The ones who turned right. We didn’t stay in touch back then. I didn’t follow what he was doing.
But he was a guest on one your previous records.
We met by writing letters to each other. Again, that was normal in those days. He released something, I released something … we started writing. I was probably fifteen or maybe sixteen; I was too young to travel around Poland whenever I felt like it. Robert’s music was based on keyboard sounds and synthesizers, and I needed sounds like these for my records, so I asked him to compose a few interludes for us.
Did he come to record them?
Actually, he mailed them. Our whole relationship never went beyond paper and pen. I saw him for the first time in 2011, when I turned up at his house in Wroclaw, unannounced.
Before that, when you were in touch, did he express any twisted fascination with the various ‘isms’?
He has always been radical. At the beginning, though, he wasn’t quite so right wing. I just remember that he signed each letter to me with the expression ‘Plot the war’.
It made us laugh hard, but it also engendered fondness. We actually borrowed this expression as a kind of inside joke. Someone said it and everybody laughed.
Do you remember when he first began to lean right?
Yes, when a new drummer called Capricornus joined Graveland. He was a skinhead. Before his fascinations started influencing Robert, he visited me in Gdańsk. He came to see a football match, and he rang my doorbell at about ten in the morning and we went for a beer.
We were sitting with a group of his friends, who were football fans. Their comprehension of music was similar to my knowledge of quantum physics: zero. Capricornus himself was quite a bright guy, but his views were completely alien to me.
But one ‘bright guy’ made metal heads and skinheads come closer?
The development of the scene was a process. Black metal was not the music of nationalists—on the contrary. At first, it was created by people who would be considered ‘leftist’ nowadays. Suddenly, influenced by a combination of the events in Norway and what was going on in Graveland, some of the guys started changing their views.
Imagine a guy in Venom T-shirt, a pentagram on his neck and a beer in his hand. When you met him a year later, he’d be wearing a Burzum T-shirt, with a wooden figurine around his neck, and instead of a beer, he’d be drinking mead. Now he’d say that your views weren’t sufficiently Aryan and that you were profaning the faith of your ancestors. You sing about Perun? So why is your nickname Nergal, and not Mirmił or Masław? That’s the way these people thought. It was absurd. Today, it might sound sinister when you say that the black metal scene turned right. In fact, it was amusing.
We did one of our first photo sessions in the ruins of an old mill. Of course, it took place at night. We showed up in full makeup. We took a few pictures. We didn’t even notice that the ruins were sprayed with graffiti, and, without further ado, we sent the pictures out to the world. One day, we got a letter from Samoth from Emperor. I opened it, and there was a litany of curses addressed to us. He almost threatened us with death because we took photographs with a peace symbol in the background.
Black metal is no walk in the park, then?
That letter unsettled me, for sure. After all, Samoth was the man—the authority of the stage. Today, I laugh really hard when I remember situations like that.
It’s rumoured that somebody tried to kill you for ‘profaning the faith of your ancestors’.
You guys were at my house then, so you know how the famous assassination attempt played out. There was this creepy guy with a gun hidden in his pocket. Anyway, gossip is funniest when it’s just gossip. Let’s leave this one there.
As you wish. How did the Slavic god Perun get into your lyrics?
History was slowly becoming my passion. It was my major in college, so it was only natural that I would try to express some broader issues by referring to history.
I remember going to Krakow with Baal earlier. We visited the Vistula Museum, and that was when I was illuminated. I saw that the raw, Slavic and Nordic heritage was a beautiful counterbalance for Christianity. It wasn’t subtle but it had power. It personified the powers of nature, which modern religions wanted to tame and castrate.
I was also taken in by the lyricist Tomek Krajewski. He wrote two verses on our first record: ‘Svantevith’s children hate Christ, Svantevith’s children hate the god of cross!’ Everything fell into place.
Svetovid—the Slavic god of war—dethroned Satan?
Freedom has many names. Different symbols can express similar thoughts. When you want to talk about going beyond black-and-white moral divisions, then polytheism is as graceful a topic as the Bible. But that doesn’t mean that my youthful fascination with paganism was shallow. I think it enabled me to turn my world upside down, and to more consciously challenge the order that I despised. All so that I could understand who I was and what I was aiming for.
With this fascination, a new stage of my life began: a more mature stage. My views ceased to be just a bundle of slogans. I began to support them with authentic knowledge. I understood that there was a range of symbols I could refer to in order to express a wider viewpoint. And it is still widening, and the wider it becomes, the more you understand that nobody has a monopoly on truth.
Nobody has the right to barge into your house with dirty boots on. I don’t force anyone to adopt my views, let’s put it that way. I don’t mind if people insult me for them, or negate and argue them.
That is the essence of freedom. Adelbert—the patron saint of Poland—didn’t subscribe to that.
You never really liked Adelbert, did you? You even wrote a song about him, ‘Glory To Adalbert’s Murderers’.
That song was on our third record, Pandemonic Incantations. I was inspired to write it by Gdańsk’s millennium celebrations. I was walking around the Old Town and there were slogans about him everywhere. He was a perfect product. It was irritating because I never bought that story about his martyrdom.
