Blog Posts - JULIE LINDAHL

The fate of a word

6/2/2019

A word lived amid the towering red poppies and purple irises, in a quiet place where it was itself.

A word was plucked and put on display in a slogan for all to see and smell.

A word was blown like a dandelion across the seas of things written and said, landing in the mud of absolutes in history and visions.

A word became sick when it was imprisoned in virulent sentences and forced into prostitution.

A word became an empty deserted shell under the rhubarb leaves.

Rest in peace, dear word, and return once more to the hopeful soil of letters.

Dedicated to the dignity of language, an endangered species.

Two men lay on the ground

5/4/2019

Two men lay on the ground, lifeless, faces of chalk, their beards still thin with youth.

Two men lay on the ground, their fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, weeping the same salt tears into the river of sorrow for lost children.

Two men lay on the ground, like chalices of history, feverish old ideologies and the refusal of all who stood there to face them and let go.

Two men lay on the ground because of the daily things that are said and the daily lines that get written so that someone else can bear the blame.

They called one a Muslim and the other a Christian, but they were brothers on the ground as the ants crept through the grass and reminded that all is passing.

Written in memory of all victims of extremist violence.

A Cathedral Burns

4/16/2019

The flames rage in my eyes because a cathedral burns.

The flames rage in my eyes because civilization burns, and the spire that reached to the heavens was a reminder of the divine in us.

The flames rage in my eyes because civilization burned people, and the imposing structure was built to instil the fear of God.

The flames rage in my eyes because we must remember all of this when the fire consumes the glory and the misery of our inherited past.

Song rises in defiance as the flames dance, but in the morning silence breaks through the smouldering embers, and whispers: rebuild, but Never Again.

On the historic fire of Notre Dame, 15 April 2019.

What You Read - Chapter 5. Book 5. Part 2 - "Hidden Behind a Soldier King"

3/17/2019

Originally posted April 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story that will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us.

Like a woman possessed, I ordered a short biographical account of Klepper’s life, his collection of church hymns and poems, and most importantly his diary. The latter had been written in blood between 1932-42, as life closed in on his family, and he grappled with his faith in the German Evangelical Church, which had capitulated to the Party. Der Vater had been the most important literary achievement of his life, he thought, having no idea that his diary would far overtake it in importance later on. Senior Nazis, even the Führer himself, it was said, had read it, because they saw it as an endorsement of rearmament and the militarization of German society. Klepper mused at their rabid hunger for self-reinforcement. Blinded by their own hubris, they could not see that it was a work of resistance, a tale of just rule that could not be a greater contrast to the violent, disorderly, power-gluttonous National Socialism.

Did you read it because your dead leaders had read it? Or did you read it because you knew of Klepper’s fate, and that there must be more to this novel than the story of a soldier king? Perhaps the contradiction of Klepper intrigued you. One who wrote about Prussian kings, whose life was broken by those who revered their mythology the most: the Nazis, your Party, your people.

Once when I sat with you over coffee in your apartment, decades after your return from Brazil, you lowered your voice to a whisper when you mentioned your neighbour down the hallway.

“I’ve had tea with her many times. She is very orderly and has the finest things, but she’s Jewish, you know.”

It was a jumble of ill emotions, including jealousy and disdain. But, soaring like a dark genie above it all, was the suggestion in your whispering that you had done something illegal. I didn’t know how to respond to this, and took another sip of tea to wash down the queasiness. Maybe that was the way you had read Klepper, as though it was something daring because his marriage to a Jew was against nature in your perspective.

Yet when first you read him in exile, you were not the same person as the one who sat before me now. Then you had left your home suddenly for an unknown and dangerous frontier, with a volatile husband who had hurt you, only because you were more afraid of what could happen if you stayed. I was certain that on that terrace you read Klepper out of fear and confusion, making a book choice that your fanatic husband would find acceptable, but that also offered refuge in what you saw as a dignified history far away from madmen and disgrace. In choosing Klepper, perhaps you also privately acknowledged your feelings of guilt and shame. And maybe this was so terrible that it led into the unfathomable darkness of depression that you spent so many subsequent years in.

You knew everything about your authors, and so you knew that Klepper coped with his family’s dwindling circumstances and the hubris of the times through his unflinching faith. In it he found the strength to resist spiritual crimping and retained his creative integrity, at least for a sufficient time to produce what would become his life’s work. Suicide or giving up went against his beliefs, until there were no other options. He stayed with God to the end, but you didn't, and now you regretted it.

“Of course God will take you,” I said unconvincingly, as you cleaned your teeth fretfully with a toothpick, after telling me that you didn’t think St. Peter would open those gates for you.

