Matthias Nawrat The Golden City

What remains of grand utopias? Matthias Nawrat travels to Skellefteå in Sweden, where Europe’s green future was envisioned through a giant battery factory—only to collapse. A literary reflection on hope, transformation, and the fractures of global dreams.

“By now, there is a general consensus that utopias are always a lost cause,” writes the author Per Olov Enquist in his 1992 essay Der Meteorsplitter ("The Meteor Fragment"). The essay is about some three thousand men and women who emigrated from northern Sweden to northern Argentina in 1911 – their dream of a better life in the jungle brought to an end by poverty and disease. “That utopia was not merely an impossible dream,” continues Enquist, “but rather a harmful and naive nightmare.” And yet the utopian vision of a better life did exist, “albeit not in the places where one might have expected it. One had to turn one’s gaze away from the usual focus, much like after being dazzled by the sunlight”.

From the plane, the countryside just before landing looks like the hide of a bison. Stretching to the horizon to the north and west, the forest – even though it is already early May – is a grey expanse, dotted with brown patches like tufts of fur. The plane begins its slow descent. Lakes now puncture the landscape.
The airport has a single runway. There are three flights a day to and from Stockholm, and – curiously – one to and from Danzig of all places. If a flight is delayed, the airport bus has to wait in front of the building, otherwise, new arrivals have no way of getting into town.

At the end of the 1970s, my father spent three summers working in the factory of a major beverage manufacturer in Stockholm. After just one month, he brought home more money than his father, the director of a Polish textile factory, earned in an entire year. From Poland, Sweden seemed like a utopia. Even today, when I stand on a Baltic beach in Poland and gaze out over the sea, I imagine a paradise beyond the horizon. I can’t help it; it’s as though it’s written in my mental DNA. On dark winter evenings in the prefab estate on the outskirts of Opole, in the mid-1980s, in that isolated, oppressed corner of Europe, the longing seeped through the membrane that separates a person from emptiness into the child’s dreams as a story of a better life, whispered by my parents at the kitchen table next door.

P. O. Enquist spent his childhood in Hjoggböle, a small village in northern Sweden about twenty minutes’ drive south of the town of Skellefteå, the heart of a region known for its forestry and mining. The region appears repeatedly in his novels, as do the small communities of the Moravian Brethren-influenced Revival Church, whose impoverished members resisted all attempts at organisation – whether by the state church or agitators of the 19th and early 20th century labour movement. Enquist’s father, a Social Democrat, worked in the summer as a stevedore in the port of Bureå and in the winter as a lumberjack. His mother was the village schoolteacher, “spiritually awakened” and deeply pious. Today, Skellefteå is also the home of Northvolt, a Swedish manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage systems, and thus the site of an entirely new European utopia.

The bus winds its way through forest for half an hour. Wooden houses occasionally shimmer between the tree trunks. A cleared patch appears, tree stumps jutting out of the earth. Spring has not yet come this far; on the birch branches, a faint hint of green is barely perceptible. After fifteen minutes, a gravel plant is visible through the trees. Slowly, signs of industry begin to emerge before us – BAUHAUS, Scania, Volkswagen, McDonald’s. We pass the first intersection, a roundabout. A person on an e-scooter glides along the cycle path. As the bus crosses the bridge over the Skellefte River, the city’s new landmark suddenly rises above the rooftops on the far side of the river against the still wintery-blue sky: the twenty-storey Wood Hotel. One of the world’s tallest high-rises made from renewable materials and built here of all places – in a small town in Sweden’s sparsely populated north: a skyscraper constructed almost entirely of wood, a symbol of Europe’s green transformation. The gigafactory for electric vehicle batteries was built here by the Northvolt corporation to reduce the EU’s reliance on China and initiate Europe’s definitive breakthrough into a sustainable future.

A little later, I find myself in the hotel lobby; pine branches rise from a stone trough next to me. In the wooden lift, the air carries the scent of a walk through a pine forest. My room is on the fifteenth floor. The walls are made from pale birch; a smoothly finished tree stump takes the place of a bedside table. Here too, the faint, barely perceptible smell of freshly cut logs fills the air, opening up the space around me. Through the glass wall, I look out over the eastern half of the city to its edge, where the forest begins; across the river, the city centre below me, a branch of Lidl.

