The title of this post is the theme that in the recent theme poll of the previous post (and DT Newsletter) was the winner, leaving the theme DT & Beds in second place. But I may turn the latter into a post at some point too.
So, for now let’s kick off with DT & Books:
And let’s get the most obvious book to feature here out of the way right at the start. It’s possibly the historically darkest book ever, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Many Holocaust museums (especially outside Germany) have a copy on display; this one I saw at the Sydney Jewish Museum:
Note it’s a copy of the 75th edition! That’s because the cult of personality around Hitler required almost every household in the Third Reich to own a copy. Also note the crease that goes through the page with the portrait of an ostentatiously grim-looking Adolf … making it look like he’s been crossed out.
As far as cults of personality involving a book are concerned, however, nothing can quite beat Turkmenistan and its former dictator’s book, the Ruhnama, by Saparmurat Niyazov known as the Turkmenbashy. The long-standing autocrat who led Turkmenistan into post-Soviet independence, and then on into one of the wackiest dictatorships in history, penned the tome in 2001 and made it compulsory reading in the country’s schools and universities. Prospective civil servants had to be tested on their knowledge of the book’s content before they could take up their posts. And what was the content? I haven’t read the book myself so I have to go by second-hand information. Apparently it’s a random collection of general wisdom, revisionist history and fairy tales.
And, most bizarrely, he had monuments to the book erected … yes, you read right: monuments. Here’s a photo of an example that I spotted in the northern town of Dashoguz in 2010:
Also note the golden seated statue of the Turkmenbashy in front of the book – also only one of many found all over the country. This Ruhnama monument is a smaller copy of the very large one in the capital city Ashgabat. That one even used to have an opening mechanism with video projections/lights shone onto the open pages, but that broke down long ago.
For outsiders it’s no more than a bewildering source of amusement, but in the country itself the Ruhnama continued to have real repressive power even after the dictator’s demise in 2006. His successor, the splendidly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (a dentist by profession!), apparently didn’t want to be left out on the book craziness front and penned his own works. Here’s a photo taken in one of the OTT museums in Ashgabat:
Meanwhile Berdymukhamedov’s son Serdar has been shoehorned into succeeding his big Daddy in true North-Korean-esque dynastic succession. Whether he’ll also follow a similar path in terms of cult of personality and weirdo book worship I do not (yet) know.
Writing books seems to be a hallmark of any self-(over-)-respecting dictator’s attempts at justifying their position – the Kims of North Korea have done the same, Mao and Gaddafi too, and a particularly prolific writer appears to have been Albania’s former dictator Enver Hoxa. Here’s a photo of a shelf full of volumes of his output on display at the “BunkArt 2” exhibition in Tirana (same photo as the featured one at the top of this post):
But not only dictators write books, dissidents too, in fact it’s of course a main means of dissident activism. Here’s an example of a book about Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The reason this book was on display at a small regional museum in the remote town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan is that Solzhenitsyn was apparently exiled to that forlorn place at one point.
And here’s another book of resistance, this time from Cyprus, written by Colonel Georgios Grivas, the leader of the EOKA paramilitary organization that from 1955 to 1959 fought against British colonial rule (successful in that the country was granted independence in 1960, though the other goal of “enosis”, i.e. reunification with Greece, was not achieved). Here’s a photo of a copy on display at the Museum of National Struggle in Nicosia:
Next come two examples illustrating how propaganda can shift in a relatively short span of time. The first is a US pamphlet issued towards the end of WWII when the Soviet Red Army was indeed still an ally in the fight against Nazi Germany:
Only a short time later, the direction shifted to increasingly anti-communist propaganda, in part driven by a series of pamphlets of a “Democracy versus Communism” series. Here’s a photo of a copy of No. 7 in the series:
Both pamphlets are on display at the Allied Museum in Berlin, which as far as I can tell still hasn’t moved to its planned new premises within the ex-airport of Tempelhof and is currently still located in Dahlem.
And now for an unexpected book encounter that I had at the Grand People’s Study House in Pyongyang, North Korea. Our group was given a tour of this grandiose library and the guide demonstrated to us the book retrieval process and produced a dated copy of a book in English that on closer inspection turned out to have been a donation from a charity in the USA:
This is so bizarre because it seems so unlikely that the North Koreans would accept, and then proudly present to tourists, a book that was a gift from what North Korea considers to be its arch-enemy (together with South Korea, of course) that I heard on more than one occasion quite casually referred to by tour guides as the “Yankee Imperialist Aggressors”.
