(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
However, there are some problems with such an understanding of Bjørnebo's essay: First, it was not with the Vietnam War that the contempt, or fear, of the European intellectuals for the United States came. We have seen this from the end of the 1700 century, and this can be exemplified in the first phase of the Cold War with German Robert Jungk's imperialist attack on 1952, or with Sartre's approximate declaration of war against America in 1953. The background is the consequences of the US Cold War against Stalin, the Soviet Union and communism, which put Western Europeans in a very special stage in the choice between the two superpowers.
The other problem with saying "We who loved America" is that Jens Bjørneboe has never loved America.
His America essay from 1966 is not a violation, but a continuation of his America view, just with other arguments. "We Who Loved America" was not Bjørnebo's first America essay. It was already under pressure in 1952 when, as an 32-year-old, he wrote "The fear of America in us".
This happened 14 years before "We Who Loved America" and before the US Vietnam War began. In "The Fear of America in Us", Bjørneboe pours out you and bile. Like Hamsun's America story from 1889, the Bjørneboe essay is not a random youth publication either. He selected it for the essay collection Norway, My Norway from 1968, as the introductory essay for four essays on "America" - not including "We who loved America".
Already as a 16-year-old, Bjørneboe came to the USA, as a "dishwasher boy across the Atlantic on one of his father's boats". He never came back. Then in 1952, the same year he made his novel debut Before the cock crows, and the year after he started as a teacher at Steinerskolen, he gets printed "Fear of America in us" in the conservative magazine Spektrum.
Bjørneboe in 1952 is interested in indentity. More specifically, our Norwegian and European identity, which is threatened by the American. "The fear of America in us" begins with a sober description of our irrational feelings: "We live between two poles of anxiety." One pole of anxiety is the Soviet Union: hunger, bombs, concentration camps. It is an official, rational anxiety. But then there is the other pole of anxiety, the United States: "The other pole lies deep in the subconscious and darkness… It is the fear of America and of something that no one really knows what is."
Here he takes the European anxiety and trembling of the grain, formulated in the language of the Cold War – the two opposite poles, the two poles of anxiety in the world. Bjørneboe describes a fear of something no one really knows what is – the unknown, the new, the foreign. About this fear he writes:
“It can turn into modernist poetry or a general nervous breakdown. But it can also be masked and operationalized into an arsenal of communist slogans: warmongering, capitalism, imperialism, etc. It just cannot be abolished. For the fear of America is the fear of an inner state, for America in us."
The new world order makes us fear America first and foremost in ourselves. It is an inner state that can not be abolished, Bjørneboe claims. If nothing else, it seems very difficult for writers to get rid of anxiety.
After a rational introduction about the threat to the European, it becomes more and more clear that Bjørneboe himself is a victim of the irrational fear of America which he tries to describe: "In the footsteps of Americanism follows a mood that makes life poor and death meaningless. Death is an uninvited guest, whose arrival can not be prevented by means of refrigerators and illustrated magazines. Life, on the other hand – you know what it is: it's pickled pineapple. "
It appears in the 1952 article that Bjørneboe first and foremost expresses one cultural critique of America. His political criticism was not to be expressed until 14 years later with "We Who Loved America." To him, American culture in the 1950s stands out as "pickled pineapple." Like Mykle, Bjørneboe dislikes large parts of modern society – including the new technology – symbolized by refrigerators and canning:
"Through the bodies that the United States has chosen as representatives in Europe, it is consistently proclaimed that the secret of life has been solved: it was the radio – the refrigerator, humanity was waiting for... Through everything we hear from America, the common thread is that the great democracy is inhabited by a new black people, of magnificent, half-mechanical giant babies who live on tinned tomato juice and artificial vitamins.”
Baby boomer Bill Clinton would then, according to Bjørneboe, be one of the millions of American children who in the post-war years were bottled up in canned tomato juice so that they became semi-mechanical giant babies. Today, probably the fewest Norwegian mothers or fathers are particularly concerned about giving their children food that has been hermetically stored, but this seemed threatening in 1952.
Bjørneboe focuses a lot on details and what are apparently trivia, but gradually it becomes clear that the small is part of his long, big lines:
"While Russia offers us the prospect of hell on earth – here and now, the United States can end up with paradise on earth. But in this paradise, when you have lived there for a while, you have to make up the apples and oranges to spot them. Life must be technicolored. "
The fall occurred according to the Old Testament when the serpent tricked Eve into eating the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, which then tempted Adam to do the same. Bjørneboe suggests above a parallel contemporary understanding of the modern and technological United States as the snake in the story. Europeans are given the role of Adam and Eve, who, after being warned about paradise on earth, are tricked into eating the super-red and make-up apples in their modern, "technicolored" world.
The biblical metaphors are not random. Bjørneboe uses them to show how Christian we Europeans are, as a contrast to how little the Americans have understood of Christianity: “Europe is the land of Christianity. European culture is not a Christian culture; it is the Christian culture. Everything that has borne fruit on European soil in the last 1800 years was of Christian descent. "
Bjørneboe believed that the Americans had chosen freedom over Christian brotherhood. Today, it may seem surprising that a later cultural radical like Bjørneboe might think so.
Today, after all, the argument is usually the opposite, that Americans are too religious and Christian, while Europeans are the secular ones.
