Already at Bergen Cathedral School, Grieg showed talent in writing. In a poetry competition in 1918.
College/University
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Problemveien 7, 0315 Oslo, Norway
Following his father's footsteps, Grieg entered the University of Olso in 1920 to prepare himself for a career in education. He interrupted his studies at the University of Oslo to work as a deckhand on a ship going to Australia.
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PN, UK
Receiving the 1924 Norway Scholarship, Grieg spent a year at Wadham College at Oxford, England, studying history and literature.
Career
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Gallery of Nordahl Grieg
Nordahl Grieg
Achievements
Engen 1, 5803 Bergen, Norway
The statue of Nordahl Grieg outside the National Scene in Bergen.
Following his father's footsteps, Grieg entered the University of Olso in 1920 to prepare himself for a career in education. He interrupted his studies at the University of Oslo to work as a deckhand on a ship going to Australia.
Nordahl Grieg was a Norwegian journalist, novelist, playwright, soldier, and poet. Before World War II. Nordahl Grieg became one of Norway's leading dramatists. During the war, he became the country's leading patriotic poet. He also is known for his novels and his journalism as well as his concern for social problems and support of Stalinist Marxism.
Background
Nordahl Grieg was born into a distinguished family on November 1, 1902, in Bergen, Norway. His father, Peter Lexau Grieg, was a school principal and a teacher of music at a university. Grieg's mother, Helga Vollan, came from a politically active family. He was related to the famous composer Edvard Grieg, and brother of the powerful Norwegian publisher Harald Grieg.
Education
Already at Bergen Cathedral School, Grieg showed talent in writing. In a poetry competition in 1918, arranged by the student body council, he came in second, the winner was Helge Ingstad (1899-2001). Grieg was a sophomore, Ingstad a senior; he gained later fame as an explorer. When Grieg met him years later, he said to Ingstad, "It was you every thought was the great poet."
Following his father's footsteps, Grieg entered the University of Olso in 1920 to prepare himself for a career in education. He interrupted his studies at the University of Oslo to work as a deckhand on a ship going to Australia.
Receiving the 1924 Norway Scholarship, Grieg spent a year at Wadham College at Oxford, England, studying history and literature.
As a writer, Grieg made his debut with Round the Cape of Good Hope, a collection of poems. With Nils Lie he published a detective novel, Bergenstoget plyndret i natt (1923, The Robbery on the Bergen Train), under the joint pseudonym Jonatan Jev. The book was filmed in 1928. Between the years 1922 and 1925, he studied philology and wrote for Tidens Tegn and Oslo Aftenavis. In 1923-24 he studied at Wadham College, Oxford, where he joined the rowers on the Cherwell and produced an essay, 'Rudyard Kipling and the British Empire.' After graduating from the University of Oslo, Grieg continued his travels. He also worked as a journalist under the pseudonym Fortinbras. With the help of the Conrad Mohr travelling fellowship, he visited the Alps, Greece, and France. Grieg's "Greek Letters" were published in Oslo Aftenavis in 1926.
The Ship Sails On (1924) gained wide attention with its revealing picture of a lot of Norwegian sailors. Later the international Red Cross launched a campaign against the venereal disease problem in port cities. The English writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), who also went young to sea, traveled to Norway in 1930 to meet Grieg. It has been noted that there are textual similarities between The Ship Sails On, which Lowry had discovered at the age of nineteen, and Lowry's debut novel Ultramarine from 1933 (Hallvard Dahlie, in 'Lowry's Debt to Nordahl Grieg,' Canadian Literature 64, Spring 1975, pp. 41-51). Moreover, Lowry may have given some of Grieg's personal traits to Hugh Firmin in the novel Under the Volcano.
A Young Man's Love (1927), a melodrama that premiered in Bergen, was still conventional, but in the following plays, Grieg began the modernization of Norwegian drama. In 1927, Grieg traveled in China as a newspaper correspondent to report about the civil war between the Kuomingtang and the Communists. "China has been violated, China continues to be abused, China has been right all along," he stated in Kinesiske dage (1927, Chinese Days). Grieg's second play, Barabbas (1927), an expressionistic avant-garde piece, reflected his experiences in the Orient. Grieg compared the pacifism of Jesus with the violence of the rebellious reprobate. In the battle between passive resistance and revolution, a young man is overpowered by the attraction of brutality.
Grieg became a kind of myth in England. Graham Greene compared in his memoir, Ways of Escape (1980), the author's arrival in 1931 down a muddy Gloucestershire lane to the appearance of three crowns on a gate. Greene had rented a cottage with his wife Vivien and Grieg came "to look him up," as he told. "The dreamlike atmosphere of his friendship remained: it was a matter of messages, warm and friendly and encouraging and critical, mostly in other people's letters. The only time I visited Norway he was away living in Leningrad, but the messages were there awaiting me. Nordahl Grieg, like a monarch, never lacked messengers." While staying in Oxford, he completed De unge döde (1932, The Young Dead), which portrayed six English poets, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley, and Wilfred Owen.
After spending two years (1933-35) in the Soviet Union - his address was one time Room 313 in the Hotel Novo Moscowskaja - Grieg wrote three plays which showed his adoption of techniques learned from the Russian stage, especially from Vsevolod Meyerhold, and the films of Eisenstein. The title of Vår ære og vår mark (Our Power and Our Glory) came from a poem of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and referred ironically to the Norwegian shipping industry, which sent the sailors to their death in World War I. Before the Bergen première, the Theater board of directors declared the production as "the prototype of Russian propaganda theater." Grieg searched for his material from old newspapers and used real-life characters. Curiously, he confessed to the actress Gerd Egede Nissen that he could not have written the work without having first watched the Oscar-winning film Cavalcade (1933), a stylish screen version of Noël Coward's play.
