Preemptive Redemption?

Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei would seem a strange choice to introduce a coup - especially one that ushered the Nazis in. But that’s exactly what happened when Vidkun Quisling rushed to the NRK - the official Norwegian radio broadcasting network - to announce that during the turmoil following the German invasion of April 9, 1940 it was he who was in charge. What’s unclear is whether Quisling himself selected the introductory music or whether the station director did. Perhaps it was simply the next record on the phonograph. We may never know.

But a fiction writer can speculate. The Kol Nidrei opens services for the Day of Atonement and essentially allows the repudiation of oaths taken in the past year and into the coming year. Was Quisling - who was a Christian with a good understanding of the Judaism - presume to exempt himself from the oath to German power he would make momentarily? Was this the equivalent of going on the air with his fingers crossed behind his back?

On Epiphanies, Flannery and Redemption

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

The grandmother in Flannery’s classic short story has an epiphany as she faces the Misfit’s gun barrel - a moment of clarity about what it means to be part of the human family when she blurts out "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children !" before the bullet hits.

That has me wondering about a scene in my WWII novel in which, at the end of the occupation, Quisling faces the firing squad for his conviction as a traitor. Since the novel is omniscient, I theoretically can get inside his head and outside his head easily. The question, though, is whether facing those bullets meant a moment of clarity - an epiphany - or not. If it does then ultimately if one adheres to the Catholic and larger Christian point of view, then there is salvation. The temptation is to rob him of humanity and leave him defiant to the end. That might be consistent with what I know of his writings. Yet he professed a form (his own) of Christianity which presumably would include the notion of salvation.

I am torn between my own feelings of vengeance on behalf of family long dead and a personal belief in redemption. I’ll let it fester a bit longer.

What books to bring?

OK - it’s down to packing. Books mainly. Even after culling the shelves of paperbacks and duplicates, there are still (perhaps literally) tons of books to sift through. It’s obvious that quite a few books will end up in storage for a while. And it’s equally obvious that while I own a Kindle, I don’t much use it. Given a choice between hardback, paperback or pixels, I chose hardback every time.

Obvious choices - anything by and about Flannery O’Connor. Anything by or about other Southern writers. Conrad Aiken’s poetry and short stories. Carson McCullers. Truman Capote. Harper Lee. Tennessee Williams. Maybe even John Grisham.

Other obvious choices - anything and everything about World War II - restricted to the European theater to get the book count down. Especially important are several books inherited from my Great Uncle Kris, including a first hand account by a Norwegian death camp survivor written just a few years after the end of the occupation. And a fascinating little book by Quisling published during the occupation and which bears a dirty boot print on the title page. (To be clear - that one was not part of my family library - but discovered on Ebay a few years ago.)

Anything and everything on Edvard Munch, who died during the last year of occupation and who refused to cooperate with the occupiers but whose corpse was given a grand Nazi funeral procession.

Less obvious choices - a collection of Faberge books and guides - because there’s a Quisling connection. By some accounts, Quisling owned an egg, perhaps purchased during a famine relief trip to Russia in the years before the war. When his widow died in 1984, it was listed in the auction notes for her estate though I haven’t yet been able to track its travels since then.