‘They look like they’re breaking up now,’ he said, pointing.
He was right. The cloud had started unravelling at its edges. In another five minutes it had all but dissolved. Light now held the air in a cold, hard brilliance. We waited, our eyes fixed on the south-east horizon.
‘Have you been to Lufsjå yet?’ he asked.
Lufsjå was the nearest DNT cabin to us, but most of us who had bought cabins in Veggli were new to the region, and we had been so busy painting and furnishing them that it would probably be another year before our exploration of the nearby regions of the vidda could begin in earnest. Anyway, as I quickly realised, Veggli was first and foremost of interest to my Norwegian neighbours as a winter resort, a place to ski in.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Have you?’
‘We spent the night there last week. Just a there and back trip.’
‘Is it selvbetjente?’ (‘self-catering’)
‘Yes.’
I shook my head. ‘You know, I still can’t get over it, the way some of these DNT places are stocked with food that you pay for on a trust system. I don’t think there are many countries in the world that would have that much faith in the honesty of its people. You just take the food you want, fill out a giro before you leave and pop it in a box. Six months later, when you’ve forgotten all about it, you get the bill.’
I’d been reading about the history of these self-catering cabins in a recent issue of Fjell og Vidde (‘Mountains and Wilderness’), the members’ magazine published quarterly by DNT. It seems the initiative came from a man named Gunnar Sønsteby, better known as a leader of Milorg, the Norwegian resistance movement during the Occupation years of the Second World War. After the war ended in 1945, Sønsteby went back to his old job as a route inspector for DNT. The end of the war saw a rise in membership of the organisation and a growing interest in spending time walking in the mountains. More cabins were built to extend the network; but it soon became clear they weren’t being used much. The problem was the availability of food, or rather the lack of it. DNT experimented briefly with providing some cabins with military rations. These satisfied the hunger, but not much more than that. Towards the end of the 1950s, Sønsteby had the idea of providing visitors with something a little more appetising. Some cabins began to be stocked with supplies of tinned fish, like fiskeboller (fish-balls), tinned meat, packets of soup and powdered fruit drinks, spreads, coffee, tea, biscuits, even exotic varieties of tinned fruit like peaches and pineapples.
The initiative was an instant success and is one of the reasons why long-distance walking in the mountains has become so popular among Norwegians today that you could properly describe it as a national pastime. As of 2018, 173 of the Trekking Association’s 540 cabins offered self-catering. A handful of the larger ones at popular hiking centres, like Finse and Haukeliseter, offer considerably more than that. You can get three hot meals a day there, beer, wine and whisky from the bar, and they have their own small souvenir shops. But the great majority of cabins are still ubetjent (‘uncatered’). These offer bunk-bed sleeping accommodation with foam-rubber mattresses and duvet, cooking facilities and fuel in the form of wood or gas. Walkers need to bring their own food and their own lakenpose (‘sheet bag’) to sleep inside. This is a sheet-thin, one-piece bag with an attached pillow slip and a nightmarish thing to wriggle in and out of, especially if you need to get up in the night to pee.
‘But for me,’ I went on, ‘the really curious thing is that when Sønsteby was asked where he had got the idea from, he said England, when he was in London during the war. He’d noticed how the boys selling newspapers on the street corners and outside the Underground stations would leave their flat caps behind when they went off to get something to eat.† People would pick up a paper and drop the money into the cap. If they didn’t have the right money they would help themselves to change from the cap. Sønsteby figured that if an honour-system like that could work in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world then it ought to work in the Norwegian mountains too.’
Jan Erik smiled and nodded his head in pleased appreciation of this unexpected paradox. Then he added, in a kindly way, that I had got the wrong man. It wasn’t Gunnar Sønsteby I was thinking of but Claus Helberg.
‘But they were both involved in Milorg, so you’re right there.’
‘I keep getting them mixed up,’ I said. ‘It’s probably because I’ve been following the debate in the papers about Marte Michelet’s new book.’
