Sigurd Aa. Aarnes, "‘The Problem of Evil’: Nazism in Jens Bjørneboe"s writing." Translated by John Weinstock. In The Nordic Mind: Current Trends in Scandinavian Literary Criticism, ed. by Frank Egholm Andersen and John Weinstock (Lanham MD: University Presses of America, 1986), 223-250. Translation of "‘Det ondes problem’: Nazismen i Jens Bjørneboes dikting." In Nazism og norsk litteratur, ed. Bjarte Birkeland and Stein Ugelvik Larsen (Bergen and Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1975), 173-194. ©1975 by Universitetsforlaget, Oslo. English translation ©1986 by John Weinstock.Contents:
Part 2: Early novels
Part 3: The Bird-Lovers and Moment of
Freedom
Is Bjørneboe a political author? Naturally that depends on what we mean by "political." If we understand "political" as a commitment to the concrete social problems that are on the agenda, no other living Norwegian author is more political than Bjørneboe. He has a striking capacity for dissatisfaction with the state of things. In one of his first articles—it deals with Peter Wessel Zapffe's treatise On the Tragic—Bjørneboe refers to the Norwegian philosopher in the following manner:
For Zapffe the conditions for our earthly sojourn are extremely miserable, painful, against our nature, beneath our dignity as well as so extremely inhumanly constituted that already at the mere thought he has to writhe with laughter. The whole thing can only be compared with a sort of perpetual painful interrogation . . . [1]
The characterization could just as well stand for Bjørneboe's own focus. From such an experience of life he has raged in his writings against our school system, judicial system, and sexual mores. Bjørneboe's novels and plays are explosive discharges. His path is marked by newspaper polemics and lawsuits. At the moment Bjørneboe is our society's great provocateur and soothsayer—the grail knight with the prophet's cape on his shoulders who proclaims to his people unpleasant truths and must pay the price for it. [2]
He begs for rags and things to wear,
to sit on the stool and rest a while,
to lie in the barn and take a nap.
But then an ox butts, and then a dog barks.
A man curses [3]
Like no other Norwegian author today, Bjørneboe represents the sociocritical, political tradition in our literature from the golden age of the 1870s and 1880s.
However, if we interpret "political" in a more "modern," sociological sense as an interest in economic and social structures, we cannot call Bjørneboe a political author—his thinking is too "old-fashioned," individualistically and idealistically, on moral-philosophical issues. Today it is easy for us to forget that Bjørneboe's point of departure was the idealistic and religious wave that swept over the western world after World War II. He was slow to mature. Ideologically the young Bjørneboe experienced the anthroposophist circle around the journals Spektrum and Horisont in the 1940s and 1950s where the leaders were men like Ernst Sørensen, Aasmund Brynildsen, Alf Larsen, and André Bjerke. The young Bjørneboe was anthroposophically influenced; he taught at the Steiner school in Oslo for several years and was a riksmål [4] supporter. The literary idols of his youth were idealistic authors of various nuance like Nils Kjær, Olaf Bull, Arthur Koestler, and Franz Werfel. There is a clear echo of all this in Bjørneboe's first articles and poetry. [5] In Jonas Bjørneboe has given a deadly ironic presentation of the milieu in depicting the young man of letters Nils Ligard—the new wonder child in the conservative press who believes in "T. S. Eliot and God" and is a diffuse antimaterialist and devotee of riksmål (Oslo 1955, 156f).
At first glance it may appear that the demagogic pornographer and anarchist Bjørneboe from the 1960s has distanced himself from the biblical allegory and religious lyricism of his debut book Poems (1951). If we take a closer look at his work, we will see that the change nevertheless concerns subject matter and style more than ideological substance. Bjørneboe has become more coarse and uncivil, more strongly committed with the years, but his ideological position is still the same. He is still and individualist and idealist. His "patron saint" was and is the most extreme of all Norwegian individualists—Hans Jæger. In praise of him Bjørneboe wrote one of his finest poems ("Before the Solstice" in Poems) and one of his most important essays ("Hans Jæger" in Norway, My Norway). Good circumstantial evidence of this continuity in Bjørneboe's development is that the most dogmatic Marxists have never accepted or cooperated with him in spite of the fact that as an anarchist Bjørneboe finds himself all the way to the left on the political spectrum. On the contrary, our domestic political literary critics—like Willy Dahl—have reprimanded Bjørneboe for inconsistency, for his "mixing of political radicalism and overwrought metaphysics" (Arbeiderbladet, December 3, 1966).
