After the premiere of The Bird-Lovers at the National Theater in 1966 the Dane Jens Kruuse wrote a rave review in Jyllandsposten Nov 13, 1966: "Jens Bjørneboe is now Norway's great modern dramatist. Maybe even the Norwegians will discover it." Today—a good ten years later—one can only state that Norwegians' interest in Bjørneboe's plays—if we judge by performances and commentaries—is still very modest. (1)

This article, like the other contributions to this collection, is to give an analysis of a single work. But the reception Jens Bjørneboe's dramas have received can shed light on a general problem: Norwegian playwrights' peculiar working situation. In other countries they do their utmost to give dramatists possibilities for growth and viable working conditions, Bjørneboe wrote with understandable bitterness after the National Theater found it impossible to accept an invitation to present The Bird-Lovers at an international theater festival in Venice:

They justifiably regard the dramatist as a central point of growth in a country's theater life, something which in savvy theater folk is naturally due to the insight that real periods of flowering within the theater life always hang together with a corresponding following of national writing for the theater. . . .
      . . . Norway is the only country I know where people do the exact opposite on principle: if a Norwegian author writes a playable play, it is received within theater circles with the same hopeless/helpless despair as a family scandal, it's as if the family's impoverished niece had suddenly had a baby.

It is therefore no accident, Bjørneboe goes on, "that I as a writer have never worked with any Norwegian director. . . . No Norwegian director has shown the slightest interest in what I have written." (2)

On the other hand Bjørneboe has had a positive collaboration with a number of foreign directors. And here is an important point. Bjørneboe writes to a high degree theater texts, scores for performances. That means that reading can only give an insufficient impression of how his plays will work—on the stage. (Consider for example the important role the music plays in The Bird-Lovers. At one point—in the final scene, where Bjørneboe has the chorus from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony give an ironic commentary on the fraternization between the former enemies—it is possible for us to imagine the effect. The rest of the music was specially composed—for the National Theater's and the Riksteatret's productions by two different composers. And they solved their assignment in completely different ways, with important consequences for the working of the whole.)

Working with a director on the production was an important precondition for Bjørneboe's development as a dramatist. In this collaboration he regarded his own text as a point of departure, which could be changed along the way to the goal: the performance. As he writes in one place, he had nothing against "even the most radical surgical pruning of the text, if it leads to the piece's content becoming more vital and concentrated again." Here Bjørneboe mentions the Odin Theater's adaptation of The Bird-Lovers as an example. (3)

But a dramatist who sees his task as an interplay between author, director and theater, becomes in a special way dependent on outer, more or less accidental conditions. And it is not unreasonable to think that the negative attitude Jens Bjørneboe met from Norwegian theater leaders made his dramatic production less than it otherwise could have been. An any rate he thought so himself. In an afterword to a new edition of Ere the Cock Crows (1967) he relates that this novel was first written as a play, in 1950, but refused by Norwegian theaters:

at that time documentary plays were not comme il faut: theater folk believed in soul and poetry and "psychology", "character", "motivations", "development" of the characters and what have you, all the old junk from a dogmatic and completely made-up "dramatic lawfulness."

So it was all of fifteen years before Bjørneboe's next play (and public debut as a dramatist), Many Happy Returns! (1965).

If the theaters back then, shortly after the war, had shown a different attitude, I would during those 15 years certainly have written a number of other plays. It may not be any great loss, but at any rate it shows that the method—a curt and polite "no thanks"—is an effective insect powder against dramatic literature. (4)

The four plays Many Happy Returns!, The Bird Lovers, Semmelweis, and Amputation were all written during the period 1965-1970. (Collected Plays also includes The Torgersen Case from 1973, which is more of a bit of polemic pleading in dramatized form than an ordinary stage play. (4A))

Many Happy Returns! builds on documentary material which Bjørneboe first presented in a series of articles on prison conditions and then in the novel The Evil Shepherd (1960). In the final play version some pieces of the original sequence of actions are retained. Beyond that Many Happy Returns! is a free-standing work, conceived and shaped for a modern stage, with short, revue-like episodes, satirical songs, stylized decor, conscious breaks of illusion, etc.

