Knausgård, Satan and the Third Reich

“The third realm is something people believed in during the Middle Ages. The first realm was the era of God, the second realm was the era of Jesus, and the third realm was the era of the Holy Spirit. Now we are entering the third realm…” — on page 121 of “The Third Realm”, the third installment of Karl Ove Knausgård’s “The Morning Star”, this is what Valdemar, a new character in the five-book cycle, says. Valdemar has light, semi-long hair, “like an angel’s,” “clear, intense eyes,” “gentle lips,” “a slim, almost fragile body.” Valdemar is a young medical technician, a former philosophy student who does not use a mobile phone, has no computer, is not online, watches films at the cinematheque, and sends letters instead of messages. Valdemar is the frontman of Domen, a black metal band that does not release its recordings, does not commercialize itself in any way, plays only live, and exclusively for a narrow circle of acquaintances and followers.

Let us recall: in “The Morning Star”, a strange, shining star appeared, and the members of the metal band Kvitekrist were found ritually murdered in a forest near Bergen. In “The Wolves of Eternity”, toward the end of summer, people suddenly stopped dying, in Moscow as well as in Norway. Now we are in the third realm, what ever that means. We are halfway through the translation of the five-book cycle already published in Norwegian. If up to now the story had been expanding outward, now it begins to close in. If the first two parts were unconventional and uncanny, the third is more con ventional, more like a traditional novel. What has so far been built upward; not the base needs to be strength ened. Perhaps that is also why some consider “The Third Realm” to be the best part translated so far. The story is slowly getting its outline. Characters from the first part return, as do certain characters from the sec ond. Some narrative lines are at their climax. There is the story of Tove’s psychosis and her family. The story of Gaute’s jealousy and his family. There is also Syvert the undertaker. New characters are introduced too, new story lines: police investiga tor Geir not only investigates the triple murder, but also creates a story of his own by maintaining parallel relationships with two women.

The investigation into the murder of the members of Kvitekrist leads us into the subculture of black metal, while the shining star announces the realm of the undead. But we cannot reveal anything yet, not even inadvertently, because we still know nothing. Yet at the center of “The Third Realm” is Valdemar Stiansen (for whom it is not impossible that he already appeared, as a bit player under another name, in the first part) and, for lack of a better word, the phenomenon of black metal. With nineteen-year-old Lina, we take the train to a se cret concert in Sweden. The remote estate is reached by gravel road; upon arrival, mobile phones are confiscat ed. The visitors look as if they are from the nineteenth century, wearing black hats, shirts and suspenders, long beards and hair. They come to the party from far away: Germany, England, Belgium, Spain… Within the grounds there are several tents, and the rooms in the outbuilding are at the level of bare necessity. From somewhere comes the bleating of goats. At nightfall a bonfire is lit, and the concert is held in a dilapidated barn. The band performs in animal masks. After a short introduction, an avalanche of distorted guitars and monoto nous riffs bursts from the stage, with vocals like the screaming of a goat. The words are howled straight into the floor: the earth wants you and the earth will get you… At the end there are only a few ordinary sentences: “That’s all folks and see you next time!”

The first wave of black metal appeared at the beginning of the 1980s. In essence, everything was connected with rebellion and shock: Elvis shocked with his hips, the Beatles with their long hair, the Stooges with noise, and punk with aggression, as a metal historian explains in “The Third Realm”. The kids from Norway, economically and socially cared for, came straight out of their bedrooms and tried to shock with Satanic iconography, saying in public the worst things that came into their heads.

When the first and second waves ran out of steam, turning into mannerism and pose, the search began for the authentic, for the “real.” A series of church burnings began in the early 1990s, along with the destruction of tombstones and the digging up of corpses, and the climax came with two cases of murder: simply, that was what the “logic” of the scene required.

Also, as the “logical” consequence of shocking with Satanism and necrophilia, “National Socialist black metal” appeared, within which there were bands with names like Adolfkult, Blutkult, Aryan Blood, Gestapo SS, Kristallnacht, Leibstandarte, Reich of the Black Sun, and the like. In the novel, among the fictional bands, the Third Reich is mentioned as well. We have kept qui et for a long time, so now we can say it: this is precisely where Knausgård fishes out his title. When he began writing “My Struggle”, we expected he would eventual ly get to Hitler. Now he has arrived at the “Third Realm” too. The double coding of the title “My Struggle” had nothing to do with Hitler: except that at the end of the hexalogy Knausgård wrote an essay on “Mein Kampf” longer than the original. In “The Third Realm” (“Reich”, as it would be in German), originally titled “Det tredje riket”, the title is linked to medieval beliefs. But one could say that for Valdemar, who is reading Speer’s memoirs, the Third Reich seems closer than the folklor ic third realm.

This play with the double coding of the title shares some similarities with the way KOK also plays with the crime genre. In “The Third Realm” we have gone deep into Gothic horror. One step further and Knausgård will find it harder to untangle the Satanic plot than it was to set it in motion. But for now everything still holds up: the essayistic part, as well as detection, philosophy and religion, and Gothic horror. There is also the idea floating around that Knausgård is only pretending to write a genre novel. “The Third Realm” is that, but also something entirely different. That “something” is what is most intriguing now. The crime plot will end this way or that way, or not end at all, but the novel will go on. To tell you the truth, who killed the members of Kvitekrist is no longer the real question. Their murder is a morbid crime, but in light of new phenomena it is quite a mar ginal event.

The real question is: what is the realm of the undead? If people do not die, what is that? Should that problem be solved, and who can actually solve it? Valdemar, it seems, exits the story here. His lyrics drive people under the ground, not out of the ground. Police investigator Geir is not the man for that case either, neither is undertaker Syvert. The investigator may continue to work on the multiple murder case, but if he were capable of solving the case of the multi-day and multi-week absence of death in Norway, someone would already have asked him for help. Undertaker Syvert fares even worse: in the brave new world he is superfluous, merely a third wheel. So what are we talking about when people stop dying? The devil or God? Undertakers and police investigators, it seems, are not equipped to answer that question. Valdemar cannot say anything sensible about the devil, unless it is a matter of the Third Reich. Closer to the heart, the idea of the novel become char acters like Syvert’s sister, the biologist; Syvert’s broth er, the astronomer; the neurologist Jarl; or the priest Kathrine. There is also Tove’s neighbor Egil Stray, whose essay on death and the dead was published in the first part. And one must not forget Tove herself, who in “The Third Realm”, on the black wings of psychosis, rapidly approaches the dark center of the novel.

Still, while we wait for the mystery and the whole five book cycle to be resolved, the final word should be giv en to the priest who already in “The Morning Star” had dealings with the man she buried. After speaking with the police investigator, Kathrine is uneasy. She does not believe in the devil or Satan; for her that is a bizarre premise from prehistoric times, when the difference between animals and humans was smaller. The idea of the devil makes everything stupider and smaller. Kath rine thinks about the baby she is carrying in her womb. It is night, the children and Gaute are asleep. Kathrine pulls on a T-shirt, takes a glass of water, and goes out onto the terrace. The thought passes through her mind: “Only you, God, can save us.”

But…

“As soon as I thought it, I knew that I did not believe in God. We are completely alone.”