The writer Nordal Grieg (1902-1943) was born in Bergen and is honored with a statue at the theater as a resistance fighter. He was distantly related to the composer Edvard Grieg. He is standing with his arms akimbo and looking into the distance.The statue is made with bronze.
"Johan Nordahl Brun Grieg (1 November 1902 – 2 December 1943) was a Norwegian poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and political activist. He was a popular author and a controversial public figure. He served in World War II as a war correspondent and was killed while covering a bombing mission to Berlin.
Background
Nordahl Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of Peter Lexau Grieg (1864–1924) and Helga Vollan (1869–1946). He was the brother of Norwegian publisher Harald Grieg (1894–1972) and was distantly related to composer Edvard Grieg. In 1940, he married actress Gerd Egede-Nissen (1895–1988).
He studied at the Royal Frederick University (now the University of Oslo) and spent time travelling abroad, sometimes as a tourist and sometimes as a sailor. Receiving the 1924 Norway Scholarship, Grieg spent a year at Wadham College at Oxford, England, studying history and literature. At least one of Grieg's poems, "Kapellet i Wadham College" was inspired by his stay there, where he was a contemporary of Cecil Day-Lewis.
Career
Poet, playwright and journalist
Grieg debuted in 1922 with his first book of poetry Omkring Kap det gode Haab, based on his seagoing experiences – as was Skibet gaar videre (1924). The latter book aroused controversy for its exposure of sailors' harsh living and working conditions.
Grieg spent 1927 as a newspaper correspondent in China, where he witnessed firsthand the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists. The same year Grieg's plays En ung manns Kjaerlighet and Barabbas were produced. The latter was a modern revolutionary interpretation of New Testament character Barabbas. The 1929 poetry collection Norge i våre hjerter expressed deep love for his country and his people in their poverty and misery and attracted critical acclaim.
His 1935 play Vår ære og vår makt depicted the lives of Norwegian sailors during World War I in which Norway remained neutral and traded with both sides. The work was an attack on the shipping industry's exploitation of seafarers. From 1936 to 1937, Grieg published the magazine Veien Frem, which initially succeeded in attracting prominent writers, but as the magazine adopted an increasingly Stalinist position relating to the Moscow Trials, most of them severed ties with it and it ceased publication.
His 1937 dramatic play Nederlaget was about the Paris Commune. The Spanish Civil War was the subject of Spansk sommer (1937) and partly also of Ung må verden ennu være, whose plot shifts between Spain and the Soviet Union. The war also inspired the 1936 poem Til ungdommen, one of his most well-known works, which was set to music in 1952 by Danish composer Otto Mortensen and was performed on numerous occasions (see Til ungdommen).
Communism
Compassion for the poor and the exploited led Grieg to join the Norwegian Communist Party. From 1933 to 1935, he lived in the Soviet Union, where he was officially invited to study the techniques of Soviet stage and film.[5] On returning to Norway, he became an ardent supporter of Joseph Stalin's policies, and became the chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union (1935–1940). In 1937, he famously wrote a defence of the Moscow Trials, attacking Norwegian authors who had criticized them. His novel Ung må verden ennu være (English: The World Must Still Be Young) was also a defence of Stalin and the Moscow Trials. In many articles, he criticized the supporters of Leon Trotsky, who lived in Norway from 1937 to 1939"
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