For Bjørneboe himself the work with the play was an important confirmation that "a very great part of the inherited 'laws' and 'rules' for dramatic literature today are just as outmoded as the 'law' of the unity of place and time . . . . We have discovered that the true 'laws' which govern the stage are far fewer than people would like to think." (5)

In the theater there exists one basic demand, maintains Bjørneboe in another article: the play's action must consist of a fight between two parties. (6)

A natural consequence of this perception—that theater is a fight/conflict—is the trait Bjørneboe sees as his distinctive formal quality: "The tendency to express oneself through opposites, by setting contrasts hard and unmediated up against each other." (7)

All his plays are built up according to the contrast method, including The Bird-Lovers, which he himself has singled out as his best. Overwork and lack of time have meant that hardly any of the books have been what they could have been, he writes in a commentary to the court case around the novel Without a Stitch in 1966.

though there are two exceptions: the play which opened at the National Theater in November, The Bird-Lovers, and the novel which came out from Gyldendal at about the same time: Moment of Freedom. I think that these two things represent the maximum of what I'm able to express today. (8)

Compared to Many Happy Returns!, The Bird-Lovers can seem at first like a relatively traditional play. Among other things it has a solidly built plot and a dramatic conflict, which is already presented in the opening scene: shall the members of the hunting club in the little Italian village give up their favorite activity, hunting birds, or miss out on all the economic advantages which the German bird lovers and their planned vacation paradise can bring? At the outset they are divided. But the moment they discover that the leader of the bird lovers is a former SS general who terrorized the village during the war, the ranks close around the hunting club's leader, Caruso. The action moves toward a climax: the execution of a just revenge. But instead of revenge Caruso and his partisan friends bow to the inevitable: the bird lovers and their economic power.

Apart from a single retrospective scene (Scene 4) one episode follows another in chronological order, at a brisk tempo and with a tension which gradually builds up to a final, surprising turning point. For most of the way Bjørneboe follows the classical requirements of the three unities: we are the whole time in the village of Bonzo in Torre Rosse, the action is concentrated in a few hours, and develops toward a logical result.

All the same it is obvious to the onlooker and reader that The Bird-Lovers breaks with the classical or Aristotelian dramatic tradition, which in this country we know best through Ibsen's realistic contemporary dramas.

This break is already noticeable in the opening scene—with Cavalli's opening song or "preamble". The brief dialogue which comes before the song has a realistic feel. But when Caruso begins to sing he turns to the hall, to us:

Here you meet Torre Rosse
Our quiet little town
It hasn't much to offer,
No name and no renown.

The song itself functions as exposition: a brief presentation of the hunting club's members, done in a parodic-naive style which may bring to mind "Cardamom town" (8A). (Other traits work in the same direction. See the stage direction immediately following the song: "Enter Caruso in a heavy-duty hunting outfit" [Sc 1: 82, FW 22]).

In what follows too the action is suddenly interrupted by songs—some grotesquely satirical, others poetical and lyric/moving or almost tragic, such as Caruso's death song. The songs fill several functions: in some cases they spring directly out of the situation on the stage, or act as an ironic commentary to it. They can also mediate the characters' subjective experiences or a more general truth, which stands for the author's account—such as Greifenklau's "Mea Maxima Culpa." Here the character on the stage steps out of his role and thereby marks a break with every realistic illusion. (9)

Bjørneboe also uses other means of emphasizing that we are seeing a play, not reality. For example, the retrospective Scene 4 in Act I—the German military court where Rosa and Caruso were condemned—has a quality of a reconstruction, put on as a demonstration for us, the audience. Likewise a number of speeches function as addresses to the hall, sometimes but by no means always marked by the stage direction (Ad spectatores). The dialogue also has a number of other, non-realistic traits. In the court scene the verdict is pronounced in a "ritual, singsong tone." [Sc 4: 92, FW 30] In the following scene we get a striking parallel- or exchange-dialogue, in which Fidele, Marco and Cavelli talk about methods of execution and Rosa, Caruso and Piccolino about culinary preparation of songbirds—with the same enthusiastic animation and some of the same expressions.

