The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2 Page 9

  Though it might well have seemed as if all of these maneuvers were being carried out in an undecided, obscure realm, they were actually underpinned by precise plans and agreements, and though things were ambiguous, this ambiguity was a tool that was consciously deployed to keep the regulations as malleable as possible, so they could then be fitted to each arising situation. That the apparatus had to remain unrecognizable was an international rule, this was the precondition of its effectiveness. The person who was identified in police queries and reports on the other side of the border mustn’t know anything about the magnitude and progress of the procedure, so that, when the mechanism of the secret service then rained down upon them, they were immediately rendered powerless. The detained refugee had no access to legal representation, they were beyond the law, or rather, they were implicated in a higher, interstate legality which presupposed their total isolation and personal neutralization, and which positioned the interest of the nation alone as decisive. The disenfranchisement of the foreigner was a necessary component of the praxis, for this circumvented the possible question of whether this was someone who had been displaced for political reasons, who could make a claim for asylum that the constitution would have to grant. Around the beginning of thirty-nine it had become evident that the immigration law passed by parliament two years earlier, which did not define the concept of political asylum, instead leaving the decision on whether a new arrival should be accepted or expelled to the individual agencies, fit perfectly with the policy of keeping the country free from undesired immigration and, in the face of the growing numbers of exiles from Germany, Austria, now Czechoslovakia as well, of thwarting any notion that Sweden might be a state of refuge. Those who wanted to stand by the disenfranchised—in addition to representatives of the Communist Party and Red Aid, a number of Social Democrats, as well as liberal-minded members of the bourgeoisie, writers, journalists—had to overcome the entire court system, which presented itself as suprapartisan but which was heavily hamstrung by the edicts that served to maintain the purity of the race and to prevent Bolshevization. It took exceptional courage, great endurance, and impeccable contacts to reach one of those who were in danger and to find out what their situation was. Those who were being detained in prison—meaning that they had already arrived in the country, legally or illegally—represented only a tiny portion of all those who were turned away at the border because they didn’t possess an entry visa or because the three-centimeter-high J could be seen in red in the left-hand corner of the first page of their passport, a mark whose introduction the Swedish authorities had themselves helped to institute. The press scarcely took notice of this incessant crush, this pleading to be let in, this confrontation between those with homes and those without, between the guardians and protectors of a state and those who had been wrenched from all forms of belonging. The failure to mention the daily tragedy at the border crossings was a reflection of the tactic of not allowing anything of the essential material of our time to penetrate into the fabric of the folkhemmet, the people’s home. The order of Swedish society remained undisturbed. In this country in which capital governed unhindered, and Social Democracy tended to the equilibrium between the classes, the will to resist had long ago been hollowed out. And where the workers’ energy to act had been paralyzed, it was to be expected that the petite bourgeoisie gained influence and were cultivating classes which not only saw themselves as responsible for maintaining the prevailing peace but were also willing to take measures that broke through their usual contentment and contourlessness. It was still almost impossible to detect and identify the urge to exercise violence in the long Swedish night. None of the activities of the authorities could be described as a breach of a liberal, democratic outlook. The arrests and extraditions took place in an orderly manner, there was nothing dubious about the connections with the security police of other states; it was not just Berlin and Vienna that were included in the communications: an exchange of criminological information was also maintained with Paris, London, and New York. Since the conference in Évian in July of thirty-eight, the committee of the Western powers, having been called together to tackle the problem of emigration, had primarily been interested in keeping immigration to their own regions as low as possible or to prevent it altogether. Anybody who entered the country illegally had already committed a crime in doing so, and if the information revealed that they were a Communist, they ended up at the mercy of the collective defense front, which ran right across Europe. Through the tightening of checkpoints and the right to deport afforded by new laws, border guards received powers that allowed them to make discretionary decisions. If there was a suspicion that one