Jens Bjørneboe

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Jens Bjørneboe teaches at the Rudolf Steinerskolen in Oslo , 1952

Jens Ingvald Bjørneboe (born October 9, 1920 in Kristiansand , Norway ; † May 9, 1976 in Veierland near Tønsberg , Norway) was a highly controversial Norwegian writer during his lifetime.

Life

Jens Bjørneboe, born in 1920 as the youngest of three children of a Norwegian shipowner, probably suffered from mental disorders as a child. At the age of 13 he made his first suicide attempt. After graduating from high school in 1940, he began training as a painter in Oslo , but in 1943 he fled to Sweden to avoid the labor service in Norway, which was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. Among the emigrants in neutral Sweden he met Lisel Funck (1918–2001), whom he married in 1945. Funck had fled Germany in 1938 as a so-called “half-Jew” and worked as a photographer in Stockholm. The couple moved to Oslo after the end of World War II and Bjørneboe made his first trip to Berlin.

After 1947 Bjørneboe turned to writing. With his wife he took part in the life of the Anthroposophical Society in the Norwegian capital. In 1950 Bjørneboe became a class teacher at the Oslo Waldorf School . In 1957 he suffered a psychological breakdown, stopped teaching and separated from his wife. In the following years he led an erratic existence. During this time he mainly stayed in Germany and Italy. In 1959 he was serving a prison sentence in Norway. The marriage with Lisel Funck was divorced in 1961. In the same year Bjørneboe married the actress Tone Tveteraas. The marriage has three daughters.

Since the early 1960s, he became friends with the theater maker Eugenio Barba , for whose theater group Odin Teatret he wrote her first play Ornitofilene .

The 1966 novel Uten en tråd ( Naked in a Shirt ) was classified as pornographic in Norway and banned. Bjørneboe and his publisher were sentenced to fines and short prison terms in a trial that received high media coverage. Bjørneboe then wrote a sequel, Uden en trævl 2 , which he dedicated to the Supreme Court. The book was published in Denmark in 1968 .

Jens Bjørneboe's life has been shaped by an open fight against depression and alcoholism, especially in the last few decades. During this time he was strongly represented in the Norwegian public not only because of his socially critical books and articles, but also because of his lifestyle. The author killed his life by suicide in 1976.

Bjørneboe was bisexual and had already hinted at this in some of his works before he finally committed himself to it after the publication of breastfeeding . Bjørneboe was in a relationship with the thirty years younger writer Gudmund Vindland , who published the novel Villskudd (1979; Ger . Der Irrläufer , 1983) three years after Bjørneboe's death . This is about the homosexual relationship between the alter egos Bjørneboes and Vindlands. Bjørneboe's family and the Writers' Union tried in vain to prevent publication. The book became a huge hit and sold well.

Services

His socially critical books are strongly influenced by the supposedly everlasting existence of evil . They depict, for example, the inhumanity of the National Socialist racial hygiene or the unworthy conditions in Norwegian prisons.

His novel Frihetens øyeblikk ( The Moment of Freedom ) , published in 1966, is considered to be one of the great novels in Norwegian literature after the Second World War . The main character of the educational novel is an unnamed judicial officer and writer who tries to reconstruct his past in a fictional principality in the Alps . This shows parallels to Bjørneboe's own biography. In 1969 the sequel Kruttårnet ( The Powder Tower ) appeared, which takes place in a psychiatric institution. The core of the novel consists of three lectures on atrocities given by the chief doctor and a former executioner . 1973 followed with Stillheten ( Stille. An Anti-Roman or The Absolutely Last Protocol ) another sequel. The setting is Africa , where the alcoholic narrator has conversations with locals and historical figures such as Maximilian Robespierre .

This trilogy, named after a fictional work by the main character, The Story of Bestiality , is considered Bjørneboe's main work. He deals with the history of evil and suffering, makes references to historical events such as colonialism , National Socialism and the Vietnam War and thus criticizes the Western world. The third part of the trilogy, Stillheten , was awarded the Critics' Prize and the Dobloug Prize, but - like Kruttårnet - also received negative reviews.

