My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Identity is culture, culture is language, language is morality. What made the atrocities of the Third Reich possible was an extreme reinforcement of the we, and the attendant weakening of the I, which lessened the force of resistance against the gradual dehumanization and expulsion of the non-we, which is to say the Jews, bolstering the we still further.

To utter the word “death” in the same language would be to say something other than the absence of life, something other than nothing, for Nazism, which had pervaded all parts of the culture, was a death cult; to say “dead” was not to say “nothing,” but to say sacrifice, fatherland, greatness, fervor, pride, courage.

Auschwitz, the way we think of it, does not exist, it belongs to the past, which is gone, and it did not even exist there either, because what we imagined happened there, in the way it was told to us, did not happen in that way, the story lies, forgetting the one, whose perspective is the only perspective possible, and this very forgetting of the one was what made the extermination possible.

Almost all literature is simply text, but not Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf is more than text. It is a symbol of human evil. In it the door between text and reality is wide open, in a way quite unlike any other book.

The new came not from without, but from within, and not in the guise of the unfamiliar, but as an amplification of the already known. And it came not as a negative force, and was not associated with destruction and death; reading accounts from early 1930s Germany, there is a striking optimism radiating from everywhere.

It is similar to advertising in our day; we know full well it is trying to manipulate us and make us buy some product, but this does not prevent us from watching the ads, which can be good or funny, subtle or just plain silly, but even if we dislike them we do not necessarily dislike advertising in itself, and although we know there is no difference between this or that product and that all the glamor associated with one and not the other belongs to the image and not the product, which can be a different thing altogether, we nevertheless still buy what we associate with the glamor.

despised the propaganda, but was also affected by it; his emotions reacted even though his mind shunned the idea that there might genuinely be something inferior about him.

This is the goal: to work other thoughts in behind the protective wall formed by prejudice, which is to say general, unreflected opinions. That protective wall cannot be penetrated by argument, for it is not made of arguments. It is made of a sense of what is right and wrong, what is decent, what is appropriate.

Seemingly there were no limits to what he might take an interest in and hold an opinion about. Describing this aspect of his friend’s personality, Kubizek emphasizes the restlessness of which it was an expression, his need for things to happen, and this gives an impression of Hitler as being in some way menaced, as if there were something he needed to get away from, and since the things that caught his attention in this way were so external, there always being some element of his surroundings with which to take issue, it is easy to think that there was something inside him that he wanted to escape or get rid of.

Certainly one’s impression of Hitler, especially after a short and superficial acquaintance, was that of a deeply serious man. This enormous seriousness seemed to overshadow everything else.

The issue with biography as a genre, and this is as true of autobiography as it is of the memoir, is that the author purports to be omniscient, a sole authority, he or she knows how it all turned out, and as such it is almost impossible not to accord emphasis to any sign, be it character trait or event, that points in that one direction, even if, as in this instance, it is merely one trait, one event among many others that in no way called attention to themselves.

But what is this “bad” that we do not embody? What is this “evil” that we do not express? The very formulation is indicative of how we humans think in terms of categories, and of course there is nothing wrong with that as long as we are aware of the dangers. In the night of pathology and the predetermined there is no free will, and without free will there is no guilt.

No matter how broken a person might be, no matter how disturbed the soul, that person remains a person always, with the freedom to choose.

Kershaw and almost two generations with him have condemned Hitler and his entire being as if pointing to his innocence when he was nineteen or twenty-three, or pointing to some of the good qualities he retained throughout his life, were a defense of him and of evil. In actual fact the opposite is true: only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief.

None of these ventures has been successful, but he is undeterred, for next time may be different. Another headstrong young man from the lowest levels of society with an unbounded, and in the eyes of others unfounded, reservoir of self-confidence, lived similarly from hand to mouth for many years with no other ambition than becoming a writer, something he achieved at the age of thirty with the publication of his first novel: Hunger.

Van Gogh was another artist of that time who lived in extreme poverty, wanting nothing else than to paint, even though in his lifetime he sold not a single canvas. We have no way of knowing if this was what Hitler was doing, but if it was not, his “no” must then have been all the more emphatic, all the more obstinate, since in that case he was rejecting society itself and all that came with it of work, career, marriage, children. Rather than being a part of that, he chose to live in the gutter.

