Hjemmefrontmuseum
The Hjemmefrontmuseum (Resistance Museum) occupies a distinctive old building just outside the castle entrance, an apt location given that the Gestapo had the habit of executing captured Resistance fighters a few metres away – after torturing them inside the castle first. Labelled in English and Norwegian, the displays detail the history of the war in Norway, from defeat and occupation through resistance to final victory. There are tales of extraordinary heroism here – notably the determined resistance of hundreds of the country’s teachers to Nazi instructions – plus a section dealing with Norway’s Jews, who numbered 1800 in 1939; the Germans captured 760, of whom 24 survived. There’s also the moving story of a certain Petter Moen, who was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned in the Akershus, where he kept a diary by using a nail to pick out letters on toilet paper; the diary survived, but he didn’t. Other acts of resistance included the sabotaging of German attempts to produce heavy water for an atomic bomb deep in southern Norway, at Rjukan, but there’s also an impressively honest account of Norwegian collaboration: fascism struck a chord with the country’s petit bourgeois, and hundreds of volunteers joined the Wehrmacht. The most notorious collaborator was Vidkun Quisling, who was executed by firing squad for his treachery in 1945. When the German army invaded in April 1940, Quisling assumed he would govern the country and made a radio announcement proclaiming his seizure of power, though in the event the Germans soon sidelined him, opting for military control instead.
Ibsenmuseet
The grand, nineteenth-century mansions bordering the southern perimeter of the Slottsparken once housed Oslo’s social elite. It was here, in a fourth-floor apartment at Arbins gate 1, on the corner of what is now Henrik Ibsens gate, that Norway’s most celebrated playwright, Henrik Ibsen, spent the last ten years of his life, strolling down to the Grand every day to hold court. Admirers did their best to hobnob with the great man as he took his daily walk, but Ibsen was unenthusiastic about being a tourist attraction in his own lifetime and mostly ignored all comers – no one could ever accuse him of being overly sociable. Ibsen’s old apartment is now incorporated within the Ibsenmuseet (Ibsen Museum), which begins with a well-considered introduction to Ibsen and his plays, exploring, over two small floors, the themes that underpinned his work and his uneasy relationship with his home country. Beyond, Ibsen’s apartment has been restored to its appearance in 1895, including many of the original furnishings, but it can only be visited on a guided tour (hourly; no extra charge). Both Ibsen and his wife died here: Ibsen breathed his last as he lay paralysed in bed, but his wife, unwilling to expire in an undignified pose, dressed herself to die sitting upright in a chair in the library. Ibsen was argumentative to the end – famously, his final words were “To the contrary” in reply to his poor old maid, who had tried to cheer him up by suggesting he was looking better.
Ibsen
Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906), Norway’s most famous and influential playwright, is generally regarded as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and certainly his central themes have powerful modern resonances. In essence, these concern the alienation of the individual from an ethically bankrupt society, loss of religious faith and the yearning of women to transcend the confines of their roles as wives and mothers. Ibsen’s central characters often speak evasively, mirroring the repression of their society and their own sense of confusion and guilt, with venomous exchanges – a major characteristic of the playwright’s dialogue – appearing whenever the underlying tensions break through. Ibsen’s protagonists do things that are less than heroic, often incompetent, even malicious. Nevertheless, they aspire to dåd – acting with heroism – arguably a throwback to the old Norse sagas. These themes run right through Ibsen’s plays, the first of which, Catalina (1850), was written while he was employed as an apothecary’s assistant at Grimstad on the south coast.
The alienation the plays reveal was undoubtedly spawned by Ibsen’s troubled childhood: his father had gone bankrupt in 1836, and the disgrace – and poverty – weighed heavily on the whole family. More humiliation followed at Grimstad, where the shy, young Ibsen worked for a pittance and was obliged to share a bed with his boss and two maids, which resulted in one of them bearing him a child in 1846. Ibsen escaped small-town Norway in 1850, settling first in Oslo and then Bergen. But he remained deeply dissatisfied with Norwegian society, which he repeatedly decried as illiberal and small-minded. In 1864, he left the country and spent the next 27 years living in Germany and Italy. It was during his exile that Ibsen established his literary reputation – at first with the rhyming couplets of Peer Gynt, featuring the antics of the eponymous hero, a shambolic opportunist in the mould of Don Quixote, and then by a vicious attack on provincial values in Pillars of Society. It was, however, A Doll’s House (1879) that really put him on the map, its controversial protagonist, Nora, making unwise financial decisions before walking out not only on her patronizing husband, Torvald, but also on her loving children – all in her desire to control her own destiny. Ghosts followed two years later, and its exploration of moral contamination through the metaphor of syphilis created an even greater furore, which Ibsen rebutted in his next work, An Enemy of the People (1882). Afterwards, Ibsen changed tack (if not theme), firstly with The Wild Duck (1884), a mournful tale of the effects of compulsive truth-telling, and then Hedda Gabler (1890), where the heroine is denied the ability to make or influence decisions, and so becomes perverse, manipulative and ultimately self-destructive.
Ibsen returned to Oslo in 1891. He was treated as a hero, and ironically – considering the length of his exile and his comments on his compatriots – as a symbol of Norwegian virtuosity. Indeed, the daily stroll he took from his apartment to the Grand Hotel on Karl Johans gate became something of a tourist attraction in its own right – not that Ibsen, who was notoriously grumpy, often wanted to talk to anyone. Ibsen was incapacitated by a heart attack in 1901 and died from the effects of another five years later.
Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and the Royal Palace
The toings and froings of Scandinavian royalty can be befuddling, but few accessions were as unusual as that of Karl XIV Johan (1763–1844), king of Norway and Sweden. Previously, Karl Johan had been the Napoleonic Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a distinguished military commander who had endured a turbulent relationship with his boss, Napoleon, who sacked and reinstated him a couple of times before finally stripping him of his rank for alleged lack of military ardour at the battle of Wagram, outside Vienna, in 1809. In a huff, Bernadotte stomped off back to Paris, where – much to his surprise – he was informed that the Swedish court had elected him as the heir to their king, the childless Charles XIII. This was not, however, a quixotic gesture by the Swedes, but rather a desire to ensure that their next king was a good soldier able to protect them from their enemies, especially Russia. In the event, it worked out rather well: Bernadotte successfully steered the Swedes through the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, firstly as Crown Prince to a decrepit King Charles XIII from 1810 and then, on Charles’s death, as the Swedish king, adding Norway to his future kingdom in 1818. Not content, seemingly, with the terms of his motto, “The people’s love is my reward”, Karl Johan had the whopping Kongelige Slott built for his further contentment, only to die before it was completed.