The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  We found ourselves caught in a war on two fronts, followed Engelbrekt through the snowdrift, and entrenched ourselves in our besieged city. Every morning, in the factory, I anticipated my dismissal. Every afternoon, upon entering the building in which Rosner lived, I expected to be stopped by police officers. Every evening, before going to sleep, the thought that something had to arrive that would change my life was overlaid by powerlessness. The union leaders were waging their campaign of terror against the Communist workplace representatives, attempting to force their exclusion with one circular after the other. But many trade union federations rebelled against the directives. While the reactionary forces seemed to be gaining the upper hand, the representatives of the democratic tradition gathered together to mount a defense. Engelbrekt had headed off to Stockholm for the fourth time, with peasant armies from Dalarna, Hälsingland, and Ångermanland. He was joined by the inhabitants of the skerries, who had been robbed by Eric’s sailors as they approached from the southeast. They took up their positions on the hills overlooking the southern city gate. And now that the power of the people was again revealing itself, their outrage spreading throughout the entire land, a whole host of nobles came across as well to offer their support to the commander in chief. There was no parchment on which their signatures would be have been worth anything; they would exchange one vow for another, one alliance for another, at the drop of a hat if it promised more at that particular moment in time. Stockholm would not be able to withstand the tens of thousands camped on the hills in the snow flurry. Might as well march into the city alongside them rather than having to receive them behind the walls. And if the nobles then joined their continued advances, shifting the responsibility for it onto the people, they would also be able to take possession of the remaining fortified cities without the need to break with the king of the Union. We asked ourselves how Engelbrekt could have let them come back to him, the brothers Nils, Bengt, and Bo Stensson Natt och Dag, Bo Knutsson Grip, Magnus Gren, and look, even Karl Knutsson, the king’s field marshal, and we felt that we had to accept that, in the end, he remained a man of the ruling classes, that he fought for their interests, and ultimately turned his back on the people. Even when we turned our attention to his demise, to attempt an interpretation from that perspective, we couldn’t get past the impression that the aristocrats had availed themselves of him for as long as he could be of use to them, only to then cast him aside once they had achieved their goal. Though this was true, it didn’t resolve our inquiry. The forces that had been set in motion by the rebellion were too complex and full of contradictions to be interpreted from a single standpoint. The historians had viewed him as a representative of the nobility, of the bourgeoisie, of the Hanseatic League, of the countryfolk; as a saint, as the founder of a nation. We could only base our conclusions on what he had achieved in a material sense. He had grown up in the age of the robber barons. He was dependent upon trade with the cities of the Hanseatic League. The deeds of the local and Danish lords had a negative effect on his production. He wanted peace for economic reasons. The high nobility was riven with conflict, and its members sought the support of lower classes to consolidate their individual positions of power; they were against the foreign king one moment and for him the next, if an alliance with him could be used to thwart their rivals back home. That’s the way it had been since Albert’s reign. An enduring conflict had descended upon the people, had devastated their work, their lives. Engelbrekt the miner wanted to protect his pits from ruin. Engelbrekt the businessman wanted to reestablish the disrupted business relationships with the Hanseatic League. Engelbrekt the nobleman wanted to seek unity in his circles, to win over influential groups to defend against the campaigns of despoliation. Engelbrekt the bourgeois wanted to strengthen the merchants against the parasitic nobles. Engelbrekt the countryman wanted to stand by the people, for he recognized that only through their strength could a revolution be brought to fruition. The dawning of a revolution carried out by large peasant armies showed that the epoch of petty thievery was over: it wasn’t knights with pillaging mobs heading out but the masses, fed up with misery and squalor. Regardless of the ends that Engelbrekt might have been pursuing at the outset, the power that he attained and was then able to direct was aimed at eradicating oppression, establishing just conditions. The unity that he sought was not national in nature, and perhaps also not yet