Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Even the most sensational scandals do not last for ever, though. After remarkably few years Jonas Wergeland was no more than a distant legend associated with the best of television broadcasting, He had been reduced to a word, a concept. If his name did crop up it was not uncommonly in the form of a superlative: ‘Wergelandian’. His television series — and other programmes made by him — had, however, a life of their own. The repeats had been running for years. The videos of Thinking Big also sold steadily. The reaction — an almost religious collective response — to the first showing could obviously never be repeated, but for that very reason perhaps, the artistic merits of the programmes came more into their own. Despite the ephemeral, soon to be outdated nature of the medium, Jonas Wergeland’s television series was an indisputable masterpiece. I am not alone in thinking this. A well-known English television critic wrote in his column in The Sunday Times that these programmes possessed the same undeniable quality and brilliance as the paintings of Rembrandt or Matisse. Nonetheless, these works of art had taken on a life of their own, independent of Wergeland’s person. There was no longer any connection between the name and the face. He could wander, unremarked, around a small Norwegian town, even pass the time of day with people without anyone recognising the features which they had idolised ten years previously.

One evening he was standing outside the old Klingenberg family home, where Wittgenstein had stayed during his first winter in Skjolden, when an elderly man happened along. They got talking. After a while I heard the other man say: ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what do you do for a living?’

‘I’m …’ Wergeland began, then stopped, as if he were trying to say something for which there were no words. ‘I am a secretary.’

Which was true. He was now working as a secretary. And he was clearly proud of it.

On our third and final day in Skjolden harbour, he asked me if I would act as driver for him; he wanted to show me something. When we got to Luster he instructed me to turn down a narrow road immediately after Dale Church. We zigzagged up the steep hillside and eventually emerged on a plateau to be met by the unreal sight of a huge, white crescent-shaped building, four storeys tall. ‘Welcome to Hotel Norway,’ he said. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I learned later that the place was up for sale, and that a lot of interest was being shown by the travel industry.

This ghostly establishment was Harastølen, an old sanatorium from the turn of the century. The fresh air and the surrounding pine forests had made it a perfect spot for the treatment of tuberculosis; there were still some signs, like the low-ceilinged ‘cure porches’ set into the embankment skirting the front of the main building, suggestive of a world of deckchairs and blankets — like that described by Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain . Later on, the premises had been used as a hospital for long-stay psychiatric patients.

I don’t know whether anyone remembers now, it is already so long ago, but it was here in the early nineties that the Bosnian refugees whom the Red Cross succeeded in having released from Serbian concentration camps and who then came to Norway by way of Croatia were interned. There were around 340 of them all told, counting their families. Many of them were severely traumatised; they had been subjected to what psychiatrists term ‘catastrophic stress’, they had witnessed the most appalling violence — ethnic cleansing — and were in a very vulnerable condition, one which could easily escalate into acute crisis. The Norwegian authorities meant well, I’m sure — they called it a transit centre — but it does not take much imagination to see that it was not good for people suffering from this sort of syndrome to live in such isolation — halfway up a mountain, deep inside a Norwegian fjord — for over a year. Things became so bad that the inmates staged a hunger strike. But not until over half of the refugees had applied to return to Bosnia — they actually preferred that war-torn region to Harastølen — did the baffled Norwegian immigration authorities realise just how embarrassing the whole situation was. The refugees received a promise that they would be resettled in the surrounding community.

We stood with our backs to the old sanatorium, a brick colossus honeycombed with long corridors and little rooms. Most of the Bosnians had had to stay at Harastølen for a year and a half, some of them for almost two years. I shot a glance at Jonas Wergeland. I could see that he was moved. He knew what it was like to live in isolation, in degrading conditions. He had no trouble imagining how it would feel to have to live here for any length of time. The refugees’ Norwegian hosts did not, however, have the benefit of this experience or such insight. Here, in what had once been a treatment centre for TB sufferers and the insane, a desolate spot five hundred metres up a mountainside, these poor people had been stashed away, as if they were either dangerously infectious or crazy. As one of them so neatly put it: ‘I feel I have gone from one prison camp to another.’

We stood outside Harastølen, next to the remains of what had once been a cable railway, just the sort to run up to an ‘eagle’s nest’, and gazed across the fjord to the mountains on the other side. In the distance we could hear the sound of sheep bells, like the ones Norwegian supporters ring when cheering their skiers on to more gold-medal victories. Jonas was very quiet. Then, as I was making to leave he said: ‘Is it possible, do you think, to understand everything about Norway from such a marginal position as this, in the grounds of a disused asylum?’

And then he began to talk, to talk eagerly and at great length. It was years since I had heard him speak with such commitment. He spoke of how incredibly lucky he had been to grow up in an age marked by the greatest economic, social and cultural changes since the Stone Age. And in that era of unbelievable prosperity he had also had the good fortune to be living in the most privileged and sheltered corner of the globe. But that was also, he said, why he felt so ashamed.

Readers will, I hope, bear with me here, if I slip in a few thoughts on modern Norway plucked from that monologue, that confused blend of praise and blame, delivered by Jonas Wergeland at Harastølen, near Luster. Because, he said, standing here outside this old TB hospital, this erstwhile mental home and, briefly, refugee centre, he felt compelled to consider the growth of modern Norway. And the conclusion he had reached was that it had all happened too fast. That was why we had become so unsympathetic, so intolerant, so callous and forbidding, all affected by a collective, almost panic-stricken case of tunnel vision which permitted us to see only what we wanted to see and which, in our misguided struggle to safeguard what belonged to us, caused us to lose sight of the need for human solidarity and common decency. He simply could not get his head round the fact that little more than a century ago Norway had been a country so poor, so doomed to scrimp and save, that the few gas lamps in the streets of its towns were not lighted on moonlit nights. Would he ever be able to understand this nation which, in the regatta of history, started out hopelessly far behind at the beginning of the twentieth century as a rot-ridden longboat with moth-eaten sails, and rounded the millennium buoy, suddenly in the lead, as a luxury yacht in a class by itself, all gassed up and bristling with electronic equipment — all of this almost without having to lift a finger, and with no one knowing quite how it had happened. Anyone would think a good fairy had flown over us and with a wave of her wand transformed a draughty log cabin into a chalet-style villa with ten rooms and underfloor heating in the bathroom. What had happened to us? Or rather: was it any wonder we didn’t know how to deal with our wealth? ‘We’re like a nation of stunned lottery winners,’ Jonas Wergeland said. ‘When people get rich too quickly they almost always lose their perspective. In this case a whole society was hit.’