Resistance, Transport, and Sculpture

Monday 17 september 2018
Oslo

This is about three not-very-related sites, all visited in one day. (Oslo is not huge, and public transportation is terrific.)

First, the Norwegian Resistance Museum, which describes and illustrates the Nazi occupation of 1940-45. After last year’s experience, seeing all the memorials in Berlin and the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, we were (unhappily) interested in the Norwegian experience. There was much more information about military activity than I cared about, because I like to know (unhappily) about the occupied people’s daily life and about underground resistance efforts. (Read the novel The Nightingale for a sobering view of the French occupation.)

This grim assembly sets the tone as you enter the museum: illustrating the ultimatum presented by the Nazis to the Norwegian king.

But here’s one of the many ways in which the resistance got messages out (e.g., notes about German troop concentrations, massing of ships, etc.) to aid the British:
A good use of cod roe, if you ask me.

Here’s just one more, because it was so unexpected. The photo is impaired by the glare, but it’s worth your time to read the description and then to zoom in on the ~device to see the detail:
Maybe dentures aren’t so bad.

Next stop: the Oslo Transport Museum. It’s much bigger than the Cable Car Museum, and although there’s nothing operational, you can walk through many of the collected vehicles: joining the little kids in hopping on and off. Here’s a beautiful pair of vehicles with someone you know:

and here’s one interior: Pretty nice.

Next stop: the Vigeland Sculpture Park. Gustav Vigeland was a troubled soul (according to our guidebook), but from 1921 to 1943 he worked in Oslo and created 600 works for the city, in return for studio space. All the figures are human, all nudes, of all ages, and to my eye, all very emotionally expressive. I didn’t photograph all 600. Here are a very few: