1
" The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonising our our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction, meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Centre was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle Of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images.
Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.
They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
4
" what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
8
" It was if I had been shut away inside myself, alone with frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, and as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
9
" The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
13
" When we got married, in the spring of 2007, the wedding had been as minimal as it was possible to make it. Linda’s maid of honour Helena, my best man Geir and his girlfriend Christina, Linda’s mother Ingrid and my mother Sissel. Five people attended our wedding in the town hall, lasting two minutes, plus Vanja and Heidi. An hour later only five people sat around the table we had booked in Västra Hammen and ate with us. No speeches, no dancing, no fuss. That was how I wanted it, I hated being the centre of attention, even with people I knew. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
15
" To protect ourselves we use the most potent marker of distance we know, the line of demarcation that passes between ‘we’ and ‘they’. The Nazis have become our great ‘they’. In their demonic and monstrous evil ‘they’ exterminated the Jews and set the world aflame. Hitler, Goebels, Goering and Himmler, Mengele, Stangl and Eichmann. The German people who followed ‘them’ are in our minds also ‘they’, a faceless and frenzied mass, almost as monstrous as their leaders. The remoteness of ‘they’ is vast and dashes down these proximate historical events, which took place in the present of our grandparents, into a near-medieval abyss. At the same time we know, every one of us knows, even though we might not acknowledge it, that we ourselves, had we been a part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism. In Germany in 1938 Nazism was the consensus. It was what was right, and who would dare to speak against what is right? The great majority of us believe the same as everyone else, do the same as everyone else, and this is to become the ‘we’ and the ‘all’ are what decide the norms, rules and morals of society. Now that Nazism has become ‘they’, it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case what Nazism was ‘we’. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
17
" The reasoning here is typical of Kershaw’s work, which is marred by his describing everything, and I mean everything, about Hitler extremely negatively, even such aspects as relate to his childhood and youth, as if his whole life were tainted by what he would become and do some twenty years later, as if in some way he were evil incarnate, or as if evil were some core inside him, immutable and irremediable, and thereby an explanation of why things turned out the way they did. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
19
" An ordinary travel agency took care of the practicalities of chartering trains in exactly the same way as they dealt with such matters normally. Ordinary railway staff were deployed to organise the logistics of the transport, plotting train times into schedules, passing information on through the system. The camps were built, personnel received their orders, the industry began. Some of the soldiers must have been picked out on account of their brutality, many being obvious sadists who could find outlet and indulge themselves here, while others were ordinary and, in any context, considerate men doing a job for work.
Two years later they tried to remove all traces; having demolished Teblinka’s every structure they built a farm on the site and instructed the Ukrainian family they installed in it to say they had lived there always. The same occurred in Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno, all traces gone. All around, life went on as nothing had happened. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 6 (Min kamp #6)
