The Barbarity of Sabaton
"I am not responsible", says the kapo. "I am not responsible", says the officer. "I am not responsible". Who is responsible then?
WARNING: Below there are mentions and Images of the Holocaust
Introduction
And I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings mauldin music about Vietnam being unbearable I find that really it is the song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.
- Theodor Adorno on Vietnam protest music
Adorno is sometimes misquoted as saying ‘it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz.’ This is an oversimplification, and in some manner he walked it back in his later work ‘Negative Dialectics.’ What he writes at the end of ‘Cultural Criticism of Society’ is:
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
- Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society
The point he is making is that cultural criticism is becoming completely absorbed by the culture industry, its function is becoming to denote what is and is not good. Cultural critics are becoming free advertisers, even the justifiers of the culture industry. This is essentially the function of the film review. Hence, the task of cultural criticism is to “decipher the general social tendencies which are expressed in these [cultural] phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realise themselves. Cultural criticism must become social physiognomy.”1 It must become the opposite of reified conscious, cultural criticism needs to be able to point out the domination of society by the culture industry. This is what separates criticism from analysis. Cultural analysis or media analysis might look at a film like Barbie and point out its feminist themes, treating the object like a work of art separate from the structure that produces it. Criticism on the other hand ignores any aesthetic function the object of Barbie may hold and goes straight to the analysis of its role within the culture industry. Whilst at the same time making sure not to reify it to the extent that it possesses some unique role or is the only cause of ideology. In short, cultural criticism always looks at structures and power relations rather than the aesthetics of works.
Vietnam protest music rarely points out the actual horrors of war, despite supposedly being anti-war. It is designed to be easy listening, to maybe get you to reflect on the situation but never to be horrified. Songs like ‘give peace a chance’, ‘ride on the peace train,’ ‘war’, and others sing about having peace and war generally being bad. These all mischaracterized the situation. The north Vietnamese had two ways home, victory or death. The war to them is not the same war waged by the Americans. The protest music takes the same position of many high status liberal opinionises towards the end of the war, that it was fought for noble causes but has been mismanaged and is going on far too long.2 The cause was no longer just. Bourgeois artists like John Lennon can sing about peace whilst the Vietnamese have their homes burnt by napalm. There is a degree of separation to the horror that the music produces in the act of consumption. The protest music attempted to raise consciousness through consumption. Many of the songs don’t even call for political action either, they just make statements about the situation. There is also the problem of form v content. A song like ‘Fortunate Son’ in terms of content, the song is obviously about the inequality of capitalist society and the violence of American imperialism. If it was a poem, no one would dispute this because you’d only have the words. Due to the form it takes of a rock song it slowly became a pro American anthem about killing Vietnamese people from a Huey helicopter. Helped in no small part I presume by its inclusion in Call of Duty Black Ops 1. The form is the problem, the manner in which it was created allows it to lose its original meaning. I still agree with Adorno, though, that Fortunate Son and other songs allow for the horrors of the Vietnam War to turn into a consumable product. I can drive to my job at Raytheon whilst listening to ‘give peace a chance’ because the act of consumption requires no thought.
Sabaton and History
I used to like Sabaton, then I stopped being 15. Sabaton are a Swedish power metal band, one of the biggest power metal bands, who sing about the history of wars. Chronologically, their music ranges from Ancient Sparta to the Iraq War. Most of their music is about the 2 world wars, though. Most recently they released back to back albums on WW1, and before that WW2 was the one topic sung about the most. Broken down album by album from their modern period:
Coat of arms - 8/10
Art of war 6/10
Primo Victoria - 3/10
Attero Dominatus - 3/9
Carolus Rex is no WW2
Heroes is all WW2
Last Stand is 2/10
Whilst they do sing about more, no one conflict is sung about more than WW2. Unlike Vietnam protest music, they make no pretensions to political content. They are an apolitical band singing about apolitical topics like war. War is treated as just war, it is rendered non-ideological because they sing from ‘the soldiers’ perspective.’ They remove the objective content of war and only deal in the subjective. This leads to some interesting problems I will cover later. Also like CCR they also have difficulties with form v content, but when it comes to meaning even their content can be misinterpreted. Firstly, in terms of form, they’re a metal band, so they make metal songs. Not good metal music like Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed but bad metal music like Metallica. This means that their songs are usually intense, fast-paced, loud, usually verse/chorus/verse/chorus/guitar solo/bridge/chorus. When you don’t want to glorify war, a bad form to use would be metal music considering it sounds like the glorification of war. From Carolus Rex, the one album I think is actually pretty OK, ‘Gott Mit Uns’ sonically presents a glorious victory in war and is followed by the first sad ballad on the album ‘a lifetime of war’ about the 30yrs war. Carolus Rex is the exception as it's about the rise and fall of the Swedish Empire and since it ends on the fall with Charles XII’s death it ends on sad songs. Personally I think it's their only anti-war album as instead of mostly upbeat songs about ‘badass warriors’ fighting war it includes multiple tracks about the suicidal dreams of Charles XII. On albums like ‘Coat of Arms’ and ‘Heroes’ and ‘The Art of War’ the sad songs are always followed by more upbeat and intense tracks. The listener is removed from thought about the sad content of what they just heard, and are immediately placed back into the standard of Sabaton’s intensity. An example of content being mistaken is the title track from their 2016 album ‘The Last Stand’ sometimes being interpreted to be about the crusades presumably because of lyrics like ‘for the grace of the might of the lord, in the name of his glory, for the faith for the way of the sword gave their lives so boldly.’ The song is actually about the last stand of the Swiss Guard during the sacking of Rome in 1527. A no less embarrassing interpretation than Fortunate Son being pro-American as the opening lyric is ‘in the heart of the holy see’, crusades to the holy land ended in 1291 and the last lyric is ‘come and tell the Swiss Guard’s story again.’ Goes to show their educational value. That is because they are not educational in themselves. In the run to their 2018 album The Great War, they started the Sabaton History YouTube channel that covers the backstory of the songs they make. You do not actually learn much from the songs themselves, although it varies. In The Last Stand you don’t learn anything about what happened except there was an event in 1527 and if you listen closely that they’re fighting an army of deserters. In Aces in Exile, you do learn that non British pilots were involved in the Battle of Britain. There’s also the much broader problem that knowledge of disconnected battles and events doesn’t actually tell you anything about history itself. There is so much more to the world than the wars that happened, so it is not true that you learn about ‘history’ through Sabaton only get told about events in wars. Sabaton’s entire catalogue can pretty much be replaced by Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘A Worker Reads History:
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Philip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.
- Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History
Sabaton and the Nazis
"I am not responsible", says the kapo. "I am not responsible", says the officer. "I am not responsible". Who is responsible then?
- Alain Resnais, Night and Fog
Sabaton has a mixed relationship with the Nazis. Not because they are Nazis, but due to the manner in which they sing about the Nazis. They have several songs from the Nazi perspective, and here I’m using Nazi to refer to the German army, not just the government. Otherwise, it would be two songs about the Nazis and Eight about the army. The worst of their songs, 'The Final Solution’ is about The Holocaust. The song is cringe-inducing in how they try to make a metal song about the horror of The Holocaust; it is deeply uncomfortable. It opens with a ridiculous cheesy synth instrumental that plays the melody of the chorus, and in writing their song about The Holocaust they still include a guitar solo which leads into a synth solo. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”3 It is misplaced to condemn black artists for making art about racism or Holocaust survivors writing poetry about Auschwitz. This is not that.In their history video on the song their bassist Pär Sundström talks about the profound effect going to Auschwitz has on a person. that emotional reaction is not present in this song. The possibility of creating entertainment about The Holocaust and I think the filmmaker Michael Haneke has a good argument against it:
Well, first of all, I have to say that I argued with Bernd Eichinger about the film [Downfall]. I think this movie is disgusting. And dumb. For a reason: You can't humanise a figure with that much historical context behind it to start a melodrama that might perhaps move some people – but what is being moved? Which emotions are moved why? If you choose such a topic you have to think about it what it means for the spectator. And the question of responsibility not only concerns the responsibility in relation to the subject being treated, but first and foremost the responsibility to the viewer: To what extent do I give the spectator the opportunity to be independent and not manipulated? Responsibility is always a matter of manipulation. The question is, how seriously do I take the viewer as a subject? How much opportunity do I give him/her to be involved in a communication with the work? Am I just postulate my opinion and try to force my opinion on the spectator, or on the contrary, am I taking the spectator seriously and providing him/her with the means of creating and forming their own opinion? That's a fundamental question, whether you're dealing with Hitler or simply an individual who you've written for the script."
"Would you make a film about Hitler?"
"No."
"Why?"
"For that reason. Perhaps I'll sit myself into hot water here, but I think a film like Spielberg's about the concentration camp is also wrong. You cannot create a moment of suspense out of whether gas or water will come out of the shower. In my opinion, this is the wrong approach. There's one movie about Holocaust - “Nuit et brouillard” by Alain Resnais – which approaches the topic in this way: What's YOUR opinion? You, the spectator? What is your position? As soon as such a subject becomes entertainment, it is, in my opinion, out of discussion."
- Michael Haneke being asked about the depiction of historical tragedy in film
Night and Fog is the only film that needs to exist about The Holocaust because it is not a piece of entertainment. It is a 35 minute documentary that is 80% archive footage of the Nazis and asks the viewer what this means to them.
Who among us keeps watch over this strange watchtower to warn the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?
