Nordic Narratives of the Second World War by Henrik Stenius

Author:Henrik Stenius
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789185509805
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
Published: 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Solidity of a National Narrative

The German Occupation in Norwegian History Culture

Synne Corell

In the Norwegian public sphere, the years of German occupation between 1940 and 1945 are commonly referred to as krigen, the War. Throughout the post-war era, there have been repeated predictions that the attention paid to these five years would decrease. Yet, books and feature newspaper continue to be published, films are made, and issues related to this period are debated in different public arenas. Even if the years of German occupation have been ascribed special significance ever since the events unfolded, it is reasonable to ask if the persistent interest represents continuity, or if it is more productive to imagine ‘the War’ as holding varying political, cultural and moral values for different agents and at different points in time. The focal point in this chapter is to examine if certain events connected to the end of the Cold War should be understood to have contributed to a new understanding in Norway of the years of German occupation. I will therefore start by outlining some defining aspects of the history writing on the occupation up to the 1980s in order to take a closer look at three historical controversies in Norway – the first in the late 1980s and the other two in the 1990s – in an attempt to uncover potential changes in the way the occupation has been assessed.

The Main Dichotomy – Nasjonal Samling vs. ‘Good Norwegians’

National histories can be read as narratives about a community of ‘us’ and ‘our’ enemies or opponents.1 In the narratives of Norway during the Second World War, the role of the nation’s ‘other’ has invariably been assigned to representatives of the German occupation regime and the Norwegian National Socialist party, Nasjonal Samling (NS). Led by Vidkun Quisling, the NS was declared the only legal political party in Norway in the autumn of 1940. With support from the German occupiers, Quisling was formally installed as ‘Minister President’ in 1942. The bulk of the history writing on the German occupation has been polarised: on the one hand the representatives of the German occupational forces, Quisling, and central politicians from the NS; on the other hand the King, the government in exile in the UK, and other agents within certain public or illegal arenas: the bureaucracy, the armed forces, the church, the organizations, and illegal groups.

The members of the NS, backed by the German occupants, have been perceived as constituting the opposite pole of the ‘good Norwegians’ of the Norwegian majority, symbolised primarily by King Haakon VII. In an article from 2009, the historian Ole Kristian Grimnes argues that ‘the post-war national story about the years of occupation has been spun around this dichotomy. The history writing of the occupation obtained its foundational structure.’2 Grimnes argues that this dichotomy can still be said to prevail, in the sense that subsequent history writing and memory culture has moderated the understanding of two poles instead of undoing the fundamental premises of this construction. In

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