Beautiful Objects of Resistance
by Ellef Prestsæter
From time to time I have been invited by institutions – mostly American – to speak about aesthetics. On one occasion I considered accepting and I thought of taking with me a bird made of white wood. But I didn’t go. The problem is that you can’t talk about aesthetics without talking about the principle of hope and the existence of evil.[1]
These words belong to the English writer John Berger (1926–2017) and introduce his essay `The White Bird` (1985). Let me state, at the outset, that I don’t fully understand the reasoning behind Berger’s reluctance to talk about aesthetics, and that I find his formulations somewhat overblown. I mean, what exactly does a `bird made of white wood` have to do with the existence of evil? I will try to return to this question later on. For now, though, I simply want to point out that, at the moment of writing this, forty years after Berger published his essay, a number of wooden birds similar to his `white bird` have landed, temporarily, on a black table in the Guttormsgaard Archive, accompanied by dozens of toys and figures made from the same material. Amongst them are more birds (of different species), a broken crocodile, a seated couple, a sewing machine, and a squirrel.[2] They were left like this following a visit from the curators Yaniya Mikhalina and Marianne Zamecznik, some months ago, as preparation for the loan of a selection of these wooden objects for the exhibition, Passing Motherhood, at Trondheim Art Museum. A couple of days later, a public event was held in the Guttormsgaard Archive. Among the visitors that day was Wenkai Xu, a Chinese architect based in Oslo. She was thrilled to discover and recognize, among the figures scattered on the table, the kind of bird she had previously encountered in Berger’s short essay, with fan-shaped wings and a tail protruding from two pieces of wood joined together crosswise. Shortly after this serendipitous incident, she forwarded Berger’s text to me and she even made her first (and very beautiful) ‘white bird’, based on his meticulous instructions.
The objects laid out on the table in the archive were made under very different circumstances by Soviet prisoners of war in Norway during World War II. Around 100,000 Soviet POWs were brought by the German occupiers to Norway during the years 1941–45.[3] They were forced to work building infrastructure – roads, railways, airports and fortifications. There were camps all over Norway, around 500 in total, but two-thirds of the prisoners were taken to northern Norway. In accordance with the racist ideology of the Nazi regime, they were seen as Untermenschen (subhuman) as Russische Schwein (Russian pigs),[4] and they were subject to extreme degradation and violence. Many starved to death or were killed. It is estimated that more than 13,000 of the Soviet prisoners of war died in Norway. This death toll exceeds the total number of Norwegian war casualties.[5]
I first learned about the prisoner of war works in the winter of 2012 when Guttorm Guttormsgaard (1938–2019) organized an exhibition of such objects in the archive.[6] The exhibition included a handwritten text in which Gunvor Gjessing (1932–2019) passed on her memories about growing up close to a camp in Saltdal in the county of Nordland:
At school we spent many of our breaks walking or ball-playing along the highway, even in the days of the prison camp. On a strip of land nearby we could see Russian prisoners being forced to dig graves for fellow prisoners who had died. By a barrack there once lay a corpse in a paper bag, with its bare feet sticking out. […] The prisoners were starving. Occasionally we managed to give them food. The guards threatened with a gun. One day a prisoner was lying shot by the road where we were walking. But it also happened that the German camp commandant was liberal and allowed Norwegian Russian barter, mediated by our schoolteacher Ragnvald Mo. Norwegian food, bread for instance, was exchanged for works made by Russian prisoners, perhaps a carved walking stick or a handmade wooden box decorated with a pattern of tiny, coloured straw pieces, almost like intarsia. Even under such harsh conditions as these, the sense of beauty could survive, and perhaps even aid survival.[7]
The title of the exhibition was Om verdighet: Russiske fangearbeider (On dignity: Russian prisoner works). It has been customary in Norway to refer to the prisoners of war as Russians and to their works as russerarbeider (works by Russians). It is, however, important to insist on their complicated, multiethnic pedigree. In addition to Russians, the prisoners that were repatriated to the Soviet Union from Norway after the war included people of more than 45 different nationalities: Armenians, Azerbaijani, Avars, Bashqorts, Bulgarians, Buryats, Cossacks, Daghestanis, Darghins, Estonians, Georgians etc. There were Jews among them, and according to the database of the National Archives of Norway, at least one Sami.[8]
In `The White Bird,` Berger analyses the wooden bird’s representational, symbolic, material and formal properties, taking special note of how `this man-made object provokes a kind of astonishment.` This feeling is related to the question of how the bird was made: `anyone unfamiliar with the technique wants to take the dove in his hands and examine it closely to discover the secret which lies behind its making.` The bird represents a mystery of sorts:
One is looking at a piece of wood that has become a bird. One is looking at a bird that is somehow more than a bird. One is looking at something that has been worked with a mysterious skill and a kind of love.[9]
Somehow more than a bird. Preparing the birds on the table for their northbound journey I am struck by a similar sense of wonder. Wenkai and Berger help me understand something of that feeling, bracketing, for a moment, my knowledge of the conditions under which the objects were made.
