We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression,
And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression
—David Bowie, “Fantastic Voyage”
When I arrived in Berlin in late April of 2013, everyone told me how good my timing was. The dark, gray Berlin winters are infamous for eroding people’s psychological and emotional stability, and the preceding one had set a record for the longest number of consecutive days without sunshine. By March, so I was told, people were at the end of their tethers; Berliners, famously direct about everything and certainly their moods, had been driven miserable and misanthropic. By April, however, the days were lengthening, the sky was a clear cerulean, the sun was bathing everything in gold, and all was forgotten. The streets below my sublet rang with enthused conversation and peals of laughter.
RM Vaughan’s Pervatory (Coach House Books, 2023), his posthumous novel, is set in this particular dreadful winter, although no years, months, or specific dates of any kind are ever declared. Vaughan—Richard to his friends, which we were—was a poet, novelist, art critic, and artist based in Toronto, then New Brunswick, who passed away in October 2020. I am certain of the novel’s setting in the aforementioned winter because, firstly, Richard moved to Berlin in the beginning of 2013. He greeted me upon my arrival that spring and left the following autumn. In Pervatory, the clouds of that 2013 winter are a condensation of what can’t be said: the irreconcilability with, and therefore the immanence of, the ghosts of the national Nazi past. Secondly, the ghosts that haunt the novel would become a very concrete aspect of German life almost immediately after its writing. The Syrian refugee crisis that came to a head in 2015, the attempted sabotage of Documenta 15, and the German reaction to Israel’s post–October 7 genocidal siege of Gaza, all stretched along in one cascading chain of consequence, assume, in hindsight, a kind of horrific predestination. Like anyone intelligent and observant, Richard saw the trouble on the horizon and wrote a novel about the horrors of the past irrupting into the present.
The narrator of Pervatory, Martin Murray Heather (who is also Richard’s avatar), writes from the German asylum where he resides for his own protection. In brisk, three- to four-page episodes, he narrates his arrival in Berlin, his day and night lives, his submergence into Berlin’s infamously robust gay sexual culture, and importantly, his awkwardly truncated conversations about history, namely the Holocaust (“Off he went, into a shrugging monologue about the Bad Time the Germans Don’t Name”)—until he meets the mysterious Alexandar spontaneously at a fetish bar. Alexandar won’t answer questions about his ethnic origin (is he Slavic? Is he German?), and his native language can’t be placed by Martin’s anglophone ear. He is everything Martin wants in a man: braw, gruff, direct, jolly and unbothered, sexually brutal and voracious. Martin falls in love, and although we follow their intimacy, we never feel safe, much less happy, for Martin. He simultaneously finds himself amid ominous circumstances: demonic children, haunted apartments, an unending series of anonymous postcards sent to his Berlin sublet threatening the devouring of Martin’s soul by an ancient demiurge with implacable appetites. Their attachment escalates; the gleefully punishing sexual violence escalates; the go-nowhere conversations about histories and origins and intractable cultural expectations escalate; the haunting escalates. The psychosis of the unspeakable and inexpressible escalates until Martin finds himself at the sacrificial center of a mysterious sex cult, from which he escapes by murdering Alexandar.
Any horror story is a portrait of human psychology. Vampire stories are about our insatiable lusts, werewolf tales a reflection of our bestial rage, and ghost stories—about possessions, hauntings, poltergeists—whisper of our traumatic memories that grow all the more powerful for their inexpressibility. Pervatory contains many glib diagnoses of Germans, the inevitable result of a new arrival processing the shock of a culture he doesn’t yet fully grasp. But what Richard gets dead right is the role of the “Bad Time the Germans Don’t Name” in the shaping of broader life in the country. Speaking through Martin’s narration, Richard diagnoses it exactly: “The Bad Time is not real to Germans anymore. Only the language around the Bad Time has any power now, and every sentence ends with a resigned chuckle.”
The German word for the reckoning of the “Bad Time” is Erinnerungskultur, which literally translates to “the culture of remembrance.” It refers to a system of education, acceptance, and foregrounding of Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust. For seventy-odd years now, Erinnerungskultur has insisted on never forgetting the answer to the question, “What have we done to others?” Of all the questions to be asked of Germany’s atrocities, this is the easiest, with the readiest answer. After all, the Germans kept meticulous records. Theirs was an ordered, precise, methodical genocide. What Erinnerungskultur has never asked is what Germans did to themselves.
Just as individuals have selves, so, too, do masses of people. Communities and nations have collective selves. When we speak casually of national character traits, this is what we mean. In addition to the intractable trauma inflicted on a slaughtered and tortured people, a genocide conducted by a nation inflicts an incalculable harm to the collective self, and its immediate consequences are inherited by the children and grandchildren of its perpetrators. And the Germans spent a good long time murdering themselves, in an orderly, precise, and methodical fashion.