democratic, but practical. As many as possible had to stand together in order to lift the weight of hardship; the stronger the will of the majority, the less the regressive forces would be able to have their way. It wasn’t naïveté or even agreement that led him to welcome the knights into the fold but rather the expectation that the supremacy of his army would command their respect. His miscalculations became apparent with his murder. At that moment, his lack of ruthlessness was revealed, his unwillingness to engage in the ultimate, revolutionary violence. He didn’t push those who had continually stabbed him in the back into the abyss in which they belonged because he had comrades in arms beside him—like Erik Nilsson Puke, Herman Berman, Gotskalk Bengtsson Ulv, Nils Jönsson Oxenstierna, Johan Karlsson Färla, and Claus Plata—who would protect him against any attack, of that he was certain. So he went to the edge of the mountain with his vanguard, to begin the descent to the bridge. In Norrbotten Count Archibald Douglas and his generals Nordqvist, Högberg, and Nygren were preparing to crush the Communist stronghold in the province. The major general had ordered the construction of the first concentration camps in Storsien, east of Morjärv, not far from the Arctic Circle. The roundup of everyone at the Party offices and of the printers of the newspaper Norrskenflamman [The Flame of the Northern Lights] was planned by the count’s adjutant, Captain Svanbom. Consultations took place with Danielsson, the bailiff of the province, Hallberg, the police prosecutor in Luleå, and Meyerhöffer, the mayor of Boden. The pogrom-like mood was whipped up in the right-wing newspaper Norrbottens-Kuriren [North Bothnia Courier] by the journalists Hedenström, Lindberg, and Moberg, and by Holmberg and Ericsson in the Social Democratic paper Norrländskan. Four members of the pioneer troop of the second army corps, the ensigns Borgström, Norström, and Krendel, along with the conscript Palmqvist, had been charged with carrying out the attack. In the enormous apparatus in which the murder was unfolding, there were direct lines of connection running from the military and police apparatus to the chair of the Finland Committee, Professor Linblom, the director of the Nordic Museum and the Skansen National Parks, the leader of the People’s Party in Stockholm, the engineer Wretlind, and Attorney General Westman, a champion of Germany, who back in nineteen fourteen had been a member of the ultrareactionary government and was now responsible for combating Communism in the country. Once again names, names in cold and deadly succession, emerging from the dense network of relationships. The traces were covered over from above by powerful allies, always from above and in a downward motion. Up above was the king, the generals, up above were civil servants, party functionaries, politicians, industrialists, up above was the cultural establishment; down below, a few young men were picked out, with blank faces and idealistic, patriotic beliefs. The fifteenth of January fourteen thirty-six. The city hid itself from the armed figures on the hilltops, the storm winds whipped up clouds of snow, only the two bridge towers and the occasional glimpse of sections of the wall emerged behind the stilts in the ice like shadows. But Brecht couldn’t shake the image that we had stumbled upon in drafting the scene, that medieval cityscape with the astronomical depiction of the reflection of the sun. In the panel, Stockholm was a jewel, glassy, painted in exquisite detail, surrounded by gracefully breaking waves, verdant islands, and high up in the clear sky above, sun rings and sun dogs, circles of their orbits, comet trails and arcs resembling the aurora borealis. Brecht wanted to incorporate cosmic phenomena, which contrasted with the revolutionary moment by indexing great stretches of time, while also placing it in a continuity. Perhaps, he said, there could be a prospect of the city with the firmament, the northern lights, ab
ove the gloom. As they reached every town, the outer baileys, the bulwarks, the bridges and walls had to be overcome before the rebels could take possession of the elegant buildings within. Reflecting the convergence of distant connections, said Brecht, the perspective of the stage also needed to be foreshortened, like looking through a telescope, making the fortifications and flickering walls of the buildings behind them seem to occupy the same focal plane, and the massive tower in front two-dimensional, shoved up against the foremost fortification tower as if there were no path between them, and directly in front of this loomed the cliff top from which Engelbrekt and his companions were descending. Heading toward the curved gate, the troop first disappeared as they plunged into the depths, before cropping up again in front of the planks of wood. Then came the soldiers, in chain mail, gray