But let's take a closer look at how Bjørneboe in 1952 contrasts the Norwegian with the American. Unlike Hamsun, he does not need 255 pages to document that modern America has no intellectual life. We have seen how both Fanny Trollope, Knut Hamsun and most other European intellectuals for over 100 years have emphasized that Americans are without spirit and soul. In 1952, this performance has probably begun to take hold in the cerebral cortex of many reading Norwegians. Maybe that's why Bjørneboe – 63 years after Hamsun – uses only a few sentences in his argument to convince readers that American civilization suffers from a serious illness:
“America's weakness for the artificial is something quite different than simply a lack of culture. It is a disease, a kind of premature old age. The American paradise of civilization has produced the Rockefeller physiognomy, and thus a peculiar, ambiguous symbol: the fetus and the old man in one... The fear of death is the companion of the appetite for life. The fear of death is the great night shadow over the American paradise.”
51 years after Bjørneboe, a cancer-stricken Einar Førde will use almost the same image of the Americans, who will have such a different relationship to death than the "we" have:
"In America, many are certainly in the process of abolishing death. They freeze germ cells, DNA material, whole corpses and other things that will be of help when death can finally be abolished and declared dead and powerless. American funeral customs are becoming increasingly perverse in alienating the living from death and the dead. The contrast for me is him who here at home stands in the barn and plans his own coffin."
Also in the resigned NRK boss Førde's comment from the spring of 2003, the natural Norwegian becomes a contrast to the unnatural American, a contrast from cradle to grave. Bjørneboe, in 1952, also tells his readers about a new American funeral custom, a "lit de parade variation that seems rather strange to unprepared Europeans". The deceased is put on display in the living room. This, too, is typically American: “Unconsciously, the American view of life lies behind all such statements. Whether it's corpses or apples you make up, can come out in one go. "
At the same time, Bjørneboe makes a claim that the United States lacks the right soil for the development of spirit and intellect: “Earthly America is a place where thinking and feeling people are worse off than anywhere else in the world. You do not have to be a specialist in American literature to come up with that idea. "
The first sentence here is an almost direct quote from Tocqueville's America book from 1835: "I do not know any other country where there is generally less independence of thought and real freedom of discussion than in America."
And these performances live with us to this day. In an analysis of our relationship with the American, the author Ragnhild Trohaug writes in April 2003 the following: «For America is the land of sin, megalomania, double standards, idiocy, cultureless and hopeless; The United States is a city that is not a haven for thinking, critical souls. "
Like the 30-year-old Hamsun, 32-year-old Bjørneboe refers to the stupefying American literature, but without being able to give a name. He probably did not think of the modern novel art that was just renewed by the great American novelists in the first half of the century Bjørneboe wrote afterwards. Hamsun later admitted, in 1928, that American literature had become a world leader. Bjørneboe has possibly made up his mind in advance about the Americans' mental abilities. Therefore, it becomes no problem for him to believe that the United States is the world's worst place for thinking people, despite the literary Nobel Prizes of Sinclair Lewis (Nobel Prize 1930), Eugene O'Neill (1936), Pearl S. Buck (1938) and William Faulkner (1949) – or despite the writing skills of two other Americans who would later receive the award: Ernest Hemingway (1954) and John Steinbeck (1962). Bjørneboe makes his claim despite the existence of the other contemporary American writers who had left their mark in 1952: John Dos Passos, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and JD Salinger.
Like Hamsun, and more indirectly Mykle, Bjørneboe admits that it is envy that drives him into the degradation of trivial America, as when he contrasts the 1950s with the 1930s:
“And people in Europe did not yet regard the Americans as walking bundles of dollars. In our eyes, they were still people, people you could talk to without harboring ulterior motives and without being suspected of harboring ulterior motives. You could buy American cigarettes in all Norwegian tobacco shops, and we were still without the rich-and-poor complexes that plague us today."
It is the Americans' new appearance after World War II that makes Bjørneboe change his mind about the Americans, not the Vietnam War, something that emerges in the "We who loved America" essay. In 1952, Bjørneboe explained how he and most Norwegians viewed the Americans in the 1930s:
“And it did not occur to anyone to envy them their wealth. The poor fellows had toiled hard enough for it... We really looked upon them without envy—they were brothers and fellows, and when we laughed at them, the laughter was without malice. Today, this is completely different. We have absorbed so much of America's outlook on life that we can no longer see the people over there... You can never have a relationship with a person you hope to enrich yourself with."
Bjørneboe believes that everything has changed in the seven years after 1945: «Today the problem would arise. Awareness of the class divide would constantly haunt the background. In five of the years that have passed since then, we in Europe have been eating herring with head and intestines and tail fins. We have collected cigarette butts and done many other wonderful things. "
The essay "The Fear of America in Us" (1952) is a far lesser known text than "We Who Loved America" (1966). This is probably due to the fact that the latest essay was published at a crucial time in Europe's relationship with the United States, as well as the 68th generation's need for intellectual support for its political struggle at home and away. However, if one is to understand Bjørneboe's – and others in his generation -'s relationship with the United States, there are many indications that "The fear of America in us" is a more central essay. Not only because it focuses more on culture than on politics, and because it seems to be an important background for understanding the "We Who Loved America" essay as well.
But it is also interesting because it is a more revealing essay. On the one hand, Bjørneboe shows self-insight by focusing on "us" instead of "them". On the other hand, he lacks the same self-insight when he loses sight of the interaction and embarks on a downfall of modern America – in contrast to "us". The fear of America in us is reduced to "Fear of America".
Excerpt from the book "Fear of America". A European story", reproduced with permission from Tiden Norsk Forlag.