Norway would not be the same without Morgenbladet
BOOK: From radical social builder via reactionary bastion to academic reserve. Morgenbladet’s history is an important piece of Norwegian history.
Erik Rudeng: Morgenbladet. A story in itself. 836 pages. Pax
Arthur Miller once said that a good newspaper is a nation that speaks for itself. This was also the case with Morgenbladet for the first hundred years it existed, the nation would not be the same without this newspaper. But already around the First World War, decay set in. Since then, Morgenbladet has experienced a hundred years of increasing loneliness.
All this is brilliantly described by Erik Rudeng, in a work that is truly worthy of a great newspaper. The morning paper was great. It was powerful, innovative and just what the young nation needed. Morgenbladet was the young Norwegian nation that spoke to itself. Since then, for long periods it has only been a newspaper that speaks to itself, which is certainly not the same thing.
Morgenbladet was the first Norwegian daily newspaper, it was the first to introduce the editorial as the great editorial Vi, and it was an important part of a nascent Norwegian public after 1814. Together with other young institutions such as the Storting, the university and the theater, the newspaper was a necessary prerequisite . for the national breakthrough of the Union era.
With a sometimes almost overwhelming wealth of detail, Rudeng adds Norwegian political history, cultural history and press history together into an impressive work, especially about the first 150 years. As usual in historical works that go all the way to the author’s own time, he also struggles to see the larger lines the closer to the events he has been. But the first 600 (!) Pages are a reading party for those interested in history.
The rest of the country invisible
When Rudeng sees the emergence of the new Norway through the prism that Morgenbladet is, there is naturally some distortion, not least that the country outside Christiania / Kristiania / Oslo and partly Bergen, becomes more or less invisible. Because Morgenbladet overlooked the importance of counterculture, with the exception of the language issue, the rest of the country becomes virtually invisible. In the language dispute, Morgenbladet played a significant role. And of course the newspaper was an important factor in the increasing centralization of the country, in that it was so clearly a voice first and foremost for the capital’s official status and trade patricianism. But revival movements and abstinence were never Morgenbladet’s cup of tea.
Today, the newspaper lives in a self-inflicted inner exile as a kind of corporate body for the capital’s academic institutions. It is a kind of life after death, but not one that has a profound effect on the general public.
That was not the case from the start. The newspaper promoted other measures, such as health insurance funds and savings banks. With the newspaper on his side, Hartvig Nissen revolutionized the Norwegian school. Its editors – not least Adolf Bredo Stabell – were significant national strategists, often with a radical program. But the glide to the right began early. From fighting for popular sovereignty, Morgenbladet became the most important body in the fight against parliamentarism. Erik Rudeng describes well how the newspaper digs into reactionary defensive positions in the area by area, until in a period after World War II it ended up among apartheid supporters, empire defenders and warlords on the far right wing, and became irrelevant also for the Conservatives, to former editor Carl Joachim Hambro’s great frustration.
Bluff of genius
Morgenbladet’s story is the story of a newspaper that gradually managed to marginalize itself by taking on partly extreme minority positions. Major journalistic and literary personalities visited the editorial office for a while, but soon found better pastures. Fortunately, they left behind colorful anecdotes, which Rudeng spices up the presentation with.
Although the newspaper began to write itself off from its readers early on, it has had many bluffs of genius and relevance since, for example when it was the first to break out of the inhibiting coexistence between party and press, in opposition to the Nazi regime among others. . world war and as a front organ in the fierce cultural wars in both the thirties and fifties. During the Cold War, the newspaper ended up in the care of Libertas, who was about to embrace it to the dead.
One of those who helped save Morgenbladet from death in absolute irrelevance was Erik Rudeng, who can also create the establishment of Fritt Ord and the House of Literature in Oslo for his CV. He concludes the detailed account before he himself got into it, but for everything that happened before that time, the newspaper could hardly have gotten any better communicator.