1.

In the beginning of the 1930s a little book began a journey through Europe. Its message was urgent but it faced many obstacles. In the first place, it portrayed reality so bizarre and so absurd that many would have denied that it was an accurate account of the acts of their contemporaries -- of human beings living in their own world. In the second place, it was written in German, and the book had to pass through a language barrier in each new land in which it appeared. Nevertheless, there were some strong spirits who were willing to give the material a long hard look -- the more difficult because of the glaring truth it reflected -- and the book was soon translated into the major European languages.

In this way Die Moorsoldaten [Peat Bog Soldiers] (1) carried its terrible message to a world that was not yet ready to receive it: a decade before the time when the post-war revelations of the existence of concentration camps, of the attempted extermination of ethnic and political groups, and the massive complicity of millions of "good" citizens, would receive widespread publicity. Years before the outbreak of World War II, the book by an escaped concentration camp inmate named Wolfgang Langhoff was lying open. The truth was there for anyone who could read.

Few figures with influence in Europe or abroad acknowledged the evidence it provided at the time. Absolutely no governments did, at least not publicly. Die Moorsoldaten, which took its name from a song which was sung by the inmates of the earliest Nazi concentration camps, gave a depiction of what National Socialism really was, and a good idea of what it held in store for humanity. In retrospect, of course, its depictions from the mid-thirties seem tame by comparison with all that was to follow. Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators were among the authors who took up the task of getting the word out early, and drew on the book for a scene in the dramatic expose of Nazism, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches [The horror and misery of the Third Reich]. When the world finally came to face the facts, the facts could only be used as lessons for the future. And very few on either side would come to recognize their complicity when the winds had finally ceased to howl.

In 1935 the little book fell into the hands of a fifteen year old Norwegian. . . . "As I read," [Jens Bjørneboe] later wrote, "the sun grew black. Since that time I have never been truly happy. Several years later it was impossible for me to grasp that the world was still in existence." (2) He read the book in one sitting, and by his own account, the almost physical shock of the experience laid the groundwork for his entire authorship.

The book was his first "meeting with reality", as he came to refer to it. It is not a passive concept. It implies not simply a vision of the world, but a collision. It is a fall from grace and presupposes the choice of either an eternal struggle with the world, or surrender resulting in selective blindness, complicity with oppression and even bestiality -- the worst sort of ;mauvaise foi [bad faith], to use Sartre's term. Human beings have often chosen to relinquish their right to use their own eyes to see. "The world is dark, gruesome and frightening," he wrote in 1972 in his introduction to his first novel Duke Hans -- another book that was dismissed after it was written, and was not published until twenty-four years later:

The world -- objectively -- we cannot portray. Our only possibility is to describe the encounter between reality and a mind. . . . Thus, the book ties in consistently with everything I have written later: The meeting of mind with reality, with the world of injustice and bestiality -- with the incomprehensible fact that a world that is in itself beautiful, has become evil and corrupt.

2.

From his discovery of Langhoff's book about the Oranienburg concentration camp up to his death by his own hand on May 10th 1976, Jens Bjørneboe would continue to look where others were not looking. As a poet, essayist, playwright and novelist in the vanguard of post-war culture in Scandinavia, he would continue to look into the dark places and bring to light what publishers preferred to ignore, make popular causes out of unpopular issues, and break ground for new forms which defied the esthetic standards of the time in northern Europe.

It has been said of him that during his life he functioned as Norway's "bad conscience.". (3) But his significance as an artist rests upon the contradictions and inconsistencies in his career, rather than his adherence to any consistent political or artistic "line." Having begun as a painter and poet with primarily esthetic and metaphysical concerns -- and personal opinions which might often be described as conservative -- it was in fact through his engagement with his art that his engagement with society evolved. At his death he was a writer at the forefront of post-war Scandinavian culture. For almost a decade it could have been said that he was simultaneously Norway's most important novelist and playwright.

As of this writing only four of his novels have been published in English: one of them because it was a succès du scandale as "pornography" in the rest of Scandinavia when it was banned and confiscated in Norway. The book that was the first volume of the novel trilogy which is his most important work was released by a major U.S. publisher, received consistently positive reviews, and strangely, was allowed to die on the shelves in the hardcover edition.(4) Almost all of his major plays have been translated, but have lain unproduced in the drawers of English and American theatres: this despite periodic bursts of enthusiasm for his work on the continent, notably in Germany. In his time he was certainly one of the most interesting theatre writers in northern Europe -- both as theorist and as dramatist -- while most other writers in the area had been, and have been, suffering in the shadow of Ibsen and Strindberg for what will soon be a century.

It is an age-old evasion to explain an author's difficulties by the notion that he was "ahead of his time." It is simply enough sometimes to be out of step with fashion. In literature, this often manifests itself in the dismissal of an author or a book that is not "modern." Duke Hans, according to Bjørneboe, was considered "un-modern." That is, it lacked "the stamp of the times" which changes from one period to another, and which "one is inclined to regard, in each period, as the only solution for literature." He adds further: "Young authors, especially, must 'belong to their time' even if that 'time' only lasts a while".

Fourteen novels, six major plays (not including his children's plays), six volumes of poetry, eight volumes of essays, over twenty translations (including works by Strindberg, Brecht, Schiller, Wedekind, Sade), two screenplays, and an unfinished autobiography -- this is the legacy of a writer who died at fifty-six, at an age at which many of Europe's most important authors had yet to complete their best work. They constitute Bjørneboe's accounts or "protocols" of the meeting with reality.

The essays -- on books, people, prisons, cats, politics, the third world and theatre -- are always deeply engaged. They tend toward extremes of unreserved enthusiasm for his subject, to direct and killing polemics, often highly humorous for all but the victim in their tongue-in-cheek irony. Many of the best essays constitute material which Bjørneboe put to the test before developing and refining it in novels or plays.

The poetry meanwhile is often metaphysical, oriented toward symbol and myth, executed with a sense for form that is Rilkean. Rilke is the writer who most influenced Bjørneboe in his early years, and the poems display the influence most clearly.

The novels. . . bring his metaphysical perspectives together with a deep sense of disturbance in response to the history, politics and culture of the West. His central work of fiction is the trilogy known as the History of Bestiality, which includes Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse and The Silence. Here the influences from the continent below the Scandinavian peninsula emerge to light. No sooner does one become evident, than it gives way to the next one: Novalis and Nietzsche, Brecht and Strindberg, Kafka and Camus, Aretino and, an elusive phantom that hovers behind the trilogy like a confessor -- Dante.

The plays, meanwhile, show the influence of Brecht, and other great non-naturalistic theatre traditions (including circus, mime and wrestling), though the dialogue itself is always in a style that is distinctively Bjørneboe. His break-through as an original dramatist in Scandinavia, the second in Norway to cast off the Ibsenite leg-irons -- the first was Nordahl Grieg -- has to do with an attitude towards originality shared by most of the avant-garde in theatre whose work has proven to be of lasting value. This is an originality which comes of a return to theatre's origins. The most striking achievements here are The Bird-Lovers and Semmelweis.

With Bjørneboe, as with many other writers who have the ability to work in different genres, the drama emerges as the most explicitly social form. All of the plays can be viewed as polemics, in the sense that they contain attacks on central facets of our society and our existence which have become institutionalized. They are also polemics against easy answers. They therefore leave the audience facing fierce contradictions. Here, Bjørneboe is of course showing traces of an inheritance from the Scandinavian tradition also evident in the work of Holberg, Ibsen and Strindberg. The undisguised influence of Brecht certainly only puts this aspect of his work further into relief. In contrast to this, the novels of Bjørneboe are very often a lonely world of perception. That is not to say that they are introverted or private, but they have the "dream-like quality which our half-conscious meeting with reality always has".

3.

Bjørneboe's development as a writer might be best described as a trajectory from esthetic and spiritual concerns tied in with his deep involvement with the spiritual movement of Anthroposophy, to his final philosophical resting place: anarchism. Yet one has to be cautious in proposing this kind of trajectory, since both impulses are evident at both the beginning and end of his writing career. Even so, his meetings with reality will turn increasingly into conflicts with society and authorities -- charges in the media, charges and countercharges in the courts, the banning of one of his books, outright prosecution, personal threats against him, and ongoing critical assessments of "unsatisfactory" trends in his work -- all this taking place in a country that would appear to be the most innocent of modern democracies.

And while his stature in his own country has taken on the proportions of a myth, his work has up till now been passed over in virtual silence in the English-speaking world; that language area where an author's work must appear if he is to be acknowledged by the world at large. The irony in this is that he never was a particularly "Norwegian" writer. He never consciously drew attention to a national or Nordic sensibility, as did Hamsun, for example -- nor did he often show an affinity for northern and Norwegian nature, isolation, and fantasy, like that we find in Tarjei Vesaas. He was internationalist in almost every sense of the word. It might even be said that he was a writer without a language. Bjørneboe's use of language shows constant evidence of his consciously allowing it to be corrupted by the German he grew up with, the Swedish he was surrounded by in exile, and the Danish-like riksmål spellings he would use if it suited his purpose. (5) When he brought his first travel pieces to the editor of an Oslo daily paper, the editor's response was favorable, though he asked, "Where on earth have you learned your Norwegian?" He said he had "never seen the like," and asked permission to "translate it into Norwegian," as he gave the aspiring writer an advance from his own pocket.

Late in his life, seasoned by many cultural battles, Bjørneboe remarked that he never intended to visit a theatre again: "It smells of the piss of the barricades". But until the end of his life the barricades would never come down -- and paradoxically, neither did the loneliness which he always associated with the discovery of truth.

There is, though, a confederation of such disturbers of the peace, even in their solitude. Particularly for those who are international in their spirit and perspective, this confederation extends over borders and recognizes its own in any place and under all kinds of circumstances. How limited their numbers are is made evident by the ways in which they often encounter each other. In 1959 Bjørneboe was making an extended stay at Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. He became engaged in a conversation there, in which he began to describe the little book about the Oranienburg concentration camp that had changed the direction of a Norwegian child's life. At this point his interlocutor stops him.

"Ich bin Langhoff," he says. "I wrote that book." (6)

©1996 by Peter Lang Publishing, New York. Used by permission.

Top        Home       Keeper of the Protocols