The Century of Soap and Barbie

It’s not obvious where Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century belongs. It isn’t a novel, not really, though it reads like one. It’s not quite history, either, though it’s densely packed with facts. Of dates, body counts, euphemisms, official slogans. First published in Czech in 2001, a decade after the collapse of state socialism, and translated¹ into English in 2005, it was written by Patrik Ouředník, a Prague-born dissident and satirist who defected to France in the ’80s and made a career translating Rabelais, Beckett, and Queneau. It’s a literary trinity that makes sense: Rabelais’s grotesque satire, Beckett’s deadpan absurdity, and Queneau’s formal games all echo through Europeana’s voice and structure. Europeana is part grotesque civic primer, part anti-humanist prose poem. It comes at the twentieth century not to explain it, but to hold it at arm’s length and list its insanities in a way that sounds, by turns, like a bored tour guide, a Party functionary, or the auto-narration from a failed museum audio guide. The lights still flicker on. The system still plays the loop. But no one’s left to care.

It is fitting that Europeana begins not with ideology or innovation, but with corpses. Measured, then lined up, totalled kilometre by kilometre like a logistical supply chain. The Americans who died in Normandy stretch across 38km, the Germans 3,010km, and the French 2,681km. The average corpse is said to be 172cm long. “A total of 15,508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide.” Ouředník’s deadpan autopsy of the European century begins here: a bleakly hilarious, formally unbroken litany of genocidal absurdity, ideological flatulence, and historical detritus rendered in faux-pedagogical prose. It is the history book as fever dream. Written in the shadow of the eternal flame that commemorates the unknown soldier but illuminates nothing.

The 20th century, we are told, may have started with World War I. Or the industrial revolution. Or Darwin. Or the general theory of relativity. It hardly matters. In Ouředník’s telling, nothing holds together for long. Least of all historical causality. Capitalism, fascism, Communism, eugenics, psychoanalysis, Barbie, Scientology, Auschwitz, microwave ovens, the Moon landing, and tampons. All flattened into the same syntactic register: recursive, affectless, deliberately banal. The delivery is not so much satirical as hollowed out, the voice of a civilisation explaining itself to an alien intelligence that already knows how it all ends.

If the Enlightenment began with the dream of self-mastery, Europeana shows us what remains when that dream is handed over to logistics. The bureaucratised will to order. The book is haunted by two key figures: the corpse and the consumer. The former piles up in trenches, gas chambers, and mass graves; the latter appears in the form of dolls, soap, and psychoanalytic patients convinced that their trauma has market value. There is no redemptive arc here, only a catalogue of substitutions. Responsibility becomes efficiency. Memory becomes spectacle. Mourning becomes Barbie in a concentration camp uniform.

All That Was Solid

The century’s grand narratives are parodied through brutal juxtaposition. The ideals of democracy are presented next to the spread of contraception. Atomic theory appears alongside shampoo. The Holocaust shares a paragraph with an American soldier gone mad because he was told the soap he was using had been made from the fat of his Jewish mistress. Women’s emancipation is linked to the brassiere, and the brassiere to the paradox of “coercive freedom.” Postmodernism appears as a punchline to Dadaism. “People were not so worried about the end of the world,” Ouředník writes, “as about a breakdown of electronic systems that would disable television and VCRs and microwave ovens.”

There is a moral claim here, albeit obliquely made: that the century’s brutality was not an exception to modernity but its logical expression. Ouředník does not shout this. He doesn’t need to. The text’s power lies in its refusal to explain what it relentlessly describes. A reader expecting argument will be frustrated. A reader trained in critical theory will find the silence deafening. It is Marx’s aphorism “all that is solid melts into air” rewritten as bureaucratic inventory, cold, affectless, absurd.

Genocide and the Grammar of Progress

The most harrowing pages. Those on the Holocaust, the sterilisation programmes, and the eugenic logic of the Nazis. Are written in the same flat, affectless cadence as those about television or sports. The horror is not dulled by the tone; it is intensified by it. Ouředník tells us that mattresses were stuffed with the hair of gas chamber victims, that soap was made from their fat, and, most grotesquely, that a Barbie doll appeared in a striped concentration-camp uniform. He offers no commentary. The line simply lands: “And a Barbie doll appeared dressed in a striped concentration-camp uniform with a number on her arm and a yellow star.” The doll isn’t real, but it doesn’t need to be. The image functions as a parodic indictment of how memory is commercialised, how atrocity is laundered through kitsch. In a culture where everything is up for sale, even genocide is made palatable, packaged for the toy aisle.

