The Kindly Ones (Littell Novel)
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The Kindly Ones (Littell Novel)
''The Kindly Ones'' (french: Les Bienveillantes) is a 2006 historical fiction novel written in French by American-born author Jonathan Littell. The book is narrated by its fictional protagonist Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer of French and German ancestry who was a Holocaust perpetrator and was present during several major events of World War II. The 983-page book became a bestseller in France and was widely discussed in newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books and seminars. It was also awarded two of the most prestigious French literary awards, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006, and has been translated into several languages. Background The title ''Les Bienveillantes'' (; ''The Kindly Ones'') refers to the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies ''The Oresteia'' written by Aeschylus. Gates, David (March 5, 2009)The Monster in the Mirror ''The New York Times''. Retrieved on 2010-09-24. The Erinyes or Furies were vengeful go ...
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Charlotte Mandell
Charlotte Mandell (born 1968) is an American literary translator. She has translated many works of poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ..., fiction and philosophy from French language, French to English language, English, including work by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Antoine de Baecque, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Mathias Énard and Jonathan Littell. Life Charlotte Mandell was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1968, the child of two academics.Interview at Maitresse
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Agamemnon
In Greek mythology, Agamemnon (; grc-gre, Ἀγαμέμνων ''Agamémnōn'') was a king of Mycenae who commanded the Greeks during the Trojan War. He was the son, or grandson, of King Atreus and Queen Aerope, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra and the father of Iphigenia, Electra, Laodice (Greek myth), Laodike (Λαοδίκη), Orestes and Chrysothemis. Legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, Peloponnese, Argos, thought to be different names for the same area. Agamemnon was killed upon his Returns from Troy, return from Troy, either by his wife's lover Aegisthus or by his wife herself. Etymology His name in Greek, Ἀγαμέμνων, means "very steadfast", "unbowed" or "resolute". The word comes from Linguistic reconstruction, *Ἀγαμέδμων (''*Agamédmōn'') from ἄγαν, "very much" and wikt:μέδομαι, μέδομαι, "think on". Description In the account of Dares Phrygius, Dares the Phrygian, Agamemnon was described as ". . .bl ...
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Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front of World War II was a Theater (warfare), theatre of conflict between the European Axis powers against the Soviet Union (USSR), Polish Armed Forces in the East, Poland and other Allies of World War II, Allies, which encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Northeast Europe (Baltic states, Baltics), and Southeast Europe (Balkans) from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945. It was known as the Great Patriotic War (term), Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union – and still is in some of its successor states, while almost everywhere else it has been called the ''Eastern Front''. In present-day German and Ukrainian historiography the name German-Soviet War is typically used. The battles on the Eastern Front of the Second World War constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterised by unprecedented ferocity and brutality, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, expos ...
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Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany quickly became a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government. The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", alluded to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which Hitler and the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945 after just 12 years when the Allies defeated Germany, ending World War II in Europe. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, the head of gove ...
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Action Against Hunger
Action Against Hunger (french: Action Contre La Faim - ACF) is a global humanitarian organization which originated in France and is committed to ending world hunger. The organization helps malnourished children and provides communities with access to safe water and sustainable solutions to hunger. In 2020, Action Against Hunger worked in 51 countries around the world with more than 8,300 employees and volunteers helping 13.6 million people in need. Action Against Hunger was established in 1979 by a group of French doctors, scientists, and writers. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Alfred Kastler served as the organization's first chairman. Currently, Mumbai-based businessman and philanthropist Ashwini Kakkar serves as International President of Action Against Hunger network. The group initially provided assistance to Afghan refugees in Pakistan, famine-stricken Ugandan communities, and Cambodian refugees in Thailand. It expanded to address additional humanitarian concerns in Afr ...
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Genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin suffix ("act of killing").. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in about 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displac ...