Often Bjørneboe creates an ironic effect by making what the characters say be contradicted by the situation it is uttered in (e.g. Piccolino citing the Biblical text "A sparrow shall not fall to earth without God knowing it" while he sights along the barrel of his shotgun [Sc 1: 82, FW 21], or Marco fighting with Cavelli and pinning him to the ground with the comment "Now do you see who's right?" [Sc 6: 99, FW 46]) Even more striking is the ironic contrast between what is said and what happens in the scene where Greifenklau rhapsodizes about birdsong and roses to the accompaniment of blows of the whip from the executioner Johannes, and with the punishment carried out as "a pantomimic, abstract process" [Sc 4: 94, FW 34].

On the whole The Bird-Lovers yields rewarding material to demonstrate what Bjørneboe emphasized as his distinctive formal characteristic: "the tendency to express himself through opposites, by setting up contrasts stark and unmediated against each other". They are contrasts of different sorts: between word and action, between lyricism and satire, between prose and verse, tragic earnest and grotesque humor, between silence and ear-splitting noise (see for example the opening scene—"an absolute, soundless silence", which right afterwards—and repeatedly later—is relieved by tramping and yells and violent noise).

This is not the place to go into this more deeply. Only one single point should be emphasized: by the conscious use of stage effects Bjørneboe achieves a special freedom. He is showing a play: the action takes on the quality of a demonstration, freed from all demands of verisimilitude, and the characters become men in a board game which the author can move around without regard to psychological motivation. They are simple types, provided with a few characteristic traits—as the symbolism of their names emphasizes further (10)—and at the same time with a common basic character.

In the case of the bird-lovers the traits are those we associate with Nazism: Ruthless display of power over those who are weaker, servile submission to authority. Racial contempt and extremist ideas of the difference between the sexes (see Greifenklau's interpretation of the world of birds in scenes 19 and 20), sadistic pleasure in causing others suffering or being tortured oneself (sadomasochism), combined with sentimental emotionalism, expressed e.g. through the concern for "our little feathered friends".

The members of the hunting club don't form an ideologically clearly defined group in the same way. They share a certain natural appetite for life and a sensuality, pleasure in good food and wine and women, in contrast to the bird-lovers' puritanism. The difference between the two groups is in this way clearly underlined (even if the two groups, as we shall see, also have important traits in common).

Two of the characters fall partly outside the groups: Piccolino (although that first becomes clear in the long final scene) and Caruso's wife Rosa. Rosa apparently represents a feminine contrast to the hunting club and its ideals: She asks, "What is justice?" [Sc 18: 106, FW 60], and tries to stop Caruso when he and his comrades take their guns to carry out their revenge: "It's a sin to kill people. Stay here!" [Sc 23: 120, FW 78] But her protest can seem like an empty demonstration and takes on an almost parodic character when she immediately afterward calls after her husband: "Come right home after the murder, Caruso! You have to get up early tomorrow." No counterweight to an authoritarian patriarchal society is provided either by Rosa or her even more subdued sisters in the bird-lovers' delegation.

So what is Bjørneboe saying through the way he lets the conflict be resolved—with the hunting club's capitulation to the bird-lovers?

That The Bird-Lovers has a political aspect is obvious. The action is fixed in time and place: some years after the Second World War, when the defeated Nazi Germany has risen again as the "West German economic miracle". The piece is—to site the back cover text of the original edition "in a sense about Germany's next and imminent occupation of Europe"—this time not a military but an economic one.

As political satire The Bird-Lovers is marked by a simple, unambiguous agitation. Bjørneboe works—as he often does—with brutal contrasts, unnuanced and hard-hitting (some may think that the satire would have had a stronger effect if it weren't quite so pointedly obvious). But even if Bjørneboe attacks a time-bound state of affairs he clearly has an ulterior target. The villagers give up the thought of justice (or revenge!) and bow to the new economic realities. Money is stronger than all ideals, at least in a society where money is the most important means of power and oppression. Or as Piccolino says in the closing scene:

The world is ruled by typewriters, police and money. But the greatest of these is money, for he who has money, he has the police also. Money can move mountains. [Sc 29: 154, FW 151]

