The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2 Read online

  The garden of the comital Piper family had been renowned for its follies and artificial grottoes, its floral landscaping, orangeries, and labyrinths. For the pedestrians on Trädgårdsgatan, which was now called Scheelegatan, the view into the complex was blocked by tall walls. Inside, on the grass surrounding the fountains and sculptures, celebrations were held, the music could be heard, and in the evening, the people could delight in the fireworks. Until the beginning of the previous century an island of flower gardens, country houses, and hunting grounds, a destination for day trips for the residents of the city, Kungsholmen gradually became the domain of tradespeople and manufacturers. Following the belated fall of feudalism, tanners and sail makers, potters and brick burners settled on the banks, and some of their small wooden houses stood for a long time between the growing, mechanized workshops, foundries, armories, and breweries. The chestnut woodlands and rows of lindens lining the boulevards were felled; on the corner of the shore of Lake Mälaren, where the stone bridge leads to Tegelbacken, loomed the steam-powered fire mill—that flagship building of modern industry—and on the leftover parcels of land, barracks and field hospitals had been constructed. As the century drew to a close, tree-lined hills could be seen only here and there, along with the odd grave, some shrubbery in unfenced squares between the sprawling buildings with billowing chimneys, the long rows of tenements for the workers of the neighborhood. The reserve of the nobility had become a proletarian district; in times of scarcity, the erstwhile island of luxury was called the hillock of hunger. A few garden allotments and plots of land on the edge of the Pipers’ property held out the longest, until, in the years leading up to the World War, the town hall and the police station with the remand center were built here, and only one last mill remained standing on the hill behind the Grundberg metalworking plant when it was incorporated into the separator plant around the turn of the century. At that time Fleminggatan was not yet sealed, and the old country road, which bore the name Reparebansgatan, after the rope makers who plied their trade on a long, covered pathway, was furrowed by the wheels of the trucks, churned up by the hooves of the horses; early in the morning and in the evening, the processions of workers would traipse along through the dirt, the mud. Where the street began, beside the Kungsbron, behind the wooden fence, there was still an area where planks were stored, and where the sheds of carpenters, firewood vendors, and junk dealers were located. Below, on the swampy banks of the canal connecting Riddarfjärden with Lake Karlberg and Lake Ulvsunda, barges were moored. Leaning on the windowsill in my room, just before those of us who lived here were overcome by sleep, I was able to gain an insight into something that had been buried during the day; in this moment something like an ability to think emerged, senses began to stir that were capable of taking in the details of the otherwise unremarkable occurrences surrounding me. Fleminggatan was empty, trams traveled past only now and then, no one was on the streets who didn’t have some reason to be here, and the people who lived here retired at an early hour. On the right-hand side, the mass of the factory could be made out behind a block of houses with no lights in the windows; the living quarters inside were swollen with a heavy breathing, an ongoing sucking in and expelling of air; in the wheezing constriction, bodies lay shoved together, flaccid, unconscious. And though it might have seemed to me that now, shrugging off my fatigue, I could become clear-sighted, I didn’t yet know what to investigate. It had something to do with being transplanted from free movement to a tightly fenced-in area. The European continent, with its wealth of relationships and tasks, had sunk away, and an onerous search for new connections had begun. The path out of direct participation in political events and tussles into the realm of a grinding monotony introduced me to that form of passivity that had always posed the greatest threat to our confidence. The workplace was dominated by the old and expended. Sometimes it seemed as if I had drifted into a kind of illiteracy, in which there was nothing but a dreary immutability, an ongoing standstill, and in which every impulse was seized by an indifference, every approach to contemplation pulverized. Nevertheless, even if it exhausted me more than the physical exertion, this too was instructive for me. I had almost forgotten this condition of self-limitation, against which my father had always struggled and which I had tackled with my comrades in Berlin. My conversation with Rogeby and Selin had reintroduced me to the problem. Earlier, the political tension, the subsumption of our actions into larger contexts had protected us from a downward slide into numbness. Even when we were in the subterranean world of the disempowered, everything that formed a part of our work had been connected to Party-related planning. Now that I was beginning to understand the language of the land, and could take part—albeit deficiently—in discussions, I initially could not understand the separation between practical matters and political consequences. Even the Communists in our workshop dealt