Karl-Magnus Johansson
Friends in Curriculum
. . . Ramberget was defining for me, to understand where I was, where I had arrived, said Glöckner. When you are at such a height, where you can look down and far away over the surrounding area, you perceive your location in a profound way. He sat down beside me on the park bench on the lightly snow-covered hill as he continued talking. And just walking around Ramberget, he said, filled my notion of home with numerous shades that were needed to understand what that notion meant to me. The modern residential towers near Wieselgrensplatsen, ‘the Manhattan of Hisingen’, as they were called by the newspapers at the time. Along the leafy walkways by the villas on the eastern hillside. Towards the south side of Ramberget, with its fertile soil. Rural labour alongside the old houses, not far from the modern industrial shipyards. Sauntering further clockwise, passing the houses and sheds of the Romani people, with all the cars they were busy buying and selling. I felt an urgent need to understand Gothenburg, to understand what home would be to me, and to recognise that the notion of home included the past, present and future. I came to love both the old marketplaces and dilapidated buildings of this city as well as the modern ambitions and the people who wanted to follow the trend of the day. Time is like a melody, said Glöckner. You can’t pause and understand it just by a note or a chord. That will not work. You have to understand time as constantly in motion and that the past, present and future are always connected in its ongoing, ever-changing harmonies. He started telling me more about his childhood in Latvia and Estonia, about the home he had that he was deprived of. About the cities he had lived in and the places he had been. He sometimes slowed down, but he would not stop talking. I was astonished by the energy he had and how natural our conversation felt, although it was almost completely a monologue. This time, unlike our first encounter six months earlier, he carried a little bag, and inside of it was a photo album. He took it out and started turning the pages. He never stopped to specifically show or talk about any single photograph. He just slowly and quietly kept turning the pages from spread to spread. As the images unfolded, I was able to see visual traces of his past that aligned well with the stories he had told me. There was a picture of Glöckner and his wife Edith in their home close to Wieselgrensplatsen, probably in the 1960s, but he did not point out even that picture or make any emotional remark about it. It was only as he neared the end of the album that he started talking. The last seven spreads were covered exclusively with pictures of the sea and the horizon. I worked so hard, said Glöckner. I aimed so high to find a home, to feel at home. Many times, I thought it was not possible, since there was an ocean between me and the place that I was brought up to know as my home. In my youth, the sea was the place where I worked—and lived—for four long years. And then, after leaving the Baltics, for so many years, the sea was the barrier between me and my own past. But since I started to photograph it, I realised that as specific as it can be, and as grand as it is, it will eventually only tell you one thing. That all is connected, and that anywhere can be your home. He closed the album and put it beside him on the park bench. He looked up, turning north to the buildings around Wieselgrensplatsen. Home, he said, is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there. I guess that this must be the place. He got up and walked away, faster than you think anyone his age would be able to. I let him go as I turned the other way, towards the river, and finally further west. Looking out over the sea towards the horizon, I was thinking about being uprooted and coming to a new place and about the trauma of having your notion of a home stolen from you. I realised Glöckner had carried such a trauma for a great deal of his life. A few minutes later, I found that Glöckner had forgotten his photo album. Or, perhaps, he deliberately left it there on the park bench. I knew there was no chance that I could find him. I did not know what direction he had gone, where he was going or where he had come from. Of course, I took the album with me. I could not have left it there on the cold wooden bench. In the coming months, even years, my efforts to find Glöckner’s whereabouts—to return the album to him—all failed. At first it caused me stress, but later on I came to terms with not finding him as I was certain I would meet him again—that he would just show up when I least expected it. But he never did.
*
In the spring of 2025, I was invited to give a lecture for the course called ‘Social Transformation’ at HDK-Valand in an old bank space at Wieselgrensplatsen. Besides the main topic of the occasion, which was archives—since I am an archivist and archival theorist—I was asked to also talk about my own relationship with Wieselgrensplatsen, where I had lived nearby for more than fifteen years. The initial and main part of the lecture came to be a personal story from the time when I was about to move to the area. The story was centred around two conversation-filled meetings with a charismatic old man called Arnold Glöckner, an emigrant born and raised in the Baltics who came to Sweden and Gothenburg in the 1940s, where he lived for decades a few blocks away from Wieselgrensplatsen. My talk was accompanied by a selection of Glöckner’s photographs. The end part of the story, presented as an excerpt above, was abruptly followed by a discussion about the German writer W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) and his distinctive style of prose. In Sebald’s novels, especially in the Emigrants (1992), and Austerlitz (2001), the protagonist—who the reader without hesitation believes is Sebald himself—meets individuals who tell their stories and who carry personal experiences of migration, displacement and living in exile. The author appears as a truth-teller who wants to expose what society had silenced, especially regarding the Holocaust. Another feature in Sebald’s work is the black-and-white photographs embedded in his novels. These can be seen as serving the conventional role of evidentiary documents, lending authenticity to the narrative and contributing to the reader’s immersion in the story. However, his documentary style of writing is indeed fiction, but fiction that relies on fragments of lived experiences preserved as photographs, documents or stories. His method is controversial and, after the release of his books, there have often been revealing moments when people made it clear that Sebald had borrowed or stolen stories or material from them. Still, his aim of carefully and with great seriousness approaching difficult questions could justify his way of writing. Sebald also shows how traces of the past, typically mediated as photographs, are used to construct versions of reality. By blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, he reveals that not only in his stories but in all histories representations of truth and reality exist only in their constructedness. Within the documentary style, perhaps to highlight the ambiguity of storytelling, Sebald’s novels always include enigmatic elements that encourage personal, critical engagement with the text, which arguably makes passive or superficial reading impossible.
Finally, after talking about Sebald’s work with the students, I revealed that I had used his method of including fragments of real lives in the story I had just told them about my two encounters with Arnold Glöckner some fifteen years earlier. Glöckner, whom I had never met, was indeed a very real person living as an emigrant in Gothenburg—just as told in my story—although he had died four years before the time of our first meeting as I had described it. Glöckner’s photographs—because they really were his photos—were not left at Ramberget after a conversation with me on a winter’s day. Instead, they were found and preserved after his death by a local historical society on Styrsö, where he had spent the last years of his life. Twenty years later, the photos were eventually handed over to the Swedish National Archives in Gothenburg, where they were digitised by GPS400: Centre for Collaborative Visual Research at the University of Gothenburg.
I apologised to the students for presenting them a made-up story and for using images by and details about Arnold Glöckner for the purpose of storytelling. The reason for my choice of lecture, which can by all means be ethically criticised, was twofold. I wanted to communicate how archives, even though arranged according to structural principles, appear as fragments with an unfixed way of reading, and that the stories we create by consulting and combining such fragments always come from outside the archive. But I also had a more personal motivation for my choice of lecture. In the year prior to the occasion, I had worked extensively with Glöckner’s 3,200 archived photographs, which at that time lacked any descriptive metadata. In addition to meticulously studying the images themselves to understand them better, I had dwelled into bureaucratic traces of Glöckner’s life in Sweden, such as taxation ledgers and his naturalisation file, to learn more about him. For every new trace I found, my understanding of him and his images changed and led me to acknowledge my own incapability of reading his images, of interpreting them. Hence, I wanted to give attention to a space of illegibility, by letting the enigmatic components of the story I presented I my lecture manifest a crucial awareness of our reading’s limits. As Christina Vatulescu, professor of comparative literature has suggested, “only when attuned to these challenges of illegibility can we learn to read ‘other-wise’.”