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 1: Introduction
Part 3: The Bird-Lovers and Moment of
Freedom
Bjørneboe fought a long battle with the material from the medical trials before it found its final literary form in the debut novel Before the Cock Crows (1952). He worked it out first—as we have seen—in essay form. Later he wrote a documentary play from the medical milieu in the German concentration camps during the war. It was rejected by the Studio Theater in Oslo in April of 1950 with the explanatory statement that "the public runs away from such material" (postscript to the Pax edition, 186-187). In the novel the dramatic form shines through clearly in the lines and the consistent scenic portrayal.
Before the Cock Crows is a documentary or semi-documentary novel -- over twenty years before Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung and before the documentary novel came into fashion in Scandinavian literature. The characters are fictitious, but the depiction of the social background and the action agrees down to the smallest details with the information Bjørneboe had presented in his articles and with his own experiences in Germany right after the war. He has—as he formulates it elsewhere—"written up some of what happened, and some of what must have happened" (The Dream and the Wheel, preface, Oslo 1964). If you read "The Unbelievable" and the novel together, the essay seems like an organized collection of material for the novel. The aim of the novel is to elucidate the essay's theme by means of a moral example on a large scale. Why did Bjørneboe choose the novel as the medium for what he wanted tosay? There may be reason here to recall something the author said many years later about the relationship between a direct contribution to the debate in a polemical article and a more indirect one in a belletristic form: "The novel form endures longer than even the best opinion pieces in a newspaper, the belletristic form has a more prolonged effect"[12] (Bindestreken 1972, 3:4).
A Norwegian—no secret is made of the fact that he is identical with the author himself—is living in Germany right after World War II. In two introductory chapters we hear about how he learns of the medical experiments on prisoners during the war. There is a fine ascent in these introductory chapters; slowly we move in toward the center, toward the human animal Reynhardt himself—the SS doctor who was the leader of the experiments. First we hear about him from minor characters like the SS enlisted man Max. Therefore, the SS doctor's name already radiates fear for us when the first-person narrator comes to live in the same house as Reynhardt's widow and son and hears from them what went on in a German concentration camp during the war.
In the center of the story, filling the final four chapters of the novel, stand Reynhardt, his family, and his childhood friend, the camp commander Heidebrand. The psychology is clearly simplified and typified in order to serve the theme of the novel: it is impossible to make a split between private and public morality, as Reynhardt and Heidebrand try to do. Reynhardt is split most—he is simultaneously the correct private person and the most terrible human butcher, sentimental and brutal. His maxim is that "you ought to limit your emotional life to the area where it has validity ... to private life—yes, perhaps to family life" (96-97). "My work and my family life—these things have nothing to do with each other" (169), he says a second time. As long as Reynhardt can consider himself a scientist and just a scientist, he apparently functions without conflicts. His moral alibi resides in the fact that he does not cross the boundary between science and politics. "If I just do one, one single thing, which goes beyond the purely medical, then I have become politically committed" (160), he says to Heidebrand.
The novel shows that such a split between private and public morality cannot be maintained. The totalitarian state demands the entire person, the system demands that Reynhardt also commit himself politically. On orders Heidebrand forces his childhood friend to seek acceptance in the SS and to spread rumors about what is going on in the camp to scare enemies of the regime. The means of pressure is that Reynhardt's family will get to hear about his work if he does not commit himself beyond the purely medical. Reynhardt falls into line. The novel's title refers to a cock crowing outside at the very moment when Peter betrayed Jesus (169). Reynhardt goes all the way and becomes an effective and unscrupulous conductor of experiments until he is finally lynched by the surviving prisoners just before the Americans reach the camp.
If Reynhardt is the novel's villain, then the camp commander Heidebrand gradually turns out to be its hero and saint. In contrast to Reynhardt he chooses private morality and his better self when he is put to the choice. He attempts to flee the country, but is caught and brutally tortured. During these trials Heidebrand mobilizes his inner spiritual resources and is transformed into a new and better person. In the introductory chapters we have already met him under a new name and new nationality as the Norwegian Lyngby (cf. Heidekraut = lyng, "heather"); busy with relief work, he does not distinguish between former friends and enemies. He has reached the insight that "everything a person becomes guilty of—everything, everything!—he can clear himself of again!" (24).
