Jonathan Littell – författare

Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, looks back on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, and the death camps as Nazi Germany falls. Set during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and in Berlin, The Kindly Ones is narrated by Dr Max Aue, who is both a cultivated intellectual and a participant in Nazi atrocities. From Stalingrad to the death camps and the nightmarish fall of Berlin, The Kindly Ones places Max Aue among figures including Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer and Hitler. As the Third Reich falls, Max reflects on the career that took him through mass murder and bureaucratic power, insisting on his own version of events.

How do fascists think? An acclaimed novelists looks at the life and writing of a prominent Nazi collaborator to investigate the links between psychology, language, and action on the far right.Léon Degrelle was Belgium’s highest-ranking Nazi collaborator and a fanatical Waffen-SS officer who fought on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Admired by Hitler and Mussolini and later sheltered by Franco in Spain, Degrelle embodied the figure of the fascist true believer long after the defeat of the Third Reich.In a richly illustrated text, Jonathan Littell here subjects Degrelle’s main autobiographical writings, his memoir The Russian Campaign, to a forensic reading, bringing it into confrontation with the work of a renowned writer on psychology and fascism, Klaus Theweleit, who provides an afterword to the book. Littell dissects Degrelle’s prose to expose what he terms an “anatomy of fascist discourse”: a recurring set of metaphors, obsessions, and psychic structures through which fascist ideology understands the body, violence, purity, and the enemy.The Damp and the Dry moves beyond biography to reveal how fascism thinks and speaks. It is a disturbing and incisive study of authoritarian mentality—one that illuminates not only the history of twentieth-century fascism, but its enduring rhetorical and psychological appeal.

What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these ‘inconvenient places’ which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality.With the photographer Antoine d’Agata, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small suburban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph, when there is literally nothing to see – or almost nothing?