My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

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 ...