Since I am going to give an account of Nazism in Bjørneboe's writing, it is important to stick to his ideological point of departure because it determines to such a great degree his relationship to his subject. Bjørneboe is not interested in Nazism in and of itself as one political system among other systems. If he was absorbed by Nazism for many years, it was because for him it was the unbelievable outbreak of violence and bestiality that he experienced in his very impressionable youthful years. Nazism and the Second World War were the same eye-opener for Bjørneboe as the Vietnam War for the ensuing generation. The staggering impressions this reality made on him raise the basic questions that always occupied him later on in his career: How did it happen that "an inherently good and beautiful world became evil and unjust" (cf. Duke Hans, 7)? How can people behave with such unbelievable brutality toward others? What sort of forces dwell at the bottom of human nature? As the servant of justice asks in Moment of Freedom:
. . . forces . . . are suddenly released and want to see blood. Even at the bottom of the friendliest and most kind-hearted fellow citizen, paterfamilias and professional dwells such a tiger-person, an insatiable, rutting monster who is filled only with one passion: hatred of human beings, a hatred which can only be calmed and satisfied by the ecstasy of blood. (Lanternebok, 1970, 221-222)
Time after time Bjørneboe has indicated that the basic theme that runs through all his work is the age-old philosophical and theological revenant, "the problem of evil." [6] It is the problem of violence, pain, agony, and evil that primarily occupies Bjørneboe, not Nazism as a political and sociological phenomenon. Therefore he has little interest in the social and economic explanations of Nazism that historians and sociologists have put forth—Nazism as "middle-class extremism," as an expression of the threatened bourgeoisie's mobilization against the working class and similar explanatory models. Everything Bjørneboe has written on Nazism lacks perspective on society, and only in his latest works are there signs of his seeing his own one-sidedness on this point.[7] When Bjørneboe uses Nazism in this way—as material for an ethical problem—he is in line with Sigurd Hoel, Kåre Holt, and most of the other Norwegian authors who have treated the occupation in a literary way.
In his most important article on Nazism—"The Unbelievable," published in Spektrum in 1949—Bjørneboe makes it clear from the start that Nazism is not a political problem for him. It was not "national socialism, not a political party and not one particular nation that threatened us, but that one particular nation at a particular moment opened the floodgates for the diabolical forces in the human mind . . . For us it is thus not techno-political problem we shall observe, and our points of view must therefore expire to the extent that they are of an exclusively political nature" (102).
For Bjørneboe the explanation of Nazism lies in "the innate bestiality in man" (103). He charges—in an "old-fashioned," mythical, and theological way—"human nature" with the responsibility for Nazism, not social conditions or social oppositions. The first-person narrator in Before the Cock Crows, who is the author's alter ego, expresses himself thus when he is going to tell about his encounter with Nazism: "I had looked into human nature ... and I noticed that the one who has met the Evil One will not easily become happy again" (Paxbok, 1967, 26).
For Bjørneboe Nazism is a manifestation of what a hymn verse calls "the abyss of depravity" in man. How can such ostensibly incompatible contrasts be contained in one mind? How is it that one and the same man can be in private a loving husband, an exemplary breadwinner, a lover of art and nature, while at the same time he officially behaves like the most bestial torturer? This ethical schizophrenia is for Bjørneboe Nazism's real core.
