While enjoying my daily musli this morning, I was amused to find this written on my milk carton:
“Fordi vi nordmenn ikke er spesielt bortskjemte når det gjelder sollys, har vi beriket TineMelk Ekstra Lett med vitamin D.”“Because we Norwegians aren’t exactly spoiled when it comes to getting sunlight, we have enriched Extra Low-fat TineMelk with vitamin D.”
I have never looked closely at the Norwegian laws regarding things like adoption, maternal/paternal leave, and marriage. I repeat what I hear from friends, when other friends ask, but never really knew the details. Thanks to some colorful charts in yesterday’s Stavanger Aftenblad, I got a little bit of a better understanding, all of my info below comes from page 4 of its August 31st issue.
Since the 1960 Swedish politics has based their childbirth leave laws on two premises – the need to give females time away from work to care for a newborn child, but secondly, on the need to get men into the house. They have had flexible leave since 1974.
I think there have been numerous changes in the law but as I understand it stands now it basically says you get 43 total weeks of 100% paid leave from work or 53 weeks of 80% paid leave. Of this, I think the mother has 9 nine of these weeks reserved for her, and the father has 5 weeks of the total reserved for him. I think you can freely divide up the rest. In contrast, in liberal Sweden there is a fully equal law reserving 60 days for each the father and mother, but provides you 80% salary for 390 days and then 60 Swedish kroner for 90 days after that.
This issue is big in this election coming in September here in Norway. Everyone but the Right party (~15% in polls) and Forward Marching Party (~20%) want to expand the reserved time for fathers and there is all sorts of talk about making the whole system more flexible so that you can take your leave well after the child is born, up until at some point while the child is in school. One reason for considering greater flexibility is that the Swedish welfare department (who I guess in this issue plays the role of the neighbor whose garden is better tended) reports that men are more likely to take paternal leave if they are allowed to do so later on in the child’s life.
Another issue is marriage and adoption. Adoption rights for homosexuals (who already have marriage rights here) and the question of getting rid of some elements of the marriage law which have gendered aspects to it (not sure what these are) are on the election agenda. Homosexuality was also in the news here because of some big conference on homosexual issues held in Norway recently. The Norwegian crown princess gave the opening speech in which she emphasized that discrimination against homosexuals still remains in Norway, especially in the workplace.
On the adoption issue:
Those who want to allow adoption for homosexual couples: Socialistic Left (SV 12% in current polls) Left Party (3.6%), Labor Party (34.6%), Red Alliance (0.x%), and looks like the Right party (15%) is considering something they call “step children adoption” for homosexuals, which I don’t quite understand. Against: Christian Democrats (5.6%) and Forward Marching Party (20%)
Those who want a completely gender neutral marriage law: Socialistic Left (SV 12%) Left Party (3.6%), Labor Party (34.6%), Red Alliance (0.x%) Against: Christian Democrats (5.6%) and Forward Marching Party (20%). The Right party doesn’t either I guess, since they say they want to “keep the partnership law.”
After my adventures at the city archive, I checked the sky to confirm decent weather and embarked on this afternoon’s biking adventure. I packed a book on Norwegian treason trials and took the bus out to Mosterøy, which is just north of Stavanger’s peninsula and reachable by tunnel and bus. For anyone making the same trip in the future, remember that when you get off on the island, you can’t continue on the same road by bike, since you will soon find yourself in a 4.4km tunnel where bikes are not welcome. You have to bike back to an intersection and turn left to get access to the island proper. Or, like me, you haul your bike east off of the road, up a steep hill, and crawl screaming through some thick thorn bushes until you find the island’s main road (helpfully named Mosterøyveien or Mosterøy road).
Only a few kilometers west of the bus stop, in the low hills of this cute farming community is Utstein Kloster, an old monastery well-known in this region. The coast is dotted with farms, boat houses, and signs advertising the sale of potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vegetables. You’ll pass by lots of sheep, cows, and horses on your way, as well as the runes of stone houses and fences dating back one, some almost two thousand years. The bike ride altogether takes less than 45 minutes at a leisurely pace.
The location of Utstein Abbey is apparently already mentioned in historical records going back as far as 800, according to the museum pamphlet but the main structure was built in the 13th century. It was inhabited by Augustinian monks until the Reformation hit. It was neglected until the 20th century when it was restored and turned into a museum and event center. Just last week some American theater company performed King Lear at Utstein Kloster, a really charming location for a play like that.
After going through the rather small grounds of the main building, I went out back and basked in the sun, listened to the wind blow through the huge trees surrounding the monastery, and actually got a few good hours of reading in before biking back! The confused museum staff waved hello to me on the grass, probably wondering why I spent much more time outside than inside the main building. I’m starting to realize that my location here makes it possible to truly study in style…
I visited the Stavanger city archive this morning. After signing in I was given a tour when I said I was interested in finding out what they had. The main reading room is well lit and has a few rows of shelves with books on local issues, some of which can be found down the street at the library. In addition, it has a set of books with municipal government meeting minutes going back over a century, and bound volumes of city budget books etc. Although I didn’t request anything, they apparently have all sorts of other documents available for request but there was no computer database or catalog to search. They also have complete copies of all the local newspapers, some both in original and microfilm.
