A Tale of Two Offices

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In my previous blog about my recent trip to Norway, I described my visit to the former home of Vidkun Quisling, where I viewed his private office while he was Minister-President (1942-45).

What I didn’t mention was that I had a much more enjoyable visit to Odd Nansen’s private home and office as well.  After the war, Nansen designed a new home for his growing family, located just a stone’s throw from Fridtjof Nansen’s home, Polhøgda, where he had previously lived following his father’s death.

Odd Nansen’s home

The house has long since passed out of the Nansen family and into private hands, but Preben Johannessen, son-in-law of my dear friend Marit, offered to approach the current owner and neighbor (Preben and Marit’s daughter Anne live almost adjacent to the house) and explain that a visitor from America was very desirous of seeing Odd Nansen’s handiwork.  The neighbor kindly agreed, and the day following my presentation in Oslo, Marit, Anne, Preben and I were given a guided tour of the home.

It was fascinating to view the architectural details Odd Nansen built into his new home, many of which remain unchanged over 70 years later.  These include a cozy, wood-fired sauna near the master bedroom, and ceiling panels in the dining room hand painted by Nansen himself.

Dining Room ceiling painted by Odd Nansen

The pièce de résistance was of course Odd Nansen’s study, occupying the highest room in the entire house, complete with specially built drawers to hold his architectural drawings.  The original, hand-drawn architectural renderings of his home were still there, available for viewing.  As Nansen completed his house plans around the same time as he published From Day to Day, he must have been a very busy man indeed.

Odd Nansen’s architectural plans

Seeing the offices of Odd Nansen and Vidkun Quisling on back-to-back days got me to thinking about the two men.

Quisling and Nansen were near contemporaries of each other (Quisling was 14 years Nansen’s senior).  Both men had close relationships with the great Fridtjof Nansen—Odd as his son, and Quisling as his key assistant, coordinating famine relief for Fridtjof in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s, as well as later projects in Armenia.

Both men showed considerable talent early in their careers.  Odd Nansen entered an architectural contest in 1930 (age 29) and placed third among 254 submissions, many by the leading U.S. architects of the day, including the son of Frank Lloyd Wright.  Quisling graduated first in his class from Norway’s military academy with the highest grades ever awarded up to that time.

By the 1930s, both men began to make important career decisions which would shape the future direction of their lives.

In 1933, Quisling, motivated by a mystic ideology called Universism, hatred of Communism, and perhaps most importantly, impressed by Adolf Hitler’s recent meteoric rise to Chancellor of Germany, formed the Nasjonal Samling (National Unity) Party, known by its initials, NSNS was a fascist knock-off of the Nazi Party, complete with its own Nordic flags, an SA-like paramilitary equivalent (the Hirden), etc.  It garnered little popular support, and never attracted more than 2% of Norway’s voters. Nevertheless, by 1942 Quisling was riding high in Nazi-occupied Norway, having just been appointed its Minister-President.

In 1936, Odd Nansen, on the other hand, formed Nansenhjelpen at the behest of several prominent Norwegians.  At significant cost to his career and family, he helped stateless refugees in central Europe obtain visas to Norway.  He was, a contemporary wrote, “mindful of the fact that he was the bearer of the Nansen name.” Despite daunting obstacles, Nansenhjelpen succeeded in bringing approximately 260 such refugees to Norway before the outbreak of World War II.

These choices put Nansen and Quisling on a collision course that resulted in Nansen’s arrest in January 1942.  In his diary entry for July 24, 1942, Nansen writes: “That confirms what I have believed all the time . . .  Quisling is behind my arrest.”  It looked for all the world that Quisling had made the better choice, Nansen the wrong one.

I am currently working on an article about The Moon is Down, a novel written by John Steinbeck in 1942.  The action is located in a small town in an unnamed country (that looks suspiciously like Norway) which is occupied by an unnamed foreign army (that looks suspiciously like the German Army).  At the novel’s climax, the town’s mayor, held (like Nansen) as a hostage, realizes he is to be executed in retaliation for ongoing sabotage.  He reminisces with his closest friend, the town doctor, about their school days, when together they studied SocratesApology.  The mayor recalls a particularly pertinent part of Socrates’ speech while he was on trial for his life, when Socrates recalls a question directed to him, and his answer:

“Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?’

I might fairly reply to him, ‘You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action–that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one.”

Odd Nansen lived beyond the biblical three-score and ten years, earning the respect and admiration of his many friends and diary readers.  He died of natural causes on June 26, 1973, age 71.

Vidkun Quisling was executed by firing squad, following a trial for treason, on October 24, 1945, age 58.

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