only with questions that were of direct interest to the entire workforce. No ideological points of view were brought up, no radical critique of society was made. Later I came to understand that their influence was restricted at that time to negotiations over wages, piece rates, reforms to workplace hygiene, and the like. Working with long-term goals in mind, they were able to gain influence in union affairs. With the small minority that they represented within the workers’ movement, it was tactically significant that they had managed to gain strong representation in important industries, in leadership positions in the unions. The demands being made by the Communist Party had to be tactically adapted to the interests of the left wing of the Social Democrats, for it was only with the support of the governing party that they could even partially be realized. When dealing with everyday details left me unsatisfied and the apathy toward international perspectives weighed upon me, I thought about the situation of the workers in Germany. I wondered if, despite being largely the result of decades of making compromises and abandoning revolutionary traditions, this atmosphere of restraint, which often felt like indifference, might actually be an expression of increased durability. The faces of the workers certainly spoke of being involved in a struggle for their rights, but the calm that they brought to this struggle seemed to stem from the conviction that they had strong organizations behind them. The power of their class expressed itself in the power of the unions, and this was a power that limited itself voluntarily. In contrast to the heated thinking that I had come to know in Germany and that had hurled the workers’ movement there into catastrophe, the fundamental attitude of the workers here was a democratic one, they were convinced that conditions could be changed in their favor, gradually, through parliamentary ballots. They would not allow themselves to be dragged into a dictatorship. They preferred negotiation to violent clashes. The sense of justice that prevailed among them caused them to appreciate the achievements of the Communist functionaries. But the sober-mindedness of the workers didn’t necessarily justify the stance of the Social Democrats. Much of the conduct of the workers was directed against the upper echelons of their party, and was also at odds with the decrees of the union leadership. They were simply more patient than the workers I had grown up with. Yet on this evening, by the windowsill overlooking Fleminggatan, I was of the opinion that the struggle I had been a part of in Spain, and before that in the clandestine cells in Berlin, must still live on within these workers as well, and must still be able to be retrieved from old experiences. I saw them in front of me, in their apparently reduced capacity for action, not protesting, adapting themselves to uniformity, and I recognized that, under the current conditions, only minor tasks, only miniscule shifts here and there were possible. But it wasn’t just this that I was contemplating, with my brow against the windowpane. The plant over there, with the chimney still smoking at night, was a walled colossus; I could see its labyrinths before me, so different from the playful paths in Pipers Park, could imagine how the industries had grown around the wooded hills and patches of meadow and how the business owners were praised for having given the populace work, and the pride of those who viewed
themselves as the founders of the wealth of the nation could be read in the gables and towers of the administrative buildings. The poorhouse, the home for the elderly, now an entrance building for the hospital across from it, was covered in ledges and turrets as if embellishing a palace. The growth of the city, the tearing down of the old, the continual process of paving the way for the new, the lingering of a world that now existed only in dreamlike images, and the unquestioned domination of the now, all of this could be reflected upon; but then came the other thing, that which was difficult to fathom, which could only find a place in one’s own contemplation. Sitting on the edge of the bed by the window, in the narrow room between the kitchen and the room in which the other tenants were sleeping, next to me a table, a chair, behind me a cockle stove in which a few pieces of wood that I had gathered on the banks of the canal were burning, I saw something develop for which I had no words, and which I wanted to explain to myself. Perhaps it was the sight of the trees that conjured up this emotion. Their bare boughs, the thin tips of the branches stood out clearly against the overcast sky, which was reflecting the reddish light of the city. From root systems reaching out into the earth, these peculiar trunks grew upward and then stretched arms out in all directions. The earth was a sphere rolling through space. I could see a small section of that sphere, with a hospital park, a fence, an empty street. The trees were imbued with growth. Sap seeped upward through the ramifications to the knots in which the germs of the leaves lay hidden. The branches shivered, stirred in the gentle wind. The city was inhabited. From the area in front of the railway station came the muted sounds of the freight trains. Tomorrow, the branches would stretch out toward the light. In a matter of weeks, their buds would open. The trees were palpating the air, the expanse, they were