of the arrivals did not, as the formulation went, intend to return to their rightful country, the directive was issued not to let them in. The mortal danger that was associated with their return was not taken into consideration. In fulfilling their duties, the officers were given plenty of opportunities to train their eye. Even before they demanded to see a person’s papers, they were able to differentiate between the moneyed, acceptable ones with entry visas in hand, and the helpless and impoverished, the expatriated, the hounded Jews, the politically active. Even though there was no sign of a threat of Communist infiltration, and the country’s small Party could be kept under strict surveillance, camouflaged beneath this hazy, almost distracted-seeming nonchalance, the protective regulations had the precise ideological objective of expressing respect and deference toward the German Reich without revealing a direct relation of dependence. It was impossible to determine whether the turning away of a refugee or the particularly severe treatment of a detainee was to be traced back to the individual zeal of this or that section chief, or to the directives of the Social Security offices, the Ministry of Justice, or the Foreign Ministry, and who could be declared responsible for the individual cases. If an arrest and its consequences didn’t remain entirely under wraps, it was a result of the intervention of that small, always constant circle of people who were in conflict with these cold-blooded decrees, who monitored the events, and who would—often with just hours, minutes to act—make a rescue attempt. Bischoff, called up once again for interrogation, where she was posed questions that she had already answered numerous times, had to set out on one of those feverish campaigns that, with petitions, parliamentary inquiries, letters of guarantee, telephone calls to members of the government, led to either the postponement or prevention of an extradition, or to a sheepish silence after its failure. A tug of war began to emerge between the proponents of jurisprudence, of humanitarian thought, and the representatives of destructiveness; and every time the former were able to record a victory, the opposing side pushed for harsher measures. At times it seemed as if this latter camp, which included many of the top military officials, the majority of the business sector, and numerous figures from academia and public life, was destined to get the upper hand. Month by month it became ever clearer how this coarsening was expanding its sphere of influence. We who had experienced the rise of fascism saw ourselves returned to that creeping, indefinable primary state of being. The terminology transformed, the pronouncements upon persecuted groups grew more ruthless. The rulers hardly needed to concern themselves with recruiting for their Schutzstaffel any more; the driving mechanisms of brutalization delivered them their lackeys, and they were mostly drawn from the ranks of those who had previously experienced discrimination and contempt. As the influence and power of chauvinism and reactionary thought grew, so did our desire to encounter signs of an organized defense and to find access to groups that were on the same splintered front as us. What was happening in this country served, it was explained, to maintain calm, order, and national independence. The intolerance shown to the refugees formed part of the diplomacy which hoped to buy them neutrality from the powerful state in the center of Europe. To the outside world, this neutrality presented itself as incorruptible. References were made to the dozens and hundreds of people who had been let in over the course of the last five years. The argum
ent that the most important task was to maintain this neutrality—an argument that radical politicians also supported—served as cover for all those who had smelled blood and advocated for the propagation of the war against the foreign and anything suspected of being revolutionary. While tens of thousands fled over the French border from the Spanish Republic, and in Barcelona the salvos of the execution squads could be heard, Swedish entrepreneurs were sounding out the conditions for a trade deal with nationalist Spain; leading industrialists had landed in Madrid, evaluating the prospects of imminent business transactions as positive. English and French manufacturers were also looking forward to normalized economic relations. After President Azaña had fled, the Western powers wanted to drive Negrín, who intended to defend the remnants of the Republic, to capitulation, and on the island of Minorca British troops intervened to expedite the Republican defeat. The last troop of returning Swedish volunteers had been welcomed at the Stockholm railway station by members of the Committee for Spain. The address was strained, the song trailed off feebly. The small regiment, accompanied by police officers, moved through the hall that evening, through the throngs of people rushing to the commuter trains, past the fountain with its lions’ mouths spouting water and the stone globe of the earth resting on top. The men, their faces haggard, wearing berets, aroused little attention. And had everyone around them discovered that they