In contrast to the other authors who are treated in this book, Bjørneboe grew up with Nazism. When Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, Bjørneboe was thirteen years old. His first political experiences were the Reichstag fire, the Moscow purges, and Ossietzky's Nobel Prize, he says himself in the essay on Hans Jæger. In these years the event that Bjørneboe has called his "confirmation," the beginning of his conscious life, occurs. He has told about it in Before the Cock Crows, in Jonas, and in The Silence. The young boy sits one summer day in his room and reads:
The sun stood almost still in the sky. But while I was reading, it became gray. For it was a strange thing I was reading; it was called The Oranienburg Concentration Camp, and it was the first political book I read.[8] It was written by someone who had been a prisoner there, and who had managed to escape. Therefore it dealt with people who had their eardrums punctured because they could not stand in a straight line, and who were beaten to death with leather belts because they were sick. And, even while I was reading, it became clear to me that those things that were written there I would never be able to forget. And what happened while I was sitting there reading during the quiet, sunny afternoon hours I would never be able to undo. But throughout the entire summer the others went around and believed amidst the sunshine and the sea and the wind that everything was the same as before. I was the only one who knew better . . . . (Before the Cock Crows, 47)
Bjørneboe has attached crucial importance to this shocking experience having struck him so early and unprepared. Those who were a little older had "a place to take refuge," political illusions to fall back on. While Hoel, Sandemose, and Borgen experience the appalling political events of the thirties like mature men, Bjørneboe is hurt in a decisive way at the very beginning. His own generation is the real "lost generation," Bjørneboe claims, the generation that grew up in an absolute political vacuum. Or, as his alter ego, the young man in Jonas, expresses it:
In our crucial, first years of youth the world went under. Those of us who became adults after the Moscow purges are an international brotherhood of brothers who never got to see each other. We fell in the war. No, we fell during the purges. We knew each other by our eyes. If you are forced to live the years from puberty to maturity without a decent ideal, it seeps into your glance. And we found each other through that. (280-281)
As Bjørneboe writes in an article from the fifties on Hemingway:
Hemingway arrived in the world, and cruelty, and violence, and pain fill the entire visual field to begin with. It looks as if it will become his only theme; but another one soon comes: What do you do to survive? If you follow the main lines through Hemingway's authorship, you will easily discover that everything deals with a sick, mortally wounded man's struggle to conquer his fear after his meeting with life . . . [9]
It is striking how much more physical and direct Bjørneboe's relationship to Nazism is than that of most other Norwegian authors. He is not sitting on the periphery of Europe observing Nazism at a distance. He has himself looked for and painfully identified with its physical and ideological victims. Therefore, Nazism in Bjørneboe's writings to a higher degree seen from the inside than is the case with other Norwegian resisters.
Again and again we meet in Bjørneboe's works the young, sensitive mind that almost explodes in its meeting with a ruthless reality: Duke Hans and the Spanish general in Duke Hans, Claus in Before the Cock Crows, Marx and the seaman in Jonas, the young men in Under a Harder Sky, Tonnie in The Evil Shepherd, and the servant of justice in Moment of Freedom. Several times the young man has Bjørneboe's own facial features, and it his own story he is telling, lightly camouflaged: the seaman in Jonas, the servant of justice in Moment of Freedom; the young deviant in the sedate society of a south-coast town, the art student refugee in Stockholm during the Second World War, and the obsessed man who travels to Germany after the war in order to study first hand the incomprehensible bestiality which had unfolded and who finally sinks into a long period of depression because of what he has seen and heard. [10]
Bjørneboe himself has revealed that on his trips to Germany he came into direct contact in "a miraculous way" with close relatives of Dr. Sigmund Rascher, one of the leaders of the medical experiments on living human beings in the German concentration camps during the war. through a German scientist Bjørneboe gains access to documents from the medical trial at the American military tribunal at Nürnberg. We get the impression of a painful obsession, like the one we know from various authors (e.g. Elie Wiesel) who themselves experienced the hell of concentration camps:
... the material ... sat fast in his body like a strange corrosive mass. He who has been lured into the mountain will never again be happy .... I felt instinctively that if I stopped halfway, I would become a sort of invalid for life. (Before the Cock Crows, 26)
Thus he turns that terrible material into an object of his study. With Bjørneboe there is a striking penchant to become absorbed with physical violence and bodily pain. We could express it more positively thus: that again and again, face to face with himself, he must have confirmed that he is able to live on, conscious of the outrageous acts the Nazis committed. He must find a way to live with these facts. He must manage to reshape them into an insight so that the catastrophe will not repeat itself. This is the point of departure for Bjørneboe's first writing about Nazism (or "national socialism,") as he always called it so as to appear objective). It consists partly of a couple of articles about the medical experiments on humans in the concentration camps. In part Bjørneboe gets his material and theme for his first short story—"The Brother", in Spektrum (1950)—and for two of his first novels—Before the Cock Crows and Under a Harder Sky—from Nazism.
