The Bureau of Past Management by Iris Hanika

Translated by Abigail Wender, published 2021, originally published in German in (I don’t know) with the title (I don’t know but it does say in the translator’s note at the end of the book)

I was doing something I very rarely do a few days ago, and I was reading a blog. That’s right, the kind of thing you would do.

The reason why I was doing so, was because the blog had linked to my blog and so it popped up in the WordPress back office and so I followed the link.

The reason why – from what I could gather though I couldn’t find the actual embedded link when I was looking for it – was because the writer was discussing the importance of blogs linking to other blogs, and mentioned an unnamed blog they’d read that mostly contained only internal links. That is what my blog does, intentionally, because the way in which I envision this site is a silo, rather than as anything outgoing.

While the community-centered blog that I was looking at sneered at insular blogs like this one that don’t engage with other blogs, I found it strange, as that’s the exact opposite of the the the the the the the purpose I see when collating my thoughts here…

I will not consider blogging as networking. This is diarising. Sitting in front of a smartphone and bleed[ing] innit…

I’m fundamentally doing this for no one other than myself, and I don’t see the prose texts published on Triumph Of The Now as public works, as part of a conversation, or even as invitations to chat…  In fact, I find it a bit odd when people comment on these posts of mine (though maybe if it happened more often I’d get used to it?). If I wanted to have conversations, I’d get some friends in real life, which is something I haven’t done though not something I feel would be impossible if I wanted to

Surely if anyone is looking at amateur[ised] pieces of text on the internet, it is with a presumption that the content is unvetted, unverified, un…peer reviewed??? … un…important…

this isn’t Wikipedia…

no blog wants to be Wikipedia (except for maybe ones that do, maybe that is a thing???) and there aren’t citations linking to articles and essays that I’ve read about the book I’ve just read because I’m not reading articles and essays about books I’ve just read… Unless I have, yeah, and then I probably would mention that or whatever???

I find books to read by browsing in bookshops, not by reading literary reviews…

Sometimes I’ll read a book based on a recommendation, but I’ll usually cite where that came from (on the occasions when it happens), otherwise what I’m reading is things that I’ve been sent by strangers or things that I have stumbled upon, or things that I’ve … like … read about on … Wikipedia … or things that are proximate on a shelf to things I like or – sometimes – books on a little recommendation shelf in a good independent bookstore. Yes.

I mainly judge books I’ve never heard of by their covers, rather than by any existing critical reputation… (i.e. if I see a book that interests me, I will read if before googling it… This is because I see life as far too long, time as no more precious than a flake of dust)…

To go back, then……..

I don’t see blogging as a community act…

I see this as a textural and textual dead end, with the thoughts I put here predominantly an aide-mémoire to myself, with the pages of this commonplace book open to anyone. 

Why not?

So, yeah… If felt strange to be implicitly (or explicitly???) attacked…

it may well have been a different blog that the writer was thinking of, but it’s certainly something I do do and something I’ve already done multiple times in this post…

But the reason why I link to my own blog within this blog is because I presume that if anyone’s reading one article on my blog they may want to read another one……. if I mention something else I’ve read to someone who’s reading my response to something then maybe they might want to see how I responded to that other text? It’s an open book, innit, but it’s a dead end.

Aaaaaaaand also this blog isn’t really about the things that I’m reading, is it, it’s about the various ways in which my variously diagnosed psychiatric disorders impact upon my engagement with the world…

But yes, I felt personally attacked. And the above has been a response. This blog is where I live my liiiiiiiifffffeeee. I already have to think about others when I’m not on my phone I dunt wanna do it when I ammmmmm

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COMMENTS ON THE BOOK MENTIONED IN THE TITLE OF THE POST BEGIN HERE

This recent novel from a German writer who I hadn’t heard of, translated by a translator I hadn’t heard of, and published by an indie press I hadn’t heard of, I picked up in Voce books in Birmingham, which is a great little bookshop down Digbeth way, where I have been a few times…

It’s a brief novel, under 200 pages, and is about an archivist who works at a fictional institute in Germany that continues in the present day to look through materials (written, visual, recordings etc) related to the Holocaust.

