My Struggle, Book 6 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The many resemblances between Hitler and Kubin’s biographies might lead us to wonder if similarity of background and experience begets similarity of mind, whether what each on his own considers and understands to be unique, particular failures and shortcomings, longings and urges, experiences and preferences, hopes and fears, might not in fact merely be variations on a common theme, in Jünger’s sense, arising out of an age and a place and a class. Not that Hitler and Kubin were alike in temperament or talent or character, but the feelings that streamed through them, the things they held back or allowed themselves to show, the things they despised and the things by which they were attracted, looked to be, or in certain cases perhaps even were, the same. It is tempting to entertain the thought in this instance, since the pictures Kubin painted as a young man are so full of death and fear of women and possess such remoteness from the human aspects of what they depict, their figures being seen as biological entities, lending them a repugnant, distasteful quality, as if he thereby were expressing directly what Hitler suppresses and which with all his might he tries to eschew.

Hitler wishes to elevate the world, Kubin describes it the way it is, which is to say the way he perceives it, sunken into hell, as in his drawing of a powerful woman standing naked with both hands raised in the air, sprinkling something onto the ground; her belly is large, grotesquely shaped, perhaps she is pregnant, and on the ground about her feet are the severed heads of men, some with mouths gaping. She is Mother Earth.

Another drawing depicts a huge vulva into which a tiny man dives from the woman’s knee, which from his perspective is as tall as a mountain. There are others too, of masses on their way to hell, seen from such distance that nothing of any individuality may be discerned, and there are drawings of death in the shape of a great skeleton leaning over a house and sprinkling something on it from a pouch, the title being Epidemic. Elsewhere, an ape holds a woman tightly from behind and paws at her genitals, there are men with the heads of birds, a vast congregation of helmeted soldiers gathered beneath the towering sculpture of an ox, chopped-up animal carcasses, severed heads on stakes, the state depicted as a trundling machine in a field, suicides, dogs frothing at the mouth, a man with his head between a woman’s legs, she in a coffin and thin as a skeleton, another is an actual skeleton, though with a pregnant belly rising like the top of an egg. These are fin de siècle pictures, yet they are filled with a horror of the body, with an extravagance and a mood of man as mass that distinguishes them radically from fin de siècle elsewhere, in other countries; Kubin would have been unthinkable in England, for instance, and also in America, and

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