This strident evil, as base as it was solemn, permeates “Death Fugue.” Identity is not destroyed, but gathered in three names, Germany, and Margarete, her golden hair against Shulamith’s ashen, the Aryan against the Jewish. Death is not nothing, the past not absent, not impossible to represent, the language is not broken, but gives meaning still. All this is gone in “Engführung,” fallen to the ground. In “Engführung” all is silent. Not a name remains. The poem penetrates the space between the name of the world and the world itself, but what it seeks is not pureness of being, in the sense of freedom from civilization and culture, which is to say the so-called authentic, for the absence of the name is a loss in the poem, as the absence of the name’s differentiating power is a loss, beseeched in vain, impossible. Even nature as it is, authentic and true, behind language, as it were, is colored by the ideology of the we, the project of striving to establish common meaning, including the Nazis’ own, in which it was one of the dominant ideas, evident not least in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where the idea of nature in itself is perhaps the most important element of all, but also in the philosophy of Heidegger, in whose work Celan immersed himself, going so far as to meet him in person, an encounter not entirely without controversy, Heidegger having aligned himself to Nazism, so not even the idea of the world as it “is,” outside language, was unaffected by the ideology and the worldview, it was woven into all things, and this lack of innocence, or this discovery of the loss of innocence, is, the way I read it, the very point of departure of Celan’s poem.
The biggest difference between “Death Fugue” and “Engführung” derives not unnaturally from the years that separate them, though is not merely a result of Celan’s writing having developed, matured, and deepened, for something else happened too during those years, concerning the way in which Nazism and the Holocaust were perceived by the culture, which is to say the we, for while in 1952 that must all still have been gaping open in its unfathomable atrocity, in a society laid waste, in 1959 it was quite differently shut, an episode that could be referred to, a period of history in which each single event, each single life, each single moment was locked tight in the emblem of the name – Auschwitz, for instance.
“Who covered it up?” the poem asks. Designation is another kind of disappearance. Therefore the poem cannot describe the deportation of the Jews, the transportation in cattle trucks through the Polish countryside, the herding into the camps, the stripping naked, the processions prodded into the gas chambers, the extermination inside the gas chambers, where in panic they scrabbled toward the doors, their corpses tumbling out when those same doors were again opened, the incineration in the ovens or on the grids over the pits, the ash. This description, which we may say is made up of facts, and which we associate with the word “Auschwitz,” has nothing to do with reality, in part because its perspective indicates a consummate course of events, which is a fiction for the simple reason that no single person witnessed this sequence, but only parts of it, and that those who were there and who did witness that course of events in its entirety are either dead, without ever having related their experience, or, in the case of those who survived, experienced it from the inside, whereas the description is always as seen from the outside.
The perspective has never existed, it belongs to writing and is possible only there. Auschwitz, the way we think of it, does not exist, it belongs to the past, which is gone, and it did not even exist there either, because what we imagined happened there, in the way it was told to us, did not happen in that way, the story lies, forgetting the one, whose perspective is the only perspective possible, and this very forgetting of the one was what made the extermination possible.
* * *
When I was growing up, playing at the age of ten in the German bunkers in the woods on Tromøya, or sitting on their artillery emplacements with my legs dangling as I stared out over the sea, only some thirty years had passed since they had been in use. But the world in which I played was peaceful and orderly, and when for the first time I visited Flensburg in northern Germany, nine years old, tagging along at the heels of my father, who walked quickly and had such an odd expression on his face as we passed through a narrow street with scantily clad women sitting in small booths on each side, presumably the reason I remember the place at all, I saw that same peacefulness and orderliness there too. Whenever we drove over the fells to my grandparents in Vestland, the majority of tourists we encountered were Germans. Many of them must have been there before, during the war. The war was something we learned about at school, mostly that small part of it that had taken place in Norway, but also, gradually, what had gone on in the rest of the world as well. In the newspapers it was present in reports of war criminals being discovered in various parts of the globe and brought to trial. The weekly magazines, perhaps Vi Menn in particular, were full of colorful stories about war treasure, so-called Nazi gold, and German war criminals hiding away in Argentina or Brazil. But the biggest sources of knowledge about Nazism were the comic books I read, such as På vingene and the Vi vant series. There, the Germans, or Fritz as they were called, were evil and unscrupulous, the “yellows” or the “Japs” even worse. All this, the books, the comics, the newspaper articles and the magazine stories, as well as our history lessons at school, seemed to be situated in a radically different age, in a radically different place, more like the forest in which Hansel and Gretel got lost than the one that became smaller and narrower as it approached the pebble beach, eventually to come to an end altogether out at Hove, where the German artillery positions were still plain to see.