receptive, like the bird that rose up from the shadows, floating upward and disappearing behind the rooftops. Perhaps, I thought, everything on earth, as it rotates in space, is one big hearkening and sensing of countless nerve fibers and tentacles, of the finest materials and organs of all imaginable forms, that all life is merely there to feel and, in continual excitation, to emerge from blindness to understanding. In the end it was nothing more than the silent presence of the trees in the yard—where less than two decades ago the discarded old men, shattered from work, would stagger around among hosts of foundlings and the sudden screams of a woman in labor in the squat barracks beside the house of the dead—which allowed me to perceive the sensitivity of our planet. I wouldn’t have been able to say anything more about it; it went no further than a fleeting intimation, this expansive view led only to a thought that, although it then fell once more into oblivion, still offered relief, because it brought an end to a long period of estrangement. I knew that I no longer had to stay alone in the enclosure of the island, that I could venture into the city, and the path that I was now taking into the night was a final tour around a self-imposed isolation. A starting point had been given. When I tried to imagine this period of three months, I perceived it as a sound, as a dull, metallic whirring. Surrounded by this echo I walked down the four flights of stairs; from the two top stories the helmet-like cupola of the town hall was visible through the courtyard windows, sinking step by step; below, along the foot of the wall, mounds of snow lay on the concrete; between the trash cans, the laundry, were sprawling puddles. I walked past the factory. With its corners encased in light-colored bricks and window arches, its ornamental gables, the unlit management building protruded from the long façade of the workshop building that led down to the canal. In the machine rooms, the lights were burning for the night shift. The humming of the rotary pistons and drive belts could be heard from the steeply sloping path. On the right, behind the fence, was the tangle of shacks and sheds, smelling of damp wood, roofing paper, mold. The water was still frozen, stilts protruded from the surface of the ice, half-collapsed boat houses, warehouses, lopsided jetties were lined up on the embankments; I climbed over piles of stones and walked along the escarpment beneath the hospital park. At the pier on the other side a mastless brig was moored, a houseboat, but long dead, only the skewed flagpole on the stern still seemed to have tales to tell of voyages on the seas. In the railway yards out the back, accompanied by whistling and spinning signal lights, train carriages were being switched. From a thicket of rangy, knobbly willows, the towering pedestals of the Saint Erik Bridge emerged; up above, a bus zoomed off over the blackness and silence. At the entrance to Kungsholmen, the bridge was flanked by two massive constructions rising out of the cliff-like defense towers; I descended through gorges and arrived at the Kronoberg parklands, which were nestled between tall, perforated crater walls. Surrounded by a cast-iron fence, the old Jewish cemetery—once situated off on its own, near a saltpeter mine down where the forests of Stadshagen began—now formed part of the park, hiding its weathered gravestones behind thick tree trunks. Here and there, a lamp shimmered from one of the holes in the uniform stone façades, scarcely visible paths snaked around the hills and spat me out on the street leading to the prison at the police headquarters. It was mid-February. The attempts to prevent Drögemüller’s deportation had failed. He was taken to Mälmo by train and packed onto a ferry to Copenhagen, with the Danish authorities signing for the delivery. The Communist politician Senander had appeared in parliament to speak out against these recent human shipments. The speaker’s hammer had struck down the reading of his expulsion papers, in which, according to royal decree, a one-year prison term was threatened upon reentry. Nobody could be found who would have been able to assist Drögemüller. But on this night, in one of the cells, its hatch illuminated, Bischoff was getting ready to move out. In the evening, the head interrogator had asked her what she would say if they let her go. At first she didn’t answer, as she thought that the remark, which came out of the blue, was some kind of ruse. But then the decision was repeated: she would be allowed to leave the prison the following morning. Both her reprieve and the sentence that had been handed down to the other prisoner each bore the same lack of feeling that arises where people have total power to decide over life and death. Three weeks earlier, she had been guided through Stockholm by the police matron. She had been left with no doubt that she would never see this city again. Suddenly she had been granted permission to stay. The arbitrariness of the process prevented her from feeling any gratitude. She just asked herself why she had been pardoned while others were being cast out. In her conversation with the officer, the game of hide-and-seek carried on a little longer. She was asked what she intended to do now, as a stateless person. Claim her right to political asylum, as stipulated in international conventions, she said. And to what ends, she was asked, did she want to use said asylum. To