Written in 1967, during the height of the Cold War and amid the growing possibility of nuclear confrontation, Termush by the Danish writer Sven Holm is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel about a group of survivors who have bought their place at Termush, a luxury resort designed to serve as a refuge from catastrophe. The novel reflects the political anxieties of its time, particularly the fear of nuclear destruction and the authoritarian isolation imposed on nations in Eastern Europe by oppressive communist regimes. Termush’s enclosed and highly controlled environment echoes this atmosphere of surveillance, censorship and restricted freedom. The survivors’ ability to endure the catastrophe is determined by their financial position: they were able to purchase safety while the world outside was collapsing. Termush offers protected accommodation in a hotel with trained staff, subterranean provision stores, access to an uncontaminated water supply, protective shelters, and a yacht ready to transport the guests should the resort later become uninhabitable.
The outside world resembles the landscape left behind after a nuclear apocalypse. Those who survived were surprised that the disaster “would happen so painlessly (…) both literally and metaphorically.”
“Nevertheless, we feel the changes somewhere in ourselves. The state of panic and anticipation is over and has been replaced by complete deafness, not just of the ears but of the whole body, a sense of exhaustion or deep-seated dizziness.”
Radiation is the main concern for the survivors:
“Radiation meters have been put up all over the hotel. (…) They are read at regular intervals.”
Yet Holm is less interested in depicting the catastrophe itself than in examining what it does to the minds of those who survive it. The disaster is largely kept outside the novel. Instead, we experience it through the psychological state of the people who have survived and through the increasingly strange and uncertain world they inhabit at Termush.
The unnamed narrator tells the story entirely from their own perspective. Initially, the management uses simple, straightforward language to reassure the survivors, but this language also helps to keep the catastrophe impersonal. The management wants the guests to conform to a particular idea of reality: ambient music continues to play through the loudspeakers, meals are served without disruption, and daily routines are maintained as though the world outside has not fundamentally changed. If a lie is played out for long enough, it begins to resemble reality; eventually, it becomes something that everyone accepts as true.
The narrator raises doubts about this behaviour, although they refrain from openly opposing it. Among the guests are those who seem to prefer concealing the truth about the impact of the disaster: “an inspired lie could be preferred to a maligned truth.”
The management gradually assumes the role of an authority, presenting itself as a protective shield between the outside world and the guests. News from outside is censored, including the news that four people who had emerged from the shelters at the resort had died from radiation sickness. The guests are protected not only from physical danger but also from knowledge of what is happening beyond the walls of Termush.
“When the radio reports (…) are delivered, one can no longer assume that they will be uncensored. Neither can one expect that the guests will resist this censorship.”
Inside Termush, disruptive guests are sedated. The management attempts to control not only what the residents know but also how they respond to what they know. The narrator reflects on the strange emotional discipline imposed on the guests:
“One of the women suddenly collapsed across the table in front of her in a fit of hysteria. (…) the woman’s reaction is understandable. What is less understandable is the way the rest of us keep such an inflexibly stiff lip without relaxing in argument. Her outburst seems to me more natural than our self-control.”
Initially, what has happened cannot be comprehended by reason. A chilling feeling of anxiety hangs over all the survivors. The narrator describes a state of exhaustion and psychological paralysis:
“I remained in a state between sleeping and walking, a stage in which there drifted through my mind half-sentences (…). My imagination is numb.”
The paying guests experience total dread and anxiety and gradually succumb to an almost unmanageable fatigue. Their fear begins to change. It is no longer simply fear of death, but fear of uncertainty, disruption and change.
This is one of the central tensions of Termush: the difference between the theoretical security the guests have purchased and the reality of living through a catastrophe. The guests insured themselves against the possibility of the world being completely annihilated when they enrolled at Termush, but they did not think about protecting themselves against other survivors or the demands those survivors might make on them. They bought the commodity called survival, and according to all the existing contracts no one has the right to take it from them. The problem begins when strangers appear and expect the guests to share the protection they have purchased.
When survivors from outside arrive at the resort and ask for help, the apparently secure and carefully controlled world of Termush begins to unravel. The guests are suddenly confronted with a moral dilemma that their contracts and preparations never anticipated. The outsiders may be injured, traumatised or exposed to radiation, and allowing them into the resort could endanger the people who are already there.
The narrator reflects on the possibility that Termush will cease to function the moment it opens its doors to other survivors who did not pay for a place there. By admitting them, the resort might ultimately prevent its current inhabitants from surviving.
