Skinless between the fronts

The last few days I have been in the company of Sigurd Evensmo. A whole past world of ideas, facts and cheats has filled my room. I have been tense and feel that I have read a biography that struck me with the same effect as a good novel: Now it must not stop! Another few pages! Well!

It has been a reunion. Or rather: a retort. I can hardly be called the unkind. At home with us, there was a devotion in the living room when Sigurd Evensmo made his way into the Silver Super at the 19 era and Saturday night. Or had movie chronicles. Then the world was good. And hung together. Later, I read all of his banter and noticed in his powerful condemnation of the anti-intellectualism of the Labor Party, which is characterized by its longevity and steadiness, as he said it.

He could speak from experience. All the while in Drammen he got correct by Oscar Torp himself for having invited counterpartist Trond Hegna, then excluded by the Norwegian Labor Party, to give talks in the local AUF team. And throughout his life, he criticized the downward prioritization of the cultural fabric in the working papers in which he worked.

Long before Antonio Gramsci was the favorite lyricist for the European left, Evensmo believed that the democratic left had to pursue active cultural work within the working class, thus creating its own identity and concepts to grasp reality. Under his way of thinking, though not formulated in this way, is also an idea of ​​intellectual, activist thinkers raised within the working class and one with it, but not subject to it.

rawness

Evensmo was called the "Silver Voice". It is striking. My father was never a radical (though a bit young). But I felt there was an inner consensus between him and Sigurd Evensmo. It was a common culture. The voice was just the outward manifestation of this. Sigurd Evensmo stood for inner security, a sense of value and a civilization in language and life, which exceeded all party boundaries. This remains the main impression after reading this work.

Stian Bromark and Halvor Fines Tretvoll wanted to write a comprehensive biography. The genre they have chosen, the British would call an "intellectual" biography. In such, life and the struggles – and not least the ideas – are woven together into a whole. Such an intention presupposes honesty. This is exactly what the author couple shows that they have – here, for example, it is written bluntly about drinking problems, pill use, smoking a lot, the deepest spiritual cellar visits and admission to a psychiatric ward at Ullevål; love affairs inside and outside the closets and long periods of writing barriers. Health faltered strongly at times. Towards the end he had to remove a lung.

Such biographies must also capture the dilemmas. They were many in Evensmo's case. And they expressed themselves in the struggle between the longing to be a full-time fiction writer and a politician with influence and a hammering journalist. Between the dream of loneliness and concentration on the one hand and participating in world events on the other. Everything mixed up with alternating bad conscience for neglecting the family.

In a way, Sigurd Evensmo got all this. The man is sparkling interesting! Bromark and Tretvoll have been able to source a rich source material: neatly arranged folders, the novels, the plays, the two autobiographies and the debate books, a good working relationship with the family, and long interviews with people who knew Evensmo. And not least his own diaries. There, the protagonist himself writes relentlessly about his own losses and doubts, but also about great victories (for example, the reception of the first volume of his trilogy about Karl Martin, English sailors). One has to wonder, as always with such diaries: Were they meant to be published afterwards and therefore written for a posthumous audience? The author couple does not discuss this.

The image of a high-ranking political intellectual is emerging. Skinless. Vulnerable. Not so brave. And quite stubborn, sometimes oxygen. Who were prey on themselves, but who experienced first-hand the impression of a Europe in deep conflicts and with them all the dilemmas of European socialism. For example, Evensmo reported directly from Sudetenland when the area was being swallowed by Hitler in 1938, and he was in the Berlin Chancellor's Office in 1945 and found Nazi documents almost while the heat was in ruins.

From his own experience he could report on the insanity of Nazism. His resistance group going to England was indicated by the Rinnan band in Ålesund. Eighteen were shot, Evensmo was supposed to be the nineteenth. He was saved by clutter and not least thanks to his wife Randy's courageous intervention and a Norwegian woman who used vigorous methods to speak his case to Gestapo boss Fehmer. Knut Rød, the policeman who organized the deportation of Norwegian Jews in 1942, escaped by saying he also joined the resistance movement. It didn't do this helper. Because sex was in the picture? Because she was a woman? On the whole, Mrs. Randi is very good at this work. Not only did she save her husband during the war. She kept the fort at home with a labyrinthine artist's mind.

Balance – and beat both ways

Precisely because they aim to be comprehensive, Bromark and Tretvoll have stretched the keel to a mentality-historical and idea-historical analysis of an entire spiritual tradition in postwar Norway: left-wing socialism and the third position. Finn Gustavsen called Evensmo a "builder". That's because, in Gustavsen's opinion, he hammered out the Third Position during the Cold War. All his life, Evensmo was wary of slippage in the direction of Soviet worship. That is why the disappointment also became so great in 1975 when SF in the desire for late-nightness with the NKP toned down Soviet criticism. Equally disappointed was Evensmo that Orientering was closed down and Ny Tid made a party organ. It was precisely this party affiliation Orientering should avoid because it would invariably lead to freedom of thought. That was the reason why he had resigned his position in Arbeiderbladet in 1948 when it became clear that DNA was becoming Western friendly.

