My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Train after train, transport after transport, human being after human being.

  Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.

  * * *

  During these past weeks writing about Mein Kampf I have been contemplating what I know about evil. Before I started I never gave it a thought, it was an issue belonging to my teenage years, my Bjørneboe period, when I felt personally reponsible for all humanity. The question of the possible existence of God belonged to the same period. I still remember a page from my diary when I was sixteen, starting with the question “Does a God exist?” and ending in the conclusion that it did not. Now I am forty-two and back at the start. I am no longer the same person; what for so long seemed so near, my teenage years, exist now on the other side of a vast ocean of time. And what I related to then only instinctively or emotionally, the social world, whose power I felt whenever my cheeks burned with shame or I was consumed by self-reproach because of something I had done that made me feel so inadequate, so awkward, so indistinct, so totally stupid and foolish, but also unprincipled and dishonest and fraudulent, I now see more clearly, not least after having written these books, which in their every sentence have tried to transcend the social world by conveying the innermost thoughts and innermost feelings of my most private self, my own internal life, but also by describing the private sphere of my family as it exists behind the façade all families set up against the social world, doing so in a public form, a novel. The forces that exist within the realm of the social reveal themselves only when they are exceeded, and they are powerful indeed, almost, no, absolutely impossible to break away from. I imagined I was going to write exactly what I thought and believed and felt, in other words to be honest, this is how it is, the truth of the I, but it turned out to be so incompatible with the truth of the we, or this is how it is meant to be, that it foundered after only a few short sentences. I came to understand what morality is, and where it is found. Morality is the we within the I, which is to say a concept of the social world, and it stands above the truth. The “ought” of morality is the voice of decency that saves us. But it is also the voice of I-constraint, the antithesis of truth and freedom, the voice that stands in our way. It is this latter dimension to which Heidegger alludes with das Man, the dictatorship of the we, the tyranny of the mean, the middle-class mind-set that transforms everything into its own image. That he failed to see through Hitler, so petty bourgeois in everything he did and thought, and Nazism, which was the revolution of the petty bourgeoisie, but was instead duped by their symbols of greatness and constructs of authenticity, unseeing of the fact that greatness and authenticity were the same as death, is astonishing. When Jaspers asked him how such an uneducated man as Hitler could ever govern the country, Heidegger replied infatuatedly, Education doesn’t matter at all, just look at his wonderful hands! Only decency could have saved him, as with all others who followed Hitler. Jaspers was saved by decency, Jünger and Mann likewise. But not Heidegger. And certainly not Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. To him, decency was remaining at one’s post and making sure ten thousand people were gassed to death and incinerated every day, ensuring the system ran smoothly and without backlogs. How treasonable the social world could be, and how powerful its forces, revealed itself in Stangl as it did in nearly all other Germans under the Nazi regime. Had he possessed the strength to break the bonds imposed on him by the social world, he would never have found himself in the diabolical madness in which he stood, would never have had the lives of 900,000 people on his conscience. In the Third Reich the voice of human conscience did not say it is wrong to kill, it said it is wrong not to kill, as Hannah Arendt so precisely observes. This was made possible by a shift in the language, displayed in its purest form in Mein Kampf, which contains no “you,” only an “I,” and a “we,” which is what makes it possible to turn “they” into “it.” In “you” was decency. In “it” was evil.

  But it was “we” who carried it out.

  * * *

  To protect ourselves we use the most potent marker of distance we know, the line of demarcation that passes between “we” and “they.” The Nazis have become our great “they.” In their demonic and monstrous evil, “they” exterminated the Jews and set the world aflame. Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler, Mengele, Stangl, and Eichmann. The German people who followed “them” are in our minds also a “they,” a faceless and frenzied mass, almost as monstrous as their leaders. The remoteness of “they” is vast and dashes down these proximate historical events, which took place in the present of our grandparents, into a near-medieval abyss. At the same time we know, every one of us knows, even though we might not acknowledge it, that we ourselves, had we been a part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism. In Germany in 1938 Nazism was the consensus, it was what was right, and who would dare to speak against what is right? The great majority of us believe the same as everyone else, do the same as everyone else, and this is so because the “we” and the “all” are what decide the norms, rules, and morals of a society. Now that Nazism has become “they,” it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was “we.” If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current of society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realized that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with poisonous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world’s most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all of this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as “they,” in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as “we.” It will come as what is right.