Although the particular institute where the novel is set doesn’t exist, and there isn’t anything – according to the translator’s note at the end of the text – that so explicitly fulfills this function in reality, the institutionalised memorialisation of this European genocide is something that has happened…

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The Bureau of Past Management explores one person’s personal response to engaging with materials related to gross violence and abuse on a daily basis.

It’s about the combination of becoming both desensitised but also the opposite of this… becoming unable to distract oneself sufficiently from thinking about these histories and the people who lived through them…

It is set in the present day, and is about a person entering into middle age who’s been working at this institute for a long time, and is growing tired and frustrated by the ways in which the lessons of previous genocides are not being heeded in the modern world, and how by almost industrialising the experiences of memorialising, there is almost a failure to comprehend the meanings and the legacies of these heinous acts…

While it is impossible to deny the realities of the Holocaust from anything except an obscene and offensive conspiracy theorist perspective, an acknowledgement of the facts and the realities of the genocide itself doesn’t necessarily equate to a comprehension of the causes and the repercussions of this violence…

Numbers are numbers, the repetition of experience that the protagonist reads – going through document after document written by survivors and written by the survivors of the victims… the similarities between all of these stories…….

is almost soporific to him by the point that he has reached in his career…

These are narratives of events he has become used to… but the images and the actions and the horrors are things that he can’t forget.

He is plagued by nightmares and waking dreams, evoked by the testimonies and visual and written materials that he engages with, that he documents and archives…

The Bureau of Past Management is a serious novel, full of references to popular culture, to pop music and to Hollywood movies, but also to philosophy, to literature, to opera, to classical music, too…

It’s about the ways in which our contemporary world and its sociocultural/economic structures are rooted in the conflicts and the abuses of the middle of the 20th century… lots of the central works of art that we associate with modernity have origins in responses to these terrible things that were perpetuated…

Because – and this is the thing that people are keen to forget – genocides aren’t things that happen, they are things that are done.

These are not things without causes, things without actions/actors, they are not passive tragedies that occur because of the shifting of tectonic plates, or the slow and eventual metamorphosing of bacterial or viral organisms into ones that we as a species are no longer resistant to…

Violent acts are done, violently, by people, they happen to people, too, yet when we think of genocides as universal, depersonalised disasters and forget about the perpetrators, that is how situations arise when these things become possibilities again… or these things never stop being possibilities……

We cannot think of genocides as tragedies alongside tsunamis, we must think of them as horrors alongside serial killers and cruel institutionalized abuse…

We name nations as the perpetrators of colonialism or genocides, but rarely do we stop and point the finger of contempt at the lower level individuals who were involved in enacting these things…

Should we forgive the people who didn’t disobey the orders? Should we forget? Or should we condemn? Should every individual with any culpability, direct or indirect, be held in contempt unless or until they are able to avow and evidence restitution? What would that even look like? How would that even work..?

But one can argue that if the perpetrators of one genocide are themselves executed, cycles of violence persist without end… So that’s no solution either… Yet millions of people who had a share in the guilt of the Holocaust were forgiven, and violence still exists in the wild in multiple places… (In my recent post about ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’ (a book on the history of genocides, highly recommended), I linked to a couple of pages from anti-genocide charities (sometimes I do do external links!) and I’ll do the same thing again here , because it is important to remember that these things continue to happen in all sorts of parts of the world.)

We like to pretend that forgiveness is an act of maturation, but every time the grunt masses involved in the execution of crimes against humanity are permitted to return to live amongst it (humanity), we signify that forgiveness can and will be given and we set ourselves up for repetition again and again and again …

Where is this going?

I don’t know.

I don’t know anything, and I don’t know how interested I am in knowing things… but what I am interested in doing is recording for myself (at some potential future point???) my reactions and my responses to ideas, narratives, realities, as experienced, as noticed, as felt…

I’m a nobody, I’m nothing… maybe that’ll change one day. But, realistically, no it fucking won’t.

Order The Bureau of Past Management direct from V&Q books via this link