From another reality

how do we write about now. and the past. how do we witness and what do we do in real time?

Memory seems personal, but it accumulates collectively, through centuries. —Gillian Osborne¹

I lived in Norway for two years in the late 1990s, in a house that was built around the turn of the twentieth century—perhaps a little bit earlier. A large, three-story house with several outbuildings situated alongside the road that parallels the coastline of the Trondheim fjord. 

We rented the upper half of the second floor, becoming the first people to live in the house for some years. My husband’s graduate advisor had taken a job in Norway and bought the place—a place that we were told by many in town that only Americans would want to buy. The house had stood vacant for a few years, but had housed refugees from Bosnia before us, who were fleeing to Norway seeking assylum.

The house had a lovely view, with large windows on two sides overlooking the garden and the water. Through open windows, you could hear the sound of the water at high tide breaking on the rip rap of the road shoulder, lapping gently with the rock of shallow waves. Oystercatchers were often heard whistling through their bright orange bills. 

The property around the house was large to support its original use: as an orphanage for children who were casualties of widespread tuberculosis that was moving through the country in the early 1900s. Its sister house up the road was built as a small hospital, to house those children who did fall ill. There was a large garden, a barn, a stabbur—a smaller outbuilding raised on stacked drystone rocks to store food through the winter. Apple trees with abundant fruit in the summer. There were artifacts from the house’s different iterations—child-sized chairs and desks, rows of hooks for coats in the basement; railings worn smooth with use along the stairway.

But the most striking reminders were the objects dating from later in the century. We had been told that the house had housed German—Nazi—soldiers during the occupation of Norway in WWII. And later we discovered alongside the hill behind the house were strings of barbwire dating from that time. One afternoon, gardening, we found an iron cross buried in the dirt.

I had never lived somewhere where the ruins of that time were still visible in the landscape, in a town still shaped by those events. I later researched more about the occupation and read of the women who were condemned and ostracized by communities for marrying German soldiers, of the many men and women who became resistance fighters, creating underground networks. Of a woman resistance fighter who studied bumblebees and became the head of the Entomology society later in life. Of the cruelty of a young Norwegian man from the same area who turned Gestapo leader and exacted torture, death, and cruelty on those same resistance fighters before being apprehended after the war and executed. It all became so haunting—to imagine how close the experiences of so many were touched by what happened in those years. To live in a house that had stood through that kind of history, those kinds of events. How the landscape still holds scars from those years.

I stayed in that house by myself most days. And it was in that house that I first had the time and space to write poetry in earnest. I had written before, on my own in certain moments of feeling, but then went to graduate school in archaeology, and writing felt like a distraction from focusing on what I thought was the career I wanted. But the poetry just kind of arrived, unbidden. Hooded crows came to the windows to tap their beaks as I’d write, or knock on the front door kick plate. Ghosts flitted in and out of memory, but I didn’t know their names, only the imagined sense of other people who lived in the same walls under such compromised circumstances.

When I left that place, I left a pile of poems in a cavity in the wall—an offering to the layers of memories housed by those same walls. 

It wasn’t until years after leaving Norway that I learned of Gunvor Hofmo (1921–1995), one of Norway’s most well-known poets of the modern era. As I translated her poetry and read about her life, I found memories of my own time in Norway mingling with those of her own story—and that of her lover’s, Ruth Maier (1920-1942). Experiences of place shared across a more collective memory.

Hofmo was a young writer in Oslo as the war began, trying to make sense of the world that was handed to her. Ruth was a young Jewish-Austrian woman who fled to Norway in 1939, to stay with distantly connected friends of friends—her younger sister and mother were able to flee to England, but Ruth could not join them under the Kindertransport, as she was 18 and considered a legal adult.

Hofmo met Maier met through volunteer work and grew close, finding commonality in their artistic interests and mental struggles to navigate life in a Norway that was growing closer to occupation. They traveled the country together with other friends, artists, and volunteers, and even traveled up to Trondheim, where I had lived. Ruth painted a picture of a picturesque red-framed bridge that my husband also had painted long ago. Memories intermingling, like a transparency laid over a base map. 

