der mann ohne eigenschaften

About two years ago Swedish writer Sven Lindquist died. Since he was a writer that had meant a lot to me, I wrote one entry about him: Another type of celebrity death. When writing that entry I knew that I should have written more about racism and colonialism, since that was what he wrote about the last decades of his life. However, on those subjects. This year I have seen Sven Lindquist mentioned in articles about the HBO documentary series Exterminate all the brutes* and about the movie African Apocalypse. I haven’t seen the documentary, nor the film, it’s still like Lindquist, back in 1992 when the published a book with the same title as the HBO series: Exterminate all the brutes, was thirty years before his time? It’s even so that the trailer to Exterminate all the brutes quotes the book, and the French military expedition that’s the topic of African Apocalypse plays a big role in the book.

*Of course you might remember the phrase from Heart of darkness and/or from Apocalypse now.