One can see an anti-capitalistic slant in this conclusion: Bjørneboe is attacking a certain kind of society. But it is also possible to see a more timeless theme here: what Bjørneboe is unmasking is a common human weakness, people are always for sale. Yet one can't stop with such a summing up. The message The Bird-Lovers mediates is far more complex and ambiguous. We are forewarned of this by the quotation from Erich Fromm which Bjørneboe has used as an epigraph (in the Pax edition of Collected Plays this quotation has for some reason disappeared):

One must remember that man's history, according to Jewish and Greek myths, begins with an act of disobedience. Disobedience is the first free act. Mankind has continued to develop itself through acts of disobedience; our intellectual development is also dependent on the ability to show disobedience.

This quote clearly points forward to Piccolino's great speech in the last act. The main point in his defense speech is that people in all times have bowed to authorities, whether temporal or religious. And from obedience followed wickedness. But the one who first demanded obedience was God—hence he becomes the real culprit. The consequence of Piccolino's argument is a relativizing of guilt. We are all guilty, not necessarily because of special evil acts, but because we accept the authorities and submit to them in obedience. This also applies to Piccolino himself:

When I was ordained, I took a vow of obedience to my superiors. I had to acknowledge obedience to the church as my supreme duty. [Sc 29: 143, FW 127]

(Later Piccolino broke his vow and is now an apostate, expelled from the Church. He thereby becomes a descendent of Lucifer, the first rebel and the first free individual, and appears now—in the truest sense—as "devil's advocate".)

According to Piccolino, then, wickedness came into the word through God's demand for obedience. And in his enumeration of atrocities throughout history, he underscores evil's timeless character: The Romans burned the Christians, the Christians persecuted Jews and heretics, the persecuted Puritans emigrated to America and burned blacks alive; Turks, Armenians, Englishmen, Americans, Japanese, Frenchmen, Communists—they are all guilty of persecutions and atrocities.

A theme running through this historical accounting is that the persecuted themselves oppress and persecute as soon as they get power. And Piccolino spares no one, including his fellow partisans:

PICCOLINO: Caruso, what did the accused do to you?
CARUSO: They beat us with sticks and shot us against a wall.
PICCOLINO: And Sandro, what will you do to them? [Sc 29: 147, FW 136]

The conclusion which we—as onlookers and readers—must naturally draw is that the former partisans fit the same pattern: the demand for justice is merely a scanty camouflage of what it's really about: revenge. Only the roles are reversed:

When cat turns mouse and mouse turns cat,
That's when the night of the long knives comes! [Sc 15: 109, FW 56]

Caruso and his friends can now enjoy the power of which they were formerly victims. Their obvious glee at the thought of the suffering they shall now inflict on their former enemies speaks clearly to this. But with that the difference between the two groups—the bird-hunters and the bird-lovers—is also erased.

Other elements point in the same direction. For example it is striking how the partisan days are presented as an exciting time of hunting—not a battle about fundamental values (and back then they didn't have to content themselves with songbirds!). Nor is their willingness to swear obedience and follow orders—and thereby achieve freedom from responsibility—essentially different from that of their enemies—something which Piccolino demonstrates conclusively.

This likeness between hunters and bird-lovers is given depth and nuance through the bird symbolism, which forms an important unifying element in the text. (11)

What Bjørneboe—through Piccolino—is pointing to is a general psychological mechanism: people's dread of freedom, their need to be subservient to an authority and to compensate for their own weakness by oppressing others (much of this is reminiscent of the views of Erich Fromm, e.g. in Escape from Freedom, Norwegian edition 1960). There are also elements in the long concluding scene—a series of Biblical allusions and also reminders of Dostoevsky's story about the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov—which point beyond a realistic-psychological interpretation. Jens Kruuse says right out that Bjørneboe here moves "his drama up into a metaphysical or truly realistic sphere." (12) At the same time Piccolino's defense speech can seem like a metaphysical digression: it has no consequences for the play's action. On the contrary: the hunting club's members reject—and are utterly untouched by—Piccolino's argumentation. It is only when Piccolino gives up all metaphysics and instead appeals to their economic interests that the plot takes a new direction. That is: it merely confirms what we already suspected in the play's opening scene: money is stronger than ideals.

