Nordahl Grieg
_Nordahl_Grieg.jpg)
Johan Nordahl Brun Grieg (born November 1, 1902 in Bergen , Norway ; † December 2, 1943 in Kleinmachnow near Berlin ) was a Norwegian writer and journalist .
Life
Nordahl Grieg - coming from a middle-class family - was a brother of the publisher Harald Grieg and a distant relative of the composer Edvard Grieg . He interrupted his studies at the University of Oslo in order to travel to various European countries as a seaman on a freighter in 1922. After his return he studied philosophy and worked as a journalist. Nordahl Grieg had been politically leftist since his youth .
As a poet Grieg made his debut in 1922 with the poetry collection Rundt Kap det gode Håp (Around the Cape of Good Hope). In 1923 the novel Skibet gaar videre was published , a critical description of life on board and in the port cities. In 1925 he published the volume of poetry Stene i strømmen (Stones in the Stream).
In 1927 Grieg worked for a newspaper as a correspondent in China and reported on the beginnings of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the revolutionary communists . He described his experiences in the report Kinesiske dage (Chinese days, 1927). In the same year he wrote the plays Barabas , En ung manns kjærlighet (The Love of a Young Man) and the anti-capitalist didactic play Atlanterhavet .
The period from 1933 to 1935 in Moscow shaped Grieg, he became a communist . After his return he was editor of the anti-fascist magazine Veien Fremd , for which prominent authors such as Thomas Mann , Ilja Ehrenburg and Louis Aragon wrote. During this time he wrote his didactic play Vår ære og vår makt (Our honor and our power), which, like the drama Nederlaget (The Defeat), was also translated into German.
In 1936 Grieg wrote the poem Til Ungdommen in Ny-Hellesund, southern Norway , which, when set to music , became very popular and became one of his best-known texts. In 1937 Grieg worked as an anti-fascist war reporter in the Spanish Civil War . In 1938 his novel Ung må verden ennu være (And the world stays young) was published, which is set in the Moscow milieu. The author consistently represents the communist ideology of Soviet repression. The main character, Ashley, an English philologist working in Moscow, enters into a relationship with an attractive woman who strictly follows her communist party discipline, and Ashley fails because as a humanist he is unable to act in a revolutionary way.
From April 9, 1940, Grieg volunteered for the Norwegian Armed Forces and then worked for the Norwegian secret service in England. There, in the same year, he married the Norwegian actress Gerd Egede-Nissen , the sister of the actresses Aud Egede-Nissen and Ada Kramm , whom Grieg had previously met and who had followed him to Great Britain. As a war reporter for the British Royal Air Force , he took part in the air raids and area bombings on German cities. Grieg died on December 2, 1943 in the attack on Berlin, when the Lancaster LM 316 , in which he was a war correspondent, was shot down. The eight corpses of the burned aircraft crew were buried after the autopsy by the Wehrmacht in the Olympic hospital on the Döberitz garrison cemetery. In 1952 the cemetery was leveled by order of the Soviet military administration . The crash site is on the shores of Lake Machnower . At the request of the Norwegian embassy, the Kleinmachnow community erected a boulder there as a memorial. At the inauguration of the memorial on November 23, 2003, the Norwegian singer Torhild Ostad sang the song Til Ungdommen . Since September 4, 2002, the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin has had a piece of the left wing of the downed aircraft, which served as a roof for a sheepfold from 1944 to spring 2002. The Kleinmachnower Lauf Club organizes a Nordahl-Grieg memorial run every year.
In 1945, after the end of the war, Nordahl Grieg was honored in his fatherland as an anti-fascist resistance fighter against the German occupation. A statue of Grieg was put up in memory of the theater in Bergen .
plant
Grieg's dramas and novels were written between the two world wars. In his dramas written in Moscow he largely adopted Soviet stage technology and the form of epic didactic play practiced by Brecht . The focus of his pieces is the criticism of class society.
The expressionist drama Barabbas goes back to impressions of the author during his stay in China. In the parable, Grieg compares the peacefulness of Jesus with the violence of suppressed rebels. In the struggle between passive resistance and revolutionary liberation, a young man is overwhelmed by brutality.
In the didactic piece Our Honor and Our Power ( Vår ære og vår makt , 1936), Norwegian shipowners did profitable business during the First World War . For expensive freight, they supply the British with armaments and the Germans with copper. The profit from this business allows them capital prosperity; at the same time hundreds of thousands of their countrymen are living in great misery as a result of the war. After the Great Depression , twenty years after the actual plot of the play, many of the sailors from that time are in a homeless asylum while the shipowners are preparing for a new imperialist war. The proletarian people are now going on a general strike.
Grieg's last play takes place in Paris in March 1871 . Germany has triumphed over France. The commune is established and creates for the good of the people, but there is a dispute over the use of force and power is misused to ruthless terror. The barricades fall, as do the patriots. The defeat of the commune is ultimately unavoidable, as Grieg teaches in his view. With his didactic play he inspired Bertolt Brecht to write his didactic play Die Tage der Kommune ( 1949 ).
Nordahl Grieg's English film script Greater Wars , written in London in 1942 , was found in 1989 and translated into Norwegian. His war poems were published in the poetry book Friheten in 1945 .
bibliography
Primary literature (selection)
- Rundt Kap det gode Håp , 1922 - Around the Cape of Good Hope
- Skibet gaar videre , 1924 - The ship sails on
- Stene i strømmen , 1925 - Stones in the stream
- Kinesiske dage , 1927 - Chinese days
- En ung manns Kjærlighet , 1927 - The love of a young man
- Barabbas , 1927-drama
- Norge i våre hjerter , 1929
- Atlanterhavet , 1932 - The Atlantic
- De unge døde , 1932 - The young days
- Vår ære og vår makt , 1935 - Our honor and our power . drama
- Ung må verden ennu være , 1938 - And the world stays young
- Nederlaget , 1937 - The defeat . drama
- War Poems of Nordahl Grieg , 1944 (engl.)
Secondary literature
- Rudolf Nilsen and Nordahl Grieg: Call from Norway , poems. Selected and transferred by Horst Bien and Helmut Stelzig. With a comment by H. Strelzig. 1st edition. Hinstorff, Rostock 1960.
- Nordahl-Grieg honor in the German Democratic Republic. Scientific Conference on Nordahl Grieg's artistic and political legacy. Greifswald, Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, 1962. [With portrait] Printed as Ms in: Wissenschaftl. Magazine d. Ernst Moritz Arndt Univ. Greifswald. 12.1963, company u. Sprachwiss. R., 1st Greifswald 1963.
- Edvard Hoem: Til undoubtedly. Nordahl Griegs liv . 1st edition. Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1989
- Actor leader . Henschelverlag, Berlin 1964
Web links
- Literature by and about Nordahl Grieg in the catalog of the German National Library
- Nordahl Grieg in the Norske Leksikon store
- Biography about Nordahl Grieg in the Norsk biografisk leksikon
- Nordahl-Grieg-Lauf in Kleinmachnow ( Memento from October 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Memorial stone to War Correspondent Grieg (Loss of Lancaster Lm316)
- ↑ Website Torhild Ostad - Music (Myspace Inc.)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Grieg, Nordahl |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Grieg, Johan Nordahl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Norwegian writer, poet, playwright and journalist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 1, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bergen (Norway) |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 2, 1943 |
| Place of death | Kleinmachnow near Berlin |