In the spring when we were in the seventh grade, I was thirteen years old, I saw pictures from the extermination camps for the first time. I was standing in the library, which was housed in the school’s basement, and it was a complete shock, I froze inside, but it was not the numbers of the dead or their suffering I was reacting to, because I had learned about the Holocaust and knew what it was, it was the image itself, a woman so emaciated she barely resembled a human, she was naked, but there was nothing sexual about her, and then there was a picture of a pile of corpses, heaped and stacked like timber, the picture had been taken from a distance and the limbs and bodies were tangled up, but I could still see very clearly that they were humans. The coldness it filled me with, the horror that went through me and left me in a state of alienation for some hours afterward, had nothing to do with their suffering or the terrible nature of what had taken place, it had to do with the bodies, the way they were arranged and what that expressed, something I had never seen before and had no idea even existed.
At university I encountered the war and the Holocaust in a quite different form, for instance the way Horkheimer and Adorno write about it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, where in order to grasp the collapse of civilization in that ultimate barbarity they provide an analysis of the Odyssey, as far as I understood it in order to demonstrate how light and darkness hung together and that light had always tried to free itself from the dark, in several instances almost succeeding, only in each case to be sucked back again. The way enlightenment became blind to itself, what began as a de-enchantment from reality, designed to make man free and his own master, ending up in re-enchantment, at the same time as progress, with all its advances and technologies, marched on, making man unfree and slavelike, and eventually it collapsed completely.
Adorno’s solution was more enlightenment, as I understood it. “What is at issue here is … the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be betrayed,” he wrote. And: “What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes.” Where the connections were between light, darkness, enlightenment, myth, Nazism, and Bergen – the city I lived in – I had no idea, because the issue did not exist. Everything had its place then. Adorno was in one place, the Odyssey in another, my life in a third, the war in a fourth. When those categories became mixed up, as in Sørbøvåg one night when I was watching TV with Grandad and the politician J
o Benkow appeared on the screen, prompting Grandad to point at the TV and say, “What’s that Jew doing there?” I did not know they had got mixed up, did not think about enlightenment, did not think about myth, did not think about Adorno, did not think about Arendt, but about Grandad, who I knew had never been a Nazi, assuming by extension that his prejudice stemmed from the age from which he came and did not in any way express anything significant about the person he was inside.
The fact that in the years that followed I read many books about Nazism had less to do with an attempt to understand than with the enormous fascination the events of that time exerted on me. The unbounded, was a much-discussed concept at the time, vague and theoretical, applied to texts, usually modernist texts, whereas the unbounded in reality, in the same way as the transgressional, another academic-intellectual buzzword, was not something anyone wanted to know about. For where did the unbounded and the transgressional exist in our culture? Drug addicts were unbounded, shunning no means of getting their hands on drugs, and pornography was transgressional, like the political direction no one approved of, the suburban pseudolibertarianism of the Progress Party, Fremskrittspartiet, like racism and the glorification of violence.
What consituted the unbounded in literature? What was transgressional there? Mostly it was genre, the traditionally lowappearing in the traditionally highbrow, or philosophy turning up in creative texts, or the poem approaching prose. For my own part, the transgressional was associated with an enormous sense of freedom on the one hand, and enormous shame on the other, played out in a rather unsophisticated fashion in a few too many beers followed by a couple of hours of undesirable yet delightfully unfettered behavior as a result. It was low and vile and wretched, even if it didn’t necessarily feel like it, whereas the crimes that took place in the Third Reich were transgressional in a radically different and fundamentally incomprehensible yet no less compelling sense altogether. It was as if they exceeded the very limits of what was human. How was that possible? The allure of death, the allure of destruction, the allure of total annihilation, of what did it consist? The world burned, and they were joyful.
I read about it, I wondered about it, and never without feeling some small measure of that same allure myself as I sat there far from war and death, destruction and genocide, on a chair in Bergen, surrounded by all my books, usually with a cigarette in my hand and a cup of coffee next to me on the desk, the dwindling hum of the evening’s traffic outside the window, sometimes with a warm cat asleep on my lap. I read about the final days of Hitler, the utterly demented atmosphere far beneath the ground where he lived with his attendants and those closest to him, the city above them, bombed to rubble by the Russians, a blazing inferno. At one point he ascended to inspire some boys of the Hitler Youth, I had seen the footage that was shot, he is ill, tries to stop his hand from shaking as he goes from one boy to the next, it must have been Parkinson’s disease. But in his eyes there is a gleam, something unexpectedly warm.
Surely it couldn’t be possible?