had fought in the International Brigades, it would have been swallowed up by indifference. And yet a year ago there had been a broad popular movement to support Spain; right into the winter isolated appeals were still being made; but now, with the downfall of the Republic, a paralysis of the will to intervene had taken hold, the oppressive realization that the resistance no longer had any use. Another procession could be seen on the streets of the city a week later, on the sixth of February. Those walking there did not part ways in anonymity. The police were not there to carry out surveillance but were marching at the front. More than five hundred students came, trainee pharmacists, dentists, and doctors in the preppy white caps of their clan, with national flags, with music, placards, banners, and torches. They had set off from the Östermalm square, their destination the public event at the Victoria Hall in Norra Bantorget. They were demanding the immediate cessation of the immigration of foreign doctors, of the importation of intellectual emigrants and Jews. From this day forth, the medical occupations were to be reserved for Swedish graduates. Sweden for the Swedes, they cried in chorus. Crowds of onlookers lined their path. In this country, we had to keep our heads down and look for another underground hideout. We had departed Paris on the day that had come to be known as Kristallnacht. Upon our arrival in Malmö we had to declare on the registration form whether we were of Jewish heritage, on our mother’s side or on our father’s. We stole into the country under the cover of the Swedish metalworkers’ union. Even with our Czechoslovakian passports we resembled stowaways. In Paris I had invoked my father, denied all connections to the Communist Party, kept quiet about my year in Spain. I had been issued a provisional residence and work permit thanks to a recommendation sent by Aschberg to the management of the Alfa Laval works in Stockholm, with the note that, through experience acquired previously in the Berlin branch, I was suited to work in the separator plant. This was the narrowest of all imaginable paths, a shabby path founded on half-truths and hypocrisies, and yet it was the only path available to me. It didn’t make me seem trustworthy, and it couldn’t guarantee my safety. During my first three months in the country I scarcely left the street where the factory was located, where I had been given a trial as a cleaner and stoker in the tinning workshop and where I had also rented a furnished room, in the building at number thirty-seven. The wide, drafty Fleminggatan sufficed me: it extended straight as an arrow from the bridge leading over the railway grounds on Kungsgatan to the steep slope of Stadshagen. Because my shift began at four in the morning and by the time I headed home after a meal in the canteen, the wintry darkness was already setting in, I saw it mostly by night. It took almost three months for me to overcome the gloom that had descended upon me after leaving Paris. It wasn’t just that everything here, unlike in Paris, was dull and muted; I had seen things as we crossed the border into Sweden that had left a mark on me, and their effects only intensified during the ensuing period. We had arrived in Helsingborg as two Jewish families were being deported, after having made their way to Denmark via arduous paths and then catching the Swedish railway ferry. The derogatory remarks we heard from our travel companions were compounded by later remarks which revealed their contempt for Jews and their scorn for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. The schism within the workers’ movement seemed to run even deeper here than in Germany or France, where, despite tactical divisions, the rudiments of a unity had always been visible. In Sweden, it was as if the leadership of the Social Democratic Party and the Trade Union Federation had eliminated any of the collaboration among workers that we had come to know growing up, or had relegated it to the realm of the unspoken. Their ruthless attitude had already been demonstrated during the selection of the group that was to travel to Sweden, when a few supposed members of the Communist Party were immediately excluded. Though I had been aware that aid was supposed to be provided only to Social Democratic workers, that I had only been accepted because I didn’t belong to a party and because the planning office had learned of my father’s position, I was still dismayed by the fact that those who were most at risk were being delivered to their doom by the trade union. This compulsion to one-sided solidarity plagued us upon our arrival on the peninsula, and it was doubly oppressive, as we took our first steps on Swedish soil, that we, just to save our own skins, had to suppress our reactions. First screaming, then moaning desperately, finally falling silent, broken, the two families, the one with a small baby, the other with grandparents and a couple of children, from Bohemia, were forcibly carried back to the ferry, and this at a time when, in Germany, the synagogues were being set alight, the Jewish shops smashed up, the racially condemned hunted through the streets. It was this imposed silence that tormented me in those