Some remarks on the Ossietzky case.

In Norwegian, see here.

To many Norwegians, the press campaign for and against Ossietzky being awarded the peace prize became a bit of an eye-opener. His fate became a symbol, and also a vehicle for understanding some structural traits of the new German regime. Why is that?       
                                                                                                                                                                                            Arthur Koestler wrote in 1944: “A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail that counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality.”
I believe Koestler’s observation is true. And, that this is the reason why the atrocities of nazism – so vividly brought to our attention through individual fates, lumps of reality portrayed in countless books and films – for most Europeans still remain an arsenal of feelings that can be mobilized. Much more so than the dry facts about the millions who fell as victims of any given communist dictatorship. Those statistics don’t bleed. In autumn 1935, it didn’t seem very likely that the German journalist and editor Carl von Ossietzky would get the Nobel Peace Prize. Today we know, through the diary entries and a letter from the foreign minister Halvdan Koht, that none of the members of the Nobel Committee in 1935 actually proposed him as their candidate. Nor was the committee able to agree upon any other candidate that year. Koht maintained that Ossietzky would not have been nominated if he wasn’t imprisoned by the Nazis, and this suggested to him that his actual peace work had not been of sufficient importance to justify the award. “So, it is correct to say that I was against it; but I wasn’t in fact called upon to offer any resistance to an award which no one proposed” Koht recalled a year later.
 
The campaign started in the diaspora milieus of German intelligentsia, London and Paris being most important. But it got a crucial contribution from an unknown 22-year-old German refugee, Herbert Frahm, newly arrived in Norway under his code name Willy Brandt. In a letter to Konrad Reisner, Brandt wrote that it was justified to go on pressing for Ossietzky's candidature, although he regarded it as a lost cause. He had been informed by his friend Finn Moe, the man in charge of foreign affairs in the social democratic party organ, Arbeiderbladet. To his regret, Moe assessed that so few Norwegians were familiar with Ossietzkys journalism that it would be difficult to muster a list of public names to support him.
 
But then, on the 22nd of November 35, the campaigners got unexpected help from a famous author and Hitler-admirer: Knut Hamsun. The attack on the German candidate was given prominence in both of the main conservative newspapers, Tidens Tegn and Aftenposten. And it was held in a personal tone. Ossietzky could have fled, Hamsun stated, but he deliberately chose to stay because he knew that there would be an outcry if he got arrested. “What does he want? Is it the German rearmament he now as a friend of peace is demonstrating against?” Hamsun inquired. “Would this German rather see his country still laying crushed and humiliated between the nations, forever depending on British and French mercy?”
 
Hamsun’s blunt attack kicked off a heated debate, a debate that not only caught the attention of Norwegian authors and students, but involved practically the whole press and prompted labour unions-petitions and also eventually tied the social democratic party to the mast by statements from their own party central committee and members in the parliament. Willy Brandt thought Hamsun had in fact had helped Ossietzkys case. The German ambassador in Norway assessed the probable outcome in a similar way.
 
The newly elected government consisted of an unlikely coalition between the social democrats of Arbeiderpartiet and the agrarian Bondepartiet. Only two years before, prime minister Johan Nygaardsvold had stated in a speech that “it is Bondepartiet who have adopted fascism in our country”. Now he was leading a minority government with them. Very few thought this alliance between former mortal enemies would last for long. But it did, and in the process, the center did hold, and even thrived. But reading the views on Nazi Germany and the Ossietzky case in party-organs like Arbeiderbladet and Nationen, one would say they were worlds apart. Arbeiderbladet had supported Ossietzky from 1934 on, whereas Nationen made no secret of their fascist-friendly leanings, and campaigned accordingly against him. The German ambassador Heinrich Sahm reported to his supervisors in Berlin in 1938 that by reading Nationen, “one could get the impression that it is a national-socialistic paper one is facing”.
 
The Labour Party, having for the first time taken office in a governmental position lasting more than two weeks, had to maneuver in increasingly troubled waters. The consensus understanding of how to maintain a small country’s interest was to stay neutral and not get involved in any conflicts between the superpowers. Their Foreign minister, Koht, went out of his way to stay neutral and not provoke. It had worked well before.
 
