War returns on covers as literature counts survival

War and – The latest issue of Ord & Bild brings Muhammad Ali’s stark artwork and essays that braid war, storytelling, and survival—from the wars that shaped Western classics to Sweden’s NATO shift, 9/11’s cinematic afterlife, and Charlotte Delbo’s theatre of memory.

War is back on every screen. and the newest issue of Ord & Bild meets it head-on—before you even read a word. Across the cover. the red titles look like a warning scratched into the dark: ‘War – The Poetics of Survival – Dark Times’. Behind them sits Syrian artist Muhammad Ali’s black-and-white drawing of exploded arms and debris.

The images that follow don’t offer comfort or explanation—just movement. chaos. and distinct human forms. sketched in a way that makes the logic hard to read. It’s the same kind of disorientation the issue’s essays return to from different angles: war doesn’t only break bodies and cities; it strains the ability of language to hold what’s happening.

Mattias Hagberg opens with a long arc of Western literature shaped in the shadow of war. The starting point is The Iliad, where cruelty and hate are catalogued in poetry. Stendhal’s account of the Napoleonic wars appears as a turn: “it is as though a vulnerable power has come loose in the text”. Hagberg writes that the breakdown of narrating war becomes sharper with the mechanized wars of the twentieth century. where modernist and postmodernist literary reckonings seem to circle the same problem again and again.

Drawing on the media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Hagberg singles out Alexander Kluge’s WWII novel Air Raid (1964) as an overlooked masterpiece. He describes it as a gathering of documents. fragments. and information—something literature might still need. he suggests: “to collect the debris that war is now spreading across the world”. The essay ends with a fragmentary item from last year: “Sweden buys air defence systems for nine billion crowns”.

In a section devoted to Sweden. Rolf Almström looks at what the country’s rapid entry into NATO means for the story Sweden tells about itself. The Swedish military claims it is defending democracy and freedom. but Almström argues that what it is really defending is territory. He insists it is up to citizens to defend democracy and freedom. yet that task has been made harder by changes to Sweden’s constitution that outlaw speech or actions that can damage Sweden’s relationship with another state or international organization.

The issue doesn’t treat this as a purely political dispute. Almström also writes that preparing for war brings its own damage. Modern war, he says, always includes sexual violence and staggering civilian casualties—damage that doesn’t need permission from a constitution to arrive.

Then comes Saga Cavallin, tracing how fiction can sprint ahead of reality. The 9/11 aftershocks, she writes, didn’t come from nowhere. Hollywood had already blown up hundreds of skyscrapers in Manhattan, in effect preparing people for the inevitable. Cavallin argues that the death drive of such fantasies is pornographic and erotic. She quotes radical feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin: “Porn is the theory and rape is the practice.” In this framing. terrorism becomes the rape of people and architecture.

Cavallin looks closely at Taxi Driver, too—especially the way the movie inspired John Hinkley Jr. to attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan in a vain attempt to get closer to Jodie Foster. whose picture he carried in his pocket. The essay then pulls the lens into a specific street scene: Cavallin standing in October 2024 on 5th Avenue among tourist shops selling t-shirts of Trump with a bloody ear and the quote ‘Never Surrender!’ alongside t-shirts of Harris and I HEART NY. Those shirts, she writes, reveal a self-awareness about turning politics into images and memes, and she finds it unsettling.

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl returns to the relationship between fiction and reality—but this time through the life and writing of French writer and dramatist Charlotte Delbo. Delbo. a member of the Resistance. survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and later published memoirs that. the issue notes. are less well known than the work of Primo Levi. Jean Améry. or Elie Wiesel. yet still highly influential.

Hagström-Ståhl focuses on Delbo’s brief stay in Sweden after she was rescued from Ravensbrück by the Swedish Red Cross’s famous White Busses. Delbo made her way to Stockholm and to Agne Beijer. who had discovered Drottningholms Slottsteater’s 18th century wooden stage machinery. Delbo mentions viewing the set for Orpheus, the same scenery Hagström-Ståhl sees in a 2025 production of the play.

Eurydice’s journey to the underworld can sound picturesque beside Delbo’s journey through the concentration camps. But Hagström-Ståhl argues that theatre is what allowed Delbo to make her experiences come to life. She ties Delbo’s work to Adorno’s claim that it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. and she spells out the wager Delbo takes: “artistic representation is both inadequate and the only means by which we can do justice to experience”. Experience. in this account. must be poetically worked through if it is to make sense—and with the help of her fantasy. Delbo survived the concentration camps.

Review by Joel Duncan

Ord & Bild Muhammad Ali war and literature poetics of survival Sweden NATO air defence systems Charlotte Delbo White Busses Taxi Driver John Hinkley Jr. Jodie Foster Ronald Reagan Adorno