One of the most prominent contemporary European filmmakers, Ukrainian director Sergejus Loznica, interprets the grandiose novel about the greatest human catastrophe of the last century in World War II, which ignited sharp discussions among writers, historians, sociologists and cultural researchers, on the stage of the theater.
S. Loznica: The time has come to realize one fundamentally important question. Let us understand that the current war is a continuation of the same World War II, which we here in our region have not considered much and have not reviewed at all. For different reasons. The thing is that, after the Nuremberg trials and the condemnation of the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, which was itself governed by the same totalitarian regime, was among the countries of the victorious alliance. Due to political reasons, Stalin's importance and abilities, all issues related to the start of the war and Soviet crimes were not reviewed. That doesn't mean they haven't happened, and it doesn't mean they won't happen again in the future. That totalitarian regime spread across the territories it managed to seize, including Eastern European countries. And now it continues to exist. Therefore, knowing that the existence of history is not instantaneous, that the roots of history reach deep and that some processes that have been frozen will necessarily reappear, all that is happening today is not the least bit surprising.
in 2006 In September, Jonathan Littell's (b. 1967) historical novel Les Bienveillantes, published in French, shocked the cultural world. The author's biography, the book's theme, the enormous scope of the novel, the writing style and the specific way of telling it seemed to foretell that this novel by an American author of Jewish roots who was only 38 years old, writing in French, would become an exceptional literary phenomenon and the object of passionate discussions by many publicists, historians and cultural experts. .
Despite this, and probably precisely because of this, this novel by Mr. Littell became a real bestseller, brought its author the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the best prose work in French, was awarded the Grand Prize of the French Academy, translated into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Ukrainian and many other languages of the world. Global critics noted Mr. Littell's novel's "absolute historical accuracy," and Britain's The Times called it "a great literary phenomenon that will be analyzed by readers and researchers for decades" and included it among the five most significant works of art about World War II.
In preparation for writing this novel, Mr. Littell spent several years in archives and libraries in Germany, Ukraine, Russia and Poland, relying on many historical books and studies about the Holocaust, as well as personal experience of war and barbarism, which he gained while participating in the humanitarian mission "Action Against Hunger". during the wars in Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "Well-wishers" is an attempt to look at the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany in a new way, telling the story of World War II not, as usual, through the mouths of many victims of Nazis and other war crimes, but from the perspective of the executioner, a direct participant and perpetrator of the crimes. In the novel, historical events are told in the form of the autobiographical memories of the fictitious Nazi SS officer Maksimilians Auje, it does not aim for a clear, coherent plot, there are no characters with whom the reader can identify, but it is an extremely dark story about a mass killing machine created by bureaucratic and systematic means and a cold, merciless, albeit the stream of perverted consciousness of an "ordinary" person who is just "doing his job".
Maksimilianas Aujė, on the one hand, is an intellectual, he is interested in philosophy, enjoys literature and classical music. But at the same time, he is a cold-blooded killer, one of the cogs of the ruthless Nazi bureaucratic killing machine. The novel opens with the narrator addressing the reader: “People, my brothers, let me tell you how it happened.” From the very first lines of the novel, the narrative makes it clear that he is not just a passive observer. He tries to involve the viewer in his reality marked by cultural, social and anthropological collapse, as if luring the reader into the prison of his ideological psychosis. Although the novel's narrator is a fictional character, real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Heydrych and even Hitler himself operate in his world. However, the reality of Mr. Littell's book is like a distorted mirror of Auje's professed worldview, in which the journey of a former Nazi regime employee, who after the war began to live a normal civilian life in northern France, is reflected through a thick ideological fog, from an unhappy childhood, an ideological "visionary" during his studies to participation in Nazi crimes in Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi death camps, Allied bombingin the ruins of that Berlin Zoo…
The Erinyes (Greek: Erinyes) are three ancient Greek goddesses of revenge and punishment, who pursue and punish criminals. In later Greek myths, they become goddesses of penance for criminals and are worshiped under the name Eumenides (or "well-wishers"). The Erinyes are most vividly depicted in the final part of Aeschylus' trilogy, the Oresteia, where they pursue Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, the king of Troy, who killed his mother and her lover. These Aeschylus tragedies also become a kind of basis for J. Littell's novel: the book is full of quotations, intertextual references, plot and contextual coincidences, provoking the autobiography and choices of Maximilian, oppressed by incest, matricide and a multitude of passively observed or actively implemented war crimes, traveling through mythological images and fragments of ancient tragedy .
The questions raised in the novel are much broader than the novel itself, the field of literary or historical research. How can you witness events that you have not been a part of? How to preserve and activate the memory of the Holocaust today, when the people who experienced or witnessed the brutal crimes are almost gone? What could be the role of literature and theater in order to understand where the roots of human cruelty, contempt for other cultures, beastly hatred, imperial chauvinism and other dehumanizing ideologies lie? Finally, how bureaucratic systematic means could have created a machine of mass killing, which nowadays we see appearing in other lands and territories. And not somewhere beyond the equator, but right here, on the threshold of old Europe.