It is in line with the viewpoint of "The Unbelievable" that the first-person narrator in the first chapters of Before the Cock Crows does not see the rationally arranged mass death in the concentration camps as anything new or exceptional. On the contrary, it is understood as a transitional stage toward a future when death will be "served by white-clad social workers," death brigades which minister to the dying. "Genuine, wholesome death"—authentic like a man's glance, handshake, and laughter—will be out of date. The decisive break with the past has already occurred for Nazism. It took place when a materialistic, depersonalized view of death broke through in medicine. In the German concentration camps only the most extreme consequences of this view were expressed. It is not accidental that the great euthanasia program that Reynhardt is going to put into effect carries the code name "catalysis"—it will expedite a process already underway (54-58, cf. 94-95). As it says on the title page, the novel is "written in memory of the victims of the blindness of the heart and the coldness of the spirit that have characterized modern science for a long time."
The weakest aspect of Before the Cock Crows as a work of art is that the moral message shines through too clearly. The narrator points to emphatically. The author's theme determines the psychology, action, and composition of the book. The characters do not live their own lives, but appear as necessary types in a morality play. The psychology is schematic, formed from the maxim that "sentimentality is the sister of brutality." Thus these SS officers love their wives and children, Mozart's music, and the roses in the garden to improbable excess, while at the same time they transplant limbs and give their victims disease-producing injections. The drop in intensity and artistic power is clear when, after the second chapter, the narrator goes from a documentary presentation to the novel's usual realistic form, characterized in part by the stereotypes of a light novel. How many cigarettes are lit and how many glasses filled in the long conversations in chapters 3, 4, and 5? I agree with Leif Longum's criticism that in Before the Cock Crows Bjørneboe tries to have us participate in a reality that is too overwhelming to be contained in the literary form he has chosen in the central parts of the book—the realistic novel [13].
While Before the Cock Crows treats Nazism in its most extreme consequences, Under a Harder Sky (1957)—the title is a quote from Olaf Bull—gives a picture of the less demonic Norwegian Nazism during and after the Second World War. Like Before the Cock Crows, Under a Harder Sky is a politically tendentious, diametrically opposed novel: not an attack on Nazism, but an ardent plea against the legal settlement with the Nazis after the war and its juridical basis. This does not mean that Bjørneboe has changed his opinion of Nazism. It is the situation that has changed. The prisoner-guards of yesterday have become the prisoners of today, and we must not treat them in the same way they treated us! Under a Harder Sky is not an analysis of Nazism like Before the Cock Crows, but a plea on behalf of a persecuted minority. In its purpose it resembles Hans Scherfig's defense of the Danish Communists during the Second World War in the novel Frydenholm (1962).
None of Bjørneboe's novels is as close to being a polemical monograph as Under a Harder Sky. In a narrative-technical sense it manifests itself in that the narrator is present the entire time and every once in a while comments on events at his own expense à la Camilla Collett (e.g. Paxbok 1969, 34-35, 66-67, 88, 134). The narrator has such a clear purpose with respect to what he is telling that he feels the need to have full control the whole time. The novel has the same basis in authentic, historical reality as Before the Cock Crows. In addition to this, Under a Harder Sky takes on an even earlier documentary character by the presentation of simulated documents that are so capably done that they could well be real (e.g., the major's article on "The Exile Government's High Treason", 119-121, and Jan's memorandum on the legal settlement, 206-207).
Under a Harder Sky has the same compositional frame as Before the Cock Crows, but in Under a Harder Sky it seems superficial and unnecessary. On the street in Oslo one day the first-person narrator meets his schoolmate Jan, who tells the story about the major and his grown children—Fransiska and Cato. In the rest of the novel—from chapter 2 on—we follow this Nazi family from the end of the 1930s through the war and the subsequent legal proceedings. In the center of the novel stands the old major—an authoritarian, conservative, conscientious hero-worshipper of the 1905 generation. He believes in "God, duty, the constitution, the fatherland, Brahms, and family life" (20), is a fanatical Bolshevik-hater, worships Nansen, and is furious about the Nygaardsvold government's starvation of the military establishment. The hopeless defensive war against the Germans in 1940 is the decisive event in the major's life. With a thorough understanding the novel depicts the old officer's political conversion to the National Samling (the Nazi party of Norway) after the military campaign (85-86). It is most important for him that the Norwegian Nazis explain the events of 1940 in the same way as he does himself. The German occupation was "provoked and caused" by the Labor Party government, because with their "policy of the broken rifle" they laid the country open to the aggressor! After the provocative mining of Norwegian waters by the English—what else could you expect than that the Germans might strike? The major joined the Nazi party because—as he says to his children—"Our country has been in the hands of people who have mocked God and ridiculed the fatherland" (91).