There was no photocopy machine and I was told merely to take pictures of non-copyrighted materials with a digital camera (such a huge contrast from Japanese archives, for example, as well as I’m sure many other places where they are horribly and unnecessarily strict about digital cameras).
While I looked through some of the materials looking for information on the aftermath of the war and especially the handling of traitors and collaborators, I was able to find lists of people who had been removed from their municipal government posts, and some information on the history of the police services in Stavanger during and after the war.
The greatest find of that morning, however, was a visit from the city’s archivist herself. She emerged from her office to show me around and ask what I was interested in. When I said I studied treason and traitors and was interested in looking at things related to the aftermath of the war in Stavanger, she said, “As a matter of fact, I did my thesis [hovedoppgave] on the [fascist] Nasjonal Samling party in Stavanger from 1933-37.” She then produced a copy of her dissertation. This is the political party of Quisling and its members, without exception were convicted of treason after the war, mostly without any trial or chance to defend themselves. While she is working on their early prewar development, when they were a completely legal and marginal party, it is great to have my own city archivist working on a topic so close. She recommended some other books, most of which I already had checked out from Stavanger’s library.
She also told me about a friend of hers who wrote hers on some kind of non-governmental organizations who worked with convicted traitors in the aftermath of the war! What a find (given my interests)! She found a copy, which I think was her own, and offered to let me borrow it. This is definitely on my reading list for the next few days…
After a night and morning of heavy rain, the sun emerged from the thinning clouds this afternoon, long enough for me to put my reading aside for a few hours and go out to enjoy it. I hunted down my young cousin, borrowed his bicycle and went on a short bike ride to one of the two lakes nearby, Hålandsvatn. Both lakes have nice trails around them and are absolutely wonderful when the weather is good, whether is it for a walk, a picnic, or some swimming in the summer.
The area surrounding the lakes are mainly residential areas and a few farms. On my hour and a half or so bike ride around the lake and back to the apartment, I passed all sorts of creatures, some pictures below.
Continue reading Hålandsvatn
I have finally gotten around to reading a book for youth written by a family friend, Gunnar Skadberg about Rogaland (the county I’m currently in here in Stavanger) during WWII, «Livet er å velge: en bok om andre verdenskrig i Rogaland – skrevet for ungdom».
In his opening descriptions he recounts a bizarre but ultimately tragic little anecdote (page 40) about some sacks of flour. German troops took the local airport here, the largest in Norway at the time, within an hour of dropping troops onto the runway and within a few hours controlled the entire area. When they arrived at the military base located in Madla, only about a 10 minute bicycle ride from where I’m writing this posting, they found it deserted of its 800 troops. Their commanding officer decided that being caught facing Germany’s invasion on Stavanger’s “rat hole” of a peninsula with untrained troops newly arrived from the east was probably not wise. He moved all the troops south to the more mountainous Sviland, Ålgård, and Oltedal off the peninsula.
Two volunteer truck drivers returned to the Madla military base to try to pick up sacks of flour to supply the Norwegian troops but when they arrived they found that German troops had already occupied it. Apparently, the German troops had instructions to be friendly towards any Norwegians who showed no resistance so, when the truck drivers explained they had come to collect sacks of flour, the soldiers helped them load the flour onto the trucks. The truck drivers then proceeded to deliver this flour to the, still resisting, Norwegian forces further south.
The story ends tragically when the trucks get to Sviland and are stopped by trigger-happy Norwegian guards and one of the truck drivers, for some reason, ends up fatally stabbed by a guard’s bayonet.
Carleen has made the newspaper for her efforts to organize “Game Day” at Bartlesville public library. They have been exploring ways of reaching teens at her library and she is putting her studies in library science in her masters program to work in the field!
I came to the library this morning to pick up a book I had requested on the early postwar treason trials in Norway. The library building is housed along with the town’s movie theater, public art exhibition space, a children’s museum and a coffee shop in a well lit glass and steel complex known as the “culture house.” In front of this we have other important mass gathering places such as McDonoalds and an open space covered in cobblestones. Last week this housed a massive book selling frenzy amongst high school students eager to sell textbooks to younger victims.
Today the little open space housed some kind of political fair. While a band, dressed in typical Norwegian sweaters and old-fashioned pilot goggles (?) cracked jokes and sang songs in a mix of dialects that gave them a nice authentic sound of belonging to “the people.”
