Barcelona Metropolis

At the end of 2019, I finished my novel Time Shelter, which was supposed to be a near dystopia describing what might happen in Europe sometime in the next twenty years or so, but which we should try to avoid. On the day of its release in the early spring of 2020, all the bookstores were closed because of the first lockdowns and the start of the pandemic. The dystopia was becoming reality. Four years later, after the most recent European elections, Europe itself looks like a dystopia.

And then the past set out to flood the world…

Yes, the past is contagious. The contagion had crept in everywhere. But that wasn’t the most frightening part – there were some quickly mutating strains that demolished all immunity. Europe, which had thought that after several serious lapses in reason in the 20^th century it had developed full resistance to certain obsessions, particular types of national madness and so on, was actually among the first to capitulate.

No one died, of course (at least not in the beginning), yet the virus was spreading. It wasn’t clear whether it was transmitted by aerosols, whether the very spray of spit when somebody shouted Germany (or France or Poland…) über alles, Hungary for the Hungarians, or Bulgaria on Three Seas could pass on the virus.

It was most quickly transmitted through the ear and the eye.

In the novel Time Shelter, due to the rising tide of nationalism and the past, and also due to European turmoil, the EU decides that each country should have a referendum to decide its happiest decade of the twentieth century to return to. But is the past a sufficient refuge? Where does its discreet monster slumber? What happens when dealers of the past appear and nostalgia takes up arms? That’s what I was trying to work out with my character Gaustine in this novel.

Now, however, we have to step out of the novel and into what has been happening of late in Europe. First of all, it’s certainly not starting now. If I had to give a roughly accurate and recent date, I would say 2014-1016. Back then, in 2014, Russia seized Crimea through a first fake referendum on the past. Europe merely stirred in its sleep, sensing something was going on, yet wanting to sleep just a little while longer. Then in 2016, far away from Europe, one of the two most important events for Europe occurred. America elected Trump.

I remember it was early in the morning when the news, unexpected and startling, arrived. My daughter was asleep in the other room, we were staring at the blue and red rectangles on the map of America on the computer, at first there was hope, then there wasn’t. When they officially declared victory, my wife cried quietly, lest we wake our daughter. And I felt that frustration you feel when you see something monstrous happening and there’s nothing you can do. I knew that this monstrous thing was not going to stay there overseas, that it was going to affect us personally and physically from now on.

I knew this monster was devouring the already fragile future of not just our generation. Perhaps the most important and most worrying catalyst event for Europe happened then, in the late autumn of 2016, thousands of miles away. It gave a surge of strength, new confidence that things could also work this way – with aggression and cynicism, with utter falsification, with the promise of a great past.

The other event that shook Europe in 2016 was, of course, Brexit. (Defoe’s concept that one can survive alone on an island like Crusoe trumped the line from John Dunne about how no man is an island, entire of itself.) This referendum was, again, at its core, a referendum on the past. Finally, there is Russia’s war against Ukraine. On the very first day it began, I wrote that this is a war about the past. After the referendums on the past, after the preachers of the past, came the wars for the past.

The enormous future dèficit

Why is the past flooding in from everywhere today? One possible answer is because of an acute deficit of future. You still have to live somewhere, after all. If the future is uncertain and dark, while the present is anxious and elusive, all that is left is the refuge of the past. No bombs drop there, the climate apocalypse seems like the ramblings of madmen, there’s no pandemic. And most importantly, in the past, there is an abundance of future.

The future was ideology – at least in the country I come from. The inexhaustible supply of future was supposed to guarantee all the ideological promises of the socialist system. Since reserves of future are being rapidly depleted, the new ideologies and their promoters now promise us that same inexhaustible happiness and greatness of the past. The past is the new ideology now. What’s more, the past is the new future. Never mind that we remember Heraclitus and his “no one can enter the same river twice.” We will enter the river of the past as many times as we like.

The other possible answer for this flood of the past is the collective Alzheimer’s we are now entering into. The people who were living witnesses with memories of the Second World War, for example, are now very few. Those who remembered the horror of that war with their bodies are gone. Yet perhaps we too easily assumed that we have created a memory of evil once and for all. And that this memory will remain just as it is, intact, in museums or books, and will magically protect us from further catastrophes. Now, however, with new wars in different parts of the world, we understand that this is not so.

Memory is a muscle. And it must be exercised daily. Storytelling is a part of exercising that memory. As the fire of memory begins to go out, the pack of the past draws ever closer. The less memory, the more past, as Gaustine says in the novel. This is why we remember – not to live in the past, but to keep the past in the past. And to make space for the future.

And here’s another fact, which those working in the memory sciences know. One of the first things that disappears as memory loss sets in is the future. Those suffering from amnesia don’t merely forget what was, they are absolutely unable to make plans for even the nearest future. In fact, the first thing that disappears with memory loss is the very idea of the future.