But Bjørneboe doesn't let the action end here. For Caruso refuses to bow to money's might. Pathetically alone he gets ready to die as a sacrifice—a self-selected Christ figure who says that it is "better that one person die for the people, than that the whole people perish". [Sc 29: 155, FW 152] No one tries to stop him. Instead the former partisans are in agreement with the former torturer Johannes: it is as if it has a higher meaning—Caruso has in fact been dead ever since that time.

But Caruso discovers that he is no Christ. He neither can nor dares to die, and bows before his executioners. What lies in this bending of the knee—which is not dictated by economic motives?

In several ways the play underscores points of likeness between Caruso and Greifenklau. Both are leaders who have demanded and received absolute obedience from their subordinates. Both have experienced death and returned from it. For Greifenklau the result is an utter lack of fear of death, while Caruso is bound to life and its joys and above all to the fellowship of the hunting club. Faced with death he is placed outside this fellowship. Earlier he has called on God as a kind of guarantee for justice. But this God has no true reality for him—least of all now in the face of death. Therefore he can sing about how remarkably lonely it is to die. And it is this loneliness he cannot bear. By giving up dying he is again accepted into the fellowship. "Now you are one of us!" says Cavelli. [Sc 29: 156, FW 154] But at the same time the hunters' old fellowship is replaced by a new one—with Greifenklau as leader. Therefore Caruso must give up his old role as leader and bow down for a new fellowship—something which is ironically underscored in the final tableau: the torturer Johannes who embraces and kisses the partisan leader to the accompaniment of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: "Seid umschlungen, Millionen!"

Bjørneboe lets the play end with Caruso's "conversion," and thereby makes the association to a theme running through all his writings: the problem of evil—and freedom. For Bjørneboe there is a close connection between "the evil" in human beings and their obedience to authorities. Without obedience no evil either. When he therefore writes of The Bird-Lovers that the play is "an analysis of the authoritarian mentality, it's about obedience" (13), he confirms that The Bird-Lovers is conceived as a new variation on his perennial theme.

The final scene in The Bird-Lovers is so concentrated that this connection may only become clear if one regards the play in the light of the rest of Bjørneboe's work, not least the novel Moment of Freedom (published the same year as The Bird-Lovers, 1966). The novel's protagonist and narrator experiences that before death all pretense falls away and freedom becomes evident, the freedom which consists in

not having any standard outside one's own consciousness, but to bear all responsibility oneself. Freedom is that one can never again get help. . . . Freedom is that one must choose for oneself every second—that nothing in heaven or on earth can help one with anything. (14)

But only a few people can bear the total loneliness which according to Bjørneboe is the precondition for freedom. This he shows in The Bird-Lovers.

Caruso proclaims proudly in Scene 2: "I won't stand for anyone having authority over us!" [93, FW 24] As a rebel against all authority he should be a hero after Bjørneboe's heart (see the essay collection Norway, My Norway with the subtitle "Essays on the authoritarian personality"). But Rosa's sharp answer to Caruso: "Will you come home at once!" sows doubt whether Caruso is really any rebel. And when the real test comes, he experiences his weakness: He doesn't dare loneliness, freedom—and death.

In The Bird-Lovers there is one person—Piccolino—who has perceived this connection. But he acts only as a commentator—he doesn't realize his freedom in action (if we disregard his break with the church—sometime in the past). And perhaps it is a weakness in the play that the character who stands for Bjørneboe's own problematic of freedom hasn't been given a more active role in the plot.

I have tried to show that behind the contemporary political slant in The Bird-Lovers there is another, timeless conflict: freedom versus obedience and repression. If this analysis is tenable, it places Bjørneboe's radicalism in a new, ambiguous light. It becomes clear if we view him in relation to a dramatist to whom he is obviously indebted (and about whom he has written an instructive essay): Bertolt Brecht. (15)

In Brecht's dramatic theory and praxis there is a central idea that the human being is historically determined. There is no timeless state. Therefore the world can be changed. And it is this Brecht wishes to demonstrate in his plays. In the Aristotelian dramatic tradition the progress of the action has the quality of something determined by fate: scene follows scene with merciless inner necessity. When the curtain falls the onlooker is left with the feeling: That's what had to happen! Brecht wants by any means to work against such a reaction, inter alia through what he calls Verfremdungs- or alienation effects. The onlookers shall be constantly reminded that what they are seeing is a play, not reality. Brecht resorts to all the theater's effects to achieve this: songs and music, pantomime, projection of texts, nonrealistic dialogue, choral speaking, a stylized way of acting, etc. The progress of the plot is built up out of freestanding episodes, consciously un-dramatized so that the audience will not be carried away by or identify with the actions and the characters. Instead Brecht wants to encourage a critical, rational attitude to what is happening on the stage. Only in that way—Brecht believes—can the drama function politically: yield new insight and desire for change. That's what happened—but it could have happened differently! At the same time Brecht accepts that the public comes to the theater to be entertained, and takes that into account when he presents his "learning pieces."

If we look at Bjørneboe's dramatics it is easy to find points of likeness with Brecht: the break with the theater of illusion and the conscious underscoring of the theatrical: this is a play! The use of songs (even if Bjørneboe in a commentary to Many Happy Returns! emphasizes that he uses the songs in a different way from Brecht), the episodic structure, elements of pantomime and choral speaking, non-realistic dialogues, simplified portrayal of people, etc. Like Brecht, Bjørneboe also takes care that our interest will be held—here nobody will get a chance to be bored!

But does Bjørneboe use these effects to advance a coolly critical attitude in the audience? In The Bird-Lovers we have, on the contrary, a very exciting plot, which irresistibly carries us along. And his contrast method (to which we incidentally have a clear parallel in Nordahl Grieg's Our Honor and Our Power) produces a series of emotional shocks rather than the clarity of reflection. If we can nevertheless collect ourselves after this subjective bombardment, what new insight can we draw out of the progress of the action? That it concerns "the conflict between authoritarianism and independent thought—a phenomenon which has dogged humanity so long as there has been history" (as Bjørneboe writes of the play Semmelweis). (16) and that humanity's wickedness, its will to cause others suffering, is without end? In that case: what concrete political impulses to action can such a perception lead to? Won't all social reforms just be a blow at the air, a fight against something which can't be combatted: a timeless, unchangeable human nature? If the play leads to such a perception, that means that it mediates a fundamental pessimism, which will more likely yield paralysis than renewed will to effort. And then it becomes politically harmless, if not harmful, even though it attacks established authorities or arouses anger in conservative quarters.

We can pose a contrary question: Jens Bjørneboe's uncompromising battle against all authoritarian systems—in all times!—is the expression of a visionary belief in an anarchist utopia: the world can be changed and become better—once all authorities are eliminated. (17) To be sure, human history has so far been one single comprehensive demonstration of repression and wickedness. But doesn't Bjørneboe's belief in human freedom imply the possibility of change?

Regardless of what standpoint one takes here, one can't avoid such aggressive questions about the true content and consequence of Bjørneboe's radicalism. And these questions apply not only to The Bird-Lovers, but to most of what Bjørneboe has written.

1.   Productions in Norway as of 1984: Many Happy Returns!: Oslo Nye teater (1965), Trondelag Theater (1977-78). The Bird-Lovers: Nationalteatret (1966), Riksteatret (1975), radio theater (1983). Also Eugenio Barba's Odinteatret adaptation, The Ornithophiles (1965). Semmelweis: Nationalteatret (1969), radio theater (1977), TV theater (1983). [Amateur performance by medical students at the University of Trondheim (1995) --Tr.] Amputation: Swedish Royal Theater (1970), Rogaland Theater (1977), "a free group in Oslo" (1983). The Torgersen Case: Stage 7 (1973). Blue Jeans: Stage 7 (1974). [Longum's original note has been expanded using data in Fredrik Wandrup's Jens Bjørneboe: Mannen, Myten og Kunsten (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1984), 142. Oddbjørn Johannessen's article "Jens Bjørneboe og norsk teater" (Sørlandsk magasin 1996: 17-19) indicates that there have not been many performances since then.—Tr.]    Back

2.    "Fugleelskerne og Den Internationale Teaterfestival i Venezia" (The Bird-Lovers and the International Theater Festival in Venice), Norge, Mitt Norge (Oslo: Pax, 1968), 154-155.   Back

3.    "Om Odin-teatrets adaptasjon av Fugleelskerne" (On the Odin Theater's adaptation of The Bird-Lovers), Vi som Elsket Amerika (Oslo: Pax, 1970), 195.   Back

4.    Før Hanen Galer (Ere the Cock Crows) (Oslo: Pax 1967) 186-187.    Back

4A.    The 1995 edition of Samlede Skuespill adds the cabaret satire Dongery (Blue Jeans, 1976). —Tr.    Back

5.    From the theater program to Many Happy Returns! Samlede Skuespill (Oslo: Pax, 1973), 77.    Back

6.    "Fra Gøttingen til Pentagon" (From Göttingen to the Pentagon), Politi og Anarki (Oslo: Pax, 1972), 240.    Back

7.    Før Hanen Galer, 187.    Back

8.    "Istedenfor en forsvarstale" (Instead of a defense speech), in En Tråd (Oslo: Pax 1967), 41.    Back

8A.    Reference to Folk og Røvere i Kardamomme By (When the Robbers Came to Cardamon Town), 1958 children's book by Thorbjørn Egner (1912-1990). —Tr.   Back

9.    What Bjørneboe says about the songs in Many Happy Returns! goes also to a modified degree for The Bird-Lovers: "The songs here are almost always used as a contrast to the situation they are set in. They don't further the action, but gives a sidelight over it—from a viewpoint which is distant from or even opposed to the process on the stage. Music and lyrics are thus used in a different way than in Brecht." (Samlede Skuespill 1973, 77)    Back

10.    Name symbolism: Huldreich (full of grace/mercy), Greifenklau (vulture claw), Stahlman (steel man), Herz (heart), Johannes—who is addressed throughout by his first name (cf. the disciple Jesus loved), Cavelli (cavallo = horse), Sandro Vitale (vital), Caruso Gentile (gentil = friendly), etc. After Wæraas, op. cit.    Back

11.    A characteristic trait of the bird-lovers' attitude is their doubleness. In "The bird-lovers' song", for example, the sentimental talk about "our defenseless little friends" slides over into an enthusiastic tribute to "Falcon, hawk and eagle, Vultures, ravens and condors" [Sc 19: 107, FW 62], at the same time they insist that "the birds are nice". This ambiguity is marked visually through the bird posters, which gradually take on a greater and greater likeness to the symbol of the occupying power = the authoritarian system (see also Greifenklau's speach about the pecking order [Sc 19: 106, FW 60f]. The doubleness proclaims a psychological split which Øyvind Wæraas ties to a sado-masochistic character structure: submission to authority and power, whether symbolized by the fatherland, a superior, or birds of prey—combined with a feeling of powerless and anxiety which is camouflaged as ruthlessness toward those who are weaker or projected onto the avian world, the weak and defenseless little friends. For the bird-hunters the hunt gives a feeling of power, and reaches great heights when the songbirds are replaced by the big game (and bird of prey) Greifenklau.    Back

12.    Jyllandsposten, 13 November 1966.    Back

13.    In Bjørneboe's libel suit against the Danish critic Ole Storm. Reprinted in Carl Madsen, En litterær prosess (A literary lawsuit) (Copenhagen: 1968), 62.    Back

14.    Frihetens øyeblikk (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1966), 148. English translation: Moment of Freedom (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1999), 143f.    Back

15.    "Brechts liv og verk" (Brecht's life and work,) Politi og Anarki (Oslo: Pax, 1972).    Back

16.    Preface to Semmelweis.    Back

17.   Bjørneboe has in several places written about anarchism and his own sympathy with it. See e.g. "Anarkisme—idag?" (Anarchism—today?), Politi og Anarki, 1972. English translation in Degrees of Freedom (Philadelphia: Protocol Press, 1998).    Back