first months, and it was a silence born not of urgent political duty but rather of petty fear, that the tiniest suspicious utterance could lead to instant dismissal, to being thrown out of the country. I knew I wouldn’t have received my papers had I not still been in possession of a valid passport. With the renunciation of all political activity, to which I had had to pledge on my forms, and my admission into the union section demanded by my hosts, I had been neutralized. These limitations, combined with my linguistic difficulties, contributed to the fact that a distance initially separated me and my coworkers in the factory. And yet, as I came to discover, almost half of the six hundred fifty workers were sympathetic to the Communist Party or belonged to it—and the Communists often reached a majority in the union elections. Always taking care to remain reserved, I made an effort to get to know the workers in my immediate environment and to find out who among them I could trust. Their beliefs could be divined from the tone with which they commented upon political events, above all when it came to questions regarding refugees. If the topic of a successful or an impeded deportation was raised, the entire structure of a struggle otherwise hidden in anonymity became visible, in which the smallest result in favor of those whose freedom could be revoked at any moment, or those who found themselves in the uncertainty of imprisonment, sparked new hope in us. Fleminggatan, by night, in the twilight of the afternoon and on the desolation of Sundays, Fleminggatan, with its funeral parlors, furniture warehouses, pawnbrokers, and meager shopfronts, Fleminggatan, with its blue trams rattling past, brakes screeching, Fleminggatan, with its view onto the King’s Bridge square, the market hall, the bare-branched trees on the canal and the distant hills behind the cleft in the houses, Fleminggatan on the way to work and on the way back home, Fleminggatan, seen from the window in my room, up in the fourth floor, opposite Saint Erik Hospital, in the grounds of which, up by the fence, the green barracks for women in labor stood next to the c
hapel in which the dead were laid out, Fleminggatan, that old, gray industrial street, came to be the epitome of the uniform and the foreign. Only once did I step through the portal with the fanned semicircle of the stained-glass upper window into the plant’s administration building, and I was sent back from the grand reception hall to the street and to the entrance to the courtyard, only once did I see the mirrored finish of the mahogany on the walls and the columns from which the ceiling arches sprouted with their coiling plaster ornaments, did I stand at the counter in front of the majestic desks and hand one of the clerks my letter, while virgins looked down upon me, the tips of their nipples protruding from beneath sheer garments, leaning out of their niches onto centrifuges, palm fronds and laurel wreaths in their hands, and then I had no further business in that tower-crowned corner building. It was not the gentlemen at the desks under the scalloped light fixtures who were responsible for me, with their French cuffs, stiff collars, and black suits; it was the workshop engineer who was in charge of hiring workers, in the office off the second courtyard from the gate. This enormous, antiquated factory was like a fortress. The buildings within the square were arranged in a labyrinthine fashion, the narrow courtyards between them, accessed through gateways, were divided up by sheds and connecting wings. I walked along the forking paths between the guard houses with my papers. My letter from the banker, my certificate of employment from Berlin, my stamped passport, my membership card for the metalworkers’ trade union, these were all documents that should have filled me with confidence, and yet it was as if I were not presenting myself as labor power but were begging the engineer, whom I ran into in a dark room above the loading ramp, for alms. People were needed on the lathes, in the assembly halls, in the packing section, but I would be considered for a menial job at best. Actually, I was told, the company wasn’t hiring any foreigners except in the offices, where relations were maintained with the branches of the corporation in almost every country in the world. Were it to occur as an exception in my case, he said, inspecting my documents with a weary benevolence, it would just be as a trial for the time being. With this, I understood, the wage had been pushed down as low as possible; the engineer knew I could not pass up any offer. I was supposed to receive eighty öre an hour. This was the minimum wage set out in the collective bargaining agreement. That I was classified as an unskilled worker and was once again made into an errand boy, a runner, was to be expected; my father had gone through something similar. The engineer’s evasiveness, his provisional acceptance accompanied by the remark that I had first of all to prove my suitability, his imprecise instructions, which left me confused about what I was actually going to be doing, this was all part of a beginning that I knew well enough. I could make myself useful in the tinning workshop, pushing the trolleys