work, it didn’t matter as what. Political work, asked the superintendent. She was aware, she said, that political activity is forbidden to foreigners. The papers to apply for a residence permit were already lying on the table in front of her. Next to them, a letter with the stamp of the German Federal Police was visible. The letter contained notification of her denaturalization. The officer shoved the forms toward her. She signed everything that had to be signed. She confirmed that she would register her address. As she signed the declaration to abstain from political activities, she thought that her energy for political action had only grown stronger through her experiences over the last few weeks. She didn’t ask who had arranged her release. Such questions were not posed in her line of work. The superintendent let on that he was amazed by her lack of expressions of joy. His reaction was marked by the same apparent childishness she had noticed in the matron. She could read no cruelty in his face. It had become her custom to produce a kind of profile of her counterparts at every encounter, and she stored the characteristics she had gathered in this way in an internal register. She memorized the fat lips of the police officer, sagging slightly at the corners, his round, well-nourished cheeks, watery, light-blue eyes and brownish, brushed-back hair, thinned out above the temples. It was a smooth, friendly face, as belonged to those who knew how to protect
themselves from the worries and suffering of others, how to carry out anonymously assigned tasks that did not affect their personalities, a face that could serve as a symbol for the neutrality and respectability of the country. So where did she wish to go tomorrow, she was asked, and immediately she answered, to the Red Aid on Mälartorget. She knew there was a candor in which everything could be concealed. A person who lived for illegal, revolutionary work could never appear to be hiding anything.

  The collapse began on the fifteenth of March. In the preceding month, which I attempted to view under the banner of mobility and planning, an anxious expectation had set in once more. As it had a year ago in Spain, the calamity that had followed elicited forms of strength in us that we had scarcely imagined existed and that enabled us to face defeat with composure. Breaking out of my isolation, forging relationships with a number of comrades helped to make endurance possible. In the weeks preceding the takeover of Czechoslovakia, I had already approached the metalworkers’ union to investigate how I could ascertain my parents’ whereabouts, and how their passage to Sweden could be arranged. But neither the unions nor the Refugee Aid nor the Czechoslovakian Family Reunification Service in Stockholm could manage to find out where my parents were; after the German troops marched into Prague, the only remaining hope was that they had been able to escape across the Polish border. At that point a desperate arm wrestle began, between the people making efforts to help those in danger and the ones passing the resolutions who were committed to quashing every intervention. At a time when the need was at its greatest, the unwillingness to offer support also reached its apogee. The more restrictive instructions to the embassies and passport offices had proven successful. With the political refugees having been criminalized and the racially persecuted dismissed as undesirable, there was no reason to expect a rush at the border any more. This applied not only to Sweden but to all as yet unscathed countries in Europe. Just as the German government gave assurances that they would not make any further significant territorial claims, the West could announce that there was no longer a significant refugee problem. Only those who managed to smuggle out capital, who had rich patrons or connections to the upper echelons of industry, or were able to establish themselves as entrepreneurs could expect an exception. The minimal support previously provided by the confederation of trade unions ran dry, not, as officially stated, due to a lack of economic resources but because of a breakdown in communication with the Party leadership in Prague, which meant that reliable information could no longer be gathered about applicants. As the definitive confrontation drew nearer, the universal exclusion of those suspected of being Communists grew more explicit. The half-heartedly commenced negotiations with the League of Nations and in England, along with the initiative of the Nansen Committee in Prague, ultimately meant that a few hundred of the hundreds of thousands of fleeing people would end up in international allocation. In order to keep their own countries unaffected, there was a concerted effort to transport the refugees to Madagascar, British Guiana, Rhodesia, and other far-flung regions, but the only places still available were a few small settlements in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Since the majority of refugees were of Jewish descent, the Swedish Foreign Minister Sandler gave the conciliatory explanation that their admittance could negatively influence public opinion in the country, and with this he found support from the Jewish community in Stockholm, who wanted nothing to do with their fellow believers from the East, whom they viewed as inferior. Yet something of a desire for justice began to take shape in the populace. It wasn’t yet a defined stance, merely the first