First published in France in 2006, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009) has re-sparked an ongoing debate regarding the Holocaust and the limits of representation. A fictional memoir written from the point of view of a German perpetrator, The Kindly Ones recounts a quasi-odyssey through Europe during the Second World War, thereby vividly exposing the atrocities committed in Eastern Poland and the Ukraine. The object of significant praise, including two prestigious French literary prizes, The Kindly Ones has nonetheless met the objection of many who have reduced Littell’s representation of the Holocaust to a pornography of violence. Wishing to counter this particular reading of The Kindly Ones, this article examines the signification of a representation of the human body as an image forever tainted by the atrocities.
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