Almost a year ago, Daniel Pedersen sat down to write "Night and Ashes – The Literature of the Holocaust". A more academic manuscript got a popular science and more personal tone.
- With the increasing anti-Semitism, I thought it was important. But it was not the main reason, it was more about the obligation to the material I had been working on, he says.
Now the book lands in a time when anger towards the Israeli government risks making some people choose not to read it.
Anti-Semitism is not something you can vaccinate away with a book. But I would like to say that if you don't want to read a book about the Holocaust because you dislike the current Israeli government, then you really should read the book. Then you have mixed two things, I don't like Netanyahu either, says Pedersen.
Workroom
The workspace, a former laundry room in the suburbs, has just been freed from one and a half cubic meters of Holocaust literature that he transported to an old mission church in Västerbotten.
Daniel Pedersen has researched, "at the state's expense", among others the poet Nelly Sachs and wanted to pay back. He also argues for fiction as an important source of knowledge.
I have a somewhat romantic view of what literature is, I think it can convey something about the typically human that historians cannot. Any empathetic parent can surely imagine what it would take to be forced to choose between leaving a small child on a train and hoping it would be taken care of by a stranger, or taking it with you into death.
Open Wound
Many books about the Holocaust are repetitive biographies and dull literature, he thinks. In addition to Primo Levi, Anne Frank, and Imre Kertész, Pedersen now introduces other lesser-known but highly interesting authors who were in the camps.
They can be an antidote to a kind of contemporary Holocaust reverence that he thinks increases the distance to the genocide. But also to sentimental film endings like in "Schindler's List" that "sort of redeem the event".
- Then you lose knowledge. Some of these books challenge our understanding of the Holocaust. Imre Kertész, for example, ends "The Man Without Fate" with the main character almost longing to return to the camp. He disrupts our understanding of this and then we cannot heal the wound. Then we continue to think.
Born: 1978.
Occupation: Author, literary scholar, and publisher at Faethon publishing house. Defended a dissertation on the poet Nelly Sachs.
Selected books: "The Poetics of Tears", on Nelly Sachs' authorship (2020) Made his literary debut with "Open Water" (2021), Editor of the anthology "Jew in Sweden", 2021. "Jon Fosse's ABC", interview book (2023).
Other: Chairman of the jury for the Berman Prize, which is awarded to authors who work in the Jewish literary tradition.
1. "Blood from Heaven" (1961) by Piotor Rawicz, Polish-Jewish author who survived Auschwitz and was critical of how Holocaust literature developed. Begins his novel with the line "Through what can one feel human? That they know how to scream."
2. "The Human Species" (1947) by Robert Antelme, member of the French resistance and married to Marguerite Duras. He was liberated by the future President François Mitterrand in Dachau and wrote a single work. Antelme portrayed the human being that the camp "destroyed", according to philosopher Simone Weil. Is currently being translated into Swedish.
3. "The Concentration Camp Universe" from 1947 by the French author David Rousset, who writes "There is a decree from Hermann Göring that protects frogs". Here, fiction was used to portray the transition "from living death to dead death".