At the same time, I wonder what Berger’s account of how aesthetics relates to `the principle of hope and the existence of evil` would have looked like had he known that such birds were also made in the prisoner of war camps. In this context, far removed from the American institutions that had invited him to lecture on aesthetics, the formulations I initially found overblown suddenly appear in a different light, resonating with the wooden objects on the table in the archive in an almost uncanny way.
It seems likely that Berger’s ambivalence towards lecturing on aesthetics in part had to do with how it relates to suffering, to ethics and to politics. Shouldn’t we avoid `aestheticizing` such things? Perhaps, but, when it comes to the objects made by the prisoners of war, it also bears remembering that the prisoners themselves had already aestheticized life in the camps by crafting such objects. Recall the words of Gjessing: `Even under such harsh conditions as these, the sense of beauty could survive, and perhaps even aid survival.` In our encounter with these objects it seems urgent to look for ways of affirming this impulse.
I have never written about these objects made by Soviet prisoners of war before, but I have often shown them to visitors in the archive. I pass the objects around and encourage people to touch them. Using a relatively established term within museum practice, I have come to refer to such encounters between people and things as `handling sessions`. They may come about spontaneously during a visit to the archive or take the form of planned events. For instance, in the fall of 2021, in Barentsburg (a Russian settlement on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway), I organized a handling session with a selection of the Soviet prisoner of war objects for the (predominantly Russian and Ukrainian) schoolchildren there. For me, the goal of such sessions is to engage with the objects collectively and in an open-ended way, without assuming that we already know their meaning. What comes out of such encounters is, in principle, unpredictable. In 2021, handling the POW works in Barentsburg enabled us to talk about the history shared between Norwegians and citizens of the Soviet Union. A few months later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine created a situation in which Norwegian interaction with the inhabitants of Barentsburg became almost impossible, and I have no way of telling what, if anything, the memories from our handling session might mean today to those who took part. For me, the experience remains a source of ongoing reflection on the power of objects to engage people under different, and often changing, historical circumstances. Sometimes I bring this story to the table of new handling sessions.
Drawing on my experience of handling the prisoner of war objects together with others, I want to end by proposing some points for consideration with respect to how and why these objects continue to move us:
1) First of all, they were made. We can imagine that making such objects was a way of carving out some kind of virtual outside to life in the camps, a temporary release from degrading circumstances. To make toys and objects of beauty in your `free time` in a forced labour camp was a work of resistance and, as Gjessing suggests, a means of survival.
2) Unlike most of their makers, the birds often managed to flee, seeking refuge in the care of people on the outside. Their literal escape from the camps magnifies the birds’ symbolic power.
3) These were gifts, tokens of gratitude given in response to the provision of food and other necessities by locals on the outside. People from whom everything had been taken were still able to give.
4) The objects were conduits. They testify to an encounter, and a mutual recognition, that transgressed and resisted the often brutally applied law prohibiting Norwegians and prisoners of war from having any contact whatsoever.[10]
5) As material traces of this recognition, the objects helped keep alive war memories among the Norwegian population at a time when the Cold War tended to suppress every sign of positive interaction between people from the Communist East and the Capitalist West.
During the Cold War, the politics of memory of the Norwegian state was shaped by national security issues. In 1951 the government decided to move the graves of the dead POWs to a central war cemetery in order to control the movement of Soviet citizens around Norway. It was feared that travel around the many graves and memorials in the country would provide Soviet spies with an opportunity to carry out intelligence work.[11] Today, Soviet or Russian war memorials in Norway have again become an urgent and hotly debated security issue. Beyond state politics of memory, however, many of these works made by Soviet prisoners of war in Norway during WWII persist. They form a vernacular, collective, and dispersed monument that embodies a principle of hope in the face of evil. They speak of care and mutual recognition across cultural and geo-political barriers. They have been – and may under new circumstances continue to be – beautiful objects of resistance.
[1] John Berger, `The White Bird`, Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 54–60. The essay first appeared in his 1985 book The White Bird.
[2] The Guttormsgaard Archive is an independent art institution built around the collection of artist Guttorm Guttormsgaard. It is located in a former dairy in Blaker in the municipality of Lillestrøm. For more details, see https://www.guttormsgaardsarkiv.no
[3] My account in this paragraph is based on historian Marianne Neerland Soleim’s magisterial Sovjetiske krigsfanger i Norge 1941–1945: Antall, organisering og repatriering (Oslo: Spartacus, 2018).
[4] Soleim, Sovjetiske krigsfanger i Norge, pp. 21–5.
[5] Ibid., pp. 10, 95–8.
[6] The exhibition was based on objects from the Guttormsgaard Archive and loans from the collections of Karl-Leif Halvorsen and Kurt Johannesen.
[7] Gunvor Gjessing, `Med fangeleir ved skoleveien`, available at https://obs-osv.com/64.html
[8] Soleim, Sovjetiske krigsfanger i Norge, p. 287.
[9] Berger, `The White Bird`, pp. 55–6.
[10] Soleim, Sovjetiske krigsfanger i Norge, pp. 183–97.
[11] Ibid., pp. 364–85.