doublets, with leather helmets and a motley selection of weapons. Up in the loopholes, archers and the Danish castle commander Erik Nilsson. Their demand that the gates be opened was met with the response that this could only take place on the king’s instruction. The Council of the Realm, cried Karl Knutsson, demands the surrender of the city. They recognized the marshal. You yourselves have decided that Stockholm belongs to Eric, came the cry. Answer: the decree is invalid. Nilsson said he would have to confer with lord Kröpelin, who happened to be in the city at the time. But they were already hacking at the gate with axes. Erik Nilsson warned that he had five thousand armed men in the castle; it’s barely five hundred, came a cry from the rear tower, and they’re too scared to come out anyway. Then the city gate was pushed open from the other side; out front as well, the noise of bolts being pulled back, beams being lifted, a rumbling of footsteps on the bridge, and the workers of the city welcomed the peasant soldiers. The ignition charges in the Party building in Luleå were detonated. Five people lost their lives: the district head, Hellberg, his wife, the treasurer of the youth organization, Granberg, and her two children. They had to be carried to their graves via remote side streets with a police escort. No death notices were accepted by the papers, no venue was made available in which the mourners could gather. At the same time, crowds of people paraded through the main streets of Stockholm with the coffins of a handful of Finland volunteers. Brecht had us read out everything that we could find out about the attack. The court proceedings were slated for the end of April. Lenient sentences were expected for the culprits, who claimed they had only wanted to give the enemy a warning, a fright, to secure the printers for the major general so that he could use them to produce a newspaper for the soldiers on the front. Brecht wanted to hear about the recruitment activities within the army associations, about the selection of the agents, the procurement of the explosives and fuses from the depots, about the declarations from the detained men that they had acted on orders, about the prevarications of those who gave the orders and their intermediaries, about the rapid diversion of attention from the murder to the illegal activities of the Communists, the national exculpation, which received important support from the voices of Archbishop Hultgren, Bishop Cullberg, and other church dignitaries, from the old socialists Ström, Höglund, Kilbom, Nerman, and Lindhagen, the distinguished working-class writers Vilhelm Moberg, Eyvind Johnson, and Harry Martinson. We attempted to return to Engelbrekt, but Brecht was already planning a new documentary play structured as a trial, Die Drahtzieher. An impossible play, a play that the state was sure to attack. The play’s new title: The Deportation of Brecht. Douglas stepped out from the darkness above, the hero who had vowed to cleanse the country of dangerous elements. He gave a big, patriotic speech. Lindberg, the boss of the union organization, agreed with him, ringed by red flags. In the Stockholm that Engelbrekt had liberated for them, the knights and prelates immediately began meeting in secret. In consultation with Kröpelin and the major merchants, they divvied up the posts for a government that would be independent from Denmark. Engelbrekt had the ports and warehouses prepared for the spring trade and ordered the expansion of the access roads, and then set off for Nyköping with his troops. No sooner had he instigated the siege of the fort than he received word that the high council was meeting in the capital. Karl Knutsson, whom he had entrusted with managing Stockholm and taking the castle, was to be named commander in chief, they said. Leaving the siege of Nyköping to Puke, Berman, Färla, and Plata, he hurried back and found the conspirators gathered together in the monastery of the Black Friars. The archbishop of Uppsala, Olof, and the bishops Knut of Linköping and Sigge of Skara, as well as the other attendees, thirty lords in all, had just robbed him of his title and bequeathed it to the knight Bonde. Only three votes had been cast for Engelbrekt. The city was in turmoil; working people, tradespeople, and peasants besieged the house on the steep alley overlooking Järntorget, only Engelbrekt, they cried, was entitled to the rank of commander in chief. But the aristocrats had read the situation astutely: regardless of whether the people were ready to tear them to shreds, they knew that right now, having just entered the final phase of his military campaign, Engelbrekt wouldn’t let it come to open hostilities with them, which would ignite a civil war. They were also familiar with his indifference toward titles, had most likely already considered the possibility that the title of commander in chief could be shared between him