Quotes from Jonathan Littell

Volevo chiudere gli occhi, o coprirli con una mano, e al tempo stesso volevo guardare, guardare a sazietà e tentare di comprendere con lo sguardo quella cosa incomprensibile, lì, davanti a me, quel vuoto per il pensiero umano.

Se stavamo commettendo un'ingiustizia, bisognava pensarci su, e decidere se era necessaria e inevitabile, o se era solo il risultato della faciloneria, della pigrizia, della mancanza di riflessione.

Gli omosessuali gli fanno paura, li odia, Pensa che un omosessuale ereditario possa contaminare con la sua malattia decine di giovani, e che allora tutti quei giovani saranno perduti per la razza.

Era questo che non riuscivo ad afferrare: l'enorme assoluta sproporzione tra la facilità con cui si può uccidere e la grande fatica che si deve fare a morire. Per noi era un'altra sporca giornata di lavoro; per loro la fine di tutto.

Your first time?" the Hauptman gently asked. I nodded. "You'll get used to it," he went on, "but maybe never completely." He

I would have liked to play the piano. Once at a concert an elderly lady leaned toward me: "You are a pianist, aren't you?"—"Unfortunately not, madam," I had to answer with regret. Even today, the thought that I don't play the piano and never will play it suffocates me, sometimes even more than the horrors, the dark river of my past carrying me through the years. I literally can't get over it.

Fin dagli albori della storia umana, la guerra è sempre stata considerata il male più grande. Ma noi avevamo inventato qualcosa al cui confronto la guerra finiva per sembrare pulita e pura.

Moc ti to nejde. Je vid?t, že jsi proležel celý život v knihách. U nás i rabín umí postavit d?m.

Ti, kdo si trvají na jasných rozkazech nebo žádající legislativní opat?ení, nepochopili, že nezáleží na rozkazech, nýbrž na v?li nad?ízeného, a že p?íjemce rozkazu tuto v?li musí dešifrovat a dokonce p?edjímat.

Jeho situaci jsem mu nezávid?l: být na sv?t? sám je n?kdy lepší, a ve válce obzvláš?.

Mohla bych se mu odevzdat? Odevzdat se, to je pon?kud zvláštní formulace, ale jen a? se muž, kterému není zcela jasná, zkusí nechat sám penetrovat, to mu otev?e o?i.

If we were committing an injustice, we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought. It was a question of rigor. I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren't automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me. Finally

There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them; for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers.

Wasn't the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a reductio ad absurdum of everyday life?

Ve?er u stolu muži probírali akce, vypráv?li si historky, porovnávali si zkušenosti, n?kte?í smutn?, jiní vesele. Jiní ml?eli, a práv? na ty bylo t?eba dát pozor.

after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn't become one by chance, and doesn't remain one by chance, either.

One night, he confessed to me that he was horrified by his first experience of the radical methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to combat the partisans; but his profound conviction that only a barbarous, completely inhuman enemy could necessitate such extreme measures had in the end been reinforced. "In the SD, you must have seen some atrocious things," he added; I assured him I had, but preferred not to elaborate. Instead

I looked at them as if I had X-ray vision: beneath the flesh I could clearly make out the skeletons; when Zorn embraced one of the girls it was as if their bones, separated by a thin gauze, knocked together; when they laughed, the grating sound burst forth from the jaws in the skulls

But at school, I found myself confronted with cruel, aggressive children, many of whom had lost their fathers in the war, or were beaten and neglected by fathers who had returned from the trenches brutalized and half mad. They avenged themselves, at school, for this lack of love at home by turning viciously against other children who were frailer and more sensitive. They

tenait à bras-le-corps. Callsen prit la parole : « Bon, je pense que vous

Povinností velitel? je ob?tovat N?mecku své pochybnosti.

C'était d'une beauté cruelle, à vous ravir le souffle, presque humaine mais en même temps au-delà de tout souci humain.

Nell'attesa, il mio odio restava lì, intatto, maturo, qualcosa di pieno e quasi succulento dentro di me, una catasta che attendeva un fiammifero.

So what's the most atrocious thing you've seen?" He waved his hand: "Man, of course!