Thus, by forgetting and not exercising our memory muscle, we leave blank spaces in the future, which the new populists fill with ersatz memory. We arrive at the light industry of memory. The past made from light materials, plastic memory as if spit out by a 3D printer.

What causes people to embrace these ideologies as their own? The profile of those who voted for nationalist parties is heterogeneous, with varying levels of education and different ages, yet people from smaller towns in Bulgaria or from the eastern parts of Germany predominate. It seems that we also have to talk about things that don’t enter into representative samples and exit polls, things we are not used to studying. Yet our job as writers is precisely to explore these unrepresented and uncountable, difficult-to-calculate things.

I’m talking about cumulative frustration. Frustration in different directions and often without clear indications – frustration with your environment, with your relationship to the world, with the world itself, with others, with elites, with the wealth gap. The visibility that new media provides only increases this frustration. I would argue that this frustration and anger (once again, I would underscore that it is not even clearly defined, which doesn’t make it any safer) simmers in the bowels of society today. And that’s where the modern-day populists and right-wing politicians are trying to drill down and reach with their probes. Not caring much what will spurt out from underneath – oil or lava.

Milan Kundera once called the media “reductionists of meaning.” In any case, every new media reduces meaning so as to make it accessible, popular, and easily explained to the reader. Kundera said this long before the advent of social networks as we know them today. But what can we say about meaning now, with TikTok, Facebook and other new media, can we even talk about meaning, let’s say “message” instead, no, actually the message has been reduced and simplified to the nth degree even before this. (Increasingly, I think we first lost the battle for education and taste, the battle for meaning in ever-larger communities, and after that the populists and nationalists had an easy job.)

Back in the day, the Nazi Gauleiters were the first to hit on the idea of using the new medium of radio for their propaganda. As is well known, Hitler and his party owed much of their election success to radio. Radio is total, it acts instantly, and speaks to everyone (newspaper is slow and only for the literate). Today the new right-wing leaders, like their predecessor, are succeeding in riding the wave of new media, which is ever faster and even more total. Will we witness the first TikTok dictators – funny, clever, charismatic, with armies of followers numbering in the millions?

Let me be clear, new media themselves do not create populism and nationalism. They simply multiply it and contribute to radicalization. The ease with which you can use hate speech on social networks, dehumanize via language, humiliate and insult, or virtually delete someone, seeps seamlessly into life outside the networks. If you utter “knife” a hundred times and threaten someone, in the end a knife will unexpectedly appear in your hand.

In the novel, I describe some emerging paramilitary groups that I called “extras for revolutions.” These are mostly young men, sturdy, buzz-cut lads from football fan clubs with tattoos of national heroes, who for a certain price and with a little training transform into a rapid-response civilian army that simulates protests, brawls, or whatever’s been ordered. Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more of these extras for revolutions in the streets, outside of the novel.

Utopias turning into dystopias

“The center is holding”, Ursula von der Leyen said after the European elections. I wish it were so, but after seeing the ultra-right parties’ electoral results, I think we are closer to Yates – Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Actually, can we even talk about center and periphery anymore? After everything that has happened in recent years, this seems increasingly problematic to me. We have outbreaks of tension at one point or another that instantly change the center. Whereas the idea that there is some big, stable power, a “center” that can put out these sudden fires, can intervene with negotiations, and so on, is unfortunately becoming more and more remote. After the most recent elections, these “centers” themselves, such as France, Austria, and Germany, are becoming points of tension.

While I was writing my novel, I often opened up Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. There’s a chapter near the end called “The Great Petulance.” It describes the eve of Europe’s first great catastrophe:

What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even for fisticuffs. Every day fierce arguments, out-of-control shouting-matches would erupt between individuals and among entire groups…

It turns out we have once again returned to this general intolerance and petulance, to broken conversations and violent outbursts one hundred years later. They require no ideology, something more serious and existential has happened within the human. Ideologies and nationalisms come later and lay their eggs readily in societal nests that have been vacated by meaning (just add happiness, peace, contentment or sublimity). And then utopias become dystopias.

From the broken windows and doors of our common existence, from the exploded bonds between us, from the looming climate apocalypse, from the widening gap between inhumanly poor and inhumanly rich people, and the ever-shrinking horizon of the future, a chill and loneliness will begin to blow in. The question of happiness, or at least of normality, for society will again become important.

Here’s how I’d like to end this essay: Don’t believe the populists who promise you that by promising a brighter past – say, the supposed peace and serenity of the 1970s or 1980s – that you will be ten or twenty or thirty years old again, as you were then. Simply put, the personal past is irretrievable, but the political past is retrievable. And therein lies the bait-and-switch, and hence the danger. Political time is repeatable, totalitarian states can be revived, and it may not be so hard to move from democracy back to totalitarianism. Even in Europe, which has supposedly learned its lessons.

Translated from bulgarian by Angela Rodel