Øyvind Gulliksen is professor of American studies at Telemark College in Norway.
The article from which this excerpt is taken was orginally published in Images of America in Scandinavia, edited by Poul Houe and Sven Hakon Rossel (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), 101-127. ©1998 by Øyvind Gulliksen. Used by permission.
For a more detailed look at how America figures in Jens Bjørneboe's writing, including a discussion of influences by Melville, Henry Miller, and Hemingway, see Øyvind Gulliksen's article Bjørneboe and America on this site.
"The title of this essay is not meant as irony," Bjørneboe wrote in "We Who Loved America", originally published in 1966:
I belong to those who have had a genuine love relationship with the United States, and I know what it feels like. Like most other Norwegians I have relatives there. Because of my father's occupation I spent time with Americans since childhood. America was the country of dreams, liberty, and opportunities; a true fairy tale. I had been to New York before I had set foot in Copenhagen or Stockholm. That was only as it should be. To me America was truly the world. I read American literature to exhaustion. I wore American ties and imitated nasals and guttural sounds in my English. When hell broke loose in Europe, Fascism in Italy and Spain and Hitler's monomania in Germany, then again the United States was the beacon to the world and, after all, a land of normality. Corrupt perhaps and crime was high, but it was wide and open and liberal, the land of freedom and of the future ... To me the United States symbolized everything that guaranteed the human rights which made life livable—but less and less so. Passion may arise with a sudden unquenchable power, but it may die out slowly. I cannot say exactly when it was, but one day I realized I no longer loved the United States. It must have been in the beginning of the 1950s. America had become dangerous, frightening, scary. It represented conformity, corruption, violence, the world's strongest military, and it aspired to become a world ruler....[During the cold war] the whole original idea of America disappeared. The dark sides of American society which had always been there: brutality, hypocrisy, materialism, and the worship of strong men, was suddenly transferred to the arena of foreign policy. I no longer believe that a person or a group or a government will act on entirely bad or entirely good motivations. Generally, there is a smattering of good and much evil hidden in the causes of people's actions. But we shall have to look for a long time in a discouraging world history before we come across more one-sided and brutally egoistic motives than in the last twenty years of American foreign policy. (27)
Norwegian culture had long been positively tied to the United States through a common heritage spanning the Enlightenment, the years of Norwegian emigration, and, finally, the German occupation. Bjørneboe's break with the dominant Norwegian view of American culture was not a solitary act of despair. His essay became the best-known expression of what had happened to a good many writers and intellectuals at the time, and it was not published lightly. Yet Bjørneboe, interestingly enough, did not change his view of what the United States supposedly once had been. It was not Norwegian liberals who had been wrong about America. On the contrary, according to Bjørneboe and others, it was the Pentagon that had desecrated America's liberal tradition. To support this argument Bjørneboe had to make an interesting distinction between America as an idea and America as a modern superpower. The conception of America as an idea remained for Bjørneboe a dream come true as opposed to the reality of endless wrong-doing characteristic of European history.
Up to and including the Roosevelt period, America was still a symbol of and a guarantee for the value of human liberty. During the years of Stalin and Hitler, the United States was still to Bjørneboe "a beacon to the world." The same attitude was articulated by Sigmund Skard. Norway's relation to the United States was a blissful one up through Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. From his position in Washington, D.C., during the war, Skard felt that the war effort united the two countries more strongly than ever before. In his book of poems entitled For Norge (For Norway), published in 1942, Skard praised "the blond Yankee from Minnesota on guard at Isafjord," (28) but his own study of the United States in Norwegian history ended in fear and uncertainty, as if his own success story had come to an undesired end.