Surrounding the stage were three booths where political organizers could pass out brochures about their respective party positions in the upcoming September election. The scene struck me as somewhat unusual. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like it in Japan or the US – multiple, quite antagonistic parties gathering in a single public space only a meter or two distance from each-other, all trying to reach the same crowd of passing people and strays listening to the band.
This was an especially interesting scene given the three parties in question: the Christian Democrats (KrF. polling at 5%, might be called a center-right party, currently trailing badly in the polls but in the current coalition government of the “Right” party the “Left” party, and KrF), the Forward Marching Party (polling at 20%, a semi-fascist populist party, but maybe I’m a little harsh), and the Red Alliance (1% which I think is a coalition of the Communists and other hard-core socialist parties).
There was no presence of the three parties who have joined forces to form what might be called the ASS coalition in the morning. These consist of the powerful Labor party (Ap., polling at 35%) which has dominated Norwegian politics in the postwar period, the Socialist Left party (SV) which has made a surprising rise in popularity in the last few years to become mainstream contender with over 15% support, and the Center party (Sp, polling at 5.6%), which traditionally was supported by the agricultural sector. However, the booth battle shifted to the Right party and SV in the afternoon.
My award for the most entertaining election poster so far has to go to a small crowd of Socialist Left youth campaigning in Sandnes last week, who held a banner saying, “Let’s Kick Some Ruling Class ASS”
Continue reading Politics in Downtown Stavanger
As I mentioned in an early posting, Norway’s resistance was very rarely a violent or military effort. One of the primary reasons was that, like anyone in the countless modern wars where occupying militaries collectively punished the local community for acts of sabotage, Norwegians feared reprisals from the occupying German forces. This is one of the many reasons why any closer look at tales of heroic resistance in occupied areas must face the darker and more complicated moral questions of this aspect of war.
Even without violent attacks directly on German forces, however, even more minor acts of sabotage got some kind of reprisals in relatively quiet occupied Norway. I was reading today through the notes and documents of the journalist Halvor Sivertsen today. He is from Stavanger, my hometown here, and spent 17 months in the Grini concentration camp 1942-3. In his wonderful little book Minneskrinet 1940-1945 he has put together his thoughts about wartime, concentration camp life, and resistance.
I was interested in how he shows how German occupying forces’ reactions to Norwegian sabotage, at least here in Stavanger, changed over time. During the first year of occupation, when the resistance in Stavanger committed various acts of sabotage including the cutting of German communication lines and telephone cables, communal punishment for these acts took the form of a fine of 3 kroner. The fine was approved by the mayor of Stavanger, county representative of Rogaland, and the Ministry of the Interior.
Sivertsen has kept his copy of the receipt of his 3 kroner “contribution,” (I was amused that, perhaps to clarify for confused locals, the word “fine” was put in parenthesis in the main text of the receipt after this euphemism) which for lack of time, I leave untranslated here:
Kontribusjon.Byskattsedlens løpenummer 6837 1940/41
Det kvitteres herved for at det er betalt kr. 3,00 – tre kroner i tilegg til byskatt utlignet med ovennevnte løpenr. for 1940/41, til dekning av en kontribusjon (mulkt) som Reichskommissar für die besetzten Norwegischen Gebiete har pålagt kommunen. Utligningsmåten er godkjent av ordføreren i Stavanger, fylkesmannen i Rogaland og Innenriksdepartemented.Betalt Stavanger Kemnerkontor
Navn: Halvor Sivertsen
Adr: [Unreadable]Sivertsen, Halvor. Minneskrinet 1940-1945 (Stavanger: Verbum, 1987), 13.
Later however, this polite fine for damage to telephone lines, complete with receipts and bureaucratic checks gave way to other forms of reprisal. Stavanger police was called in by the fall of 1941 to draft labor for guard duty to watch over the communications network (In postwar Denmark, Danish who were “factory guards” protecting industry from sabotage were prosecuted for collaboration after the war, I’m not sure if they were mostly volunteers or were also drafted. Only in rare exceptions were Norwegian laborers prosecuted for collaboration)
Here, untranslated is the first part of one of his draft notices for 3 hours labor,
Stevning
til
Halvor Sivertsen
…
Etter ordre fra det tyske Sikkerhetspoliti innkalles De herved til vakttjeneste ved tyske telefonkabler i Skankeholen
Torsdag den 16/9 1941 fra kl. 3 til kl. 6De møter på politikammeret, Nytorrget 1, en halv time før tjenesten begynner. De vil da få nærmere instruksjon.
Den som unddrar seg fra vakttjenesten, vil bli dratt til ansvar av det tyske sikkerhetspoliti, som også selv kontrollerer at vakttjenesten utføres etter ordren…
Vakten plikter i den oppgitte tid å patruljere den oppgitte strekning, nøye å overvåke telefonkablene på strekningen og hindre ethvert angrep på dem. Han er berettiget og etter evne forpliktet til å pågripe eventuelle sabotører og øyeblikkelig melde av til politiet, telefon 20500…
ibid., 15.