The old major also discovers that he shares certain Nazi viewpoints. His earlier, violent aversion to Nazism now appears as a defensive reaction:
... many of those things he had felt strongest antipathy for turned out to be on closer scrutiny as if taken from his own innermost thoughts .... The status of women: Kaiser Wilhelm's famous words about "Kinder, Küche und Kirche." Basically it had always been the major's deepest conviction that the woman's place was with the children, in the kitchen and in church .... And then there was the strict, and from an early age on, military education for the boys .... But above all it was the National Socialists' views on the fatherland which he now accepted. They were as if carved out of himself .... (87)
Wouldn't Nansen have stood on the same side if he had lived? the major asked himself. The old officer is presented as a subjectively sincere, somewhat naive idealist, an innocent victim whose assumptions made him react as he had to do in the given situation. His membership in the Nazi party is an expression of opinion and nothing else (cf. 186). Within the novel's system of values the major is conceived as "an anachronism, a remnant of the past who believed in the fatherland, in honor, that an oath is an oath and that two times two is four" (122).
The conversion of the grown children—Cato and Fransiska—to Nazism is more an act of loyalty to their father than an independent political choice. Fransiska's feminine experience of "the men and the politics they were involved in" is especially sensitively portrayed. She probably understands what her father means by his rational arguments for Nazism, which he puts forth in his letters and newspaper clippings for her, "but it didn't take root in her." She "thought with her body and not with her head" (123 and 122).
On the whole the dualism between "the feminine" and "the masculine" is a central motif in the novel. The war has its origin in "the man's soul" with its "delight in catastrophe". Deep inside, man is uneasy, homeless, and afraid of the every day ("No Man's Land," 123-125): "everything man needs in order to destroy the earth, is a radical, an extreme idea." The ideology is nevertheless just "the superstructure, the struggle and destruction are the heart and goal of the matter" (220). In contrast to man, woman faces life and the everyday, everything that blossoms and grows. "The German tarts" are the "only ones who saw the war from an entirely feminine ... life-preserving standpoint" (221), the narrator comments. This motif reaches its climax in the grandiloquent song of praise to woman of all epochs which appears on one of the novel's final pages (222).
Fransiska vaguely understands that she belongs to a period that has altogether lost respect for rational arguments—"reason is dead"—and the passions have taken over. Here lies the deepest appeal of totalitarian mass movements—Nazism and Communism—to the age. If you say that two times two is four, you are met with the answer: "What party do you belong to?" (122)
En route we get several snapshots of Nazi environments, portrayed with a strong empathy and emphasizing the positive and idealistic. The NS people experience their situation everywhere in such a way that it is they who carry the heaviest burden during the occupation. They constantly feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Who is going to stem the flow against the Nazis if they didn't have their counterparts in the NS regime? The old major visits, among others, his old friend Captain Ross, who has become minister of shipping in the Quisling government. The minister reveals that this very day he has saved the Norwegian home fleet from the Germans' demands to hand it over (98-100, cf. the visit to the county board chairman's office, 92-94).
Cato becomes a fighter at the front and Fransiska a nurse in the German Red Cross. When the war ends, the whole family is dealt with severely in the legal purging of Norwegian society. Fransiska, who has experienced a brief but happy romance with a German solder, is put in a women's prison together with "German tarts." The old major, who is already sick, breaks down during his trial and prison term and dies.
In order to formulate the novel's central argument against the legal purge in Norway after World War II, the narrator uses two spokesmen: the former home-front fighter and saboteur Jan, who becomes a law student after the war, and Jan's uncle, the lawyer Leer. The salient point in their argument is that the London government's treason decree is invalid because it was not approved by the Norwegian Parliament. Furthermore, the treason decree is unconstitutional because it is given retroactive force. Only those Nazis guilty of actions that were forbidden before April 9, 1940 can be punished, the two lawyers claim in the novel. The notion of deterrence that the treason decree is based on—that A is punished so that B will not do something wrong—is "Moscow law." The treason decree shows that we ourselves are infected by the Nazism we fought. On the contrary, a little country like Norway ought to show the world an example of respect for human values and the culture of justice by carrying out a worthy and painfully correct treatment of the NS members (144-150, cf. 196 and Jan's memorandum, 207).