What was typically motivating the campaigners for Ossietzky’s candidature in Norway? Well, apart from the author Sigurd Hoel, and the journalist Ragnar Vold, who both were exceptionally well informed, I think it is safe to say that most of the sympathizers had read next to nothing of Ossietzky. But as far as they were informed by the liberal and left-leaning press, they knew that Ossietzky had bravely fought the forces that now had gained the upper hand in Germany. They knew that Ossietzky had – in his own words – chosen not the easy way, but the one necessary. They knew him as a man who did not deviate from his principles. And that he therefore now, as an enemy of the regime, was imprisoned and mistreated. He thus became a symbol of a disillusioned but bravely fighting humanitarianism. But also, a telling case in point of the despotic character of the new German regime.
 
Hamsun’s attack on Ossietzky got a retort in the liberal newspaper Dagbladet the very same day. The author Nordahl Grieg – otherwise a staunch defender of the judicial customs in Stalin’s Soviet - certainly did form an apt response to Hamsun’s inquisitorial questions:
 
“Answer Ossietzky! The horns are sounding. Here we have a grand Norwegian poet who attacks you. He is a brave man, he has carefully chosen his enemy, as you lay there silenced in the concentration camp. He wants to see you forgotten. But this may be one of those things we will not forget – the grand mighty world-celebrity asking, and the man in the convict suit who cannot answer.”
 
A petition penned by Helge Krog was signed by 33 members of The Norwegian Authors’ Union. It denounced Hamsun’s attack on “a defenceless and silenced prisoner, taking side with an autocratic political regime which has expelled the elite of German authors into exile.”
 
Aftenposten refused to publish the petition but attacked it instead in its editorial: “About the well-intentioned signatories who had allowed themselves to be led on a leash by Helge Krog and his team of Marxists, one should use the words of the scripture: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
 
The internal debate among the Norwegian authors in the Ossietzky case is material for another presentation. When the Union of Norwegian Writers later met to consider the anti-Hamsun declaration, the vote to approve it won by only 74 to 44. Let me just mention two of the authors who did not sign the petition, Ronald Fangen and Tarjei Vesaas. The first one was not asked because Helge Krog had doubts about his attitude. Ronald Fangen was known as “German-friendly”, and was yet one of the first authors to publicly warn against the new regime in Germany. And the first author to be arrested during the war. The second one, Tarjei Vesaas, was just about to get his book accepted by a Berlin publisher. He did not sign, most likely because he feared it could jeopardize a promising career. He had his doubts, but the book “Das große Spiel” got published the year after, and so was the follow-up “Eine Frau ruft heim”, the same year. Vesaas had in 1933 written to his wife: “I am not a fan of Hitler. But I am fond of the whole of this vigorous nation which stands so alone against the whole world. I always take sides with the losers.” That was a common sentiment shortly after the First World War. A sympathy that often blurred the distinction between people of nations and their regimes.
 
In 1936, the international attention had increased and the list of famous names who had formally nominated Ossietzky was impressive. The pressure on the committee from home and abroad was mounting. Just before the final decision was to be taken, Halvdan Koht resigned briefly from the Committee, and he justified it on the grounds that while the different views of the committee were kept in discretion, one could hardly avoid the government being kept accountable for their decision. And this would limit the commission's freedom of choice. But Koht was immediately followed by another committee member, the former Foreign Minister Ludwig Mowinckel. Thus, Koht’s maneuver actually served to strengthen Ossietzky’s candidacy, because the deputy representative for Mowinckel was Martin Tranmæl, the chief editor of Arbeiderbladet. Aftenposten commented that Koht instead should have remained as a guardian to “avoid that the peace prize is being misused to serve our domestic Nazi-hatred.”
 
As the decision in favour of Ossietzky finally fell on 23rd November 1936, there were strong feelings on both sides. Willy Brandt, at the time undercover in Berlin, noticed the joy and hope it had sparked in the underground resistance, as well as the rage by many other fellow Germans. “This is tearing down for Norway all that our seamen, our businessmen, and our athletes are building up” one Norwegian business newspaper stated.
 