Is the province notable for its unusually high concentration of burger joints and Asian restaurants? Can the same, perhaps, be said of all Europe? I have dinner at Bastard Burger, on the main shopping street, about a hundred metres from the hotel. Orders are placed on a touchpad screen. Outside, the pedestrian zone is empty; the shops have already closed. On my way back, a Tesla whirrs past me along the quiet street.

On my first night, I have trouble falling asleep. Until midnight, a bright turquoise light stretches across the sky outside my window. Around three in the morning, I’m awake again. At first, I think the light falling through the curtains onto the floor is a spotlight, perhaps set up outside by window cleaners on their lift and directed at my room. I draw back the curtains and stand at the glass wall. The night-time city below is deserted, yet strangely illuminated; the buildings seem to cast no shadows. On the main thoroughfare from south to north, a logging truck passes by, followed shortly after by a yellow DHL twin-trailer. Otherwise, there are no cars, no people moving along the streets below. Everything sleeps.

Shouldn’t every utopia be a global one? A utopia that reimagines the working and living conditions of all people on earth – but one different from the failed communist utopia of the 20th century or from the western Left, which seems consumed by identity struggles and may have lost sight of the working class? Are we, in truth, confronted today with two competing utopias? One imagines the total isolation of cultures and a national working class – whatever those terms may mean today – insisting on the separation of nations and empires. The other envisions a complete blending of working classes and cultures: a world entirely without borders, where people and production move freely.

I have a breakfast of sour milk with yellow berries – hjortron, Nordic berries or cloudberries in English. At the table next to me, a man and a woman in suits are talking in Finnish. I overhear German being spoken at another table. Two men are discussing a business deal for their company, the manufacturing of car bodies and how some other company is asking far more. We’re much cheaper, says one of the men. They have obviously come here for business negotiations. The breakfast room buzzes with chatter; nearly every table is occupied, some by families with children. As I leave the room, I hear a language being spoke at a nearby table which I take to be one of the Indian languages.

On my first day, I visit the Skellefteå Museum. I learn that three Sami languages exist in the region. The word árnnie, which denotes a traditional hearth in a hut – a sacred space – comes from Ume Sami. In South Sami, the word is aernie, and in North Sami, árran. I also learn about the colonisation of northern Scandinavia by people from the south, about the work of Christian missionaries and the development of gold mining and timber construction. A black-and-white photograph shows the workforce of a Skellefteå sawmill: gaunt, dirt-streaked faces, in the front row, boys no older than twelve. Then came telecommunications, the first bourgeois villas, a sawmill workers’ strike in 1932 and social housing projects under the Social Democrats in the 1940s. A colour photograph shows a family in front of a 1960s VW bus: father, mother and two children gathered around a camping table by a lake. Next came the rise of the IT company Norrdata, with its first computer installed in the basement of the company headquarters, followed by the founding of Skellefteå Campus with a department of Umeå University of Technology. The exhibition concludes with a short video animating plans for Northvolt’s factory halls: greened roofs form a wave-like structure that naturally merges with the surrounding forest, swelling up from the Baltic Sea onto land before the large industrial port in Skelleftehamn. In one hall, robotic arms move through the air, operated by people in white coats standing behind displays, conversing animatedly with each another.

