The Ice Museum (24 page)

Nansen's patriotism was of a robust sort; he had been a key negotiator during the Norwegian independence talks with Sweden, a key representative of Norway abroad, a key candidate for president. Yet Nansen was never blindly partisan; he was never obsessed with his own country, to the exclusion of all others. He ceded the Arctic quest to Amundsen, a relentless, obsessively driven explorer, who cared less about international geopolitics and more about simple adventure. Nansen turned to the epic disaster of Russia in the post-Revolution era. During the 1920s, he became involved with the League of Nations, working as high commissioner for the repatriation of prisoners of war, helping to return Russian prisoners held in Germany and German prisoners held in Russia. He worked to alleviate the famine that hit Russia in 1921; when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 he used the money to establish farms in the Volga region and the Ukraine. The Nobel Prize particularly recognized his part in devising the Nansen passport, which supplied stateless refugees with identity and travel papers; beneficiaries included Vladimir Nabokov's family. He was accused of naivety, by his peers and by later writers, of being manipulated equally by the Americans and the Russians. He might have been aware of the tactics around him, but was too fixed on his goal to care.

And in the 1920s, as Norse mythology was bound into nationalism in the northern countries, Nansen was linked to a folksy domestic party called the Fatherland League. The Fatherland League wanted a strong Norway, a nation that could protect itself from the creeping threat of Communism, as they saw it. Nansen lent his powerful jowls, his sonorous charisma-drenched presence, to its calls for the Norwegians to fulfil their potential. Even in this, he couldn't stay with empty phrases, with rhetoric stripped away from action. He was increasingly a reluctant figurehead, too diverse for the shriller forms of nationalism. It was a fortunate reluctance, prescient in the circumstances: after Nansen's death, the Fatherland League was drawn towards extremism, hijacked by Nazi sympathizers.

The boat passed crags to starboard, with tree-coated rocks low in the fjord, and I thought of Nansen's house outside Oslo, which I had visited on the way to Bergen. I had arrived on a bus out of Oslo, which had stopped on a major road. Nansen's house lay up a narrow lane; when he lived there it had stood beyond the limits of the city. Most of the house was being used as a research institute, but the director of the institute took me up to an unheated room, at the top of the house. The room was usually kept locked, and the researchers stayed away, but the director had a key; his office, he told me, was just opposite, and a sense of the past must have permeated his days, as he walked past the locked door. He twisted the key and we entered a neat study, with a view of rust-coloured ivy clambering on the walls outside. On the desk there were hundreds of handwritten sheets of paper in neat piles. There were shelves stacked with leather-bound books, and cloying pre-Raphaelite paintings on the walls. More austere were the black-and-white photographs, scattered around, of an explorer, diplomat, statesman and his family. As I stood by the desk, my hand on the chair Nansen had sat in, I felt the sense of a gap. The trappings remained, preserved in their places, but the unifying consciousness had vanished. A few Nansen flasks were stacked in a corner, for taking samples from the ocean, just one of Nansen's inventions, which had included the tailored runners of his Nansen sledge, and his own recipe for pemmican. There were files of correspondence from Russians, stacks of fountain pens, knives to sharpen pencils. Nansen had laboured in the room, struggling to solve the problems of another nation, writing letters, preparing his notes, petitioning governments and the League of Nations. Nansen had overworked in the small cluttered study throughout the 1920s. He saw the carnage of the First World War, and he kept thinking that hard work might solve it. Yet he couldn't gather all the parts together.

Had he lived into the 1930s, Nansen would have been surprised at what happened to his former assistant Vidkun Quisling. Nansen had met Quisling through Russia, where Quisling had worked as a military attaché in St. Petersburg. Nansen employed Quisling throughout the 1920s in famine-relief enterprises and in the attempted repatriation of Armenians from Turkey. When Nansen wrote
Russia & Peace
during 1923, Quisling helped him. Nansen found Quisling a competent administrator, and recommended him for a series of jobs in Russia, the Balkans, and the Ukraine. Asked once to recommend someone to speak about Russia, Nansen recommended Quisling. After Nansen and Quisling stopped working together, they exchanged letters; Nansen sent Quisling New Year's greetings shortly before his death. They were hardly friends; Quisling was much younger, much less senior, and Nansen by the end was a regal and fixated man, concerned more with causes than with individuals. Like any other budding opportunist, Quisling struggled to link himself with Nansen; after Nansen's death, Quisling supplied commentary and reaction in the press, trying to bind himself to Nansen's reputation. It was a game he was still playing at his trial for treason, after the end of the Second World War, when he claimed Nansen had been like a protector and a father to him. But Nansen had been like a protector and father to Norway, in the popular imagination; it was a feeling many shared.