Works (in German)

  • Jonas and the Miss ( Jonas, 1955). Skulima, Heidelberg 1958. New edition: Jonas. Free Spiritual Life, Stuttgart 1993
  • Good luck Tonnie ( Den onde hyrde, 1960). Hinstorff, Rostock 1965
  • The Bird Friends ( Fugleelskerne, 1966). Merlin , Gifkendorf 1967
  • The moment of freedom ( Frihetens øyeblikk, 1966). Merlin , Hamburg 1968; 3rd edition 1995, ISBN 3-926112-52-2
  • Before the rooster crows ( Før hanen galer, 1952). Merlin , Hamburg 1969
  • Naked in a shirt ( Uten en tråd, 1966/67). Merlin , Hamburg 1970. Paperback: Rowohlt (rororo 4378), Reinbek 1979
  • The Powder Tower ( Kruttårnet, 1969). Merlin, Gifkendorf 1995, ISBN 3-87536-139-3
  • Naked in Shirt II ( Uten en tråd II. ) Merlin , Hamburg 1971
  • Silence. An Anti-Novel or The Absolute Last Protocol ( Stillheten, 1973), Anyway . Grafenau 1993, ISBN 3-922209-41-6
  • Sharks. The story of a shipwreck ( Haiene, Oslo 1974). Merlin , Gifkendorf 1984; 2nd edition 2003, ISBN 3-87536-237-3
  • Against the patrons. Essays and pamphlets on culture and politics. Introduced by Karlheinz Deschner , however, Reutlingen 1980
  • Man is invisible. Incitement to treason and freedom. Pforte, Dornach 2007, ISBN 3-85636-192-8

literature

  • Tore Rem : Sin egen gentlemen. En biografi om Jens Bjørneboe [Volume 1]. Oslo, Cappelen Dam 2009.
  • Tore Rem : Født til frihet. En biografi om Jens Bjøneboe [Volume 2]. Oslo, Cappelen Dam 2010.
  • Fredrik Wandrup : Jens Bjørneboe. The man, the myth and the art. Gifkendorf, Merlin 1990, ISBN 3-87536-199-7
  • Joe Martin: Keeper of the Protocols. The Works of Jens Bjørneboe in the Crosscurrents of Western Literature. New York, Lang 1996, ISBN 0-8204-3037-4
  • Ingvar Ambjörnsen : Jens Bjørneboe. In: Krachkultur 6/1996
  • Ingvar Ambjörnsen : meeting Bjørneboe. In: Krachkultur 14/2012
  • Raimund Wolfert: With a restless heart in my chest. Jens Bjørneboe and male-male love , in: Forum Homosexualität und Literatur 2004, issue 44, pp. 93-109.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fredrik Wandrup: Jens Bjørneboe in: Norsk biografisk leksikon, accessed on March 17, 2013
  2. ^ Esther Greenleaf Mürer: Jens Bjørneboe in Tanya Thresher (ed.): Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 297: Twentieth-Century Norwegian Writers . Gale, Detroit, et al. 2004. p. 21
  3. ↑ Jon Olav Gotland: Norwegian Literature ( Memento of the original from September 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . glbtq.com  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.glbtq.com
  4. ↑ a b c Mürer, p. 23
  5. ↑ Lillian Olsen and Torunn P. Westerfjell: Homobok fyller 25 år . NRK, February 23, 2004
  6. ↑ a b Mürer, p. 20
  7. ↑ Mürer, p. 22
  8. ^ Fredrik Wandrup: Jens Bjørneboe in: Norsk biografisk leksikon
  9. ^ Jens (Ingvald) Bjørneboe in Alf G. Andersen and Hans-Erik Hansen: 500 som preget Norge . Damm / Millennium, Oslo 1999

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bjørneboe, Jens
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bjørneboe, Jens Ingvald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Kristiansand , Norway
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1976
Place of death Veierland near Tønsberg , Norway