American contemporary culture as it swerved from earlier ideals worried both Bjørneboe and Skard, who otherwise had precious little in common. Increasingly, cultural critics on the left warned Norwegians against a leisurely adaptation of American materialism. For instance, Sonja Henie's art museum just outside of Oslo was to Bjørneboe a symbol of the worst possible kind of American influence in Norway: art bought with profits from an American entertainment culture that he and others could do without. In another collection of essays entitled Norge, mitt Norge (1968; Norway, My Norway), typically, Bjørneboe felt the need to devote a whole section on what he called "America." The contemporary American culture which had become an integrated part of Norway's own was to Bjørneboe a bloated kind of materialism, a superficial private happiness, which he felt led Norwegians away from the basic values of life. He and others increasingly focused on aspects of what Michael Harrington called "the other America" such as the poor, violence in the streets, outdated political slogans, and the self-made man turned egotist. As Bjørneboe's criticism of America as a political superpower grew stronger, he also started to probe America as an idea, an intrinsic part of our psyche. In 1952 he had published an essay entitled "Frygten for Amerika I oss" (The Fear of America Within Us). Republished several times, the essay is a surprisingly early statement of cultural malaise at a time when most Norwegians looked to American affluence as a model for rebuilding their own nation. Bjørneboe, ending on a note of irony, reminded his readers of what was behind the mask of troubled tranquillity:
We live between two poles of anxiety. One is in the open. That is the fear of Russia and of things we know: hunger, bombs, mass deportation, and concentration camps. That is a publicly accepted, undeniable fear. The other pole is within us, hidden in our dark unconsciousness. It penetrate only those who are sensitive and young enough to be receptive. This is the fear of America and for something nobody knows what really is. It may burst into modernist poetry or into mental illness. It may also be masked and geared into an arsenal of communist slogans, such as warmonger, capitalist, imperialist, etc. But it cannot be eradicated. The fear of America is fear of a state of mind, of America within us. In the wake of Americanism floats a feeling which renders life impoverished, death meaningless. Death is an uninvited guest, whose knocking cannot be blocked off by refrigerators and colorful magazines. Life, however, is a known fixture: it is canned pine apple. (29)
The experience of Bjørneboe and others that it was, above all, the American involvement in the Vietnam war which caused their change of opinion is illustrated by the statement that Vietnam made us "lose our illusions of American ideals." (30) This experience was not uncommon. In 1969 the young labor politician EinarFørde, who was later to become director of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, published a collection of essays entitled Amerika og vi (America and Us). Reading this book today, it is interesting to notice how its profound skepticism about American culture, coming from a future head of national radio and TV, predates a time when these media are becoming increasingly Americanized. Just a few years ago the monopoly of Norway's single national radio and TV station was broken, and a new set of American-inspired broadcasting rules was put in place under Førde's nominal leadership. More channels were devoted to talk shows and pop music, short news reports were brought every hour, and advertisements were allowed on private stations and a rival semi public TV channel.
There is a considerable difference between these policies and the reasons Førde gave in the introduction to his 1969 volume for the importance of a comparative study of American and Norwegian culture. One reason was that the United States had "come to represent acts and ideals at home and abroad which ought not to become ours." The United States, said Førde, had become the dominant power, politically and financially, in the world. Consequently, what the United States decided had consequences for Norway. He was certain that Norway's relationship to the United States would play a decisive part in his country's future, and the book he had edited was intended as a warning to that effect.
In his preface Førde admitted that he had changed the views he had held in his younger days. President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961 had been a powerful influence on his earlier political engagement, but now, he confessed, Kennedy's words smacked of a dangerous rhetoric, and his high-sounding ideas of slogans for a hidden imperialism. Vietnam had backfired on Førde's American dream, and what had once appeared to be the President's genuine idealism now appeared to his Norwegian observer not only doubtful but fundamentally misleading.
But it was not only Vietnam and the fact that Norway was in a military alliance with the United States that turned Norwegians, particularly on the left, against American culture. The dream of a better world and the chance for everybody to have a new start in life, which had been key to Norwegians' understanding of the United States since the days of emigration, had become tainted. What had once been a dream of fulfillment to be praised now became a consumer materialism to be avoided. To many Norwegians, the American dream of a classless society, which had inspired the old liberals in Norway, gave way to an image of the most class-ridden society in the world. These observations can all be found in Skard's post-Vietnam meditations on America. To Førde and others President Richard Nixon had a credibility problem from the very start. His words about America as the greatest nation in the world simply did not ring true as long as newspapers could report of the country's "unbelievable poverty, deeply rooted discrimination and profound injustice.&quo5; (31)
It is hard to say whether the tone of the Cold War changed Norwegian attitudes to the United States for good. In the post-Cold War era, American politics are not discussed much in Norway. Traditional allegiances to the United States seem to have shifted. Probably for the first time in Norway's history its conservative forces are referring to American politics, if not as a model, at least as a prime example of a free enterprise with smaller taxes, cheaper cars, and profitable investments in the oil industry. Up to and including the Roosevelt years of the 1930s, the United States was admired by many a Norwegian social-democrat and liberal. Now it is more a haven for market-oriented conservatives.
27. Jens Bjørneboe, "Vi som elsket
America",
in Vi som elsket Amerika (Oslo: Pax, 1970), 22-23. Back
28. Sigmund Skard, For Norge. Dikt (Duluth,
MN: The
Fuhr Company, 1942). Back
29. Jens Bjørneboe, "Frykten for Amerika I
oss", in Norge, mitt Norge (Oslo: Pax, 1968), 213. Back
30. Bjørneboe, "Vi som elsket
America", 21.
Back
31. Einar Førde, ed., Amerika og vi
(Oslo: Det
Norske Samlaget, 1969), 11. Back