Michelet was a journalist who had just published a book in which she claimed that the anti-Semitism of Norwegians in general, and of the Norwegian resistance movement in particular, had let down the Jewish population of the country during the war. The issue had a personal interest for me. For over a year, back in the 1980s, while working on my biography of Knut Hamsun, I had occupied a desk next to Oskar Mendelsohn in the bowels of the Oslo University Library in Solli plass.‡ Mendelsohn was working on a massive, two-volume Jødenes historie i Norge (The History of the Jews in Norway), his attempt to rescue from historical oblivion each individual member of the Norwegian branch of a people brought almost to the verge of extinction as a result of the war. I had grown to like him and to admire the almost superhuman dimensions of the task he had set himself. I still remember one occasion when we were talking at my desk. Abruptly he broke off and asked, with a chill in his voice: ‘What is that “J” on the cover of your book?’ Puzzled, I replied that it stood for ‘Journal’, and that it was my way of distinguishing between different notebooks among the set of several identical ones I was using for my research. Moments later I realised the source of his alarm, a still-vivid memory of those identification cards stamped with ‘J’ that all Jews had been forced to carry by the Nazis. In absolute mortification I hastened to show him my notebooks marked ‘L’ for ‘Letters’ and ‘C’ for ‘Contacts’.
At the heart of Michelet’s argument was a claim made by Gunnar Sønsteby in an interview in 1970 that Milorg leaders had known of the Nazis’ plans for the Norwegian Jews a full three months before the campaign of deportations and executions had got under way in the autumn of 1942. According to Sønsteby, information from his sources within the Nazi-controlled state police had left members of Milorg in no doubt about the intended fate of the Norwegian Jews. ‘Our job was to fight, not to help people’ was how he explained the fact that the rescue of the Jews did not then become a Milorg priority.
Michelet argued that the failure to warn the Jews of what awaited them could only be ascribed to an anti-Semitic bias on the part of the Norwegian population as a whole at that time. She made this alleged complicity explicit in the title of her book: Hva visste hjemmefronten? Holocausten i Norge: Varslene, unnvikelsene, hemmeligholdhet (‘What did the Home Front know? The Holocaust in Norway: warnings, evasions, secrecy’).
The media debate that ensued was bitter and acrimonious, and for obvious reasons. Milorg veterans like Sønsteby are among Norway’s greatest heroes. Their stars shine as brightly as those of Nansen or Amundsen, and their right to this status had never been even slightly questioned before. Ethically, the war has been a more troubling subject for the Norwegians than for the British. Britons had not, after all, suffered the trauma and humiliation of Occupation. And once it was over, Norway, a country with a population so small it feels like a family, was faced with the problem of how to deal with the significant numbers who had joined Vidkun Quisling’s far-right, collaborationist party Nasjonal Samling (‘National Unity’) during the Occupation. Many were committed Nazis, many were influenced by a fear of Bolshevism, most were probably motivated by the improved access party membership gave to hard-to-come-by rationed goods like meat, jam, butter and sugar, as well as by the human fear of ending up on the losing side. They all had to be dealt with.
In the world of the arts, film has been the medium that has concerned itself most consistently with these subjects. From the end of the war until the early 1960s, Norwegian film-makers were concerned to depict
a dugnad spirit among the population as a whole in the face of the misery, shortages and unpredictability of daily life during the five years of the Occupation. Arne Skouen’s Ni Liv (Nine Lives, 1957) described what happened after a sabotage mission by the Norwegian Resistance was betrayed to the Nazis. Based on a true story, it follows the escape of the badly wounded Jan Baalsrud as he makes his way through Troms county for the safety of the Swedish border. Skouen’s concern was not so much to depict Baalsrud’s individual heroism as to show that he would never have made it without the help of others. In this respect, it was a typical reflection of Norwegian social values.
Skouen’s Kalde spor (Cold Tracks, 1962) inaugurated a second phase in this cultural self-analysis, one in which attention was focused on the failings and existential distress of individual Norwegian resistance fighters. Toralv Maurstad played a self-tormenting former resistance member who tries in vain to escape his personal demons by seeking out the solitude of the mountains once the war is over.