Books and dark dictatorships also come head to head in rituals of burning “enemy” books, most infamously on 10 May 1933 on Bebelplatz in Berlin, when the Nazis torched some 20,000 books by Jewish or otherwise “undesirable” authors in a vicious propaganda “show”. As Heinrich Heine had prophetically said “This was just the beginning – where they burn books they will eventually burn people”. Today there is a unique kind of monument set into the middle of the square of Bebelplatz, an “empty library” underneath a glass pane. So here it is the absence of books that is the dark aspect:
The Nazis weren’t the only ones who burned books as part of their regimes’ political methods. In Buenos Aires at the ESMA, the main memorial to the victims of the “Dirty War” waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship against its opponents in the 1970s and early 80s, I encountered this perspex box with (partially) burned books by such authors:
Another mass of books, not burned but discarded and scattered, I encountered in one of the abandoned school buildings in the ghost town of Pripyat in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
Another amassment of books I saw in the form of a large installation at the MONA museum in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Here a whole room is filled library-style with books that are all blank, just white paper:
Staying in Australia, here’s a book about life imprisonment on display at the visitor centre of Port Arthur, the most significant of the World Heritage Convict Sites in Tasmania, a former penal colony:
Also in Australia I visited the gloomy former Adelaide Gaol. One of the cells still had a bed in it – with a single book lying lonely on the pillow. I find this quite an atmospheric photo:
At Adelaide Gaol, decommissioned only in 1988, there’s also a library where inmates were able to borrow books to read in order to lessen the boredom of incarceration. Here’s a photo of it:
Another (mock/reconstructed) library forms part of the Vojna Memorial in the Czech Republic, a former hard labour camp from the early communist era where inmates worked in an adjacent uranium mine. In this photo note the Stalin portrait on the far wall:
A category of books most directly linked with death are books of condolences. Here’s a photo of a book of condolences that I encountered at Buchenwald in 2011, it’s for Jorge Semprún:
Jorge Semprún, who passed away on 7 June 2011, was a Spanish author, activist and politician, who as a member of the communist French Resistance was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in Buchenwald concentration camp but survived and was liberated towards the end of WWII. He later wrote two seminal books about that time and how he managed to survive the camp.
Another connection between a book and death I came across in the USA when I visited a Minuteman ICBM Launch Control Center in North Dakota, a highly intriguing decommissioned site that was opened up to visitors. Here’s a photo of an unexpected kind of book I saw at one of the missileers’ desks:
I found it most astonishing that apparently the guys with the keys to nuclear Armageddon were left to self-study nuclear safety! Shouldn’t they have been fully familiar with all of that before being sent down into an LCC for actual “alert duty”?
Finally I want to finish on two books with dark content that mean a lot to me personally. The first is a book by Hoimar von Ditfurth (1921-1989), who was a well-known and highly respected scientific journalist and author in Germany. When I was young I almost religiously watched every episode of his regular science programme “Querschnitte” (‘cross sections’). The most impressive one that I vividly recall was a two-parter that was taking stock of the state of the world in terms of climate and environmental destruction called “Der Ast, auf dem wir sitzen” (literally: ‘the branch we are sitting on’). That’s a reference to the German saying “Am Ast sägen, auf dem man sitzt”, literally ‘to saw off the branch one is sitting on’, which is used for reference to any sort of foolishly self-endangering behaviour.
In the book form that came out a while later (in 1985) the title was changed to the even more pessimistic So lasst uns denn ein Apfelbäumchen pflanzen, ‘so let us plant a little apple tree’, which is a reference to a quote from Martin Luther, who apparently once said (my translation): ‘If I knew that tomorrow the world would end, I’d still plant a little apple tree today’ (originally meant as an expression of defiant optimism, actually). The subtitle of the book “es ist soweit”, means ‘the time has come’:
Now you could argue that the world didn’t end the next day after the book came out, but of course that would be taking literally what was supposed to be a rhetorical technique to underscore the urgency of the planet’s problems. Yet it didn’t quite have the desired effect. I remember how it annoyed me when Ditfurth appeared in talk shows promoting the book and was asked “so, is it really too late, are we doomed?” and he responded “well, if we changed the way we treat the planet drastically, then maybe not yet”, which instead of triggering concern about what could be done only caused a relieved sigh, “ah good, so we don’t have to do anything”. And over the following four decades since then nothing much has changed, except we are now more than twice as doomed, but still emissions and environmental destruction are increasing further, despite all the (largely empty) pledges by governments, while scientists ever more clearly voice the same message Ditfurth tried to get across back in the 1980s.
Sorry it got a bit depressing – if you want some musical relief on this theme I can recommend a certain song by the British rock band Muse, which has – be forewarned! – two instances of the F-word in the title (and lots more in the actual song). Search for “Muse (band) f-word” … I tested it, it works. Or, if you dare, simply follow this external link to the official video on YouTube …
And lastly, a post on this Blog on the theme of “dark tourism & books” obviously also has to feature my own book Atlas of Dark Destinations, of course. Here’s a photo I’ve posted before – it shows my book amongst other titles (some also dark in different ways) in a bookshop at the international airport in Albania’s capital Tirana in April 2022:
When my wife pointed it out to me I actually jumped with surprise. And it remains the only time I had such a surprise encounter with my book in an actual bookshop.
But with this I shall come to a close.