Didn’t he die for his faith?
He died because of his own actions. And he wasn’t quite the saint he is portrayed as today. He came to Prussia when he was banished from the Prague court, for various political reasons. He wanted to destroy Cyrillo-Methodianism.
As a Czech, he was far from being patriotic and he supported the emperor—maybe for money or maybe for a place in the Roman hierarchy which was set up by the Ottoman dynasty at their will. Or maybe he was just religiously psychotic, like many other saints.
In those times, people with dubious pasts leaned toward religion. It gave them an asylum and a wider range of possibilities. All his missionary activities were about barging into other people’s cultures and religions, for no other reason than because they were different to his. They warned him, they banished him, but he kept coming back, like an intruder. So he died like an intruder, immediately after the mass he gave in the holy grove. It’s actually kind of funny that people that feel offended by the very existence of a person with different views on TV, today enshrine him.
Do you approve of killing someone in defence of one’s own sovereignty?
I treat history as it should be treated—I draw my conclusions from it. Because you believe in some other god and have different values, that doesn’t mean that you can fuck up people’s lives and change them according to the ‘one and only’ interpretation.
You don’t want to convert Catholics, then?
I have a sober attitude toward them. I think our relation is symbiotic. If there weren’t people like me in the world, their business would have collapsed. They need me so they can scare little children with me. It works both ways. Without them, I would have had no enemy. We’re in the state of permanent war, and there is no chance of a truce because our war makes the world go round.
Bulgakov described it beautifully when he wrote that everything casts its shadow. There is no day without a night. Some people see only darkness in me and only light in themse
lves. So be it. I like all colours, but for them I seem to be evil incarnate. That’s my role.
You don’t go into their holy groves?
I fight fire with fire. But I don’t go into their houses. Everything takes place in the public domain. I see it as a stage—where there is a place for us both. I have also created my own space. I don’t tell them how to pray and behave in churches, so why do they want to control what I do at my shows?
They sued you for the Adalbert song, too?
Some of them are hysterical; some are supportive. After releasing Pandemonic Incantations, I gave a copy to Professor Józef Włodarski. Today, he is the vice-rector of the University of Gdańsk, but he used to be one of the lecturers on my faculty. It turned out that his son is a fan of our music, so I wanted to give him a present. When I met the professor again, he invited me to his office. He surprised me when he said, ‘Mr Darski, I am Catholic, but I can’t argue with this story about Adalbert.’
That was a shock for me. These words were coming from someone whom I perceived as an authority.
But more people were offended than were supporters, true?
Yes, because in Poland we’re being fed—bombarded, even—with pictures of saints who don’t really have much in common with historical reality. There is Adalbert, there is Maksymilian Kolbe … just two examples.
Well, well, now Mr Holocausto is criticising Maksymilian Kolbe, the Polish friar who volunteered himself to die at Auschwitz in place of a total stranger.
I’m a historian, and I know that he also wasn’t quite as he appeared. We look at him through the prism of what he did. We idealise him. But he was a guy who believed in the international plot of Jews! Some people defend him and say that Jewish issues were only marginal in his teachings. What kind of argument is that? That way, you could defend some murderer who took out a small nation, because by comparison to what Hitler did, that is just a ‘marginal’ case.
Kolbe’s defenders claim that he left over a thousand documents, and that references to Judaism appear only in a few of them. One is enough, if you ask me. Kolbe’s canonisation provoked protests in the whole world, and rightfully so. Just look at the activities of the Knights of the Immaculate, whom he founded. Extreme clericalism, looking for masons in every possible place …
Do you like looking for flaws in the saints’ images?
Actually, Kolbe has been with me since high school. I wrote an essay about him back then, and the way I presented him was not exactly positive. My teacher, who was very religious, didn’t even mark it. She told me that she would give me one more chance to think it through and write the essay again. Of course, I was to interpret Kolbe’s history according to the convention.
This was at the time when I drew a lot of inspiration from the authors of the Young Poland modernist period: Przybyszewski and Micinski. One day, I came up to that teacher and asked if we were going to talk about this period in greater detail. She asked me directly if I was a Satanist. She also said that she couldn’t let me out of school with views like that. She was on a mission.
Surely she was out of line?
She was. But, paradoxically, I was grateful. She awoke something in me. I began to read more on my own. I discovered Dostoyevsky, Witkacy … if she had just stroked my head and tried to ease my reactions, she might have tamed me. Instead, each of her attacks just made my rebellion stronger.
Did you correct your essay?
I wrote a new one. It was politically correct. I felt the lash of censorship on my ass. What could I do? Nothing.
Have you ever been to an extermination camp?
I have. I was eleven when I first saw the concentration camp in Stutthof. My young mind absorbed information. I knew who founded the camp, I knew that people died there, but I couldn’t picture any of it in my head. There was no deeper thought to it than that. That only came later, when, as a seventeen-year-old, I went to Auschwitz.
What did you feel? Empathy? Sympathy? Maybe even some degree of fascination?