When I returned from Stockholm three years ago, I didn’t recognise this town, says Challa. In the 1990s, when I was at high school in Skellefteå, all I wanted was to get away. Enjoying a beer in a pleasant setting, as we are doing now, would have been impossible back then. There were no nice bars, only working men’s pubs I didn’t like going to.
I meet Challa on a Wednesday afternoon. We sit in the Wood Hotel’s restaurant Paolo. For the past three years, Challa has been the director of the Västerbotten Theatre, part of the cultural centre named after the poet Sara Lidman, which occupies part of the Wood Hotel complex. Lidman also came from the region and wrote novels, among other things, about the labour movement in northern Sweden. Alongside the theatre, the cultural centre includes concert halls, a well-stocked municipal library on the ground floor, three restaurants and a spa on the building’s roof. As I have noticed, it’s used by a lot of people. They take a break on the wide wooden staircase, attend concerts and theatre performances or simply relax in one of the library’s sofa corners and read a newspaper. After finishing school, Challa moved to Umeå, a university town about a hundred kilometres south of Skellefteå, and later on to Stockholm, where she was the director of a dance theatre.
Now I direct this theatre, which can compete with the major theatres, she says. The city is full of small shops. On the streets and here in the building, different languages are spoken. You can tell that things have changed in recent years. It’s such a shame, the way things are developing now.

The next morning, I drive for kilometres past the abandoned halls of the Northvolt corporation in the rental car I have picked up in an industrial estate on the edge of town. Vast areas in the middle of the forest have been levelled and covered with gravel. They were supposed to be asphalted and turned into carparks, but the approach roads go nowhere. Around two thousand people, including foreign skilled workers from Pakistan, India, Venezuela and Senegal, along with employees from EU countries such as Poland, where another Northvolt plant had been planned near Danzig, found themselves dismissed overnight.
One family from Venezuela, says Lena – an employee of the industrial union IF Metall for northern Sweden, speaking from her office next to the ice hockey arena on the outskirts of the town – is a case that really broke my heart. They had sold everything at home to afford an apartment here. They had taken their children out of school and already re-enrolled them here. The four of them arrived on a Friday in March, stepping into their new life, which they had given up everything for. On Monday morning, the factory held a welcome party for the newly arrived employees. But during the celebration, a member of staff from the finance department entered the room and handed them their notice.
It’s unbelievable, says Lena. No one could understand why Northvolt kept hiring new skilled workers. Perhaps, until the very end, they believed there were only a few initial hurdles to overcome. Just some little bumps in the road, Lena adds, sounding for a moment almost surprised at her own words.

Since the right-wing Sweden Democrats began exerting influence over the country’s conservative minority government, a new residence law has come into force in Sweden. Non-EU nationals must prove within three months that they have an employment contract to stay in the country. The monthly salary must be at least 28,000 Swedish kronor – roughly 2,500 euros gross – which rules out low-wage or temporary jobs. The Northvolt employees from non-EU countries who asked the union for help after their dismissal are highly skilled, but they have very little time to find new jobs, and most do not yet speak Swedish. Many arrived in Sweden with their families, using their entire savings to buy apartments in Skellefteå – apartments now worth only half their value following the company’s bankruptcy. And the loans they took out still have to be paid back.

Hassan will continue to work at Northvolt until the end of the month, because one production line – an order for Scania – is still running. I meet him at an after-work party for newcomers to Skellefteå in the large concert hall of Sara Kulturhus.
I hope to find a new job soon, he says in perfect English. He drinks a glass of sparkling water with lemon.
Where are you looking? I ask. All over the world?
For now, I’m concentrating on Sweden, Hassan replies.
Aren’t you highly specialised in EV battery production? Would you be able to operate completely different machines?
He says he could easily switch to different machines, and that you learn quickly.
I ask if he has children or family, and he says no, which I suggest might be an advantage. You don’t have to feed an entire family, you only have to think about yourself, and you can move quickly, if necessary.
Yes, Hassan nods. In a way it’s an advantage. On the other hand, though, there’s no one here to help you, no one to support you emotionally. You are completely alone.
I ask him whether he at least talks to the other employees about his concerns, and if they support each other.
Of course, says Hassan. We’ve been talking about it for weeks. He looks at me somewhat incredulously, as if I’ve come from another planet – a writer who knows life only through observation. We’ve been talking about nothing else for weeks, he adds.