signs of a general sense of compassion. Individual trade unions—those of the metalworkers, agricultural workers, forestry workers, municipal workers, and typographers—advocated for effective efforts at assistance, while among the representatives of the parliament and the business community, and within the nationalist groups, talk could be heard about the danger of Judaization. With this, the persecution that immediately took on a systematic form in occupied Czechoslovakia extended into the Nordic kingdom, which had made a name for itself for its liberal and progressive attitudes. No broad public debate took place. The measures to shield against the catastrophe on the part of the government and dominating parties had already grown too strong. Only the Communist press and a few liberal newspapers addressed this immense problem, to no avail. On the fifteenth of March, the Western world had revealed its utter bankruptcy. It was not a bankruptcy of falling share prices, however—the activity on the stock markets, especially on the metal markets, was lively—but the dissolution of the last semblance of moral values. They no longer even attempted to cover up their duplicity. According to the official statements from the world of diplomacy, getting involved in the fate of the displaced would only have fostered panic. The only aim was self-preservation. The cry of outrage that hung over Europe was smothered. With the melting snow, the burgeoning spring, we were all enveloped by the reign of death. Just as the Western powers sat by as Czechoslovakia was destroyed, a few days later they looked on as the Spanish Republic fell. They hadn’t just contributed to the crushing of both democracies; it was their own handiwork. They kept quiet about the fact that they had given fascism a helping hand, assisted by the neutral governments. Likewise, as reports filtered in about the horrors, the terror in the conquered countries, the statesmen clung to an appearance of normalcy. There was no reason, so they said, to interfere in the affairs of other nations. Reports of torture and deportations were played down as fairy tales. We were forbidden to speak about the events; from Switzerland all the way to Scandinavia, any foreigner who dared to attract the attention of their reluctant hosts by expressing their own opinions was placed in custody or thrown out. Every utterance that could be considered political was akin to self-incrimination. We were reminded how incredibly lucky we were. We were to replace every stirring of criticism with gratitude. Having slipped through a loophole in the laws of the Swedish state ourselves, we had no right to make accusations about these restrictive measures. We still wanted to view our presence here as a transitional situation. We learned the language, assimilated into working life, shunning the thought that we could ever make a life here. And how, I said to Bischoff, are we then supposed to feel a sense of belonging in this country that lets us know how unwelcome we are at every opportunity. She looked at me with astonishment, said that was irrelevant, since we were only waiting to be put to work elsewhere. She could find no complaint against Sweden, she said, for this country was acting in accordance with a system we had been familiar with for a long time, whose foundations are threatened by the tiniest hint at concessions. Sweden, she said, is for her a small piece of a world that draws its power precisely from the elimination of proletarian internationalism. At the moment, the only thing we can do here is barricade ourselves in our cells, she said, but, in the long run, we will inherit the greater power, for while we are connected to all continents, the West is fractured, their selfishness is testament to nothing but their fear of collapse. What is this ostentatious Europe, she said, compared with the enormous, as yet untapped sections of the earth from which one day a force will grow, in the face of which our miserable present will recede into oblivion. And if this state of perseverance makes us anxious, we should think of what awaits the Soviet state. Everything is now aimed at its annihilation. Even the unspeakable things happening to the people in the countries occupied by fascism failed to unsettle her; for a long time now she had been tied up in this process, which had not even come close to reaching its climax. Sweden seems out of the way, but it is cemented in with the rest of the West, she said, and just as the events in one land bleed into the events and decisions in the other countries, the fate of the peoples of the world is a singular one, indivisible, the torture and murders form part of a universal order, it is not possible for us to single out the lot of any individual. I wouldn’t even know whether I could feel sympathy for this or that person were I to hear of their agony, so all-encompassing is the collective pain. Only as a tot