When Dad died, Yngve and I found a Nazi pin among his belongings, a pin with a German eagle to put in the lapel of a jacket. Where did he get it from? He was not the type to have bought something of that nature and therefore he must have been given it or come across it in some way. When Grandma died, a year and a half after Dad, and we went through the house to divide things up, we found a Norwegian edition of Mein Kampf in the chest in the living room. What was it doing there? It must have been there since the war. It was a fairly common book at the time, with thousands of copies sold, someone might have given it to them as a present, without it having any significance for them, but nevertheless it was still strange that they hadn’t got rid of it after the war, for they would hardly have been unaware that it was incriminating. After the initial sensation the discovery of something so illicit gave rise to, I thought little more of it. I knew the people they were, Grandad and Grandma, and I knew they were from another age, in which other rules applied. Then came a period, perhaps a year later, when I began to read up more systematically about Nazism, it was just a subject I began to explore, the way I had previously explored other times and places in history. I read Shirer’s work on Nazism, Kershaw’s first book about Hitler, Gitta Sereny’s book on Speer, Speer’s Spandau diaries and his memoir, Inside the Third Reich. This was what I was reading when Tonje and I broke up and I moved to Stockholm. There, alone in a very feminine one-room flat I’d borrowed in the city’s Söder District, I read the Swedish translation of Gitta Sereny’s book about Treblinka, Into That Darkness, it made me unwell for a couple of weeks, and after that I read no more about it, it was a path on which I could proceed no more, where everything closed in on itself, everything emptied itself.
* * *
Seven years later, in the spring of last year, I bought a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Norwegian. Or rather, because I had since made a name for myself as a writer, and because the interest surrounding that name was as great as it was, I took no chances ordering the book from the antiquarian bookshop myself, I was paranoid and scared it might get out, so I asked Geir to order it for me. He paid the two thousand kroner the two volumes cost and sent them on to me. Unwrapping them and standing with them in my hands filled me with distaste, to say nothing of the near-nausea that came over me when I started reading the first volume and Hitler’s words and Hitler’s thoughts were thereby admitted to my own mind and for a brief time became a part of it. I was due to go to Iceland for two days and had thought of reading the book on the plane, seeing as how I was intending to get started writing the first book of this novel when I got home again, and because it shares its name, My Struggle, with Hitler’s book, and because Hitler’s book and the Nazi pin were unexplained mysteries in that story, or perhaps not mysteries, but more exactly fields of the past that manifested themselves in the present and which I felt unable to trace back to anything I knew in that past, I had decided to write a few pages about Hitler’s book.
I usually always sniff the books I buy, the new ones as well as the old, putting my nose to the pages and breathing in their smell because I associate that smell, and the smell of old books in particular, with something good, that element of childhood that was unconditionally pleasurable. The adventure, the abandoning oneself to other worlds. But I could not do that with Mein Kampf. The book was evil, in some indefinable way. I was unable too to have it on my shelf or on my desk, and instead I put it out of sight in the bottom drawer. Reading it on the flight, as I had imagined I would, was unthinkable, I realized that the moment I sat down in my seat after boarding. One of the female flight attendants congratulated me on my books, the other winked and said she knew who I was, and two passengers in the row in front of me were reading the same article about me in Aftenposten. Being that visible made reading Hitler’s book out of the question, but it would have been just as impossible even if I had been anonymous, since the book in itself is stigmatizing, and if anyone had seen me reading it there in public a mood of distaste would have spread through the cabin and people would have thought there was something wrong with me. I left it in my bag for the duration of the flight and even when, having reached my destination, I stretched out to relax on the bed of my hotel room before the event I was scheduled to take part in, I left it there and turned on the TV instead, the embarrassment was simply too great. But why? I had read the Marquis de Sade, another stigmatized writer, but that was literature, hailed as pioneering and revolutionary by all the great French philosophers of the postwar period and used as a point of departure for their analyses of power, sex, language, and death. But with Hitler’s book it was different. Hitler’s book is no longer literature. What later happened, what he later did, the axioms of which are meticulously laid out in that book, is such that it transforms the literature into something evil. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is literature’s only unmentionable work. To say that this fact makes it interesting is impossible, regardless of the fact that it is interesting, since in that case one is deemed to l
ack respect for all those sent to their deaths by the system to which the book directly gave rise. Six million Jews, only sixty-five years ago. Almost all literature is simply text, but not Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf is more than text. It is a symbol of human evil. In it the door between text and reality is wide open, in a way quite unlike any other book. In Germany it is banned to this day. In Norway it has not been printed since the war.
* * *
Shortly after the war ended, in 1947, a book came out by a German-Jewish philologist, Victor Klemperer, entitled LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, later published in English as The Language of the Third Reich. Klemperer was a professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, an assimilated Jew, married to an Aryan woman. When the Nazis seized power in 1933 he therefore considered himself safe enough to remain in Germany. Soon, however, he lost his job, his house, his right to borrow books from the library; he was stopped from listening to the radio, refused the right to read books by non-Jewish writers, and eventually prohibited from speaking to anyone other than Jews – and, indeed, from writing. He lived under the constant threat of deportation, a fate he avoided only by virtue of his wife’s lineage and because he had fought for Germany as a volunteer in World War I.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 55