Still, Bromark and Tretvoll are open to thinking that too, in the trajectories George Orwell turned so fiercely toward: anti-fascism that was blind to totalitarianism eastward. One cannot be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian, Orwell said after the experiences in Spain. Bromark and Tretvoll discuss this and state that there was a trend Orientering to focus more sharply on the United States than on the Soviet Union. "Although serious human rights violations were recorded in the states on the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was not a given that the greater Saka was served by reporting on the overtramps. It would only lead to more confrontation, ”the authors write. "That's why you kept quiet". They explain this trend of perspective shifting with the massive America dominance in Norway at this time, from 1954 to 1964. The goal was to cool down, not contribute to schematic thinking. In addition, it required more thought power to see the black pages of the United States than to criticize the dictatorship in the East.

I think this is fair. We who have the facility should watch out for backward court action. It should also be added that Evensmo himself cannot be accused of cheap anti-Americanism. He got to visit the country invited by the US Department of Foreign Affairs and came home with many good impressions. He was not a true believer in either way.

Well away from Steigan syndrome

However: Evensmo's enthusiasm for Yugoslavia – west of east and east of east, as he called his reportage book from Tito's federal state – was strongly influenced by this logic. In Tito's admiration, the two content fragments of The Third Position flowed together: Tito's independence from the great power blocs and the attempts to create a worker – driven participation socialism from below combined the foreign policy of Norwegian left-wing socialism.

Today, as we sit with the facet, it is easy to see that Evensmo was a Yugoslavia romantic. He probably saw that Yugoslavia was no democracy, but he underplayed the terror, the imprisonment of opposites and Tito's own dynastic exile. Partly it was difficult to know this in his day, but he didn't see much of it either.

Another reason for this devotion to Yugoslavia was the experience of the war and the Nazi ravages of Yugoslav prisoners of war on the Blood Road. Evensmo got several projects with the Yugoslavs, but they did not always go painlessly. Today, Tito makes it sharp on the list of history's worst mass murderers. The dictator's manipulative work to pit the various nationalities against each other in order to stabilize his regime, we see today the tragic consequences of. The conclusion is that Evensmo's attitude towards Yugoslavia is far from the classic Steigan syndrome vis-à-vis Pol Pot (Former AKP (ml) leader Pål Steigan went to great lengths to support the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, editor's note), the submissiveness of the Silesian pilgrim to mass murderers.

No illusions

Was he politically naive? No, but it strikes that Norwegian left-wing socialism seems strangely un-theoretical. It may sound strange, and I can only support this point of view after a more thorough examination of Orienterings vintages. But in the 50s and 60s there was an intense social science and historical debate both in Europe and in the United States about American and Soviet society. Bromark and Tretvoll do not tell us much if this was reflected in Norway.

What is clear is that SF was illusory about the USSR. We did not get an illiberal left as in France (with Sartre as a classic exponent). A left-hand side that went over stag in logical saltomortals to excuse the tyranny of the Soviet Union ("one must expect some eggs to be crushed in such a gigantic liberation project for humanity"). Here SF went clear, and it is obvious that Sigurd Evensmo must be counted among those who prevented this opportunistic romance. Here lies his significant historical location.

Bromark and Tretvoll have written one of the most important books of the autumn – well-written, well-documented, captivating. We could have wanted comparative perspectives with the rest of the Nordic region (how did Evensmo and the rest of SF relate to the Danish SF and the Swedish Communists, for example?) And we could have wanted a closer discussion of SF's view of democracy. Did SF and SV, for example, have any idea of ​​a socialist democracy? Precisely the fact that this biography gives rise to such desires shows its interest-inspiring qualities.

Death is devouringly annoying. I should have liked to see Sigurd Evensmo's assessment today of the political journey of life he carried out. His great sorrow – probably – over the Yugoslav tragedy, his probably not so great surprise over the fall of the Soviet Union, his reflections on world politics, the rise of China and the problems of the United States. Would he have seen Tito's responsibility for the dissolution of the republic in the 90s? Then we could have heard the Silver Voice again. And then maybe we could have gotten him from smoking so terribly.

A great book! ■

Reviewed by Bernt Hagtvet

Bernt Hagtvet is professor of political science at UiO. His latest publication is The Black Book of Genocide. Political mass violence and systematic human rights violations in the 20th century (ed.) University Publishers 08.