and Karl Knutsson Bonde. They moved on to praising his military abilities, wanted to make him believe that he was destined to receive other honors than those he could secure through affairs of the state. That his place was at the head of the army, that the knights wanted nothing more than to walk behind him on a victory march. And things went as they had expected; Engelbrekt said he was willing to share the highest position of power with Karl Knutsson Bonde until the conclusion of the struggle. The nobles assumed he would never again be able to claim the title for himself alone, for, if he were to complete his task, his life would also be complete, and the people would exhaust themselves in liberating the country. And so, having assuaged the workers in the city, Engelbrekt returned to Nyköping, left Färla and Plata to continue the siege, headed off with his other comrades in arms to Östergötland, tasked Erengisle Nilsson with the encirclement of Stäkeborg and Bo Knutsson Grip with storming Stäkeholm in Tjust. He headed to Kalmar, which was to be conquered by Nils Stensson Natt och Dag, and forged ahead toward Blekinge, took Ronneby, where he installed Claus Lange as lord of the castle, reached the west coast, placed the fallen Laholm in the custody of Arvid Svan, put Halmstad under the control of Bo Stensson and Varberg Herman Berman, secured a peace accord with Älvsborg, before finally reaching the heavily fortified Axvall with Puke. Engelbrekt’s path down the east coast, turning off to the west before Skåne, heading up through the Danish province of Halland; this journey lit by torches, with musters in every village; this journey that traced a ring around the country and confirmed the rule of the people, was for him also a journey to exhaustion, to ruin. Riding through the winter and the frigid spring without so much as a break, camping out in the open air, had wrecked his health; feverish, plagued by aching muscles, barely able to stand upright anymore, he left Axvall under Puke’s guard to seek a moment of respite in his castle in Örebro before continuing on to Stockholm. At the end of February, having turned our attention to the ailing, aging Engelbrekt, to follow him in his final hours, we had to pause because the flu Brecht had been lugging around flared up again. Not far from Örebro, on the southern banks of Lake Hjälmaren, Bengt Stensson Natt och Dag had been living in Castle Göksholm since being chased out of Tälje, and he visited Engelbrekt in the castle to attempt a reconciliation. Also present was his son Måns Bengtsson, who had won Engelbrekt’s trust on the field of battle and whom Engelbrekt had made his squire. The commander, crippled by gout, hobbling about on crutches, fed the visitors after coming to an agreement with the knight to make peace. The presence of young Måns erased all distrust. But their only intention was to determine the condition of the people’s leader. They saw that he wouldn’t be able to raise his sword in defense, that it would be simple enough, as the councillors in Stockholm had decided, to kill
him at any opportune moment. It wasn’t long before the opportunity arose. He informed them that he planned to set off for Stockholm the following day, by boat, in order to spare his health. He sought the advice of these compassionate men about the most favorable route, and they suggested he row through Hemfjärden and Ässundet, then through Mellanfjärden to Björksundet and Sundholmen, where he would be able to rest. But the nights are still cold, said Bengt Stensson, and, as the islands were not far from Göksholm, he offered to put Engelbrekt up at his place. Engelbrekt thanked him, said he couldn’t waste any more time, had to set off early if he wanted to reach Rossvik on the eastern tip of Lake Hjälmaren by the coming evening, where Nils Gustafsson Båt was expecting him. In that case, said Måns, he could choose one of the larger islets to make camp, since there would be plenty of wood there for a fire. Our further analysis inspired only antipathy in Brecht. It was not just his illness in which he shrouded himself, as it were, but also a sudden desire to shield himself from Engelbrekt’s unbearable end that made it impossible to continue working on the piece. Interrupted by a barking cough, he had still shown an interest in the paradoxical historical condition according to which Engelbrekt, though he had led the people to victory, never entrusted them with the top positions, and according to which the people—who were actually already standing out in front—left the leadership to others, as if they too were unaware of their capacity to make decisions. Brecht’s final remark on the project, which I jotted down in my notebook, was that the members of the House of Natt och Dag were to be called Night and Day in our version. That was shortly before the twelfth of March, the end of the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland.