. But what do you expect? It’s a world of cowards. I made my choice, and I won’t go back on it. If the boat sinks, I’ll sink with it.”—“In Stalingrad, I interrogated a Commissar who quoted Mathilde de la Mole, you remember, in The Red and the Black, near the end?” I repeated the sentence to him and he let out a guffaw: “Oh, that’s unbelievable. He got that out in French?”—“No, German. He was an old Bolshevik, a militant, a real tough guy. You’d have liked him.”—“What did you do with him?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry,” he said. “Stupid question. But he was right. I admire the Bolsheviks, you know. None of this trained cockroach show with them. It’s a system of order. You submit or you croak. Stalin is an extraordinary man. If there were no Hitler, I might have been a Communist, who knows?” We drank a little and I watched the people coming and going. At a table near the back of the room some people were staring at Rebatet and whispering, but I didn’t recognize them. “Are you still into cinema?” I asked him.—“Not anymore, no. I’m interested in music, now.”—“Really? You know Berndt von Üxküll?”—“Of course. Why?”—“He’s my brother-in-law. I met him the other day, for the first time.”—“No kidding! You have some relatives! What’s become of him?”—“Not much, from what I could make out. He’s sulking at home, in Pomerania.”—“Too bad. He did some good stuff.”—“I don’t know his music. We had a long discussion about Schönberg, whom he defends.”—“That doesn’t surprise me. No serious composer could think otherwise.”—“Oh, you’re on his side too?” He shrugged his shoulders: “Schönberg never got involved in politics. And also his greatest disciples, like Webern or Üxküll, are real Aryans, aren’t they? What Schönberg discovered, serial composition, is a sonic potentiality that was always there, a rigor that was so to speak hidden by the deliberate vagueness of the tempered scales, and after him, anyone can use it to do what he wants with it. It’s the first genuine advance in music since Wagner.”—“Actually, von Üxküll hates Wagner.”—“That’s impossible!” he cried in a horrified tone. “Impossible!”—“But it’s true.” And I quoted von Üxküll’s statements to him. “That’s absurd,” Rebatet retorted. “Bach, of course…nothing comes close to Bach. He is untouchable, immense. What he achieved is the definitive synthesis of the horizontal and the vertical, harmonic architecture with melodic thrust. With that, he put an end to everything that came before him, and created a framework from w
hich everyone who followed him tried in one way or another to escape, until finally Wagner blew it apart. How can a German, a German composer, not be on his knees before Wagner?”—“What about French music?” He made a face: “Your Rameau? He’s amusing.”—“You didn’t always say that.”—“One grows up, doesn’t one?” He finished his drink, pensive. I considered for an instant telling him about Yakov, then decided against it. “And in modern music, aside from Schönberg, what do you like?” I asked.—“A lot of things. For thirty years now, music has been waking up, it’s becoming really interesting. Stravinsky, Debussy, it’s great.”—“And Milhaud, Satie?”—“Don’t be an idiot.” At that moment, Brasillach came in. Rebatet called out to him: “Hey, Robert! Look who’s here!” Brasillach examined us through his thick round glasses, made a little sign to us with his hand, and went to another table to sit down. “He’s really becoming unbearable,” Rebatet muttered. “He doesn’t even want to be seen with a Kraut anymore. You’re not even in uniform, so far as I can tell.” But that wasn’t quite the reason, and I knew it. “We got into an argument, the last time I was in Paris,” I said to placate Rebatet. One night, after a small party where he had drunk a little more than usual, Brasillach had found the courage to invite me back to his place, and I had followed him. But he was the kind of shameful invert who doesn’t like anything so much as jacking off listlessly while languorously gazing at his eromenos; I found that boring and even slightly repugnant, and had curtly cut his excitement short. That said, I thought we had remained friends. Probably I had wounded him without realizing it, and in one of his most vulnerable spots: Robert had never been able to face the sordid, bitter reality of desire; and he had remained, in his way, the great boy scout of fascism. Poor Brasillach! So casually and summarily shot, once it was all over, just so that so many good folk, their conscience at peace, could return to the fold. I have often wondered, too, if his leanings had worked against him: collaboration, after all, remained within the family, whereas pederasty was something else entirely, for De Gaulle as well as for the good workers on the jury. Whatever the case, Brasillach would certainly rather have died for his ideas than for his tastes. But wasn’t he the one who described collaboration with this memorable phrase We have slept with Germany, and the memory will remain sweet to us? Rebatet, on the other hand, despite his admiration for Julien Sorel, was cleverer: he got his death sentence, and his pardon with it; he did not become a Communist; and he found time after all that to write a fine History of Music, and to let himself be forgotten.