Hitler’s weakness as a painter was that he found no way of expressing his own inner being, or else lacked the will to address it, and perhaps this was the reason he gave up and settled for painting as a simple means of making ends meet.

It is a very suggestive photograph, for he is merely one of the crowd, a face among thousands, a fate among thousands, full of the collective zeal that swept through the cities, towns, and villages of Europe in that summer of 1914. To himself, naturally, he was everything, immersed in his life and destiny, a twenty-five-year-old semi-artist with no family and no friends, living

Munich with no direction but with an inner fire now ignited,

As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together.

Modernity was characterized as rationality, therefore they turned toward what was not rational, not purposeful, but which transcended such tendencies and found meaning in notions considered timeless and nonpragmatic. “The people” was one such notion, bringing together concepts of home, nature, culture, and religion, against whose immutable core the constant shifts of industrialism and modernity could only flake away, against whose profound depths, evoked by history, mythology, and religion, the entertainment industry and increasing commercialization of the day appeared abjectly shallow and banal.

Wagner, Hölderlin, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, George, all those writers and poets cultivated by German youth, celebrated the great, the divine, the essential, and they lauded death, too, which lay beyond it all.

about World War I, Storm of Steel.

Men have come together at this place, on each side of a hypothetical line, an invisible chalk mark, in this theatrical distortion of reality in which the familiar is uprooted and life removed to its furthest limit, so relentlessly transgressed, as if they were the gods themselves, since what awaits beyond, on the other side,

is death, which is to say nature.

In a way, this is the zenith. For nothing is more precious than life, and here it falls to the ground like hail in a storm. Clearly it is a sacrifice of unprecedented dimensions, but for what purpose?

The birds inhabit a world that to them is complete, a repertoire of actions they must carry out every day, throughout their every year, in an interplay of events and instincts with no other significance than keeping them alive, sustaining them in their state of existence. They see the world, and they are familiar with it, though only as effect, not as cause. The sun is warm, the rain is wet, the air consists of various strata through which they fly. They are locked inside their birdness, through which

That we should similarly be locked inside our humanness has always been a natural thought, our religions issue from it and seek to define what is beyond, that which is concealed from us yet visible in its effects, and they do so in images that simplify for us what we feel to be complex. None of these images is useful here. No god descends from on high to appear bef...

If the processes that lead to war are a scheme, war itself is not, for death is absolute. Death is not modern.

As indeed is the heart, for like death the heart is always the same. The heart is not modern either. It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable, neither rational nor irrational. The heart beats, and then it does not. That’s

This is the insight of war. All existential thought, any quest toward authenticity, stems from here. The occurrence of death opens up a new reality within our preexisting reality.

It, I, we/they. These are the fundamental elements of life, which from their hiding place in the complexity of civilization emerge in the simplicity of war, and which, by virtue of their concerning the most essential, must be acknowledged.

But what could be more hallowed than the life of the individual? The life of the all, or one’s own all, one might surmise, this being the legitimization of the majority of wars. Nonetheless, it is an abstraction, and must surely mean nothing in the instant of rising to one’s feet to charge forward into a hail of bullets.

What remains is the war as an expression of an essentially internal state: “The true springs of war are deep within us, and all that’s atrocious, occasionally flooding the world, is only a mirror image of the human soul.”

They had been to the very perimeter of life, inhabited the borderland between all and nothing, and the intensity that had saturated them there, the carnage they had witnessed, could never be meaningless or empty, could never be nothing; this they knew above all. From a political perspective the possible consequences were basically twofold: never again could there be such an appalling and meaningless waste of human life, or else a new war would render meaningful the sacrifice of those two million German soldiers. To Hitler, only the second of these possibilities was real.

everyday reality was thereby elevated and made significant, not by its interpretation in art, by art’s selection of individual constituent parts within it, the world as read in the poem, as heard in music, as seen in the painting, but by the direct and unmediated reshaping and modeling of reality itself. Hitler turned Germany into a theater. What that theater expressed was cohesion, and through cohesion identity, and through identity authenticity.

Who would not wish to be a part of something greater than the self? Who would not wish to feel their life to be meaningful? Who would not wish to have something to die for?

The question we must ask is whether the war was caused by political circumstance and historic, societal factors, unthinkable in our own postwar societies, or whether it came about because of a release of certain forces that have always been present in man, a part of our makeup as human beings, present in every one of us, and which may be released again at any time from now.