It’s almost as if Northvolt’s gigafactory was a modern Tower of Babel.
This is what Petra also tells me shortly after. She, too, is looking for work, although as a Swede, she enjoys slightly better protections than the foreign skilled workers. All those thousands of people who came here from around the world are well-educated and intelligent, she says, but they come from all kinds of backgrounds. There were many conflicts. For example, Swedish workers are accustomed to flat hierarchies, whereas supervisors from abroad sometimes have different ideas about teamwork. In addition, the working language in the factory was English, which not everyone spoke equally well.
Northvolt also bought some machines in China. When something broke down, says Petra, taking a phone out of her jeans pocket and showing me the display, we sometimes had to communicate with the experts using Google Translate. There were constant misunderstandings, work slowed down and production lines had to be stopped.

It’s hard to completely dismiss the idea that Northvolt’s grand, utopian vision, which was backed by other European companies like BMW, Volkswagen and Scania, was simply planned on a scale that was too global and overly ambitious.
That’s true, says Lena, the union representative. On the other hand, as those responsible repeatedly tried to explain, it wasn’t possible to plan smaller or slower. The vision had to be big. From the very beginning, the pressures of global competition and China’s economic dominance demanded mass production, the consolidation of several European companies and the recruitment of a large number of specialists to keep unit costs low.

Moss, lichens, berries – relicts of the last Ice Age, traces of the glacier still visible in the landscape. Low pines, dense undergrowth, fallen trees in various stages of decay, stretching for kilometres in every direction. In a wooded area, I step out of the car. Pine cones crunch beneath my soles. Two jays take off from a bush.
This is where P. O. used to sit and read the newspaper, Magdalena tells me a little later. As a child, it was the only reading material he could find in the house, apart from the Bible. Sometimes, he would just gaze out over the valley, the lake and the village of Hjoggböle.
She opens the door of a dilapidated wooden shed; inside is a tiny room with a pit toilet built over a wooden plank. She takes me back to the “Green House”, as Enquist called his childhood home in Another Life. The house is now infested with mould; one side seems to be sinking slightly into the ground.
Up there on the gable – Magdalena points to a window on the first floor –hung the famous “heavenly harp”. That’s where the child would lie in bed, listening to the freshly strung telephone wires brushing against the roof and gable wall, imagining that he was speaking with his late father in heaven.
We’re standing on a small hill, right in front of the green-painted wooden house. Next to it, the current owners have built a new home. They don’t want to tear down the “Green House”, says Magdalena. She unlocks the small museum in the yellow prayer house next door, where the devout once gathered – P. O.’s mother among them – and which now serves as a meeting place for the Sunday fika, the Swedish ritual of coffee and cake. Magdalena works at a church in Skellefteå. Recently, she and her husband, who is a pastor, moved back with their children into her parents’ old house, just down by the lake.
It’s a strange feeling to realise that something you know from books actually exists in a real, tangible place. The room in the prayer house where we are sitting is bathed in a greenish and pink light. Through the yellow and pink glass windows, the forest shimmers, and on the other side, a meadow with a birch tree is visible. It is quiet. I try to imagine all the characters from the novels gathered here: poor woodworkers, farmers and their wives steadfast in their revivalist faith, like Enquist’s single mother, who drilled into her child not to “fall to dancing and alcohol”, to sin. This would shape the future writer for life, yet alas, he did eventually succumb to alcohol, perhaps precisely because of his strict upbringing.

At the end of our conversation, I asked the union representative, Lena, whether she thought the entire Northvolt project had been for nothing. She paused for a moment, then shook her head: No. Things have changed here in Skellefteå – people have become more optimistic, and the cultural centre was built. Forward-looking developments occurred even before Northvolt, too. And who knows – maybe a buyer will still be found for the factory, someone who will start up production on a smaller scale.

“The utopia certainly did not exist in the great revolutionary ideologies,” Enquist writes in his essay. “Perhaps, if utopia did exist, you could only catch a glimpse of it by looking where you least expected to find it.” As I set off for the airport, my thoughts turn to my parents and their friends in Opole in the 1980s, when the people of the Solidarność movement first occupied Danzig shipyard, and then, after a year of the “Carnival of Freedom” in Polish cities, the frightened communists declared martial law, so that it took almost another ten years before the party was finally overthrown.