During the 1930s, after Nansen's death, Quisling began to work on his ‘philosophical' ideas. Quisling developed a fantasy about the north: he thought Norway was the homeland of the Nordic race, and believed the nation should play a leading part in the Greater Nordic Peace Union. The Nordic race, he believed, was a force for global civilization, and by working together, Quisling believed, the Nordic or Nordic-friendly countries would create world unity. He wanted the Scandinavian countries and Germany and Britain to form a ‘Nordic League.' Quisling maintained that materialist creeds would collapse, and be superseded by a return to spiritualism.

I imagined, as the boat moved along the coast, that Nansen would have dismissed Quisling's world-changing scheme as utopian adolescence. Nansen's enthusiasms and passions were undercut by a brooding sense of melancholy, bordering on despair. It was a state of sensitive paralysis that had come to him during the Arctic night, even as he marvelled at the beauties of the ice floes. It was a form of humility, a reluctant acceptance of the insignificance of human desires and doctrines in the face of the vast emptiness of the northern regions. A writer of vivid imagination, a myth collator of eclectic tastes, Nansen was also precise and realistic, qualities fashioned by the trial of theory during Arctic travel. When Quisling began to entwine his variety of nationalism with the schemes of the German National Socialists, Nansen would have despised the presumption and barbarism of the Nazis, their belief that world orders could be created through violence and destruction. As he had recoiled from the totalitarian force of the Communist state, Nansen would have been repulsed by the curtailing of individual freedoms inherent to the Nazi order.

Quisling was a minor political figure, in a small country, but he craved political power and philosophical influence. He had a brief stint as a cabinet minister in the early 1930s for the Agrarian Party. His strangeness, his introversion, his extremism combined to make him unpopular. There was a bizarre moment during his time as a minister when he was apparently attacked in his office at knife-point. Instead of sounding the alarm, Quisling sneaked out of the building and went home, and only called the police later. It made everyone uneasy; something was unclear about the story, and it contributed to a sense that Quisling was bizarre and untrustworthy. The gulf between desire and attainment fell like a shadow across Quisling's career, as he struggled to emerge from insignificance. He founded a group called the Nordic Folk Uprising, based on the ‘fact' that ‘Norwegians along with other Scandinavian peoples form the core of the large folk family which represents the most valuable racial contribution to humanity, the great Nordic race,' said Quisling. During the 1930s, Quisling became increasingly concerned with racial ‘purity' and anti-Semitism. He talked about ‘blood consciousness, ' marching his men through working-class districts, trying to gain support from the disaffected. Quisling wanted the regeneration of the Nordic race as much as the Nazis—he hoped the Norwegian population would swell to 10 million by the year 2000. He would have been disappointed: Norway's population in 2000 was less than half this number. In 1933 he founded the National Union, but his party failed to attract popular support. In elections leading up to the war, it was always scrabbling around at 2 or 3 per cent of the overall vote. By slavish imitation of the Nazis, Quisling hoped for a similar coup: he dressed his militia in brown shirts; he insisted on being addressed as the
Fører
, the leader. He was in contact with the German fascists during the 1930s; he sent off a telegram to Hitler thanking him for all his work for the ‘Germanic and Nordic
Brüdervolk
.' He went to visit Hitler and Rosenberg in Berlin in the winter of 1939; he tried to negotiate for the leadership of the new Nazi Norway during 1940.

When Hitler invaded Norway in 1940, Quisling announced that he was the leader of Norway, and ordered the Norwegians not to resist the German forces. While the Norwegian king refused to acknowledge him, Quisling kept addressing the nation on the radio, in the newspapers, announcing himself as the prime minister, telling the Norwegians to collaborate. As a tactic it failed; Quisling was largely disobeyed and once the lack of popular support trickled back to Berlin, Hitler withdrew his support for Quisling's coup. Quisling was humiliated, and ordered to go to Germany. Around this time the word “quisling” came into use across Europe, meaning a traitor, a man who tried to sell his country to an invading army. ‘A vile race of quislings—to use the new word, which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuries—is hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to “collaborate” in his designs and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while grovelling low themselves,' said Churchill in 1941. George Orwell took it up, describing treacherous
quislingisms
—meaning devious manoeuvring and lies. In the summer of 1940, the Norwegian king and members of the pre-war government fled to London, where they remained as government-in-exile throughout the war. Quisling wheedled his way back to Norway in the autumn, and took command of the collaborationist government. He spent the war railing against the Jews, the Freemasons, capitalism, Marxism, democracy, Bolshevism, England, the U.S., Churchill, Roosevelt, Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange. All these evils, Quisling kept saying, were attacks on the Germanic peoples.