On November 20, 1948, Bjørneboe published a feature article in Aftenposten about the medical experiments under the title "From Doctor to Executioner in the Name of the Swastika." The major article, "The Unbelievable," in Spektrum the year after, is an expanded version of the feature article. Neither of these articles has been included in Bjørneboe's three collections of essays, in spite of the fact that the essay in Spektrum is Bjørneboe's most important expression of opinion on Nazism and an outstanding intellectual achievement—objective, precise, irrefutably logical in its construction.
In this 1949 article Bjørneboe takes as his point of departure the fact that now after the war we must convert our horror and disgust for Nazism into constructive experience. Our situation resembles that of a man who has just been on the verge of drowning. Afterward he can try to forget the experience, or he can learn to swim. We must act like the man who learned to swim, objectively and unemotionally find out what Nazism really is, and thus transform it into experience and insight. If we are going to analyze Nazism, we must turn our attention in two directions, Bjørneboe claims. First of all we must investigate the tree for its fruits. We must study phenomena that show us Nazism in a culture, in its most extreme consequences. Secondly we must psychologically investigate "which spiritual qualities must be present in those people who are able to implement Nazism" (102).
Those phenomena which are best suited to show us Nazism's face are the concentration camps and the medical experiments with humans that were carried out there. On the basis of Eugen Kogon's Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (München 1946), Bjørneboe claims that the camps had three main functions: through the prisoners' labor thy provided the economic basis of the SS organization, they were educational institutions for the new executioners, and they were gathering places for people who were going to be used for medical experiments or exterminated. Using Alexander Mitscherlich's and Fred Mielke's document collection Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung (Heidelberg 1947), Bjørneboe then gives an overview of the medical experiments, arranged by types, with information on their aims and procedures. Down to the smallest details this material is used in Bjørneboe's first novel, Before the Cock Crows.
What sort of people created and functioned well in this system? Bjørneboe then asks. Who were they? Everything suggests that the responsible SS men had been intellectually well-equipped, energetic men, but their intellectual level was without "an emotional counterpart." The doctors who carried on medical experiments with people embodied the official scientific mode of thought that dominated western universities for a long time: man is a higher mammal. With this view of man, who would really have anything against "higher mammals experimenting with each other?" The Nazis are not the first who carried on medical experiments with living humans. On the contrary, Bjørneboe claims ironically, it will "always be national socialism's merit that right before our eyes it drew the conclusions of our life philosophy" (109).
Finally Bjørneboe raises the question as to whether there were not people in positions of power outside of Germany who knew what was going on and who had the means to stop the crime before Hitler became too powerful. He thinks beyond any doubt that the leading statesmen everywhere knew what was happening in Germany, but they did not use the means at their disposal to stop it. "This is what is unbelievable," Bjørneboe concludes.
I have quoted the article at such length because the viewpoints of this essay recur everywhere in Bjørneboe's early writing on Nazism. The question about coresponsibility, which the article goes into, is a theme in Bjørneboe's first short story -- the intense The Brother, printed in Spektrum in 1950. [11] It deals with a young boy of eighteen who takes his life in desperation because none of the small town's influential men had wanted to do anything when he showed them a collection of documents he made himself about atrocities against prisoners after the Second World War. The three men whom this young boy had visited—a consul, a lawyer, and a school principal—meet in the local men's club one summer evening. Each tries to build up a defense for himself, the dead boy, and the others because he had avoided the challenge. The short story's theme, about substitute pity, is formulated by the oldest of the men, the consul, who is himself closest to death:
"To inquire further," he said, "as far as I can understand it is a question for such people of inquiring further. They can never give up." ... "There are people who are born to inquire—inquire over and over again. About the same things .... And it is very important that they inquire," continued the consul weakly; "very important. For in that way they take a great burden on themselves for the rest of us, and a general passport can be issued for the whole crew in their name" (Lanterns, 22)
The short story is the only one of Bjørneboe's literary works with a connection to Nazism that ends optimistically. The younger brother of the dead boy inherits the document collection and knows for himself when the sun rises the next morning "that he would be in his company for many, many years ahead—and that he had inherited more from him than just the shirt." (23)