Nederlaget (1937, The Defeat) had as its background the bloody events of the Franco-German war and the crushing of the Paris Commune of 1871. It was Grieg's most successful play and prompted Bertolt Brecht to write Die Tage der Commune (The Days of the Commune), performed in 1956. Grieg drew from observations and experiences as a war correspondent in Spain, where he witnessed the Civil War and the collapse of the Republican government. The revolutionaries lose because they are not brutal enough. Again Grieg uses two opposite personalities to illustrate conflicting ideologies. Varlin is an idealistic humanist, who wants to achieve victory "not through killing or dying, but through the creation of justice." Rigault believes in the necessity of terror. In his character, Grieg bowed to the Stalinist policies and system of state terrorism, but his theme was that love and justice shall triumph. An excerpt from Grieg's poem 'To Youth' is in a plaque on the island of Utøya in honor of party members who were killed in fighting against Franco's totalitarian ideology: "War is contempt for life; peace nurtures it. Use all your might; death will lose."
The monthly journal Veien frem (The Road Ahead), which Grieg established in 1936, provided an important forum for antifascist debate, but it ceased publication after only two years. The journal contained contributions from such famous writers as Maxim Gorky, Aldous Huxley, André Malraux, Thomas Mann, and others.
Like a number of other writers, Grieg did not raise his voice against the crimes of the Soviet state. Because of ideological reasons, Grieg accepted the Moscow trials and defended them especially in his Stalinist novel May the World Stay Young (1938). In the story Ashley, an English philologist working in the Soviet Union, comes under the influence of Kira, a Communist girl, who firmly believes in party discipline. However, the Moscow trial reveal Ashley as a typical western European humanist, who is not able to act. Grieg himself confessed in a letter to Graham Greene that he was working in the strange bourgeois atmosphere of Moscow summer. "I am sure you will like to live in Moscow, there is such an enormous mass of people - a vast multitude of races, hopes and disappointments. And your hatred to nature can easily be satisfied here, here is no nature for many hundred miles, only something flat and stupid under an idiotical sky."
Following the German invasion of Norway, Grieg volunteered for active duty in 1940 - his subsequent adventures could have been invented by P.G. Wodehouse. Grieg was recruited in the army without uniform or weapon as a private soldier, but he managed to obtain a Krag rifle and some remnants of a uniform. By chance, he became a member of Fredrik Haslund's team, helping him to transport the nation's wealth from the Bank of Norway into the port city of Tromsø, the government's last stand on the national soil. Eventually the cargo, eighteen tons of gold, was loaded into the English cruiser Enterprise and Grieg accompanied the gold to London. Because the clerk from the Bank of England did not show up at the station, the bored Grieg left a plainclothes detective with the 547 cases on the platform, and took a taxi to the Charing Cross Hotel.
Upon landing in England, Grieg served there Norway's government-in-exile and read his poems for the BBC/Norway Broadcasts. In 1940 he married Gerd Egede Nissen (1985-1988), an Ibsen actress. While staying in the United States he visited his friend, Professor Sverre Petterssen, in Boston. During this period he worked on a film script about Edvard Grieg.
Grieg was killed in Germany on December 2, 1943. He had joined in the capacity of an observer an Allied bombing mission and did not return from an attack on Berlin. His friend Sverre Petterssen had prepared the weather forecast involved in that mission. Grieg's body was buried by members of the Red Cross, but new bombing raids destroyed his grave. Greater Wars, a film script written in London in 1940-41, was found in 1989 and translated from English by Brikt Jensen. The story told of a meteorologist who worked in the northern outreaches of Norway. Grieg's poems written between 1940-43 were published by Helgafell in Iceland in a volume entitled Friheten (1943). Forbidden in Norway, the book was smuggled in the country in thousands of copies. Its most famous pieces include '17. Mai 1940:' "We fight for the right of breathing / Now, but a day shall be / When Norsemen shall breathe together, / The air of a land set free."
Compassion for the poor and exploited led Grieg to join the Norwegian Communist Party. From 1933 to 1935, he lived in the Soviet Union, where he was officially invited to study the techniques of the Soviet stage and film. On returning to Norway, he became an ardent supporter of Joseph Stalin's policies and became the chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union (1935-1940). In 1937, he famously wrote a defence of the Moscow Trials, attacking Norwegian authors who had criticized them. His novel Ung må verden ennu være was also a defence of Stalin and the Moscow Trials. In many articles, he criticized the supporters of Leon Trotsky, who lived in Norway from 1937-39.
However, the outbreak of World War II , and especially the German invasion and occupation of Norway, brought Grieg into great variance with Stalin's policies. The Soviet Union signed in 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany and until being itself invaded in 1941 instructed Communists worldwide to regard the ongoing war as "an Imperialist War" in which they should not take part. Conversely Grieg, as a staunch anti-Nazi and a Norwegian patriot, committed himself from 1940 onwards to the struggle against the occupation following the German invasion of Norway. In the winter of 1939-40, Grieg served in the Norwegian Army in Finnmark on neutrality guard during the Russo-Finnish Winter War. In 1940, having served during the Norwegian Campaign against the Germans, he escaped to the United Kingdom in the same vessel carrying the Norwegian Royal family and the National Gold reserves.
Interests
Politicians
Joseph Stalin
Connections
In 1940, Grieg married actress Gerd Egede-Nissen (1895–1988).