The chief characteristic of a malignant narcissist, as elaborated by social psychologists such as Erich Fromm in the mid-1960s as a subcategory of narcissistic personality disorder, is a void of the self. The narcissist buttresses against this void with his unshakeable belief in his own exceptionalism. His life becomes a performance for others, for which he expects constant congratulation. This narcissism, this impregnable self-contentment with having been such good and thorough rememberers, is the “resigned chuckle” with which Martin becomes complicit when he is overwhelmed by the psychosocial complexity of positioning oneself (one way or another) in relation to a murderous national past. In one episode, he attempts several times to address the elephantine ghost in the room (with hook-ups, in casual conversations at gay bars), but he encounters only this meaningless response, and his bewilderment and frustration in the face of what is tantamount to stonewalling denial compels him to simply leave the matter lie. No sooner does he declare his disengagement— in the very next episode—than he meets Alexandar.
Author photo of RM Vaughan. Photo: Jared Mitchell.
In 2013, at the time of Richard’s writing, the object of remembrance—“what we did to others; what we did to ourselves is unseeable, unspeakable and therefore unthinkable”—was indeed a ghost, a lingering undercurrent that had been consigned to the foggy margins of public life. When I first moved here, there were of course racist elements and agitators in German life. It was unthinkable and a matter of myopic national pride that, unlike in a chaotic United States, these elements would or could never enter into mainstream politics. The course of the last decade has turned this undercurrent into a river that is now directing the flow of political, cultural, and social life in Germany.
There are other -kulturs in the German language, the most recent of which is the neologism Willkommenskultur, or “welcome culture.” It was coined in 2015, two years after Richard finished writing Pervatory. It names the apparent enthusiasm with which Germans accepted the role as the great shelter to the waves of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war that year. Germans turned up at ports of arrival in droves. News footage showed crowds bearing hot soup, tea, and coffee, cheering the arrival of refugees as if they were the Beatles landing in the US. However, my life in Germany has taught me that any time -kultur is appended to a gerund, the resultant phenomenon’s expression stands in ironic contrast to its named meaning. I had been living in Berlin for two years by that point, and even as a white male from a G8 country with all the requisite money and paperwork, I had experienced the full brunt of the German contempt of the foreigner. Manias are fleeting, and I know what follows their ebb. It became clear to me that the humanitarian fervor displayed by Germans, especially politically, had nothing to do with the refugees or generosity of any kind; it was another narcissistic performance, a self-congratulatory display to garner the jealous approval of observers.
Within less than a year, Germans began to openly resent their refugee neighbors, frustrated and perplexed by their perceived reluctance to cast off their own cultures, customs, and languages, and fully embrace a Germanness that could and would never be conferred on them. A rash of sexual-harassment cases and assaults on women during New Year’s Eve in 2015 was blamed squarely on newly arrived refugees. In fact, regardless of their ethnicities, almost all the assailants were, according to police reports, longtime residents of Germany. This crucial distinction was ignored in the tabloid press’s initial reporting. In 2020, a far-right extremist opened fire in a shisha bar in Hanau and killed nine people, propelled by the belief that migrants (and the Germans who welcomed them) sullied the “purity” of Germany. Two years later, general chaos on New Year’s Eve in Berlin was blamed on migrants, despite the fact that less than a third of people detained by police had a migrant background. Center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politicians openly stated on Twitter that this violence was in the migrants’ natures, and they had no respect for Germany or its institutions. The CDU subsequently won the Berlin city-state elections in 2023, marking the first time a right-wing party has governed Berlin in thirty years. As part of its first proposed budget, my neighborhood of Neukölln—home to an overwhelming majority of Turks, Kurds, Syrians, Sinti and Roma, Afghans, and Palestinians—would no longer receive support for maintenance of parks, children’s playgrounds, or public primary schools, and its garbage collection would be drastically reduced.
The far right, once considered laughably peripheral on the German political spectrum, thrived and bloomed in this widespread atmosphere of immigrant panic to the extent that it can no longer legitimately be called the far right. Between 2014 and 2017, the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party—who count vocal Holocaust deniers and racists among their ranks—went from having a less than 10 percent share of the public vote in the former east German states to an almost 35 percent share (it currently polls at around 14 percent in Berlin). In the 2024 European Parliamentary elections, the AfD became the second-largest German delegation to the European Parliament. The party has so completely shifted the political compass in this country that its politics are now espoused by what used to be the political center. The current German chancellor, center-left Olaf Scholz, openly discussed mass immigrant deportations in an October 2023 interview with the mainstream press, and in November 2023, members of the center-right CDU, the AfD, and some prominent business leaders organized a secret “conference” in Potsdam to discuss the pragmatics of the mass deportation of “undesirables.” That same month, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck made a speech calling pro-Palestinian protests “Islamist demonstrations” and threatened any protesters without a residence permit with deportation, all while citing Germany’s responsibility to ensure “Jews can live freely and safely in Germany.”
This has surely been the greatest and most oxymoronic, semantic sleight of hand of the German far-right: the persecution of immigrants, a longstanding Neo-Nazi aim, purportedly done in the righteous name of protecting Jews.
