OCTOBER

Cairo

On 1 October, Hasan al-Banna sends a circular to all the Brotherhood’s administrative offices, in which he urges them to make ready for jihad. He sends a telegram to the Minister for Religious Affairs, asking him to remind the imams to speak at Friday prayers about the necessity of jihad.

In another telegram to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, he states that the Muslim Brotherhood sees no way to save Palestine other than by violence. He offers the Arab League 10,000 armed men ready for combat. The Brotherhood then sets up a number of recruiting offices for the defence of Palestine, and within two days over 2000 men volunteer in Cairo alone.

Moscow

The Soviet Union is a secret, even to itself. The bureaucracy spreads disinformation among the powerful at various levels of the hierarchy, and few know exactly what the others are up to. The outsiders who call themselves ‘the West’ know even less. They draw the erroneous conclusion that the USSR is still a long way off having an atom bomb of its own.

Deep inside the country, the harshest times are finally giving way to change. The famine that took the lives of over a million Soviet citizens in 1946 has eased. While there may not be enough food, there is at least some. Ration cards are withdrawn. Stalin stands on the pedestal of pedestals: no one is permitted to worship anything as they worship him.

1947 is a turning point. Not just because Mikhail’s weapon will soon be in all combatants’ hands, but also because the USSR now has the capacity to produce atom bombs. The first of these, RDS-1, is dubbed ‘First Lightning’.

On 10 October, Mikhail receives the official test results from the Soviet Army headquarters. His weapon has been selected for further development, together with two other models.

Mikhail simplifies and modifies the design. The weapon becomes lighter, has fewer components, can be subjected to rougher treatment without adverse effects. A weapon for an army of untrained men. An arm that doesn’t weigh too much, that never stops working, however many blows and however much dirt and wear it is exposed to. Cheap to manufacture. Not always the most accurate of weapons, but accurate enough, and capable of being adjusted to fire single rounds or for automatic fire.

That, in the end, proves to be the decisive factor. Now the device that bears his name is selected for mass production in the USSR’s armaments factories and is distributed throughout the Soviet armed forces. This weapon will adorn a country’s flag, it will be used by over 50 million people in liberation struggles and terrorist acts. One day, the best-known Russian word worldwide, apart from vodka, will be Mikhail’s surname — Kalashnikov.

Turin

Italian chemist Primo Levi’s year seems to be shifting shape, opening up into an affirmation.

Firstly, his serious-minded fiancée, Lucia, has been his beloved wife for a month now. Then Franco Antonicelli comes into his life, an anti-Fascist and poet in Turin who runs the small publishing house Francesco De Silva.

The publication of Primo Levi’s book — the description of his year as a slave labourer for IG Farben in Monowitz, Auschwitz — is going to become a reality. Maybe the days can become lighter now; maybe his body can slough off captivity and he himself can be free, at last? He is 28 years old, and he may even be happy.

Antonicelli, his publisher, changes the title of Primo Levi’s manuscript to Se questo è un uomo and sends it for printing. On 11 October, it comes out in a print run of 2500. Cheap paper, no advertising campaign to speak of, but at least it is there.

Turin’s middle classes show some interest; the odd review is written. And that is that. Nothing more. The book vanishes. The testimony remains unheard.

Stockholm

Nelly Sachs makes her debut as a poet at the age of 56.

A poet who is both new and age-old. New because no one has ever written as Nelly Sachs writes, not even Nelly Sachs. Age-old because in her new work she transcends the here, now, then, and soon. ‘Living under threat’, she writes, means ‘mouldering in the open grave, without dying.’

Homelessness. Neither German nor Swedish, neither Jew nor Christian, neither alone nor together: both, neither, and death flows beside everything. Nelly Sachs creates her homeland in the language of night, a place where neither history nor geography forms a boundary, and where the dead and the living walk past one another, beside one another, and exchange silences.

