The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The time from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War was a period when the fundamental building blocks of our human existence and organisational structures were in flux, not to say disintegrating, and the unprecedented radicality of those fifty years, which gave rise to the last two great utopian movements, Nazism and Communism, can only be understood on the basis that the societal order suddenly, because of a massive build-up of pressure arising in industrialism’s in time extremely compressed and in volume extremely expansive changes, no longer could be taken for granted, it began to crack and appeared increasingly arbitrary, governed by rules imposed from without, in a civilisational system at odds with its people, from which they, or many of them, felt utterly alienated.