It’s hard to define. There were a lot of emotions, and they appeared simultaneously. It was overwhelming, that’s for sure. I felt death—its literal presence. Not only knowledge showed up, but also awareness that people died in this place. Not hundreds, or even thousands, but many more. I didn’t fall to my knees and start crying over people’s fate, but there was sympathy in me. But only sympathy.
The thought that a human did something like that to another human was terrifying. And it wasn’t really that long ago—just a few dozen years. The same concept was equally fascinating. It opened my eyes. It made me realise that people are not really the way they like to picture themselves. I saw that there was something in all of us, something very strong and dangerous and able to emerge at any time.
So it’s not just Nazis that were bad?
Not just them. Extermination camps are just an image of a given mechanism. As such, they represent a fresh scar, and they touch our imagination. There are still people alive who survived death camps. Cruelty, however, has been inside us since the very beginning. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago … and it will still be there in the next thousand years. The only thing that changes is the actual technology of murder—the ways of causing death and pain. This is what history tells us about humans, and that’s what Auschwitz told me.
Is there a murderer in you, too?
He’s there in all of us. I have this scene from a TV programme in my head. Don’t ask what programme it was, I don’t remember. I may exaggerate a little, but this is how I see it in my head. An older man who survived a death camp meets a group of politicians. It was after the war. Everybody is looking splendid, young and beautiful, wearing perfect clothes. Each one of them shows a lot of respect to this man, all of them express their sympathy, and he, looking at them, asks himself a question: ‘Who would you be in the camp? Whose side would you take?’
Whose side would you take?
I don’t know. We are talking about an unimaginable situation. Here’s a trivial example from real life, though. When I was in hospital, I felt that Dorota should spend more time with me—not only to be there physically but also to support me more emotionally. I kept telling her that if she had been sick, I would have spent all my time with her.
‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said.
I didn’t understand that. Today, though, I know she was right. We often squander words and speak idly. It’s not even about believing in what we say. On the contrary, we’re convinced that we would act in one particular way and not another. But when we face a particular event, all of that goes to shit.
Today, when I go to a hospital to visit friends—and I do have friends who are now as sick as I was—I can’t endure any more than an hour. I want to be with them, I want to help them, talk to them, give them a bit of the outside world, but the reality is that hospitals are places that you have to escape as soon as possible. Of course, when I was sick, things looked different. I didn’t know what I would feel later. So don’t ask me what I would do if I found myself in a death camp. There is no answer to that question.
Maybe you lack a moral spine?
God leads me on that one. I love my neighbour as I love myself. I always show my faith, in every situation …
There are people who might say that, though.
Bertrand Russell once wrote about them: ‘The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.’ I’m afraid of such people. I don’t trust them. I feel that, in an extreme situation, they will be the first to fail. When their confidence hits a wall, everything they try to erase from their own image is suddenly controlling them.
You don’t fight your demons?
I tame them. I am aware of their existence. I talk to them. When I watch a movie—not some disposable bullshit but a serious psychological film where the protagonist has to make difficult choices—I place myself in their situation. Sometimes I terrify myself.
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br /> I wrote a song about it, ‘Say Hello To My Demons’. Every one of us has our dark side. This darkness is both terrifying and fascinating, and you never know which of those feelings will prevail.
Do you ever experience patriotic feelings?
Sometimes. But I feel European more than anything else. Someone once noticed that, when I introduce the band in the States, I always say, ‘Behemoth from Europe’.
There’s a big Polish population in the USA. Didn’t they feel offended?
Maybe, but that doesn’t make much sense.
Why? Maybe they’re proud to be from Poland …
… which is a part of Europe! A lot of immigrants have a strong need for identification, and this is why they close themselves off in national ghettos. Poles who live in other countries shop in Polish stores, drink in Polish bars, and work with and for other Poles. Basically they hibernate.
When you visit Jackowo in Chicago, or Green Point in New York City, you feel like time has stopped there. Everything looks exactly like it looked fifty years ago. And people have their fathers’ habits too. If you live in a foreign country, you must be open to its culture and assimilate with it. That’s the only way you can develop.
Don’t you feel proud to be Polish?
Sometimes I do. But more often I feel embarrassed. I accept my nationality. I don’t want to change it, but I can’t be a slave to space, either.
You’re a harsh judge.
It’s not that. Poland has potential. I see it. People are hungry for success. They’ve got loads of energy, but they’re channelling it the wrong way. They look back too often, and they take pleasure from suffering.
There are moments of glory in our history, and we idealise them: we put them on pedestals and altars instead of going onward in the here and now. We call ourselves the chosen nation, even though we’re closer to being desperados.
Sometimes I get the impression that Poles feel comfortable being the world’s victims. We excuse all of our failures this way. If it’s not those bad Germans, then it’s the bad Russians. We have always been the victims, and this is the message we send to the world. So, inevitably, they see us this way, and they treat us accordingly, and when we want to escape our national ghetto, we hit a wall that we built ourselves.
Confessions Of A Heretic: The Sacred And The Profane: Behemoth And Beyond Page 8