  * * *

  Reading texts written in the decades leading up to World War II is like reading the legislation of a former society whose laws no longer apply. The ideas expressed make up a system which in itself is comprehensible and meaningful but which is no longer connected to any practical reality. The notions of what constitutes a human being, what constitutes a society, and what is most important in our human life are inapplicable to the society in which we live today. No student of any high school today would lay down his life for his country, no twenty-five-year-old today would find any value at all in the deaths of two million people. The phenomenon is simply inconceivable, other than as an abnormality. Anyone today who suggested democracy was an expression of decay, liberalism a disgrace, would be hung out to dry in all our media. Antidemocratic sentiment is a taboo in the original sense, something society eems cannot be touched on. When it is approached, it is approached in ways that shield us from its content, much like the rituals of primitive societies, in this case by the texts of the era being accorded a particular status where, in the same way as the holy excludes that which is unholy, all but their purely textual properties are ignored. In this way we are able to approach notions like divine violence, central to an essay written by Walter Benjamin in 1921, which, because he is one of the most recognized thinkers of t
he Weimar period, perhaps of all modernity, must be rescued from its antidemocratic implications, and we may also investigate ideas concerning the arbitrariness of law without lending them any significance other than that which they command in the internal world of the text, whose propositions go back to Antiquity, to Plato, Aristotle, or even to the Presocratics, as far forward as to Nietzsche, back to the Romans and Roman law, further to Heidegger, back to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, on to Benjamin, back to Descartes, and all the way up to Kierkegaard, but never at any point reaching into our time and our society, never in any binding sense, for the insights gained in such texts find no consequence in the reality outside them. The problems they raise are addressed and aired, but their validity is restricted to their own delimited context, exactly as rituals once addressed the chasms within their own societies. The best example is Nietzsche, one of the most influential figures in the field of the humanities, referred to in almost every discussion of society and culture, yet the reassessment of values that takes place in his philosophy, which absorbs and fascinates generation after generation of students, never genuinely impacts in the sense of any obligation being established between the texts and the present-day reality of the reader. All thoughts in this respect, relating to the undemocratic, to qualitative differences between human beings, to the nihilistic, to the amoral, and to the arbitrariness of law, are treated as text, and any fascination or relevance made a matter of internal fascination or relevance.

  This distance between the text and the world emerges in exemplary fashion in an essay by Girard in which Hamlet is construed as a drama dealing with Hamlet’s attempts to put an end to vengeance, which is the fundamental trope of mimetic violence. Hence the postponements, the doubt, the hesitation, the lack of initiative, the impotence. In this essay Girard disqualifies almost all previous interpretations, such disqualification eventually becoming a point in itself as he considers how so many scholars of literature, so many professors over the past hundred years and more, could have construed Hamlet’s reluctance to avenge his father as a failure, an expression of faltering will and faltering ability, even going so far as to pathologize Hamlet’s resistance to such an act. When these texts on Hamlet are read a thousand years from now, in another culture, their readers will surely think that professors and other scholars of literature were a bloodthirsty and vengeful lot. Hamlet is a portrayal of a human being, professors and other scholars of literature are human beings too, yet this identification is never touched on, the connection is simply never made, for the morals and ethics of Hamlet are morals and ethics applying within the text or system of texts, not to the human beings who read those texts in their own lives. The question professors and other scholars of literature ought to ask themselves in order to understand Hamlet is this: What would I have done if my father died and I suspected someone of killing him? Would I have gone to the person I thought had killed him, who it turned out was my uncle, and avenge my father’s death by killing him? No, nobody would, to do so would be quite atrocious, a deeply archaic and absolutely immoral act. What we would do would be to go to the police and allow the law to preside. This is Hamlet’s dilemma, Girard tells us, he is one of us, a so-called modern man caught up in an archaic system of vengeance and violence. To his mind this system is not anchored in anything absolute, it is arbitrary, and if it is arbitrary it is also a game, and if it is a game then indeed everything else is a game too, the social world is nothing but counters on a board which may be moved in one direction if this set of rules applies or in another if another set of rules applies. Such arbitrariness only becomes clear the moment we step outside the system, or when the system goes from following one set of rules to following another. Both before and after such a transfer, the social world and the system of rules are one and the same, difficult to separate, as if the rules are not applied but come from within, from the social world itself, like nature, with the same conditions as exist between the laws of nature and natural matter.

  The question of what I would have done and thought had I been Hamlet is one of identification, and identification concerns likeness. In an essay about Rembrandt, Jean Genet describes a train journey he once made and how he was seated in a carriage opposite a particularly loathsome man with bad teeth, who smelled awful and spat tobacco on the floor, and how all of a sudden it came to Genet, out of nothing and with the force of every revolutionary idea, that all men were of equal worth. This is an idea that is more than familiar to us, and we are brought up to believe it to be right, but what Genet describes is the abrupt insight into what it actually entails, its utterly wild radicality. Was this wretched and despicable person on the seat opposite equal to him? Are you equal to me? It is an impossible thought. Genet stares at him and their eyes meet. What he sees in the man’s eyes, what reveals itself to him there, in that fleeting moment, makes him wonder if there is something in our identity, far within its depths, that is absolutely the same. In other words absolute identity. Genet does not link this idea in any way to Rembrandt, but it is rooted in Rembrandt’s paintings, and this I know to be true; I saw a self-portrait by Rembrandt in a London gallery, and the powerful sense of nearness in its gaze, as if risen through the four hundred years that have passed since it was painted, now to meet our own, told me exactly what Genet was talking about. While I have never put it into words, I have nonetheless felt its truth.

