When Georgi Gospodinov was just awarded the Booker Prize for his novel “Time Refuge”, he wrote Guardians, it is “almost uncanny” how aptly this book sums up our epoch. That’s right, the Bulgarian author has succeeded in writing a parable about the dangers of nostalgic populism that is as oppressive as it is funny. But there are many books year after year that aptly summarize their respective times. But it gets really scary and at the same time impressive when you meet the author of this book for an interview and in the course of the conversation the streets in front of the café seem to be transformed into the scenery of his novel, the fictitious staff suddenly start to roar quite real out there and at the end a Nazi squad with a huge flag – but from the start.
It was June 22, 2022 in Sofia. In the morning it became known that the opposition would request a vote of no confidence in the new Petkov government in the evening. For the first time, she really tried to tackle the mafia-like corruption networks that have had the poorest country in the EU firmly under control for decades. Now the city was seething: Progressive forces had desperately called for a solidarity demonstration in front of Parliament in the early evening. As a result, the networks around former Prime Minister Boyko Borissov also called for people to come to parliament. Huge police forces were massed throughout the center.
At that time, Sofia was the end of a reportage trip through the whole of Europe, 20,000 kilometers, 33 borders, many languages, even more stories, always the question of what still holds the EU together. What was repeatedly noticeable on the trip was, on the one hand, an almost euphorically serious feeling of unity in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine. On the other hand, the influence of populist parties could be felt everywhere, each with its own national re-pupation into national myths and egoisms. There was the blazing hatred of all the nationalists who would love to stoke their respective campfires with the EU’s rubble. And there was a lot of throwbacks to some good old days. The greatest lack in this rich continent seemed to be that of a viable vision of the future.
obtained from Aufbau Verlag, website.
(Photo: Svetla Stoyanova/Aufbau Verlag)
Gospodinov cast exactly this lack of future in “Time Sanctuary” in a brilliant story: A psychiatrist creates clinics for Alzheimer’s sufferers from the past, the floors full of objects, smells, photos from the sixties, seventies, eighties, depending on which decade the patients are happiest have memories. For the first time since the onset of their illness, they feel at home somewhere in this backdrop of the past, as all the old objects trigger sediments of consciousness that were thought to have been buried long ago.
The highlight of the plot: There is a collective run on these clinics, after all the healthy people are now just as overwhelmed by the miserably complex present as the dementia patients. Rather snuggle up with your own memories than arm yourself for a bleak looming future. The clinics are spreading explosively, all countries are gripped by such violent waves of nostalgia that an EU-wide referendum on the past is held.
Unfortunately, each country can decide for itself in which decade it would like to establish itself permanently. The Italians plead for the sixties, Sweden chooses the seventies, in which they give thanks Abba and Ikea became world export hits, Germany longs back to the time before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when people lived their tranquil, prosperous existence in the windless shadow of history. However, as the countries seek shelter in their own nostalgia bubble, they are simultaneously drifting further apart.
During Trump’s presidency, he also noticed bizarre excesses of nostalgia in Bulgaria
Weeks earlier, Gospodinov had suggested the “Café Timeless” near the parliament for the meeting. Now, while he was talking about the dangerously sweet poison of nostalgia in the café’s courtyard, it was as if his novel had suddenly leaked, as if his fiction was leaking here in the center of Sofia and contaminating reality. He was just saying that he started the book after Trump’s surprising election success. “Something broke in time that day,” he says, “Something got wrong in the time.” For him, the scariest thing about Trump was his slogan: Make America Great Again. “More specifically, this one Again. Like filling the past with blood.”
At the same time, he noticed a lot of bizarre excesses of nostalgia in Bulgaria, from the revival of folkloric costumes to the boom in militaristic tattoos and huge medieval festivals to reenactments of historical battles: “Supposedly there are 100,000 functioning weapons in Bulgaria from the 19th century. That would be an army from the past, far greater than our current army.” And while he was talking about it, more and more traditionally dressed men streamed by outside, a bit like Tatar carnival or the annual meeting of Genghis Khan fans.
Gospodinov, looking after a squad of young men in paramilitary guise, said how strange it was that the Ukraine war “breaks out just when the last people who remember World War II are leaving us. As if everything had to work itself out repeat because we keep forgetting the elementary lessons”.
History repeats itself, not as a farce but as a reenactment
When asked ironically whether Gospodinov staged the whole scene out there for his interviewee, he said he was continually surprised by the overlaps of his book with reality itself. “You think up a dystopia and then it becomes a documentary after the fact.” One of the central images of the book is that of the virus of the past, which is spreading rapidly across the globe (“And then the past set out to conquer the world… It spread from person to person like an epidemic, like the Justinian Plague or the Spanish flu.”) The first lockdown because of the pandemic came right after the release.
When asked which decade Putin’s Russia would most like to return to, Gospodinov had an immediate answer: “He dreams of the heroic Soviet Union in the early 1940s, when the world stood by them in the fight against Nazi Germany.” His novel ends with hundreds of thousands of Europeans flocking to a historical spectacle on the Polish border to recreate September 1, 1939. History repeats itself, not as a farce but as a reenactment.
The demonstrators in the evening had to be separated from each other by huge police forces, in front of the parliament a middle-class audience with EU flags, a young woman in dreadlocks drew the NATO symbol on the street with chalk. Behind the parliament, however, the dark personnel from Gospodinov’s novel seemed to have gathered, priests with large crosses, strange costume ensembles, like extras from a Bulgarian farm museum, colorfully embroidered shirts, leather boots, curved daggers … And of course the obligatory troop of neo-Nazis, one had the SS -Runes on bare calf muscles, another wore a T-shirt with a giant swastika.
Since that day a year ago, since the fall of the Petkov government, there have been two elections, and there could be a third in the fall. Bulgaria is languishing, unable to manoeuvre. Boyko Borissov, who wrapped the country in thick felt during the years of his reign (the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has investigated 120 fraud cases in Bulgaria, almost 300 million euros are said to have disappeared from the state budget in the three legislative periods that Borisov ruled the country ), this Borisov is slowly but surely regaining power.
Meanwhile, nostalgic nationalism continues to thrive. Or as it says in “Time Refuge”: “There are countries whose only wealth is their own misfortune. The oil of melancholy is their inexhaustible resource.” This novel is really worth reading.