The truth was that I had no idea, as I didn’t presume that there was a God. I had come to the daunting conclusion that you had chosen the path of no remorse, and I grieved your tragedy as though it were mine. I tried to reassure you, because, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, if there was a God, he could do what I was incapable of, which was to know your many faces and to see them as one. Reassuring you was my reminder that what you read that I read wasn’t only about you. It was about both of us.

What You Read - Chapter 5. Book 5. Part 1 - "Hidden Behind a Soldier King"

3/16/2019

Originally posted April 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us.

The Bertelsmann order arrived once a month at the tiny border outpost between Brazil and Paraguay, where you had gone into self-imposed exile with your husband in 1960. At home in the Federal Republic, prosecutors wrenched open a past that previously you thought had been entombed by the need to look ahead. Your husband, my grandfather, ordered books from this German publisher about Adenauer, the post-war Chancellor of the Federal Republic, who spoke in favor of drawing a line under history, and Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s assault on Russia that turned the fate of the war. Grandfather, who remained afraid of the noose of justice until his natural death, wanted everyone else to forget, while he reserved the right to look back at where the military strategy, and the chance to grab more land in the Ukraine, had failed. The Holocaust was a parenthesis to him, which was quite alright in your new surroundings. In the nearby town where ranchers occasionally gathered to determine how they were going to protect the area from drug traders, strong men were admired.

Among the books you ordered was "Der Vater" (The Father), a novel about Frederick I, Frederick the Great’s father and the founder of the Kingdom of Prussia, that became a bestseller in 1935, but that had largely been forgotten or rejected because of its association with the time period in which it was published.

It was one of the last books to remain in the shelf above your bed, where you lay with intensifying nightmares under the camel-fur cover. I tried not to look around the apartment at your things, as you came ever closer to death. Other members of the family had already decided what they wanted to have once you had died, and sometimes you assigned things to them. I couldn’t bear it, and attempted not to look at anything in your apartment for too long. You had always been generous with me, passing on things that had been most precious to you over the years: your grandmother’s swirling garnet brooch, your best winter hat and coat, and your heavy silver serving spoons. You offered all of your photo albums that included war-time images of the occupation, adding that your children intended to burn them once you had died. I accepted your offer, since the things around you were world heritage to me and should never be destroyed.

Once, when I thought you weren’t looking, I removed this last thick novel of yours from the shelf. It was no longer sufficiently well known to have been recorded as an audio book. No one in the family cared much about it, because no one else read like we did.

“It’s a book about the suffering of kings, who must endure more than ordinary people,” you said, as you caught me flipping through the pages.

I quickly slammed the book shut, embarrassed that you had caught me looking through your things.
“Do you want it?” you asked, holding your ailing body up against the doorway.

Into your eighties you had led walking groups through the Black Forest, but now you didn’t walk much anymore, and barely ever changed out of your blue satin bathrobe and night shirt. Your offer unleashed an awful struggle inside of me. I hated the idea of taking more of your things, but the prospect that this book might help me to solve the riddle of you was irresistible.

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” I said sheepishly, looking at the sober grey book that had suddenly become mine.

On the journey home, I began reading eagerly, but encountered a dense, nearly indigestible historical account of the nascent Prussian kingdom. Impatient that the book might not deliver the answers I sought, I turned to the author description on the last page. After reading the short text, it struck me that while remorse had never crossed your lips, you may in fact have felt it inside. How I hoped for it.

Jochen Klepper, the author, was the son of a pastor who had interrupted his studies in theology to become a writer in Berlin in 1932, shortly after he had married a Jewish widow with two daughters. A decade later, after all efforts to spare his wife and one of her daughters from deportation had failed, he switched on the gas in their Berlin apartment, so that they could die together. I pictured you on the terrace of your Brazilian ranch, out of the glare of the sun that your skin could not tolerate, reading the work of this energetic novelist, whose life and career your movement had cut short. What thoughts went through your head, what feelings through your heart?

What You Read - Chapter 4. Book 4. Part 2 - "War, Peace & Why"

3/7/2019

Originally posted April 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us.

Tolstoy’s deeply Russian sense of fatalism, expressed most clearly by the enigmatic character of the Russian General Kutuzov, dulled the sharpness of this new question and must have come as a relief to you. According to him, in the eye of battle no one was responsible and no strategy possible. According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov and Napoleon resigned themselves to fate and superstition, and history simply unfolded. You found a certain comfort in this portrayal, which I had difficulty understanding until I learned that you had volunteered for an organization responsible for redistributing clothing that had once belonged to those sent to be exterminated ‘for the war effort.' Was this too part of the momentum and the haze of war that no one had any control over?

In later years, the nervous condition that forced your eyes to shut each time that you looked at the printed page seemed the harshest of punishments for one so in love with books. Instead, you listened to “War and Peace” performed by some of Germany’s best acting voices on a tape recorder.

