Going into time

By : Stig Dalager

Some years ago Villy Sørensen wrote in the present journal that if a book is received with both warm support and heated rejection it is at least a sign that it has affected someone and perhaps something else as well. Davids bog and Jeg tæller timerne are works that fall into this category (in a Danish context, on should note). While Søren Vinterberg in Politiken, for example, viewed Davids bog as a work of international standard’ and called attention to the book as a monument to our disgrace, the book was not only denied literary merit but I myself received threatening letters from neo-Nazi circles. These threats convinced me that the novel had an important mission.
   When I was writing and researching Davids bog in Vienna I had a conversation with Simon Wiesenthal, who some weeks earlier had been to the European premiere of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. He was clearly infuriated by Claude Lanzmann’s attack on the film for being a falsification, i.e. a kind of popularised Hollywood travesty of the sufferings of the Holocaust. Lanzmann’s view was that an artistic description of the Holocaust is not only impossible but also immoral. Opposing this point of view was Wiesenthal’s own, namely that each new generation ought to make its artistic contribution to the portrayal of the Holocaust, and that the Holocaust, as the greatest crime in the past century, was in danger of being stereotyped in phrases and oblivion unless the writers of the generations which had not themselves been witnesses attempted to make artistic contributions. He advised me to ‘document’ my story as thoroughly as possible, and I followed his advice so far that in the novel’s portrayal of the Warsaw Ghetto there is not a single sequence that does not in one way or another refer to events that really did take place.
   The quality of a novel’s documentation is not, of course, any guarantee of its artistic purity, but does in my opinion invalidate the attacks on account of immorality and speculation in a phenomenon like the Holocaust for as long as the sufferings are not an author’s free fantasy, but have purely factually taken place.
   In principle I think, like Goethe, by the way, that nothing human should be alien to a writer, and that literature, if it has a ‘mission’, ought to penetrate into regions of the history of human passion and suffering, which is beset in advance by taboos, covered by the conventions imposed by journalism or the constraints of entertainment, or, if you like, by ‘the dust of oblivion’. A writer’s most important tool is of course language, and what else can one do with that language than examine as consistently as possible the always mysterious inner reality of man, no matter where it has set its mark?
   With Davids bog I aimed to give voices and faces to the millions of ‘vanished’ children, I chose a face and a destiny and worked at it consistently, precisely because the fate of the one was that of thousands. At its most profound, the whole thing was about trying to understand the impossible and in spite of everything give language to what can almost not be said. But is it not, in the last analysis, the task of writing to try to expand the limits of what can be talked about and to be paradoxical? When Wittgenstein recommends silence in the face of what cannot be talked about, is it not the writer’s task, by means of his language, to try to make a hole in the silence? To give voice to the language-imposed silences?
   I do not claim that I have succeeded in this task in my writing, I merely try to point the way I have seen ahead of me for several years.

Translated by David McDuff