Les Bienveillantes

Les Bienveillantes takes the form of the memoirs of a fictional character, Maximilien Aue, who took part in the Nazi mass killings as an SS officer. Its seven parts are named after movements of 18th-century music and dance. They follow the course of the war on the Eastern Front, from the mass shootings of 1941 through the Battle of Stalingrad and the extermination camps to the fall of Berlin in 1945.

The title refers to the Eumenides of Aeschylus. Jonathan Littell, a Franco-American writer, wrote the novel in French.