The Cold Centre

Hello Gentle Reader

The twentieth century certainly must have been one of the most innovative, progressive and tumultuous centuries of recent memory. The world had fallen into place, and fallen apart simultaneously. Countries were divided; new ones formed from the divisions; independence was at hand; and eventual annexation and amalgamation would take place. Governments formed. Governments were dissolved. War brought the world to its knees. It would be a war that at the time was deemed to end all wars. What subsumed was tragedy. Trench warfare brought the opposing armies into stalemates. Despite the innovations of technology and science, at the time warfare had not adapted to the new tools implanted. War was still chivalrous. Yet it was not the only war to be; and by far did not end the concept of war; but was merely a precursor to the changing dynamics of war. From here peace came; but only in the form of a world ravaged by human destruction. Work – none to be found. Yet the twentieth century progressed into new forms of expression as well. Where the Victorians first began to experiment in new artistic measures, and expression, their theories carried on into other disciplines and opened up a new world of creative possibilities, which were outlaid in manifestos: Surrealism, Dadaism, cubism, and futurism. Modernism did away with the concepts of a novel, in the late nineteenth century. Yet it founds its final maturation in the early twentieth century, with acclaimed authors that included Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The novel was taken away from the societal realms and bleak realism; and probed with new found psychoanalytical theories the concept of the human mind; and the literary mode of expression was to become such a medium to explore characters via thought and internal workings – rather than action and external dialogue. Modernism reassessed society after the horrors of the First World War. What would soon come as modernism started to lose its sway on the world, would be yet another grand tragedy that would scar the world, stain human history and show mankind how innovative it was; but also how innovation is equally destructive as it is altruistic. With the outbreak of the Second World War, one realized that peace was not at hand, and possibly never will be. In this time period, the chivalry of war was lost. The world had progressed towards production of tanks, which appeared to be unstoppable and unbreakable. Rockets showed the possibility of space being no longer unattainable or unreachable – but a possible new heavenly frontier to explore. Destruction was less tragic; and more easily acquired. Bombings were a present fact of day to day life – relentless and without discrimination. When the Second World War ended however, we saw what terror truly looked like. War on its own was a dreadful; but what was soon discovered after the war, was how mankind could cross the line between human and monster, without looking back. What no one knew at the time was: how little distance lied between the two. Society and mankind was forced to look into the atrocities that had taken place, with systematic and meticulous planning. How death became a factory. How countries were sustained via the use of slave labour. We realized that beneath the uniforms, beneath the armour, the guns, the bullets – beneath the entire machine called ‘War,’ there was a nihilistic seed waiting to be watered, and when it is given water and sunlight, one is willing to do anything. People looked into the hollowed eyes of survivors. They gazed into the blank stares of the victims. What stared back was the abyss. But also a plea: never let this history repeat itself.

Yet this was just the start of realizing our own acquired concept of power, which was endowed to human beings in this century. Society realized, that the end of times did not mean celestial apocalypse or biblical Armageddon. The end could be brought on by human hands. It came in the form of a red button, which could be mistakenly pushed. After the Second World War postmodernism came into being. It viewed mankind’s great potential of doing good, with skeptical eyes; realizing how easy it was to revert to animalistic and advanced draconian measures for some cause, for some reason, for some ideology. The twentieth century moved forward. Progression continued, and so did the world. The world had become split, not just by borders and countries, but also by ideologies. Such ideas became sources of power and of paranoia. This had led to a golden age of espionage and covert affairs.

In “The Paris Review,” German writer Jenny Erpenbeck writes of her memories of: “living on the edge of the world,” where the Berlin wall once stood, that became the physical barrier and barricade, which had separated the world. A world divided by opposing ideologies, where one was bathed in the gray light of communism: a ideology of utopian concepts, which had found itself corrupted by power and control; and that of capitalism: a ideology of freedom both economically and personal, that found itself contorted and manipulated in a manner, which abused freedom to fill one’s own pockets. With the fall of the Berlin Wall Erpenbeck wrote of new words being thrown around: freedom, independence, and unification. Yet it soon became clear that the divide was not just a physical wall; but an attitude that many on opposing sides could not grapple with. Freedom to travel, expression, and to shop – became uncertain nightmares that disrupted what was once daily life. The world that once sat on the edge of the world had been pushed over the edge. The question would be, would it fall into place or would it fall apart. This is the world that Inka Parei writes about in “The Cold Centre.”