Those survivors who are allowed inside are treated differently. They are given a different, more basic meal from those served to the paying guests. Every new arrival represents a potential threat to the people who have paid for their protection. The generosity shown to the strangers eventually results in twelve guests becoming infected, intensifying the fear and resentment among the paying residents.
The question therefore becomes one of individual rights versus the collective good. Who has the right to decide who should be protected? Do the people who paid for Termush have a greater right to survival than those who happened to be outside when the catastrophe occurred?
The guests are asked to vote on how to deal with those who knock on the door of the resort and ask for help. Yet the meaning of this democratic vote is questionable. The guests know little about the alternatives and do not fully understand the consequences of the choices before them. Democracy depends on certain principles of freedom, and voting appears to be a simple demonstration of that freedom, yet the decision itself restricts the freedom of the injured and other survivors who are not part of the voting pool.
The paying guests have rights, but only within the limitations prescribed for paying guests. The management also considers the psychological strain placed upon them by seeing injured and distressed people. In this sense, compassion itself becomes a threat to the stability of the community.
Initially, Termush operates according to the moral and social rules of the old world: money determines access, contracts determine rights, management maintains order, and the residents believe that the systems that protected them before the catastrophe can continue to protect them afterwards. But as conditions deteriorate, these rules become increasingly inadequate. A new moral code has to be forged.
The management responds to growing anxiety with increasingly authoritarian measures. After the arrival of outsiders and the subsequent infections, the management attempts to control the atmosphere among the paying guests, believing that prescribed tranquillisers will resolve their anxiety. The distinction between protection and control therefore becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
The collapse of the old order is also reflected in the behaviour of individual guests. One of the paying guests reveals that he has terminal cancer and had lied on his application to Termush, resulting in healthy people being rejected in his place. The condemnation of his behaviour is universal. Another guest hangs himself.
These incidents expose the fragility of the moral order that the residents have attempted to preserve. Their carefully constructed community is based on contracts, wealth, exclusion and the assumption that individual survival can be secured through preparation. But catastrophe exposes the limits of all of these universally accepted notions.
The guests’ behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing. Their malice is gentle; their cruelty is tired and fortuitous. They are not transformed into obvious monsters. Instead, their humanity becomes strangely diminished by fear, exhaustion and the desire to preserve what they have.
The texture of the world becomes increasingly alien and unknowable, while the boundaries between safety and danger, civilisation and chaos, begin to dissolve. The resort was designed to protect its inhabitants from the outside world, but gradually the outside world enters Termush psychologically, socially and physically.
At the centre of the novel are questions of morality in a new and uncertain world. Some residents believe survivors should be accommodated; others see them as a threat to the community and its limited resources. The decision raises uncomfortable questions about who has the right to survive, whether safety can be privately owned, and what we owe to others when resources are scarce.
The novel also contrasts reality with theoretical concepts and with the illusion of safety. The residents have constructed Termush around the belief that catastrophe can be managed through planning, money, technology and rules. But the disaster creates circumstances in which these systems no longer function as expected.
Even the narrator reflects on their own ageing body, weak muscles and physical limitations, recognising that survival is not simply a matter of being protected from external danger. The body itself becomes vulnerable to the changed conditions of existence.
Termush is also a novel about the collapse of the old-world order and the uncertain emergence of a new one. The guests attempt to preserve the structures of the world that existed before the catastrophe: contracts, property, privilege, management and democratic procedures, but the catastrophe has created circumstances in which those structures can no longer provide clear answers.
The most unsettling aspect of the novel is that the catastrophe does not necessarily produce dramatic chaos immediately. Instead, it produces a strange psychological suspension. People continue to eat meals, listen to music, follow routines and obey rules while knowing that the world outside may no longer exist in anything resembling its former form.
Termush becomes a kind of experiment in what happens when a privileged group is given the means to survive but discovers that survival itself creates new moral and psychological problems.
The guests have purchased safety, but they cannot purchase certainty. They can protect themselves against radiation, but not against fear. They can control access to the resort, but not the consequences of their decisions; they can censor information, but they cannot completely prevent reality from entering their consciousness.
Ultimately, Termush is not simply a novel about surviving a nuclear apocalypse. It is a chronicle of a microsociety beginning to collapse and an exploration of the psychological strangeness produced by catastrophe. Holm is interested in what happens when people discover that the old rules no longer apply, but that they are still desperately trying to live according to them.
The most unsettling question of Termush is not whether humanity can survive the end of the world, but what kind of humanity might emerge on the other side.