One of Hofmo’s first published poems was written for Ruth:

The words, shiningly silent
I shall find
give them to you, hammer some moments together
under the frame of eternity
so you will never forget me

Hofmo and Maier, ca. 1940

We know much more about Maier now because she left a diary. It was in Hofmo’s possession for years—she tried to get her friend’s words and legacy published in 1953, but never succeeded—told by the largest Norwegian publishing house that Maier’s memories are “too private”. The refusal to publish Maier’s writing may have led to Hofmo’s later mental break in 1953. It was only after Hofmo’s death in 1995, that the poet Jan Erik Vold found it among her papers, and was able to finally have it published in 2007. It was translated into English in 2009. 

The diary’s accounts shook Norway’s cultural memory. Because it outlined a young Jewish refugee’s life of fear and anxiety as Norway became occupied by the Germans—and it marked one of the darkest days to visit Norway, when over 500 Jews were arrested and deported, including Maier, to Auschwitz in 1942. It is believed that Maier and many others were murdered within days of their arrival.

In 2012, the government of Norway issued a formal apology for the events of that November night. Many felt this was far too late. Many Norwegians never knew or recognized how many Jews were arrested and taken out of the country that night, of how much horror was unleashed in the complicity of the Norwegian police. The Prime Minister, speaking on Holocaust Memorial Day on the anniversary of that dark night, said: 

The Holocaust came to Norway on Thursday 26 November 1942. Ruth Maier was one of the many who were arrested that day. On 26 November, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the sound of heavy boots could be heard on the stairs of the boarding house "Englehjemmet" in Oslo. A few minutes later, the slight Jewish girl was seen by her friends being led out the door of Dalsbergstien 3. Ruth Maier was last seen being forced into a black truck by two big Norwegian policemen. Five days later the 22-year-old was dead. Murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Fortunately it is part of being human that we learn from our mistakes. And it is never too late. More than 50 years after the war ended, the Storting [Norwegian Parliament] decided to make a settlement, collectively and individually, for the economic liquidation of Jewish assets. By so doing the state accepted moral responsibility for the crimes committed against Norwegian Jews during the Second World War. What about the crimes against Ruth Maier and the other Jews? The murders were unquestionably carried out by the Nazis. But it was Norwegians who carried out the arrests. It was Norwegians who drove the trucks. And it happened in Norway. — Jens Stoltenberg, prime minister, 27 January 2012

Recent artists have written drama and produced a short film about Hofmo and Maier’s work and experiences, and the meaning their story holds for the experience of the country as a whole—a personal story offering entry into what was more universal than anyone realized. That while there was resistance, there was also occupation—and complicity.

Ruth was an aspiring artist, and the sculptor Gustav Vigeland had met Ruth through artist friends. He asked her to model for him, and his sculpture of her, titled “Surprised,” is permanently displayed in Frogner Park in central Oslo. It’s only by the slight chances of relationships that these memories of her remain in the country—a young woman who wanted to be an artist, who painted and wrote, who met and fell into a deep relationship with a woman who would later become a well-known Norwegian poet. 

Images of Ruth Maier's paintings, from the collection Jeg Glemmer Ingen (I forget nothing)

The haunting I felt at the house in Norway from time to time, when I’d walk up the hill and be reminded by the barbed wire, or other signs of occupation that remain—the airport dating to the occupation, a sunken boat left submerged in a fjord up north—now has these added layers of Gunvor Hofmo and Ruth Maier for me. I wonder where they were when they visited the same lands I was living in decades later, if the bridge Ruth painted has a memory of her. Lingering memories of place that can’t be seen, but somehow are still felt, still present.

Hofmo followed Maier to the dock the night when she was deported. She was there to watch the ship leave in the night, as the last photo from the city’s edge on the bay still outlines in a nightmarish fog of black and white. Approximately 772 Jews were deported from Norway during World War II; only 34 of those deported survived until the end of the war.

When Hofmo learned of Ruth’s death, she fell into a deep depression and was hospitalized. She clung to denial for a time, believing she once saw Ruth alive when she was traveling in France after the war had ended. She continued to write essays on socialist issues, poetry, and philosophy and published five collections of poetry by 1955. However, her mental health plummeted and she stopped writing for over sixteen years while living in a psychiatric hospital. It was when she emerged from those years that she began to write again, publishing 15 poetry collections between 1971 to 1994.