One suspects that Baudrillard would have recognised a kindred logic in Europeana—not just in its content, but in its form. The text is a kind of hyperreal artefact: a simulation of historical narration in which meaning collapses under the weight of data. Nothing is analysed, only listed. Memory is no longer of events, but of memory itself.

There’s also something Adam Curtis-like about Europeana. The clipped detachment, the pattern of accumulation without explanation, the way horror and banality blur into each other. Like a Curtis montage without the words, music or voiceover, the book assembles facts until they stop making sense. Until all that’s left is the systems that produced them. If Curtis shows us how history was edited into ideology, Ouředník shows us what it looks like once ideology collapses under its own weight. Curtis exposes the machinery behind belief. How power edits history into something legible, persuasive, and usable. Ouředník arrives after belief has collapsed. What he offers is not a counter-narrative, but the static that’s left once narrative itself has broken down.

In its method and tone, Europeana is often Pynchon-esque: history rendered as absurd mechanism, a catalogue of facts and horrors in which atrocity and innovation sit side by side without hierarchy. But where Pynchon’s paranoid men stumble through plotlines in search of meaning, Ouředník dispenses with characters and narrative altogether. There is only the sound of the century itself. Deadpan, encyclopaedic, mordantly absurd.

Europeana doesn’t rank events; it flattens them. Not out of relativism, but as provocation. The horror is that genocide and gadgetry, eugenics and chewing gum, all end up on the same bureaucratic plane. The historical system on trial here is one that transforms everything into efficiency: from the “optimization” of racial stock to the statistical cost-benefit analysis of asylum seekers. The human being appears as something to be engineered, surveilled, improved, and, when necessary, eliminated.

The Memory of Memory

One of the book’s most quietly searing insights is that the 20th century does not just produce history. It produces memory. Not memory as resistance, but memory as commodity and image. As Debord might have put it, the memory of the century survives only as spectacle—detached, aestheticised, endlessly replayable. Holocaust memorials proliferate. Dolls and movies stand in for testimony. Philosophers say we must “slow down history.” Sociologists debate whether stereotypes are the last repository of meaning. Testimony becomes recursive. “Some historians said that memory was no longer of events, but of memory itself.”

In Ouředník’s hands, memory is the last arena of ideological contestation. Because history, as a linear and rational narrative, is no longer possible. “History,” one might say, “has ended” not with triumph, but with a shrug.

In fact the text reads like a counterpoint—no, a eulogy—to Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Where Fukuyama saw the victory of liberal democracy as the final form of human government, Ouředník presents a world in which history hasn’t ended in triumph, but in accumulation: of corpses, euphemisms, gadgets, and slogans. If the Cold War’s close was supposed to usher in rational progress, Europeana instead catalogues a century so saturated with horror and kitsch that meaning itself collapses. Fukuyama wrote history as a narrative arc; Ouředník responds with the flatline of data. No hero, no endpoint, a civilisation addicted to procedure, allergic to mourning, and structurally incapable of reflection.

Sex and the Bomb

The final chapters blur into a carnival of postmodern kitsch. Film sex scenes shift from cornfields to cars to telephone calls. The Oedipus complex is debated alongside chewing gum and hair removal. Meanwhile, the Waffen SS engineers America’s space programme, and 528 million people watch the Moon landing as proof of “higher-quality interpersonal relations.”

What is left, in the end, is a civilisation obsessed with signs but indifferent to substance. Where rape victims and rocket scientists alike are memorialised in sculpture, but nothing changes. Where death is meaningful only if it can be archived or aestheticised. Where the central question—“Why?”—appears, at last, in thirty-nine languages carved into steel pylons for a Holocaust monument that cannot explain the thing it commemorates.

Conclusion: Posthumanist Kitsch

In its satirical flattening, Europeana suggests that the real terror of the 20th century is not its violence but its banality. That the worst atrocities were carried out not by monsters but by bureaucrats. This is not to say that ideology doesn’t matter. Rather, that ideology becomes management. Racial hygiene, factory efficiency, scientific modernisation, identity verification. The historical narrative becomes a data stream. The crime becomes procedure. The text doesn’t offer Marxist critique directly, but its method is dialectical in form: the synthesis of history and absurdity becomes the content of the posthuman condition.

Europeana is not easy to categorise. It’s too cold to be elegy, too ironic to be lament, too factual to be fiction. But it is, perhaps, the most honest book ever written about the 20th century. It doesn’t chart where we went wrong, but whether “right” was ever on the map.

Footnotes

1. Translated by Gerald Turner ↩︎