Is the want in me? Am I simply unable to grasp hold of my own time, my own place, to see it the way it is, the way it really is, to know that it is everything, and to be filled with joy by that knowledge?

Is it my responsibility to validate that world, to fill it with value? Is that possible? Or is it empty, a simple, ongoing state of serial reproduction, copying itself and copying itself again, on and on into infinity? An emptiness that moreover is the foundation of our own biological reality, our life as human beings? If so, why do we imitate the emptiness of serial life in the culture we create? Should our culture not instead establish difference, which is the stuff of all worth, in which value resides and from which it is released, and thereby of all meaning? Does that meaning not exist? Or is it concealed? Concealed then by what means? Concealed by our social existence, whose differences exist in order to keep in place, not to set free, and which indeed keep us in place within our particular lives, our routine lives, from whose viewpoint

When I read Rudolf Otto or Mircea Eliade, both of whom circle around the experience of the divine or the holy, in order to gain an understanding of that experience and to define it, and when I read the writings of Christian mysticism or the Church Fathers, pervaded as they are with the rapture of religious excitement, I find myself confronted by something utterly alien to me, which does not occur at all in my life or in the world around me, other than the occasional glimpse offered by TV into some ecstatic religious movement. This weakens an otherwise fundamental conviction of mine that says the emotional life of the human is constant, that the feelings that stream through us have always streamed through all human beings, and that this is the reason why it makes sense for us to consider even the oldest works of art, or to read even the oldest texts of literature.

When we closed the door on religion, we closed the door on something inside ourselves as well. Not only did the holy vanish from our lives, all the powerful emotions associated with it vanished too. The idea of the sublime is a faint echo of our experience of the holy, without the mystery.

It is a recognition of something whose more exact nature has eluded me. And a recognition of the vast and to us unknown quantity that is death.

Everything he saw would soon be gone to him, and would never come back. Not just his family, whose fates and destinies he would never know, but also the fjord and the fell, the grass and the humming insects. And the sun. He would never see the sun again. These thoughts tainted everything I saw that day. The beauty of the world became enhanced, and yet it seemed crueler too, for one day it would be gone to me too, and continue to exist for those who remained, as it had done since the beginning of time. How many people had sat where we were sitting and looked at the same view? Generation after generation stretching back in time, all here once, all gone now.

We do not believe in omens, we do not believe in God, in fact we believe in nothing; instead we know.

This is why Turner’s sun, or the event depicted by Lorrain, or the sea and the harbor in Broch’s opening passage, appear so intense and awaken such vigorous emotion. This is the truth of art.

Indeed, across the chasm of familiar and unfamiliar time it speaks to us; a cave of paintings tens of thousands of years old leaves an impression on us and in a certain respect cannot be surpassed, the same is true of the first creation narratives, even though we know little if anything about those who wrote them or how they lived. Compared to the swell of generations who lived through the hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of Enlightenment philosophy, the ensuing four hundred years of rationality are but a ripple on the surface, a scratch on the rock of a fell, and from such a perspective concepts like “rational” and “irrational” are not particularly fruitful. It is all a matter of different ways of relating to the unknown. We have succeeded in exorcising the unknown, and we are at ease and secure, the first culture in history not to tremble in the face of our circumstances, life is under our control. But the price of such security is high, for it is a presence in our lives. And it reveals itself in death.

Art is what cannot be done again, Borges reminds us, and is as such akin to the miracle.

For us, the one true life is our own singular life, unexampled and individual, while imitation is false and submissive. In the Imitatio Christi imitation is the ideal, the possibility of withdrawing from life and devoting oneself fully to Christ being ever present, always hallowed, never anemic or strange.

What I know now, which I did not know then, is that there are forces inside us oblivious to good and bad, and emotions that can be so powerful as to override everything without our even knowing that we are in their grip, for the ego, the I, that thin sliver of light at the edge of our consciousness, contains our whole identity, colors our understanding of all the other forces, desires, and emotions that exist within us, much as the age in which we live colors our perception of the past, for there is no natural outside, neither in the body nor in society, and to arrive at such a place, from where we can see ourselves or the age in which we live, requires an effort, and that effort is huge, for the forces that pull on our self-awareness and on the contemporary age, drawing everything into their domain, are not gravitational, but centripetal.