What makes a society monstrous — and whom does it itself declare to be monstrous? Bernhardt is less interested in monsters as fantastical creatures than in what they make visible: social norms and boundaries, what is excluded and repressed, and those stories that find no place in official narratives. The novel’s “swamp” thus becomes a kind of counter-archive — a place where what has been forgotten or lost is preserved.

“We need to imagine the monster not only as a destroyer, but also as a creature of rescue. With a backpack on its spiny back, it wanders through time, from swamp to swamp, gathering up the shards, fuzzy remnants, and overlooked treasures — in the monstrous hope that they might survive the death of the old world,” Bernhardt writes.

The essay connects closely to Bernhardt’s research on haunting, memory, and the affective afterlives of violence. In his chapter “Haunting” in The New Key Concepts in Affective Societies, he asks how the past continues to reverberate in atmospheres, bodies, and feelings — and how the present and the future can be understood through the traces of what has never fully disappeared.

Şeyda Kurt was also a guest in 2024 in Bernhardt’s CRC-supported discussion series UNTER UNS: von Geistern, Dschinns und Monstern at the Roter Salon of the Volksbühne. Fittingly, their conversation focused on monsters.