Basically, the document says you have to show up at police headquarters for instructions, that you’ll get in trouble with the German gestapo (Or “security police” whoever they are) if you don’t,
and that you are required to patrol the lines, alerting the police by phone if there is any attack on the lines.
In this way, reprisal is combined with forcing local inhabitants to directly prevent sabotage, adding one more moment when local laborers might choose to comply and thus interfere with the resistance, or resist the occupation authorities and possibly land in Grini concentration camp, where you can enjoy (mostly) potato “storm” soup for the duration of your sentence.
As you can see, while things got worse than a 3 kroner fine, this was hardly anything to complain about. Reprisals can, of course, get much much worse. While rare in occupied Norway, whole villages (the houses) were burnt down on some occasions, and mass arrests and beatings also happened. Norway, however, did not witness anything similar to the kind of massive atrocities as reprisals for resistance attacks and sabotage that many other occupied areas of Europe were to see.
I’m enjoying a month back in my hometown where I’m trying to teach myself basic reading of German and reading about treason trials and political retribution in early postwar Norway and Denmark. I am also enjoying this time back here to hang out with my friends and relatives of course.
The most fun way of connecting with my young 13 year old cousin is by playing role-playing games, which is something I have also very much enjoyed since as long as I was old enough to read. I sent my Dungeons & Dragons books, etc. to my mother’s apartment here in Norway and have kicked my rusty old mind into gear in order to create some adventures for him and his friends (two other 14 year old boys in the 9th grade in Norwegian school, plus another to join next week). Today, during our little gaming session my enthusiastic young adventurers decided that they wanted to lay a trap for a powerful and diabolical monster (a Night Hag) who was preying upon a village at night (For the record, I usually but not always try to subvert the simple Good/Evil binaries and various race-based generalizations which are a trademark of such games). It is a bit complicated to explain for those who don’t know how these games work, but suffice to say my players decided to raid the Night Hag’s cave while she was out hunting and steal something called a Heartstone inside, which she would notice immediately. They would then await her return and hope that she would fall for the trap when they would try to ambush her.
They wanted to dig a large pit in front of the Night Hag’s cave. Unfortunately, there is nothing but stone outside the cave, which is on a mountain side. Their priest has a divine spell which can turn stone to clay, but only 30 cubic feet per spell cast. If they can cast the spell 4 times, and without using other creative techniques to remove the stone, they can turn a total of 120 cubic feet of solid stone into soft clay which they can then dig out, fill with wooden stakes prepared by the cooperative villagers and then hide the trap with an illusion to deceive the Night Hag (who has some spell resistance, but they don’t know that).
This is all very technical and somewhat irrelevant, but to make a long story short, they had to calculate how wide, long and deep they wanted to create their pit. At one point this meant that, in order to calculate one possible configuration of the size, they had to figure what 120 divided by 16 was. I ruled that they were not allowed to use a calculator (on their cellphones) since I wanted to see how my young friends did at calculating this out and was amazed to discover that after 15 minutes of trying, they were not able to figure out 120/16 by hand. I got the answers 6 from one boy while another emerged from a trance of complicated and bizarre notations to declare, if momentarily, the answer to be 25.
Now, these kids are actually very smart. They had lots of great ideas during the adventure and were able to solve all of the other puzzles I created for them (including a classic one involving riddles and mirrors to open a secret door). They were also surprisingly worldly in their estimations about how various other people in this fantasy world would behave. That is, by observing their internal debate over how to interact with people they met they showed they were able to make very complex and realistic appraisals of how strangers would behave in reaction to certain situations and adjusted their own decision making in accordance, something which reveals considerable experience in social interaction and overall maturity.
In addition, while we played the game almost all in Norwegian, whenever characters spoke, or riddles or inscriptions were read, it was in English (both for my convenience, since I’m more eloquent in English, but also in order to create a certain mystique) and these 13-14 year olds had almost no problems understanding any of the English in the dialogue or puzzles or replying – on behalf of their characters, in English. The only exceptions were not understanding the word “passageway” and sometimes using distinctly Norwegian word order in their English sentences.
However, while they came up with creative solutions to other various problems, simple math like the division of 16 into 120 stumped them (Disclaimer: I also suck at math really badly, so I was amazed, if momentarily comforted, to find anyone with greater difficulty than myself, albeit among those half my age). I asked when they learnt how to do division at school and they said that they remember vaguely having learnt how to do something like 120/16 in 6th or 7th grade but can’t remember how it was done. I don’t know how representative these boys are but I couldn’t help but wonder how old the average child in other countries, especially in East Asia where I have spent so much time recently, can do this kind of math? Then again, if they are not to be engineers or mathematicians, does it matter in a world of cellphone calculators?