- Alain Resnais, Night and Fog
Sabaton takes the opposite route. The Holocaust is presented like any other event in history. They make no direct reference to the actual victims, only to Kristallnacht which if the listener is unaware of there would be no reference to whom the victims were. Who was to be blamed [for the depression in Germany] and sent to die? The song asks, we know who was blamed and who were killed. It was the Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, communists, disabled people, Slavs etc. They have even made The Holocaust apolitical. Only in the lyric and history video do they make reference to the victims. The most important part of The Holocaust is who the victims were, it wasn’t just mass killing it was systematic industrial genocide of groups they wanted to be wiped out, especially Jewish people. This is the real barbarism of Sabaton, not only have they turned The Holocaust into a consumable metal song, they have stripped the victims of their place in history.
Every other song is about the Nazi army. I say Nazi army for a good reason, this is the problem of the ‘soldier’s perspective I mentioned earlier.’ Subjectively, soldiers and the generals might disagree with the Nazi’s ideology, in their video for the song ‘Wehrmacht’ they do mention this and also that objections didn’t lead to action. Objectively, however, they’re fighting for The Holocaust, that is their goal, that is what Nazi victory looks like. Everyone in the Nazi army is fighting for the Nazi cause. This does get mention in their music like in Ghost Division, a song about Erwin Rommel’s tank division in France, they sing ‘Massive assault made to serve the Nazi plan.’ A rare example of someone saying Rommel was fighting for the Nazi cause and not some strange abstraction of a non-Nazi ‘German cause.’ This contradiction between the objective and the subjective shows up most prominently in ‘The Last Battle’ about the battle of Castle Itter. The historical event is an ex Wehrmacht commander and ex SS officer joining Americans to free French prisoners from a castle occupied by an SS unit that hasn’t deserted. The Wehrmacht commander, Josef Gangl, earlier on in the war took part in the battle of Kyiv. The Nazi’s victory in the battle of Kyiv led to the Babi Yar massacre, where 33,000 Jewish people were killed in the first of many massacres and up to 150,000 people total. Of which the Wehrmacht took part. I don’t know if Gangl did, but the battle he was fighting led to this. If the Wehrmacht didn’t march into Belarus, 80-90% of the Jewish population wouldn’t have been killed. If the Wehrmacht didn’t march into Lithuania, 95% of the Jewish population wouldn’t have been killed. If the Wehrmacht didn’t fight the Nazi cause, The Holocaust couldn’t have happened. This is the other barbarity of Sabaton, by singing from the soldier’s perspective they remove the objective nature of their actions. They try to create a separation between the army and the Nazis. “I am not responsible", says the kapo. “I am not responsible”, says the officer. “I am not responsible”. Who is responsible then? In the song titled after the Nazi army, they ask ‘what about the men.’ I would respond, what about the men:
Conclusion
As I speak to you now, the icy water of the ponds and ruins fill the hallows of the mass graves, a frigid and muddy water, as murky as our memory. War nods off to sleep, but keeps one eye always open.
- Alain Resnais, Night and Fog
To return to cultural criticism, what does Sabaton’s music actually mean? It can only exist when the horrors of war are so separated from consciousness that people can think of it as respectful to sing about. At the end of Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes:
All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is rubbish. In restoring itself after the things that happened without resistance in its own countryside, culture has turned entirely into the ideology it had been potentially – had been ever since it presumed, in opposition to material existence, to inspire that existence with the light denied it by the separation of the mind from manual labour.
- Theodor Adorno, Night and Fog
Culture moved on, indeed the world had moved on and in doing so has no foot to stand on to say ‘never again.’ Sabaton have no right to say ‘never again’ when they do not even say what we want to never happen again. The Culture industry can turn any tragedy into consumption, from The Holocaust to The Vietnam War. That’s the real problem, Sabaton is just part of the same legacy as John Lennon and Black Sabbath, although there is a difference in their content. If horror can be replicated for easy consumption, if it remains at a distance from consciousness then it will lose its meaning. When influences take photos of themselves at Auschwitz, there is quick and righteous condemnation. When Sabaton sings about the Holocaust without mentioning the victims, it is ‘respectful.’ The actual meaning of ‘never again’ is not just as a phrase people use, but to ensure that the horrors of fascism can never again come to fruition. For normal people to happily participate in the pogroms, for the most vulnerable in society to be targeted and killed whilst the world takes a blind eye. For music like this to be possible is a condemnation of ‘never again.’ The horror of The Holocaust can never be represented in consumable form, and to do so is barbarism. I will end with the most powerful and important section of Minima Moralia written in 1944:
The idea that after this war life will continue ‘normally’ or even that culture might be rebuilt – as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism? As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the murdered. If as many of the others were killed, horror will be institutionalised and the pre-capitalist pattern of vendettas, confined from time immemorial to remote mountainous regions, will be reintroduced in extended form, with whole nations as the subjectless subjects. If, however, the dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, Fascism will, despite everything, get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Out of the firing-line [§33]
Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society. I don’t own a copy of Prisms were its printed
Noam CHomsky mentions it in this interview:
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum), p.362