“What we did was nothing compared to the slaughter of the Napoleonic Wars. Terrible! TER-RIB-LE!” you exclaimed, with an indignation I recognized from growing up at home. You patted the thick book, which you kept before you on the dining table when you were listening to it, even as you no longer opened the cover. It was like your best defence in a never-ending trial.

When you were over one hundred years old, I confronted you with the truth you could never share with me: the fanatic Party and SS engagement throughout the duration of the Third Reich. I tried not to cast blame, having learned from Tolstoy that the forces of history were too complex to lay the responsibility for their unfolding at the feet of any one person.

“This history doesn’t belong to you and you will never understand it,” you snapped, warning me to leave the past alone. It was a clever, temporarily destabilizing retort until I reflected upon your apparent mastery of the Napoleonic Wars, which had ended nearly a century before you were born. If none of us had the right to history, how could you have the right to the early 19th century?

I have sometimes wondered whether it is the duty of family members to the leave the past of loved ones alone. It might have been an act of tolerance and mercy to behold and accept, rather than to demand clarity about every one of your many faces. But I chose another path, which was to read “War and Peace” now and again to discover the questions that may have lurked in your heart, because someday they could be mine.

What You Read - Chapter 4. Book 4. Part 1 - "War, Peace & Why"

3/6/2019

Originally posted March 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us.

In February 1945, as you left the smouldering ruins of Berlin for your parent’s rural estate that had survived the war, you looked out the window of the packed train, full of widows with bloodshot eyes and unnaturally silent children, and asked yourself: “Why?” Beside you were your four children, all under the age of ten. The fifth was on the way. Your husband, who remained in the SS bunker, would soon head south to fight in “The Final Victory,” and you never expected to see him again.

The exigencies of life would soon wash over that question, like the tide that takes back what it has washed onto the shore. Years later, when your nation’s fate had been settled, and you had established your own home back in the farmlands outside of Hamburg, it washed up once again.

“War and Peace” was over one thousand pages long, and had been published in six parts during 1865-9, sixty years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in the journal, “Russian Messenger.” You read it repeatedly, as though somewhere in its rich tapestry you would find the answer to your question of why men went to war. Although, as an adolescent, you had tried to escape it in the books at your attic window and had hoped for prosperity, war overtook your life like a tsunami, and now you wanted a simple answer.

At first, Tolstoy gave you one that you could distance yourself from, in the tale of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, and the urge of their men to battle. The smallest taste of the ecstasy, freedom and camaraderie of war was worth the stench of disease and death. In between battles, there was no need to think of purpose – one could even idle - loyalties were straight forward and life seemed simple. In contrast, peace was a devilishly complicated existence; something you saw in your husband, who clung to war long after it was over by sleeping with his revolver. This explanation allowed you to avoid feeling any responsibility. War was the realm of men and had nothing to do with you, because, according to Tolstoy’s tale, all that women could do was to wait, long and grieve.

As you read on, you realized that Tolstoy wouldn’t let you off so easily, which is the reason that you read this thousand-page novel repeatedly. In the detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the Battle of Borodino - Napoleon's defeat by the Russian army and the battle that Hitler did not take sufficient note of in his decision to invade Russia – Tolstoy advanced a theory that you would wrestle with for the rest of your life.

One could not attribute the will to war solely to leaders, he said. Rather, it was the product of a power relationship between the leader and the people; men and women, who would not hesitate to murder or depose their leaders if their “passion for destruction,” once ignited, was not fulfilled. This went to the heart of your fears: Underneath your passion for the highly civilized, did you too possess a passion for destruction? Your leaders had committed suicide, been sentenced and hung, but there remained a deafening silence about the past that masked your inner turmoil. The question of why men went to war evolved into the question of who was responsible. It dangled in your thoughts without a home, like one of the roots in those medicinal plant books.

What You Read - Chapter 3. Book 3. Part 2: "The Decline of a Family"

2/24/2019

Originally posted March 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us.

I wondered whether on the estates your husband and his comrades stole in the name of the Reich in Poland, you listened to Mann’s BBC radio broadcasts, imploring the German people to awaken from their fateful sleep. To do so was illegal, but as the senseless war turned against Germany, increasing numbers listened in private to this literary giant, who lived in exile with his Jewish wife in America. Did you dismiss his revelation that people were being gassed down the road from you as the influence of ‘decadent’ America on his mind, or did your nightmares begin then? Did you wonder about the ill-smelling haze from the chimneys that drifted overhead, or did you dismiss it as greasy smoke?

“The Holocaust was a conspiracy by the international media to keep Germany down,” you once told me, offering what you regarded as an appealing alternative truth.