Quisling thought the British had begun well, as stern Anglo-Saxons, with
Beowulf
a respectable early Saga, and then they had been receptive to the Viking conquests. But he thought the French had ruined it for the British, invading them, mixing them up with all sorts of un-Germanic elements, softening their language, drawing them away from the true brotherhood of Nordic nations. This was why Britain was being so disappointing about Nazism, Quisling had argued, because of this Romance strain in the national character, which had caused the British to lose their way. There were collaborators throughout Norway: there were the members of the council of commissioners who governed the country under the leadership of the German
Reichskommissar,
the thousands punished at the end of the war for treason, the dozens who were condemned to death. There were the tens of thousands who joined the Nasjonal Samling, supporters of Quisling's movement for Nordic supremacy. Several thousand Norwegians fought with the German forces, choosing to enlist in the Nazi cause. Yet there was the other side: the thousands of resistance fighters in Norway, the thousands of Norwegians who died fighting with the Allied forces, who were imprisoned in camps in Norway and Germany during the war years. There were savage reprisals from the Germans against those Norwegians who worked on the clandestine ferry route from western Norway to the Shetland Isles, shipping refugees from the occupied country. Nearly a hundred thousand Norwegians went abroad, half of them to Sweden, where they lived out the war. The king and the Norwegian government worked in London, trying to gather forces together.

After the war, Quisling was tried in a Norwegian court. He was charged with treason and with trying to bring Norway under foreign control. To the end, he repeated his claim that the coup of April 1940 and his position as minister president in occupied Norway had been in Norway's interests. He went to his death protesting his benevolence, clinging to a misguided notion that he was making the consummate sacrifice for his ideals. ‘My work, our effort, has never really come to light,' he claimed in his address to the Norwegian Supreme Court, in October 1945. ‘I have come to understand that there is a divine power in the universe, and that this power is connected to the development of those who live on this earth, and that what is happening here on earth during this important time is a watershed marking the beginning of God's kingdom here on earth.' Perhaps, he said, his benevolent intentions had ‘turned out negatively' on this occasion. He passed his last days writing frantically, imagining he might leave a meaningful philosophical legacy. He was condemned, and shot.

This fantasy of a pure northern race propelled Quisling towards vicious collaboration. Quisling imagined the racial superiority of the Nordic race as proven by, entwined with the grandeur of their rocks. It was a ragged mess of foolish pride, racism and a personal quest for power. The fantasy compelled others, who never went so far as Quisling, Norwegians who stopped at ideas, though their ideas were brutal enough. Knut Hamsun was ruined by the war, and by his own sense of the superiority of the Nordic people. Hamsun became an antithesis to Nansen, falling into the mire Nansen avoided. They were contemporaries; Hamsun had written his seminal works as Nansen waited in the ice for
Fram
to move further north. They won Nobel Prizes within two years of each other. They were both fiercely determined, fiercely independent, and convinced of their rightness in most things. Nansen died with his reputation intact, but Hamsun's was ruined by the Nazi occupation of Norway, and by the choices he made in response to the occupation. Earlier a rebellious peasant, furious with literary cliques, Hamsun recast himself in a more sinister role, as a deluded nationalist, bellowing about the superiority of his country. Hamsun mistook the
völkisch
slogans of the Nazi Party for a robust defence of the ancient grandeur of the Nordic lands. He wanted Norway to be brought into the Germanic age. He wrote in support of the Nazis, entreating the Norwegians to help the occupying armies. He met Goebbels, and later gave his Nobel medal to the German as a present. He was introduced to Hitler; Hamsun was deaf at the time and spoke no German, so spent the interview shouting in Norwegian at the Führer. He wanted Hitler to agree to give Norway autonomy at the end of the war in the case of a Nazi victory, which Hamsun seemed to think was certain. Hitler was irritated by the interview, and, according to eye witnesses, stormed away, the exchange unfinished.