ality, she said, can the misdeeds be tackled, only as a totality can they be remedied. And then, with the seemingly unbearable things we have to bear, there are still those small, inconspicuous actions that also lend something purposeful to our presence in this land that does everything it can to degrade us. With which she meant the hours that she spent going around to the construction sites with the collection box for the Red Aid. She couldn’t be accused of political activity for this, the workers’ parties themselves ran this organization, and if she agitated, then she did so inconspicuously, by reminding people about Spain, about those who had been executed in Germany. The workers who gave her donations from their measly wages knew her, with friendly derision they called her the schoolteacher, because during their short breaks she gave them lessons about the history of fascism, and in a form that could not be construed as propaganda by an informant; factual, mixed in with anecdotes that conveyed easily recognizable, everyday situations to her audience. Otherwise, she found work as a cleaning lady, for eighty öre an hour, even mopped floors in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dusted off desks there on which important papers were left lying around, until the employment agency’s error was discovered and she was immediately dismissed and transferred to private houses to sweep and scrub. As she recounted this event to me, she emphasized that quality which she had already identified in the appearance of the police matron and which, amid all the disrespect that had been meted out to her, presented itself as a kind of innocence of being. This elicited a conflict in her, she said, resulting from the fact that although she sees her adversaries as shaped by their upbringing, she also detests them as stooges of the rulers. With the domestic servants and menials, she explained, she was always searching for signs that would indicate something of the consciousness of their oppression, and often, standing in front of a person who had just hurled the most vulgar abuse at her, she would catch herself wondering how they could be won over. In which other European country, Bischoff said, laughing, would it be possible to put a political refugee, released from prison, to work cleaning rooms in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and what’s more, rooms in which the shelves were filled with books in Russian, including Lenin’s Collected Works—and she didn’t even believe it was some kind of trick in order to catch her spying. Rather, she said, it spoke to a fundamental naiveté, to a lack of talent for intrigue, which, supplemented by the manifold support of comrades, might one day lead to the production of an image of this country that would counter the oppressive one handed down from the era of its genesis. From my very first encounter with her in the immigration office of the social welfare agency on Riddarholmen, where the emigrants would arrive with fearful looks and cowed shoulders, she had exuded an immediate straightforwardness that seemed to imply that the hassle of filling out forms and getting documents stamped couldn’t get to her at all. It was almost with curiosity, with a certain pleasure, that she had stepped into the long, wooden shed, which was located below a palace from Sweden’s epoch as a great power, with which it was connected by a gangway. This shack, with its cramped, musty waiting room and the counters where we were processed, resembled the quickly cobbled-together buildings that were familiar to us from border-crossing stations and detention camps and that—from its smeared blotting paper to the potbelly stove—conformed with the meagerness and makeshift nature of our living situation. The imposing buildings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—which, with their noble façades, their courtyards, and round towers, lined the island and encircled the church of Gustav Vasa—accentuated the architectural style of the buildings intended for the homeless. This was the age of the wooden sheds in which people were herded together in order to be added to lists and sent on to be fed, to the refuge, to be interned or liquidated. And high above us, the windows were left open to let in the light which, reflecting off the waters of the Mälaren, fell into the exquisitely decorated rooms in which the Sparres, Bondes, and Wrangels, the Rosenhanes, Hessensteins, Stenbecks, and Oxenstiernas had once had their seat. We could take solace, said Bischoff, in the fact that, earlier, there had been only goats grazing around an abbey of the Gray Friars here; and she made this remark with a glance at the trail of miserable figures edging over from Munkbron. In addition to Bischoff, I had recognized Lindner, who had worked as a nurse at La Brévière, that haunted home in the forest of Compiègne. We had both lost our citizenship by this point, and she too was here to pick up her alien’s passport. Bischoff was living at her place on Hägerstenvägen, in Aspudden, a suburb in the south of the city where scores of foreigners had found cheap accommodation; her room with kitchenette cost fifty-six kronor a month. Lindner too, a former member of the Young Communist League and the Red Students’ League whose father had disappeared in thirty-three while imprisoned, and whose husband had fallen in April of thirty-eight on the Ebro, cleaned apartments for an hourly wage. It was not until we had left the office that we began to speak to each other. That we only exchanged a brief greeting upon recognizing each other among strangers and then arranged to wait for each other outside with a wave had become a rule for each of us. Lindner and Bischoff had gone ahead, I could see them at the end of the path to the quay, clerks from the government offices that were accommodated in the island’s stately houses were sitting on the benches and the stone steps by the water, the midday sun was giving off warmth, people were consuming their packed snacks, dockworkers