Their worries turned out to be unfounded. Although Der Führer was fuming with rage, prohibiting any German citizen in the future from receiving any of the different Nobel prizes, the German diplomatic reactions were all in all muted. The whole thing became of little significance to the long-term business relations between the countries. In 1938, Koht said in a confidential parliament meeting: “In all real matters I have not noticed anything that has disturbed the relations between the two countries or the two governments.”
 
Fredrik Stang, chairman of the Nobel Committee, delivered a speech in honour of Ossietzky in December 1936. Stang was afraid of “arousing irritation” and wondered whether the “polemic against the German statements is sufficiently balanced”. His ceremonial address was couched in moderate terms after he had “struck out important sections” which he “would have liked to say”, as he later put it. The king's chair stood empty during the ceremony.
 
It was often stated in the conservative press that the Peace Prize had been politicized and hijacked by a hidden agenda, and, as Aftenposten put it; “misused as an affront against those who think differently”. “Tidens Tegn” stated that “It is not as much the love of peace as the hatred of nazism that had brought Ossietzky's name to the fore.”
 
Some years later, one could observe a similar pattern of thought when the board of The Norwegian Authors’ Union refused to express any support for the newly arrested Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, because “it could be perceived as an expression of a general anti-communism.”
 
Aftenposten tried to calm the waters and stated that “it would be very unfortunate if Germany regarded the nomination as a protest against the German system of government (nazism)”
 
In hindsight, the agenda was barely hidden on either side. But those who sided with Ossietzky meant that the German Nazi system was well worth a protest. And that the dictatorship in itself is prone to threaten the peace between nations.
 
Ossietzky was never able to speak on “the fraternity of nations” in Oslo. At first, Hitler planned to let him travel to Oslo, only to take away his citizenship. Goebbels spoke of letting heads roll. Göring thought differently. He tried to make Ossietzky renounce the prize and keep quiet, offering him a monthly sum of money and the best treatment possible for his tuberculosis, which according to an inmate was inflicted on Ossietzky through an injection. Göring knew full well that a Nobel speech held by Ossietzky to the international press would be a terrible blow to Germany's reputation. Ossietzky refused his offer. So, he was sent back to his “Zauberberg for the poor”, a single 9 square meter room in an apartment for tuberculosis patients in the poorest quarters of Berlin where he was to spend the rest of his days. A guard was posted outside the door, but he was sometimes absent due to the fear of being infected. We know this, because a young Norwegian couple, Inger and Finn Lie, travelled to Germany and managed to find the place where he was kept. And, after having assured Ossietzky's wife Maud that they were not journalists, the couple were invited in. Finn Lie had a long chat with Ossietzky whilst the women went out for a walk. Ossietzky was convinced that Germany was preparing for another war. Lie told him about Hamsun’s verbal attack, and not holding back what he felt about it. But Ossietzky waved it aside. “I don’t know him as a person, but what a wonderful author he is. You must promise to send me his latest book”.
 
Was Ossietzky a communist, as the campaigners against him implied? Having read Die Weltbühne, I’d say no. Full stop. But he had, as a «leftist without any party affiliation», repeatedly stressed the need for an alliance between the two socialist parties to block fascism's way to power. On the first of March 32 he would have preferred a unifying social democrat candidate, but as the social democrats opted for Hindenburg, he saw no alternative to voting for Thälmann. Ossietzky wrote: “The social democrats say: Hindenburg means fight against fascism. From where do the gentlemen get this idea? [..] The Hindenburg coalition between the worn-out court ladies of monarchy and the coming court-men of the dictatorial republic is a product of party offices who have lost touch with the electorate. Germany has in these last years hungered and suffered too much to let their decisions be formed by piety. Most of them have little to gain, but rather a lost existence to avenge.”

His daughter, Rosalinda von Ossietzky

Ossietzky was never able to speak to an international public again. Nor did he ever see his daughter again, although she spoke to him by long-distance telephone on her 18th birthday in December 1937. She was by then in Sweden, and he was still in Berlin, where he died on the 4th of May 1938.