Location becomes a character in itself for Inka Parei. Her three published novels each take place in the former GDR, and deal with the recent history of Germany. The “Cold Centre,” itself deals with the manufacturing of cold to sustain the publication of “Neues Deutschland,” and the ideology that it was to openly propagate. It was to spread the propaganda like pollen – only on the wings of paper and in letters of ink. The novel is narrated by an unnamed man in the first person. He was a refrigerant technician. His job like his co-workers: maintain the desired temperature for the press of “Neues Deutschland,” as it fulfilled its own duty, by manufacturing ideology and propaganda to spoon feed the populace into continually have hope and praise the system in which they were forced to live under.

The novel moves between the present and the past. Parei writes of a lost world in “The Cold Centre.” A world of a forgotten and failed political system. A world of pipes that dripped with condensation. A background of blinking lights – solid green lights, lights that would turn red when errors occurred and emergencies were in motion; as well as large black switches. The descriptions of the turbines, compressors, and the loud running machines, reminded me of the ammonia plants of hockey rinks. How the concrete floor would shake when the plant ran: compressors operational, turbines out of sight spinning, belts vibrating. The pipes coloured to code; and labeled accordingly. Steam pouring out of the building. The difference: the plants in the hockey rinks were to maintain ice; where the cold centre of this novel was to maintain the operation and distribution of ideology. – In the present this former world has since been destroyed. The buildings were antiques of time that did not need to be praised or remembered. The people of the east where to step out of grey light of their oppression, and to step into the neon lights of a new world with promises of freedoms: freedom of expression, to travel, and to shop. Despite the physicality of the world being united different perspectives and understandings of the world still remained. As the narrator points out conflicts arose from individuals ingrained views of the world:

“I was ashamed at having worked there. It made no difference in this context that I’d been a simple worker, not responsible for the newspaper’s content. The reason for my feeling was not the fact I’d been so close to a political system that is now widely rejected. It was that I hadn’t realized that at the time, I’d been a part of something without understanding what it was and without seeing the slightest need to think about it—just as children feel at one with their surroundings they grow up in, consider them the norm.”

“The Cold Centre,” is a novel that scours the personal past of an individual, as he tries to understand the repercussions of his past, as well as the system, and how despite the attempts of destroying this old world – continue to find ways to exist or lest leave their mark. Such as the “Neues Deutschland,” large brass ND remaining on the old building, because the letters were too heavy to move. Yet the novel is compressed, as our narrator attempts to organize and investigate his past workspace, and his old co-workers to try and understand why someone he cares about his suffering from cancer. Bringing to light how the Chernobyl disaster was not just quarantined to one area, but found its contaminating irradiated touch far into the world of the Iron Curtain. The novel probes how the past – despite the landscape changing or being removed; still creeps into the present. As the novel shows, it can creep in with questions regarding the past, and the claustrophobia of the past collapsing, disintegrating and being demolished – while questions of the present still required to be answered.

“The Cold Centre,” is a novel that probes personal history via the larger historical moments. It is a novel that surrounds itself in location, to offer both atmosphere but also understanding of the conditions of life. Landscape, space, and place – become characters in themselves; they become external forces that influence and offer answers about the characters. The language is sparse, matter of fact. The shifts of time come abruptly, but eventually coherent and as the novel comes to its own close. Inka Parei asks the question of how a city that existed on the edge of the world, made due and survived after being pushed over that edge – did it truly neatly fall back into place, or did that old world just fall apart, while the new world reunited with it, to become whole once again.

“Just as I had before, I now lived in a world filled with people, with cities and streets, schools and government offices and with nature, with which I was fairly familiar. And almost all those things were referred to using words I knew. But if the same language was used in such different worlds, could I trust that language?”

How does on collapse after their world is pushed over the edge, and is sent plummeting into the end? For Herta Müller, when she was in Romania she was: the German; when she arrived to West Germany she was: the Romanian. Did and do such divides for this ‘homecoming,’ and reunification still linger in Germany and Berlin today. Are the divides between East and West, now perceptional divides, rather than the ideological ones that had separated and segregated?

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M. Mary