Guy Batey | A Death Foretold

A Death Foretold

It began with a growing sense of foreboding. I started to feel that the signs of the past I found everywhere in Berlin were warnings that history could soon repeat itself. There was a pervasive sense of a world out of kilter, of something amiss.

Yet there didn’t apparently seem so much wrong with the world. Europe was full of confidence, and the political centre felt itself dominant and invulnerable. So I continued to take these anxious photographs, and put it all down to an over-active imagination and middle-aged gloom.

A few years on, and it’s hard to believe how much has changed. What, not so long ago, would have been unthinkable is now all too real. The far right is active across Europe, and around the globe, nationalism is spreading hatred and fear. The world and the liberal values I grew up with are beginning to look like a thing of the past.

What comes next is uncertain: it might not be as bleak as I fear. But always at the back of my mind are the words of Primo Levi, survivor of the Holocaust: ‘It has happened, therefore it can happen again.’

A Death Foretold was published by Silverhill Press in 2019. It's available here.