Kallt land

Recently, a screencap from a Swedish high schooler's Facebook made the rounds on social media. It pictured her and her friends on a school trip to Auschwitz, dancing under the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign, captioned with "Refuse to be PC, lol!"

In The Devil's Workshop, a young Swedish woman comes to Theresienstadt looking for her family history, winds up staying and masterminding the campaign to turn what's left of the city into a tourist attraction, complete with slogans like "If Franz Kafka had survived, they would have killed him here". Unlike the moronic brats in the example above, it's done for the best of reasons; to make sure this is remembered. She's horrified at the cavalier attitude towards atrocities in the so-called "East" (to which everyone, all the way to Vladivostok, responds "What do you mean, East? This is Central Europe!"). Concentration camps turned into pig farms, goats grazing in the ruins of Theresienstadt, etc. In the West, we've learned to compartmentalize, to turn monuments into safe Never Again-Lands. In the parts of the world where millions died at their neighbours' hands, it all got hushed up by the next tyrant.

The fact that it's Theresienstadt - constructed by the Nazis as the "nice" face of concentration camps - is not coincidental. The fact that I, as a Swede, have spent much of the review talking about a minor character in the book probably isn't either. Our hero, of course, is the guy who grew up in what's left of the city, with a mother traumatized by literally being fished out of a pile of corpses and a father who represented the new oppressors. How do you make a memorial to something that's ongoing? Well, he's not sure, but there's always demand for it, especially with the likes of Lukashenko and Putin working for political points... Conscripting the dead to fight ideological battles for you has rarely not worked. Once we've picked the martyrs, we can point them at any villain we want. At the same time, we need to remember, don't we? How can we promise "never again" if we don't know what happened - how can we promise it if we define it as ONE event, safely stored away behind glass? If we only honour the dead, how do we rate the living?

The Devil's Workshop works partly exactly because it's a quick, picaresque romp, with a bleak sense of humour not miles away from Vonnegut or Hrabal. Our nameless hero is swept up in a story older and bigger than himself, one where nobody really has any say, but everyone tries to wrest control of the narrative to make it play along. Memory is a tricky beast, but so is The Devil's Workshop. That it works fine as a short, sharp companion piece to the equally excellent Museum of Abandoned Secrets doesn't hurt either.

As I write this, Europe is once again scuttling back towards the slogans and easy answers of the 30s, in many cases spearheaded by the very countries who grew up on rhetoric about the Soviet friends smashing fascism. Wasn't it a Czech who said "When you smash monuments, keep the pedestals - they'll come in handy"?