Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In 1982 I received a Christmas present from film director Roy Andersson, it was the book Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline. The reading of this book changed me. Something in it appealed to me deep down inside and I was seriously affected. Maybe it was the pervasive humor in that dark narrative that appealed to me.
Céline wrote about his life trauma after participating in the slaughterhouse that was World War I. I had, of course, no similar trauma behind me, but had lived through a decade of extremely turbulent family relationships in my original family. I knew something about humor as a weapon and I could relate to his way of describing both people and events. My fascination with Céline as a character made me read his other books and I created my own image of him as a human being (feasible, or not). However, I summoned the courage to write a play, the Knife of Europe, which treats his exile in Denmark after World War II.
To me, the two novels Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan are indispensable experiences in my life. Céline is the epitome of a European 20th century man: Involved in two utterly bloodstained world wars. Completely traumatized already as a young man. World War I saw 1/3 of his French generation comrades die on muddy battlefields, 6 million young men. It's a slaughter we cannot even imagine today, and still we are talking only about the French side. On the German and British sides the losses were just as numerous and the traumatic experiences just as strong, traumas that laid the foundation for the next great war just over 20 years later.
Today, we have a better grasp of what is known as PTSD, but back then few hardly knew what it meant. I attempted to make a film from a trauma perspective about Swedish experiences of warfare in Afghanistan, but unfortunately the financing did not work out. However, I converted the script to a play instead, The Chain of Blood. And the play about Céline I wrote, the Knife of Europe, was staged at the Gothenburg Municipal Theatre in 2016.
