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Littell, Jonathan
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3 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.
The death of Raul Hilberg, incontrovertable specialist on the Shoah
Jonathan Littell, interviewed by Mathieu Lindon, responds to the death of Raul Hilberg, the great historian of the Shoah, who passed away on August 4th. Littell, author of 'Les Bienveillantes', the fictional confession of an SS officer, made extensive use of 'The Destruction of the European Jews', Raul Hilberg's major work. "It is almost a dictionary. It was of permanent use to me. I continually referred to it for everything to do with the bureaucratic structures, the organisation charts, when seeking a detail on the unfolding of certain sequences. ... [Hilberg] is the incontrovertible expert on the Shoah. He was the first to conceptualise it, to apply an almost structuralist approach to it. His focus on the Shoah was specific, he showed how German bureaucracy played a fully fledged role in it ... . Everything that has followed uses and refers to his text. The English version is also beautifully written, which is rare for a historian."
» full article (external link, French)
More from the press review on the subject » Security Policy / Crises / War, » History, » Germany, » France, » U.S.
All available articles from » Mathieu Lindon
Littells offers another perspective on the Holocaust
The daily publishes an interview granted by Jonathan Littell to the French newspaper 'Le Monde' that was conducted by Samuel Blumenfeld. The author of the 'Bienveillantes' notably responds to criticism concerning the credibility of his character, Max Aue. "I agree, but a sociologically plausible Nazi would never have been able to express himself like my narrator. That man would never have been able to shed this light on the men surrounding him. ... I was not seeking verisimilitude, but truth. There is no novel possible that nails itself to a single register of verisimilitude. Novelistic truth is of another order than historical or sociological truth. The issue of executioners is the big question that historians of the Shoah have been raising for fifteen years. They only remaining question is the motivation of the executioners. It seems to me, having read the works of the great researchers, that they always come up against a wall."
» full article (external link, Spanish)
More from the press review on the subject » Literature, » History, » Europe
Jonathan Littell writes about "collective evil"
"The category of evil is a result, not a cause. There is no such thing as a person who is naturally evil in themself". 'The Well-Wishers', written in French, relates the daily life of a Nazi executioner. In an interview with Guy Duplat, the author of this book, that has had a great success, explains his approach. "What interested me was the question of executioners, of State murder. ... What is true for individual evil remains so for collective evil, when the executioner is surrounded by people telling him that he is doing good. All communities have the power to do evil. The famous Milgram experiment, where people were asked to press a button that could inflict suffering on others, showed that anyone indeed can cause harm in a certain context."
» full article (external link, French)
More from the press review on the subject » Literature, » History, » Germany
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