Fredrik Wandrup, Jens Bjørneboe: Mannen, myten og kunsten, p56-59, 63-65. ©1984 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. English translation ©1998 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer. Used by permission.
As a teacher he was inventive and inspiring as few are. Untrained in pedagogy, he interpreted his role with a sure instinct. To be sure, he was not equally sure of himself in all subjects. Mathematics, for example, was not his forte. There he preferred to get an unusually gifted pupil to help him with the teaching.
The pupils came from all strata of society. Bjørneboe was known as a rigorously just teacher who never discriminated among the children. He was just as occupied with every single one. If he had favorites, it was among the weakest: "I especially appreciate difficult pupils," he said in an interview in Morgenbladet in 1955.
In the fifties the Steiner School was in the pioneer phase, it demanded all its teachers' efforts. Strict demands were made. You couldn't be absent more than two days a year. You could starve on the pay, 300 kroner a month didn't go far.
As an employee at the Steiner School one was obliged in addition to the teaching to take part in maintenance and work parties on the school building. Here the teachers battled fire and flood, cold and decay. The school go no kind of public support or subsidy. Idealism and zeal for the cause were the driving force. . . .
Vis-à-vis the youngsters Bjørneboe's love of telling stories came fully into its own. Among other things he could pull all the curtains and tell the children frightfully creepy ghost stories light of a flickering candle. In the next period he could give a description of all the world's splendid fruits, with such insight that you could see the juice running down his chin.
"The ancient Persians had to know two things," Bjørneboe told the children. "To tell the truth and to shoot with a bow and arrow."
The next day he brought a bow so the pupils could learn to shoot. Afterwards followed the truth.
Bjørneboe's own class, which he had from the first to the seventh grade, was famous for its giftedness, in dramatics as well as phenomenal proficiency in drawing. He doubtless managed to infect them with his zeal, his sense of independence over authority, for imagination over dry teaching.
As a Norwegian teacher he could say to a pupil, "You can write an essay on anything at all, if you just live yourself well enough into it. You can write about a staircase, for that matter. Do that, write about a staircase for tomorrow!". . . .
At that time Bjørneboe was ardently involved in the Anthroposophical milieu... He took part in the great debate on Anthroposophy which raged in Dagbladet's columns in 1955. Among other things there was wrangling about Darwin's theory of evolution versus Anthroposophy's more spiritual -- but claiming to be scientific -- view of humanity's origin. With support from historical authorities, from Voltaire to Strindberg, from Goethe to Ibsen, Bjørneboe defended in Dagbladet's columns among other things the idea of reincarnation.
The Steiner School's view of man Bjørneboe describes thus in the article "Shall we put our children into the Steiner School?" (1952). It was published in the magazine New School, which Bjørneboe edited from 1952 to 1957:
Put very simply, the Rudolf Steiner School regards a human being first and foremost as a being of unceasing growth: the possessor of a spiritual life, which is capable of becoming infinitely rich and strong; of a body, with all that that implies; and finally, of a mysterious "something," a "something" which lies behind consciousness -- and which one can say "I" to. This "something" which lies behind everything else is the deepest authority in us, the truly human in us -- this essence which no one has seen.
Marxism's basic idea is that all social and cultural life are products of economic conditions, and psychoanalysis's basic idea is that all of human spiritual life is products of sexual forces. Or to put it simply: Everything is sex and money.
Bjørneboe thinks that the social-democratic regime educates youth under the motto "the most possible knowledge in the shortest possible time." At the same time his own political concepts and alternatives are, to put it mildly, vague and superficial at this time, he is more occupied with broad lines than by practical details. His ideal is "a society which can recognize the individual as something which is different from all others . . . only a society which wishes to have free, independent, distinctive persons, which is grateful and not despairing over human diversity, can become a viable society for the young."
Was Bjørneboe a conservative reactionary? Hardly. Rather it was the dawning feeling for anarchism which lurked behind the sweeping words about freedom. He raged against adjustment and conformity, against the demand for submission to the least common-denominator mentality which pervades society:
When young people today come into more radical forms of unhappiness or "conflict," then they generally encounter more or less disguised demands that they shall "adjust" to society. The word "adjustment" is on the way to becoming a key concept for all who now have anything to do with the young to any degree.
The author rages further against the increased materialism which marks the time's demand for increased affluence, to government contributions and grants. What will become of the intellectual goods from Europe's rich cultural heritage in the glorious welfare state? Will youth be content with an insatiable chase after material goods? Will they let their need be blunted by such a mentality? Bjørneboe answers with a strong no:
Truly healthy young people will get their material advantages themselves, and when one day they understand what it all adds up to, they will throw all the gifts back in the faces of the givers.
It was undeniably something like that which happened ten or twelve years later. The youthful protest in the middle of the sixties came among other things like an explosive reaction to materialism and the one-sided emphasis on things; to the older generation's blind speculation on status symbols and increased affluence. But also to security, the demands for adjustment and the lack of possibilities for risk-taking and "adventure" in the welfare state. Then Bjørneboe had his day. It wasn't his contemporaries from the fifties, but the rebel generation from the next decade who caught up what he really stood for, who sought the same freedom and equality which Bjørneboe back in the 1952 essay "The Fear of America in us" had expressed like this:
The West chose freedom, the East chose equality. But freedom without brotherhood is an economic and social law of the jungle. Without brotherhood freedom has no equality.
Bjørneboe talks here with the voice of the anarchist hero Bakunin. The same thoughts resound in the rootless, dreaming, freedom-loving, fist-swinging barricade stormers of 1968. Writings like "Ten Commandments to a Young Man who Wants to Get Ahead" or "On the Guardian Type" could have been taken straight out of the hippie movement's gospels.
Nearly twenty years after Bjørneboe wrote Jonas he read his poems for attentive and cheering teenagers. He caught them with his biting, disrespectful humor, his lively commentaries, his unqualified solidarity with the young. And the mild, kindly love of his fellow man which lay behind the gallows humor.