full of bars, heating up the smelter; they got me to shovel coal, to fill up and empty the acid vats, jobs for which it was difficult to find local workers. I had always been a foreigner at my workplace, the last to be taken, the first, when necessary, to be let go, but here I was also lacking everything that had formerly balanced out the precarity: researching, studying, and planning with like-minded people had given the day some value, and I couldn’t even ask about these things, for it would have betrayed intentions that had no place here. A pressing suffocation could be felt in the courtyards. I was always deep below, surrounded by the blackish-red brick walls, the grimy, brown, plastered façades, in the coal pit near the bulky block of the boiler house, beneath the monstrous smoke stack, on the tracks with the trolleys, in the tangle of gangways, in the low-ceilinged rooms with the acid vats and smelting furnaces. All of the work spaces that we were able to reach faced toward the interior of the compound; barely a ray of light fell through the windows. And yet everything was just as it was supposed to be. The thudding of the steam hammer was there to toughen us. We had to show that we were up to the enduring thunder. The forge in the coal yard was a black grotto, the system of rods and levers, flywheels, pipes, and pylons were patchily lit by light bulbs. The drive belts thrummed, the lathe chisels screeched in the machine halls, the end of which was impossible to make out in the smoke and metal dust. We had to defy the deafening drumming, everything that sought to break us down, in order to find our way to ourselves. To be a worker meant going through the unspeakable wear and tear every day, while somehow maintaining our strength, so as to, someday, when the time came, seize hold of everything. After heating up the crucible at four o’clock in the morning, it took three hours for the tin to melt. During that time, the manufactured centrifuges were carted in and had to be submerged in the tubs of hydrochloric acid to be cleaned. We usually had no time to put on our protective masks. Hampered by the stiff oilskin coats and wearing large gauntlets, we lowered the pieces on chains, the vapors penetrated our lungs like knives. Coughing, our eyes watering, we heaved the smoldering, dripping masses out of the vats and transported them to the tin crucibles, where they had to arrive still damp, plunging into the boiling metal with a hiss. With the constant to and fro, the eternally recurring bending, stretching, the reaching out of hands, many a day passed in a void of thought that was only interrupted by the moments when we stood between the curved tin walls of the toilet, on the threshold to the courtyard above the coal shaft, and, staring into the smoky skies, relieved ourselves. And though there was no communication between me and my comrades beyond a wave, a reference to actions to be performed, a mute compliance, and though it might also have seemed as if nobody had yet discovered anything about my background, an agreement had soon arisen among us that asked after no language or heritage, a bond to one another through the collective dragging, the drudgery we carried out together. I recalled my father’s rules, to recognize the necessity in every detail of work, to view no activity as lowly, and, in carrying them out, to never abandon concentration, engagement; and there, even before I was able to progress from my existence as a refugee into the realm of political action, this feeling of solidarity kicked in, drawing its being from the sight of a gesture, a face. Though I might not have received a better wage than the underpaid women in the quality-control section for finished materials, even long-established workers only rarely—by increasing their production rates—reached an hourly wage in excess of one krona thirty-five or fifty, and many were forced to work additional hours as tram conductors, as ushers in cinemas; one even worked Sundays as an attendant at the Skansen nature reserve. As I was waiting for the opportune moment to alter my situation, Selin, the foreman in the tinning workshop, shop steward of the workshop club, approached me. When he asked me to come with him, one Saturday in early February after quitting time, I didn’t yet know that he had divined the motivations behind my seeming contentment. He joined me, as if by chance, in front of the factory gate, we walked across the street, up Scheelegatan, he didn’t say anything that could have made me suspicious, seemed only to want to speak about typical work issues. Over behind the town hall, between the black trees in the snow, the police headquarters was visible, with its white moldings, balustrades, and balconies, its light-green, ornamental cupolas as if erected from a construction set, and across from the imposing, square town hall tower, topped with a helmet-shaped cupola, lay the fenced-in front garden of a squat, elongated building with its pilastered façade. Narrow paths led along the sides of the towering wall that sealed off the property; on the left, at the steps of the Amaranten, was an inconspicuous café that Selin told me to enter, mentioning casually that a common acquaintance, Rogeby, was awaiting us.