Hofmo became a prolific writer. She did find love again in 1947, living with another Norwegian poet, Astrid Tollefsen—some accounts say they were the first queer women to live openly together in Norway, a far more conservative place than its reputation would belie—homosexuality was illegal and punishable until 1972. But their relationship suffered with Hofmo’s increasingly fragile mental health, leading to her institutionalization in 1955. Hofmo was quiet and shunned publicity—she rarely left her house after 1977. One of her last works to be published was a collection of poetry paired with a selection of Ruth’s paintings. She later would say that Ruth’s life and death became the defining moment of her life.

Hofmo’s poems hit with such quiet strength, with starlight and longing—words of a writer who has known deep sorrow and still decided, after a long struggle, to continue writing:

Four poems
1.
Raw breath of snow
under gulls that
cleave the dusk
like thoughts against
night’s arrival

when doves stir
and doors sling open
to sorrow’s cellars
under the cathedrals 
of night.

2.
The lights of night
are the torched processions
for God

The damned 
souls that
catch fire to 
their longing
high above rising 
sorrow.

3.
The day sinks
born in the arms 
of night’s midwife.

4. 
Night it is, night:
a whale with
mouth open
to hunt our souls’
mackrel hours.

July night
The bitter smell
of damp summer grass
draws the expanse together

It is like the
trees and stones
forest and peaks
have hinged 
together in a fragrant
center.

It is a night
of dark spells
that break
on the invisible
on the night’s thoughts

in the waters
where all is born
renewed and renewed

And your soul, in
the shadow of your
sorrow's steps,
lives on like
a thawing anemone.

We went back to Norway with our son several years ago, and we returned to the house on the sea, the bridge where both Ruth Maier and my own partner painted its bright red frame in the snow.

I was unprepared for how emotional it was to return, to have so many accumulated memories over the years since living there—my own, those of others who lived there before, of those I’ve since acquired in writing and reading poetry, of knowing more of Hofmo and Maier’s story. Of becoming a mother and returning to a place where I first became a wife, joining my partner while he studied in Norway.

I learned of Maier’s diary soon after I had begun to translate some of Hofmo’s work. I had it sitting on my shelf for some time waiting, unsure if I wanted to face the pain of her bright life in those pages. But then I found it again during the first months of the pandemic and finished it in one day, marveling at the depth of feeling and insight she wrote at such a young age. Her daring and insouciance, held alongside passion and love. Her desire to create. Reader, I sobbed—late into the night.

Some of her quotes hit like a hammer—so clear-sighted that they demand to be held, and I wrote them down in my commonplace book:

In the past people used to believe in evil spirits, in masters. Now they believe in race.

And this:

…history, this pretentious name that people are wont to call the outrages being perpetrated right now. When Hitler marches into Prague they call it history; even when a Jew is beaten up its history. John’s been killed, Hildegard, Ehrlich drowned on the Athenia. History! History!

One of Hofmo’s most famous poems, written in her second book Fra en annen virkelighet (From Another Reality), was also one of which she was most proud. It speaks to the splitting that happens when life has to change with such loss:

From Another Reality

The search for reality ends in sickness.
I was much too close to things,
so I burned through them
and stand on the other side
where light is not divided from darkness
where there are no boundaries—
only a silence that casts me into the universe of loneliness,
of incurable loneliness.
See, I cool my hand in chilly grass:
that’s surely reality,
that’s surely reality enough for your eyes,
but I’m on the other side
where blades of grass are chiming bells of sorrow and bitter expectation.
I hold someone’s hand,
look into someone’s eyes,
but I’m on the other side
where the person is a fog of loneliness and fear.
Of, if I were a stone
that could hold the weight of this emptiness,
if I were a star
that could drink the pain of this emptiness,
but I’m a person cast out in the borderland,
and I hear the silence roar,
I hear the silence call
from deeper worlds than this.
                                  --(translation by Sissel Furuseth)

Reading Hofmo² and Maier, I’m reminded of how many unresolved memories of lives and places call to us beyond the borderlands of another reality—to listen.

1. Osborne, Gillian. 2021. Green Green Green. Nightboat Books. p. 22

2. Sadly, there are very few poems by Hofmo translated into English. I’ve been trying to contact publishers and executors of Hofmo’s estate for permissions to publish them, but it has been slow going, so if anyone has insights into translation work and publishing, would love to hear your experience and/or any insights you might have. I would love for her work—and her story—to be more visible to English-speaking audiences…