were also taking their breaks here beside the cargo which was to be loaded onto the steamers of the Mälaren. From the square where we sat down next to one another as if by chance, on the opposite side of the fjord we could see the long, southern quay, which ran from the sluice to the Västerbron. The yellow and ochre-colored buildings of the old town jostled up the slope, nested into one another, the trenches of the stairways, alleys, and forecourts lay deep in shadow, a forest of chimneys grew out of the glistening roofs, towered over by a castle-like building with a tall turret. Further to the right, workshops, squat red wooden houses, warehouses, and production plants ran alongside craggy cliff faces. A few freight cars stood on the path by the banks; slowly, a small locomotive rolled past, expelling bulbous clouds of steam; the cranes were lifting sand, gravel, slabs of stone from Gotland off the barges and loading them into piles. The aliens’ passports we had received afforded the women an income as domestic servants, me work as a metalworker; every three months, after renewed evaluation of our behavior, we could apply for an extension. Czechoslovakia, Spain had fallen, the Germans now had their sights on the Memel Territory, Danzig, Poland, and we were sitting in the March sun, our fatigue after the workday, begun at four in the morning, was evaporating, the ringing in our ears also dissipating, the bright, expansive view onto the water calmed us, our kin were dead or disappeared, yet we were enveloped by something like a feeling of security. At this first meeting, Bischoff had said it had to be a mark of our weakness if we thought we could find nothing here but a handful of like-minded comrades; we should be making an effort to extract more from the situation. To begin with, she too could see nothing but ambiguous events; it seemed to her as if something were always being covered up here. I never knew, she said, whether some kind of scam was being cooked up behind the curtains or if a harmless rearranging was taking place; but then I thought that this haziness had to be related to my ignorance of the country and its customs and mores. Perhaps the only people we could trust now were those with whom we stood in a collective struggle, but the noises from the harbor and the shipyard all the way over on Pålsundet and the peaceful activities surrounding us made it impossible for us to believe that someone could harbor malicious intentions toward us; the government agencies and offices were the same all over; sure, they wanted to make us their slaves, but the world of work was infinitely more expansive, and one we were familiar with. Yet it was precisely the peacefulness, the tranquility of the image with which we were faced here, that made us think of the severity and peril that accompanied our existence. How, we asked ourselves, could the day proceed so uninterrupted, with all
the treachery that had descended upon Europe; and we could only explain this naiveté to ourselves by postulating that the dimensions of the horror were too great to be grasped. And it was precisely in people’s inability to imagine their own obliteration that fascism found its precondition. Within an immediate context every individual can imagine defending themselves, but what lay beyond the discontent about the deformity that pressed upon us was no longer conceivable; the moment we made an approach toward everyday rebellion, we ran up against the first impenetrable bastions, and from there, increasingly sealed off, the branches of iniquity extended outward. How was an individual at their workbench, at their stall, supposed to sense something of the murderous lust of those who had emerged from the typical regimes, how should they, held hostage by their worries, grasp something of the phantasms dreamt up by the despots. Thus, inexorably, the poison from the realm of depravity and the greed for profit seeped into every group, syndicate, and organization, dissolved their ties, their mutual relationships, undermined the integrity of their representatives, and this development was able to proceed so successfully because the soil in which it now grew had been fertilized for years. A beautiful, clear day at the end of May, with gulls over the water, twenty years after the end of the war of our fathers, twenty years of misfired efforts at transforming society, and we were sitting on the harbor wall, no different from the gullible, the betrayed people around us, like countless others we had attempted to improve the situation with subtle interventions, and like everyone else we had failed. Even the final line of defense upon which we had still pinned hope, the workers in France, had been defeated. Lindner told us about the days in Paris, in late November, early December, as the general strike that had erupted was crushed. She shielded her eyes from the glaring light as she conjured up what she had seen, the scattered crowds fleeing through the salvos, the truncheons raining down, the wounded and dead on the pavement, those who had been seized being tossed into police wagons, the tattered red flags, the gloating headlines of the newspapers. The notion of the Popular Front no longer existed, the right to strike no longer existed, the right to assembly had been dissolved, wrath could no longer rise up, only a shivering, a powerless groaning remained. Bischoff had put her arm around Lindner’s shoulder. Those animals, she said, will not prevail.