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Bureaucracy
The term bureaucracy () refers to a body of non-elected governing officials as well as to an administrative policy-making group. Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials. Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned. The public administration in many jurisdictions and sub-jurisdictions exemplifies bureaucracy, but so does any centralized hierarchical structure of an institution, e.g. hospitals, academic entities, business firms, professional societies, social clubs, etc. There are two key dilemmas in bureaucracy. The first dilemma revolves around whether bureaucrats should be autonomous or directly accountable to their political masters. The second dilemma revolves around bureaucrats' behavior strictly following the law or whether they have leeway to determine appropriate solutions for varied circumstances. Various commen ...
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Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page ''magnum opus'' ''The Destruction of the European Jews'' is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution. Life and career Hilberg was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Polish-speaking Jewish family. His father, a small-goods salesman, was born in a Galician village, moved to Vienna in his teens, was decorated for bravery on the Russian front, and married Hilberg's mother who was from Buczacz, now in Ukraine. The young Hilberg was a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended synagogue on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellent and developed an allergy to it. He did however at ...
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Claude Lanzmann
Claude Lanzmann (; 27 November 1925 – 5 July 2018) was a French filmmaker known for the Holocaust documentary film ''Shoah'' (1985). Early life Lanzmann was born on 27 November 1925 in Paris, France, the son of Paulette () and Armand Lanzmann. His family was Jewish, and had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He was the brother of writer Jacques Lanzmann. Lanzmann attended the in Clermont-Ferrand. While his family disguised their identity and went into hiding during World War II, he joined the French resistance at the age of 17, along with his father and brother, and fought in Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed the 1960 antiwar petition Manifesto of the 121. Career Lanzmann was the chief editor of the journal ''Les Temps Modernes'', founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and lecturer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In 2009 he published his memoirs under the title ''Le lièvre de Patagonie'' ("The Patag ...
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Shoah (film)
''Shoah'' is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust (known as "Shoah" in Hebrew), directed by Claude Lanzmann. Over nine hours long and 11 years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps.J. Hoberman, "Shoah: The Being of Nothingness", in Jonathan Kahana (ed.), ''The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 776–783. Also see Claude Lanzmann with Marc Chevrie and Hervé le Roux, "Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about ''Shoah''", in Kahana (ed.) 2016, 784–793. Released in Paris in April 1985, ''Shoah'' won critical acclaim and several prominent awards, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. Simone de Beauvoir hailed it as a "sheer masterpiece", while documentary maker Marcel Ophül ...
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Soviet Partisans
Soviet partisans were members of resistance movements that fought a guerrilla war against Axis forces during World War II in the Soviet Union, the previously Soviet-occupied territories of interwar Poland in 1941–45 and eastern Finland. The activity emerged after Nazi Germany's Operation Barbarossa was launched from mid-1941 on. It was coordinated and controlled by the Soviet government and modeled on that of the Red Army. The partisans made a significant contribution to the war by countering German plans to exploit occupied Soviet territories economically, gave considerable help to the Red Army by conducting systematic attacks against Germany's rear communication network, disseminated political rhetoric among the local population by publishing newspapers and leaflets, and succeeded in creating and maintaining feelings of insecurity among Axis forces. Soviet partisans also operated on interwar Polish and Baltic territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940, but ...
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Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya ( rus, Зо́я Анато́льевна Космодемья́нская, p=ˈzojə kəsmədʲɪˈmʲjanskəjə; September 13, 1923 – November 29, 1941) was a Soviet partisan. She was executed after acts of sabotage against the invading armies of Nazi Germany; after stories emerged of her defiance towards her captors, she was posthumously declared a Hero of the Soviet Union.Kazimiera J. Cottam: ''Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers'', , page 297 She became one of the most revered heroines of the Soviet Union. Family The Kosmodemyansky family name was constructed by joining the names of Saints Cosmas and Damian ( () and () in Russian). From the 17th century, the Kosmodemyansky were priests in the Russian Orthodox Church. Zoya's grandfather Pyotr Kosmodemyansky was murdered in 1918 by militant atheists for his opposition to blasphemy. Zoya (her name is a Russian form of the Greek name Zoe, which means "l ...
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