In Under a Harder Sky responsibility for the purge is assigned to Dag—a radical political and social movement from the 1920s—"the iron guard from Daggry" (dawn). However, the novel's force as tendentious writing is weakened by the fact that the central characters—the critic of the legal settlement, Jan—and the advocate, the former Motdagist, lawyer Wastrup, and his wife Afrodite—lack poetic vitality. It is an example of how uneven Bjørneboe can be that the depiction of these characters in several places slides into unintentional caricature. Within the novel's idealistic and religious system of values the paragon Jan is praised for not being devoted to Marx. Nor does he love alcohol; "he loved the Bible" (160). To a fault it says that he "drank milk, which he had sorely missed in Norway, he read the Bible, and he thought" (163). In contrast, the narrator equips Wastrup and his wife with all the villain's props. She is a nymphomaniac—look at her name! He is cold and cynical. Together they and their culturally radical circle worship "that strange, evil trinity by the name of Marx, Freud and King Alcohol" (160). It is the same schematizing type of psychology we met in Before the Cock Crows—if possible, carried even further.
We can distinguish between a situation-determined message and a theme of timeless universality in Under a Harder Sky. The message is connected to the purge of the Nazis in Norway after World War II and will lose its contemporary relevance when this has become pure history. Nevertheless, the message contains a memento about common human guilt and responsibility which has a destination beyond the historic situation that it sprang from in the novel. One of the minor characters, a friend of the old major, formulates this further appeal thus: "A wrong which befalls one of us, strikes all of us. There is something in us which his hit by every single wrong that happens in the world" (205).
The timeless, universal theme in Under a Harder Sky is connected to the opposition between "the feminine" and "the masculine," which I touched on earlier. At the end of the novel Jan says to the narrator: " ... there are two forces which meet in our civilization: man and woman. Until now the man has won (220). Politics and war is man's work. Man has always betrayed "life and the "ordinary day", which is woman's element:
Life itself grows only during the ordinary day. On the ordinary day hay is mown, gardens cultivated, trees planted. On ordinary days the grass grows, grain ripens. Children grow up, are small and round, become pale and slender, get large eyes and take the world up in themselves. This is the ordinary day. (124)
It is this reality that man has betrayed in the name of the idea and the cause. It is Jan who finally formulates the theme in Under a Harder Sky. It is reminiscent both of Bjørnson's "beyond human power" motif and the idea of the patriarchy's destructive effects in Sigurd Hoel's writings:
We have lived in a sort of age of treason. We sell people for ideas. We are full of hideous, political passions which we call ideas. It is men's fate to be possessed by such ideas, and for them we betray each other, we betray the ordinary day and life. (218)
As a novel, Under a Harder Sky has the same weaknesses we found in Before the Cock Crows. The relationship between polemics and argumentation and the literary work's portrayal of life has gone wrong. The fusion does not succeed. As so often with Bjørneboe, you have the feeling that personal indignation was too white-hot for him to have placed sufficient time and distance between himself and his material. Most of the characters remain as postulates without a breath of life. All in all, Under a Harder Sky is in its unfinished, draftlike form one of Bjørneboe's weakest novels. Toward the end it seems as if the narrator has grown tired of the epic and would rather debate. Most alive is the amorous portrait of the young girl Fransiska with the sensitive depiction of her erotic awakening and romantic relationship to the German soldier. The occupation atmosphere—the blacked-out small town paralyzed by the Germans' terror—is intensely recreated in the chapter "Meeting" (137ff).
It is a strange situation that both of Bjørneboe's novels about Nazism are among his weakest. What is the reason? For me the explanation lies in Bjørneboe's interest in Nazism not as subject matter for literature but rather for the great fundamental philosophical and religious questions that National Socialism raises: the problems of pain, of suffering, of evil. Paradoxically Nazism functions best as a motif in Bjørneboe's writing after he has stopped using it as the only or most important material!