As you said these words, you will have recalled Toni’s reference to “the secret scandal, that feeds on oneself in the quiet and that devours self-respect.” Her call for “uprightness and openness” would have grated on you, as you delivered this explanation to me that you knew was false. In that moment, it must have been terrible to be so well read.

It was easy to blame the males for everything, but inwardly you must have contemplated your role in the fall of the family, and in the ill-fated Brazilian adventure. Despite the security you and your husband had built up through your business and home outside of Hamburg after the war, the renewal of war crimes trials in the late fifties put both of you under pressure. The argument that one had simply followed orders, and therefore could not be regarded as responsible, fell on deaf ears. There was no knowing where this might end, and so you both took the extended hand offered by a former SS-comrade who seemed to be living the good life far away under the sun.

Toni followed you in every move you made, with her encouragement of ill-fated transactions between men that she thought would benefit her, but that eventually resulted in the sale of the grand family home, and the scattering of the remaining members in different directions. Despite this, Toni never let go of her aspirations, as impossible as they had become. Neither did you, and while I can rail at you for your apparent lack of remorse, this is what kept you alive, so that I too could gain a glimpse into what had preceded me: the golden age of Hamburg merchants and the thousand-year Reich, which in their preoccupation with infinity were destined to end.

What You Read - Chapter 3. Book 3. Part 1: "The Decline of a Family"

2/24/2019

Originally posted March 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us.

It was a pocket-sized hard cover with a mauve-colored flap that you gave to me for my sixteenth birthday. On the front was a sketch of a woman in a bonnet on the arm of a man in a top hat making their way through the narrow streets of old Hamburg. This was the city as it looked before you left it for Poland in the spring of 1940, and as it had been for centuries, before Allied bombs flattened it three years later. Above the sketch was the subtitle, “The Decline of a Family,” which didn’t strike me until many years later. At the time, you proclaimed that Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” was the best crafted novel you had ever read, and that Mann was without question Germany’s most gifted novelist.

“But strange about his private life,” you muttered with distaste, and didn’t elaborate.

None of these comments could entice an impatient sixteen-year-old to endure the unending sentences in German. The book went out of the wrapping paper straight into the book shelf, only to be removed twenty-seven years later when the subtitle began to haunt me.

You’d left your husband in the interior of Brazil, your marriage long broken, your eldest gone, with your remaining children scattered across the continents. The dreams of living space and abundant resources had been dashed by the self-defeating nature of greed, and you lived in your small apartment, like a lady of the manor in parody, staring at a grand painting in a heavy, baroque frame of men in a golden field.

It was in your very last years that the shoe-horning of old dreams into present realities became most apparent. One of your children, who had no family of her own, cared for you day and night, and often you’d scold her about the quality of her service. I preferred to think that this was just your frustration with the growing confines of age, but one couldn’t help the feeling that in your attitude were the last traces of overlordship from a bygone era. Increasingly, when I visited and watched you from across the dining table, I saw one of Picasso’s women, whose face, with its many angles, could never be ascertained.

In the lives of the Buddenbrooks family I caught a glimpse of one of those facades. It revealed your young woman’s aspiration to live the life of the elegant Hamburg merchanting class, and to stroke your hand across the light yellow upholstered sofa - a color reserved for the privileged - in Toni Buddenbrooks’ childhood home. In the beginning, your husband seemed to offer you a comparable possibility, as he managed his father’s successful chocolate business, and drove through town in a Wanderer, a luxurious German brand car. That was until the Depression struck, and your angry spouse signed up for the Party just a few days before the bewildering Christmas of 1931.

I wondered whether you had been able to keep a copy of “Buddenbrooks” in your home under the Third Reich. This wasn’t because no one had one. On the contrary, like all other books that were banned and burned during the thirties, everyone had copies. In fact, there had never been as thriving a business for books in Germany, legal and illegal, as during that time when people sought a temporary escape from the impending new war.

Yet, in your household it may not have been possible. You and your husband had cast your fates with the Party and its elite from the beginning, and the daily demonstration of loyalty demanded the rejection of the intelligentsia, particularly Jews or those who had married them. Blood and Land became your mantra, so that your husband could realize his dream of leaving the ‘decadent’ city and the chocolate business, and becoming an influential landowner.

A Person Called Hope

2/18/2019

Sometimes you meet someone who does things just because they need to be done, who explores and pursues ideas fearlessly wherever they may go, and who looks around into the fine detail of everything, into its brokenness, and feels the sublime whole. That person is hope. Fly, fly, fly Peter Tucker. How we will miss you. Godspeed, my friend.

Image: "Hope" by artist and philosopher, Peter Tucker (1942-2019)

In Svenska Dagbladet, 2007:
https://www.svd.se/slottsparkens-baste-van