Word: nansen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Jepsen receives orders from Berlin to stop Max Ludwig Nansen from painting, he feels rather awkward. Nansen is not only a world famous artist, he is also Jepsen's lifelong friend. But the policemen never wavers. Echoing the party line, he informs an incredulous neighbor that their friend Nansen is "a danger to the State and undesirable, simply degenerate, if you see what I mean." Jepsen hesitates in the performance of duty when he finds the wounded body of his traitor son. But the hesitation is momentary. "What has to be done is going to be done," he reassures...
Jepsen is not out to save his neck. He is a good citizen who enjoys his work. The artist Nansen calls him "a man who only wants to do his duty and makes no other demands on himself." His self-image is a stereotype: he is, as Siggi realizes, the embodiment of "the joys of duty...
Jepsen cannot be sure what "they" expect from him, either. He is guided by his sense of what a loyal policeman should do and think. When the ugliness of events looms before him, he shuts his eyes and keeps on working. He lacks the humanity of Nansen, who agrees to hide the deserter Klaas from the Gestapo. The painter quickly abandons generalities when he is confronted by a contradictory reality. Although Nansen joined the Nazis when the Party was still a small band of loudmouthed chauvinists, he rejects the National Socialist State just as everybody begins to cheer it, because...
WHEN JEPSEN calls his old friend Nansen a "degenerate," he is taking the word of the loudspeaker over the experience of his daily life. This victory of the pseudo-idea is the triumph of Nazism. The exceptional man, the artist of whatever profession who can see through the lies, resists. The rest follow. And even Nansen turns his eyes from the central horror. When the breeze wafts the black smoke of the death camp ovens towards the small town where the painter and the policeman live, the two men have lies to blow the smoke away: "the Dutch are burning...