My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

My whole world consisted of entities I took for granted and which were unshakable, like rocks and mountains of the mind. The Holocaust was one such entity, the Age of Enlightenment another. I could account for them, I had a clear image of them, as everyone did, but I had never thought about them, never asked myself what circumstances had made them possible, why they happened when they did, and definitely not whether there was any connection between them. As soon as I started to read Horkheimer and Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, of which I understood very little, something opened, in that things which could be viewed in one way could also be viewed in another, words lost their force, there was no such thing as the Holocaust, for what the term indicated was so incredibly complicated, right down to the comb in the pocket of the jacket in the pile of jackets in the warehouse, it had belonged to a little girl, the whole of her life exists in the term “the Holocaust,” and up again to the big concepts like evil, indifference, guilt, collective guilt, individual responsibility, mass man, mass production, mass extinction. In this way the world was relativized, but also more real: lies or misunderstandings or deceit were inherent in notions of reality, not in reality, which was inaccessible to language.