  I am you.

  This has nothing to do with the social we, for only the unique I can express it, and all art, in conveying and communicating what is shared within a culture, concerns this. Any art that expresses only the social we is art that becomes isolated by time, a hundred years later it is the expression only of its era, of what was going on in the social world at that particular time and nothing else. This social we was what Nazism destroyed, and what Paul Celan’s poem is a response to. “Engführung” is the end of what began with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written in the remains of the language the Nazis destroyed, not with the intention primarily of displaying that destruction, though in 1959 that must also have been important, but to forge a new path from language into reality. To do so, Celan went to the most basic components of the language, its very foundation, which is I, you, we, they, it – and is, was. Against the void of death and absence they discharge new meaning, which is unexampled, which is to say inimitable, valid only here, in this single poem. The boundary of meaning is also the boundary of community, and to that place only the one may go. So far does the poem reach into the idiosyncratic that no name can be mentioned, the name being a superordination, something general, unaffected by time, always the same, and yet steeped in time, whose associations flow steadily through it. Thus Celan approaches the it of the I, though not in the form of the body’s namelessness, not in the form of the silence of biology, but that part of the human self which is the same in all of us. The poem’s archaic feel, the historic events addressed as something outside the name, which is to say in the undifferentiated, which is always the same, or borders on sameness, comes from this. In a strange though absolutely significant way, the namelessness of the Jews who were executed in World War II seems at variance with the namelessness within the poem, which is not in any way bound to the body, not deadlocked by silence, but on the contrary seeks to give the silence that is the relationship between the nothing and the all, between the linguistic conception of the world and the world itself, a voice. That voice is the voice of the one, and it is the voice of the all. It is I, it is you, it is we, it is they, it is it, and it is time, flowing through it all.

  I am you.

  Jesus said, Your neighbor is like you. The consequence of that idea, so wildly radical, is that Hitler is worth as much as the Jews he ordered to be unprecedentedly to death and incinerated. Genet said, Your neighbor is you. From this too there is no exception, not even in the case of someone such as Adolf Hitler. We are opposed, and rightly so, to everything he stood for. Hitler is our antithesis. But only in respect to what he did, not in terms of the person he was. In that
, he was like us. Hitler’s youth resembles my own, his remote infatuation, his desperate desire to be someone, to rise above the self, his love for his mother, his hatred of his father, his use of art as a space of great emotions in which the I could be erased. His problems forming relationships with others, his elevation of women and his anxiety in their company, his chastity, his yearning for purity. When I watch him on film, he awakens the same feelings in me as my father once did. In that too there is likeness. He represented conservative middle-classness in so many respects, and this too I know, it is the voice, trembling with indignation, that says you are not good enough. He also represents the defiance of conservative middle-class values, the young lad sleeping until midmorning, refusing to look for a job, wishing instead to write or paint, because he is something more and better than the others. He was the one who opened a we and said you are one of us, and he was the one who closed a we and said you are one of them. But above all he was the man who emerged from the bunker, with the world in flames and millions of people dead as a result of his volition, to greet a line of young boys, his hands shaking from sickness, and there, in a fleeting gleam of his eyes, revealed something warm and kind, his soul. He was a small person, but so are we all. He must not be judged for what he was, but for what he did. What he did, however, he did not do alone. It was done by a we, that we was put under pressure, it gave way and something collapsed. Only those who were strong enough in themselves could withstand it. They were the self-willed and the disloyal, who refused the ideology, which is the community’s idea of how the world should be. Paul Celan’s poem is a nonideological poem, expressing the antipode of ideologies. Even a name is expressive of ideology, an idea of a person, at the same time as it is that idea that saves a person from extinction within the mass: the name is the one. Hitler made his name the all, emptying from it any semblance of individuality, as Hess once said, You are Germany. After the Holocaust his name remained, his face endured, whereas the six million Jews who perished remained nameless, faceless nobodies. This too is a theme of Paul Celan’s poem. A story ended there, in that zero point, in that oblivion, desolate and forsaken, all that is human obliterated, worthless. Another story began there, our story. Who covered it up, Celan asks in “Engführung,” who concealed the uniquely and authentically human of this catastrophe in the general, emblematic, and common language if it had not broken down?