Someone must give a voice to that which no longer exists. Someone must give words to that which is wordless, embody that which is disembodied. In the tiny flat at the bottom of the building with squeaky pipes and hissing taps lives Nelly with her mother. Two women: the younger takes care of the older, while at the same time receiving signals from an absence and transmitting them in the form of poetry. An elegiac writer of remembrance? Memories of perceptions. Memories of extermination.

At night, the soul is not subject to the impact of the surrounding world; it is then that the stars exert their influence, and in our dreams another world appears that is otherwise invisible. At 23, Bergsundsgatan, under the meridian of the clothesline, she links herself with something that is no longer there, yet nonetheless exists. There she sits, as fragile as a memory herself, and conjures up the shades from among the dead, condensing them, making them visible as smoke.

She carries out German literature’s work of mourning, someone has said. The first to create art from absence, says another. The person who proves the need to write poetry after Auschwitz, says a third.

Her German-language debut, the anthology In den Wohnungen des Todes is reviewed on 13 October in Stockholms-Tidningen. The reviewer calls her a sister of Franz Kafka — the fourth, the spiritual sister, in addition to his three biological sisters who were murdered by the Nazis:

Accompanied by something reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s aloof smile, the anonymous suffering takes on a name and a shape. The author takes a step back, as it were, from her black-and-white images, allowing that which is human and limited to take its place among that which is unlimited and that which is beyond comprehension …

But Nelly Sachs is not a sister of Kafka. Her brothers in poetry will be quite different: Gunnar Ekelöf, 16 years younger, and Paul Celan, 29 years younger. In them she will find a sense of belonging, both wordless and rich in words. It is she, they, and lightning, breath, salt, wound. Eye, hand, throat, smoke, and ash.

Flight will be the metamorphosis that brings forth the poet Nelly Sachs. In the light of a stellar eclipse, she writes ‘the first letters in the wordless language’. Others will soon follow, but for now it is her, and her alone.

Rogers Dry Lake

Above the desert salt flats, an aircraft breaks the sound barrier. Few pilots think it possible; human beings are not made for speeds above the velocity of sound. But pilot Chuck Yeager shows they are mistaken, and that simultaneously breaks a consciousness barrier. Other things will be possible one day. What? Everything. Supersonic aircraft, progress, conquest.

Poland

The former Prime Minister and leader of the Polish Peasant Party, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, flees the country to escape prison and a death sentence on the grounds of alleged anti-Communist activities.

Cairo

Hasan al-Banna orders his Brotherhood to make ready for jihad. On Monday 20 October, the first battalion is already on its way to battle in Palestine.

Al-Banna and the Grand Mufti carry out a joint analysis of the Palestinian problem: individual states and their governments are not to intervene in any way other than through political and diplomatic channels. Should war become necessary, it will be up to the Palestinians themselves to wage it. The people of the Arab League nod in unanimity and stand by to pay. They call in more volunteers from all over the region, train and arm them.

Kashmir

22 October. The first war between India and Pakistan breaks out.

Hollywood

Billie Holiday’s director, Herbert Biberman, is questioned on 29 October by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Is he a member of the Communist Party? Is he a member of a certain trade union?

Together with nine of his colleagues, Biberman invokes his constitutional right to remain silent. The ten men wish neither to confirm nor to deny the charges. In contrast to other filmmakers under suspicion, they fight back. In the course of the public hearings, they accuse the House Committee on Un-American Activities of itself engaging in un-American activities. Every citizen has the constitutional right to belong to the political party of his or her choice, they argue jointly, and the whole basis for HUAC’s activities violates civil rights.

The ten men become known as the Hollywood Ten and attract a huge amount of publicity. All are blacklisted and banned from ever again working in Hollywood. They are given custodial sentences.

Billie Holiday doubts Herbert Biberman’s guilt. In her opinion, he should have screened New Orleans for HUAC’s benefit. With all that Uncle Tom stuff the movie contains, it would have demonstrated that Biberman is a good American.