A third phase emerged by the end of the 1960s, characterised by films that considered the fate of ordinary Norwegians who were not members of the resistance, in particular the experiences of women and children during the war. The ethical problems surrounding such phenomena as black marketeers and those owners of construction companies, known as brakkebaroner (‘barrack barons’), who profited by building for the occupying forces, were also explored. Women directors such as Laila Mikkelsen and Bente Erichsen were prominent voices in this phase. Mikkelsen’s Liten Ida (Little Ida, 1981) looked at events through the eyes of a seven-year-old child bullied because her mother has had an affair with a German SS officer. Erichsen’s Over grensen (Across the Border, 1987) re-examined the case of two Norwegian border guides who were alleged to have robbed and murdered two Jewish refugees whom they were supposed to be leading to the safety of the Swedish border in 1942, and who were acquitted when the case came to trial after the war.§
Erichsen’s film raised all sorts of uncomfortable questions about culpable silence, anti-Semitism, and greed among Norwegians during the Occupation. The ferocity of the debate it aroused was a harbinger of what was to come with Michelet’s book, and the film’s appearance may have been one reason the war disappeared as a theme for the next twenty years.
It was not picked up again until 2008, in Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s Max Manus. Based on the memoirs of its eponymous hero, the film describes Manus’s involvement with the illegal press in Norway during the war, and his activities as a saboteur while a member of Kompani Linge, one of the most admired of all resistance groups in Occupied Europe. By local standards Max Manus had a huge budget, and it was marketed as an event of national significance so successfully that the premiere was attended by King Harald V and several government ministers, as well as surviving relatives and associates of Manus’s.
Max Manus was the first in what was a new genre for Norwegian film, a Hollywood-inspired celebration of the heroes of the resistance. Harald Zwart, a Dutch-Norwegian director with a number of real Hollywood films to his credit, followed up with Den 12. mann (The 12th Man, 2017), essentially a glamorised remake of Nine Lives. Like Max Manus, The 12th Man took liberties with the known historical facts of the stories they were based on. Both films did extremely well at the box office.
The commercial success of this approach meant that Michelet’s attack on the Home Front gave a severe jolt to this romanticising of its activities during the war years. I asked Jan Erik if he’d read her book, and what he made of the accusations of anti-Semitism it contained.
‘No, I haven’t read it,’ he said. ‘But I’ve been following the debate, the contributions from the Holocaust Centre, the Resistance Museum, the war historians and so on. It’s a difficult thing to talk about.’
He looked at his watch.
‘Shouldn’t the moon be up by now?’
I glanced at mine. ‘Any moment now,’ I replied. ‘I think maybe your watch is a little fast.’
‘Hmm.’
Jan Erik frowned. He shook his head several times and then fell silent for a few moments. He seemed to be struggling with his thoughts.
‘Michelet is young,’ he said suddenly, pulling up his hood and zipping his anorak up to his neck. ‘She has no idea what it was like to be at war. She has empathy, but it’s luxury empathy, the empathy of the spectator. What happened, happened. You can’t change it. The past isn’t a film. You can’t rewrite the script and shoot it all over again until you get the result you want. Every war, all wars since Vietnam – Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans – they’ve all been television wars. You watch them. You take sides. But none of it is about you. Your daily life goes on just the same. Young people have no idea of how uncivilised a real war is. It’s brutal beyond their conception of what brutality can be. Listen: in October 1942 Josef Terboven, Hitler’s Reichskommissar in Norway, issued an order announcing the death penalty for thirty-eight different forms of resistance and civil disobedience, including anyone caught spreading news from London, anyone found in possession of a weapon, and anyone caught helping refugees to escape.’
He pulled the hood back off his head again and turned towards me, wagging his index finger in my face.
‘You could be arrested and locked up in Grini** just for wearing a binders (‘paper clip’) on the lapel of your jacket.’
‘Why a paper clip?’
‘Because it was a symbol of support for Milorg,’ he said. ‘Like a red woollen hat – Norwegians were banned from wearing red woollen hats in public during the war. And the paper clip was invented by a Norwegian, a man named Johan Vaaler, so that gave it an added dimension of symbolic power.’
I had heard this widely believed but erroneous claim several times before. I was still feeling slightly silly for having mixed up the names of two of Norway’s greatest resistance heroes and saw my chance here to redeem myself by correcting Jan Erik’s mistake.
‘Actually, Jan Erik, it wasn’t invented by a Norwegian. Vaaler did patent a design for a paper clip in 1901, but the Gem paper clip – that’s the one everyone uses today, with the two metal loops – was already widely available. Vaaler’s clip stopped halfway round. It didn’t have the second loop that would enable it to exploit the torsion principle, so it didn’t actually work. Vaaler’s design was never even put into commercial production, but most Norwegians still think he invented the paper clip.’
Jan Erik looked at me and nodded his head slowly several times. ‘Well, you learn something every day. Thank you for telling me that. But even so,’ he went on, raising his voice, ‘the fact that Norwegians believed it was invented by a Norwegian gave the act of wearing one on the lapel of your jacket an added patriotic force during the Occupation.’
I knew that even this wasn’t true, since one of the most curious aspects of this particular cultural myth was that it arose after the war, decades after Vaaler’s death in 1910, and instead of being debunked grew more and more powerful, even making its way onto a commemorative postage stamp in 1999 and into the pages of the Norsk biografisk leksikon (‘Norwegian Biographical Encyclopedia’) entry on Vaaler in 2005. But this wasn’t really what we were talking about so I let it go.
‘You could get shot for listening to the radio,’ Jan Erik continued, ‘never mind helping complete strangers cross the border into Sweden. My grandfather was a Milorg leader in Grimstad. He was an XU agent, an undercover intelligence agent working under the command of the British Special Operations Executive. He was arrested in January 1943, tortured, sentenced to death and executed in the Trandumskogen forest in May 1944. The Milorg leader for the whole of the south was shot along with him. While they were still at Grini prison they were told that Milorg could rescue them as they were being driven out to the place of execution at Trandum. They said no. They knew the Germans would kill dozens of innocent civilians in retaliation, so they said no. I never knew him, of course. But my father often talked about him. So…’
He let the sentence drift as he raised a bladed ha
nd to his forehead and peered across at the horizon. It was lit by the first counterglow of the setting sun, a soft pink light now that the blue had been filtered out.
Again he looked at his watch. It was one of those large, self-winding mechanical watches on a thick brown leather strap. He held it up close to his ear to make sure it was ticking and then flapped his wrist vigorously.
‘Maybe it’s already risen,’ I said. I was surprised I hadn’t thought of this before.
‘I’ll have a look.’
He unbuckled the straps on his blue Swedish rucksack, took out a pair of binoculars in a black case, opened the case, pulled off the dust caps from the eyepieces and raised the glasses to his eyes.
‘You’re right,’ he said, standing up and holding out the glasses to me. ‘It’s well up.’
I stood up, took the glasses and looked for myself. Faintly, behind the powdery pink sheen, I saw the pale, round shadow hovering two or three centimetres above the horizon. I leaned my elbow on Jan Erik’s shoulder.
Now that we had located it we were easily able to see it with the naked eye. For a few moments the whole clock of understanding stopped and we just stood there watching. I thought of Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon. Where did I read that this painting was the inspiration for Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot? Or had I dreamed that? So many things nowadays, it seemed to me, occupied a hinterland in which dream and reality resembled each other so closely it had become hard to tell the two states apart.
After almost two minutes the moon pulled slowly free of the Earth’s shadow and began to climb into the sky. As though deliberately breaking the spell of the moment, Jan Erik belched. He roughly beat the dust from the seat of his trousers with his hand and said it was time he was getting back, as it was his turn to take Stella for a walk.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon, c.1825–30.
The Cabin in the Mountains Page 19