Such disingenuous hate-mongering fueled the political sabotage of Documenta 15 in 2022. It began with an “exposé” by an anonymous far-right blogger who had rechristened himself the “Bündnis gegen Antisemitismus Kassel” (Kassel Alliance Against Antisemitism). The organization of the latest (and possibly last) Documenta was decentralized and rhizomatic. The Indonesian collective ruangrupa was invited to curate the exhibition, and its response was to invite other collectives with the instruction that they, in turn, invite more collectives. I am an admittedly cynical art viewer, and I have never seen anything so genuinely, inspirationally, structurally game-changing: the most prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world was entirely free of art-world hierarchies, fashions, and star names. It was a utopian demonstration of the power of collective action. The vast majority of participants were from outside of white, Western Europe. Some of these collectives openly allied themselves with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. BDS, as of a May 2019 German parliamentary vote, is considered de facto antisemitic, and therefore qualifies as illegal hate speech. The blogger accused Documenta of harboring antisemitic propaganda; the press took hold of this, and the entire German political apparatus was brought to bear on the exhibition. A particularly grotesque crescendo in this response was the intervention of a “scientific committee,” brought in to “objectively” determine whether defamatory artworks were present. In the German popular self-conception, this unassailable and immutable “expertise” on what constitutes antisemitism reflects a ludicrous perversion of Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours of deliberate practice: Many Germans consider themselves the unimpeachable authorities on antisemitism because, as their fealty to Erinnerungskultur demands, they believe they “applied” antisemitism so expertly. Not a single Jewish person or artist was present on this committee.
Since Documenta 15, and especially since October 7, Germany has seen a wellspring of such governmental watchdog committees, all of which—especially since Israel’s post–October 7 escalation of its devastation of Gaza—seem to be spending most of their time targeting left-wing Jewish organizations and freezing their bank accounts on suspicion of terrorist activity. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population in Berlin—one of the largest in Europe—is under constant surveillance. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Neukölln was turned into a series of police checkpoints. Carrying a Palestinian flag, wearing a keffiyeh, uttering the phrase “from the river to the sea” aloud remain grounds for arrest, all in the name of the protection of Jewish people. Palestinian solidarity protests, vigils, and conferences are deemed illegal and violently disrupted and dispersed. The mainstream tabloid press refers to any solidarity protest as “Jew-hate.” Meanwhile, neo-Nazi marches continue to enjoy constitutional protections (as long as no one is seen displaying a swastika or performing the Nazi salute), and the presence of genuine antisemitism in the edifices of political power is ignored: the deputy prime minister of Bavaria, discovered to have been a neo-Nazi pamphleteer in his school days, remains uncensured and retains his position.
Pervatory’s Alexandar is an embodiment and emanation of these ghosts, and when mortal risk overwhelms sexual desire, Martin murders him by gouging out his eyes with a ballpoint pen. This is a poetic completion of Richard’s diagnosis of the “Bad Time”—its only power is in words, and so it can be undone by a Biro. But Richard is too smart for such a pretty end, and so we have a German psychiatrist’s report that declares Martin’s entire narrative a nonexistent and unsubstantiated paranoia. If the ghosts can be undone by words, they can be redone by words, and this is where Richard is at his most prescient. It is left to the reader to decide whether Martin is being protected or gaslighted by his German psychiatrists, but the metaphor is clear: the German establishment speaks with utter conviction, and its unquestionable authority has the power to shape reality. What is currently unfolding in Germany is indeed an institutional gaslighting, performed with total conviction by all arms of the state, with full cooperation of cultural institutions, academia, and the press, in a manner that infects all aspects of public life.
To be critical of Israel or even acknowledge the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is to be antisemitic, and therefore to be blacklisted. Universities, institutional galleries, and museums are righteously, intransigently complicit. Artist-run centers and cultural collectives have been defunded. Artists’ exhibitions and residencies have been canceled. Academics’ guest lectures and visiting appointments have been revoked. Writers’ awards have been rescinded. The search committee for Documenta 16 has resigned en masse over fabricated open-letter scandals. The Berlin culture minister attempted to make state arts funding contingent on declared support for Israel. In Saxony-Anhalt, one of the AfD’s strongholds, declared support for Israel is a prerequisite for citizenship, a move that is being considered across all German states.
Since October 7, each of my artist and academic friends and acquaintances involved with German cultural institutions have encountered some attempted blockade of their work on suspicion of their political convictions, and every challenge to it has been met with an unyielding “just following orders” self-protectionism. Grassroots activism and clandestine resistance from within is taking place and claiming small victories. But this is not simply a political confrontation. It is an engagement with a national psychosis. Officially, the “resigned chuckle” persists and has become all the more duplicitous as it is issued from the places that are meant to be ambassadors of free artistic and critical expression. Whether deliberate or not, the practical outcome is clear: in its zealous deplatforming, Germany is in the process of assembling a list of degenerate artists and thinkers, and the future landscape of German culture and thought is looking decidedly homogenous. Or, in the language of the ghosts, pure.
Pervatory was written eleven years ago, and the ghosts that Martin deems too complicated to face, who haunt him, fuck him, undo his sanity, and eventually try to murder him are, at the moment of the novel’s publication, not ghosts anymore. The hoped-dead and prayed-to-be-forgotten former self of Germany has risen, and its primal prejudices have proved infectious. If Richard wrote Pervatory today, it would be a zombie novel.
