"The national core narrative of heroes and villains from the Second World War has lost its shine."

That's what literature professor Unni Langås from the University of Agder (UiA) says.

She has recently released a new book about how war criminals are depicted in today's art and cultural expressions.

For 80 years the Norwegian story about the war has been quite unambiguous.

On one side stood the king, the resistance fighters and the good Norwegians. On the other side were Vidkun Quisling, the traitors and the evil Germans. This black-and-white portrayal is now being challenged.

"New stories keep bringing new interpretations of how we understand and remember the war. Some of them also attempt to change our view of the past in certain areas," says Langås.

Together with her colleague Henrik Torjusen she is the editor of the book Krigsforbrytere i dagens estetiske minnekultur.

The book contains 14 studies of recent stories where the collaborator, the traitor and other war criminals take centre stage. The stories are drawn from non-fiction, poetry and novels. But artworks, theatre performances and memorials are also considered as stories.

Memory studies are not historical studies of what actually happened, but rather investigations of how we create and maintain memories of the past.

"Memory studies are about how we experience and interpret what has happened and convey it in films, books and other forms of storytelling," says Langås.

Ever since 1945 and up until around 1990, the Norwegian story of war heroes and traitors was quite uniform. The story established itself as the national core narrative of the war years.

"The core narrative shows how the nation wants to understand itself, but it doesn't have much room for nuance. You're either among the good or the bad, among the heroes or the traitors," says Langås.

The core narrative was part of the curriculum at teacher training, primary and secondary schools until recently. Additionally, the story was often part of the National Day speeches around the country. In this way the memories of heroes and traitors were maintained.

But from around the 1990s, more and more children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have created stories about family members who weren't war heroes. This is an international trend that is also happening here in Norway.

"Recent stories about the war increasingly focus on those who ended up on the wrong side. Numerous portrayals of the war criminal have emerged in recent years," says Langås.

A theme that often appears in the new stories is a childhood filled with shame and silence. Descendants take a reckoning with a time and war that wasn't their own but has still affected them and their families for many years.

"It's both about the need to get to know your family – and the fear of recognising yourself in them. Many fear their own identity is shaped by the extremes of a father who tortured a victim or a great-grandfather who betrayed his country," says Langås.

Among her contributions is an analysis of authors Erlend Wichne, Wencke Mühleisen and Ida Jackson in the collection of articles.

"They tell, in a way, a double story. They speak of a Nazi past in close family and attempt to understand themselves and their own lives today from that perspective," she says.

That war criminals are now depicted as nuanced humans instead of monsters does not mean they are acquitted or portrayed as blameless.

"It simply means the image of unambiguous heroes and traitors becomes nuanced. To get close to the criminal makes the person more than just a criminal. He becomes a father, brother, family man," says Langås.

She reminds us that it's not new that our perception of the war is largely based on films and literature.

"The past is over, but memories are continuously retold in old and new ways. Today's stories are somewhat of a renegotiation of the core narrative about the correct perspective of the past," says Langås.

New books and films spark discussions about the core narrative and how we understand the war. This is how new thoughts and ideas about the past arise, explains the researcher.

"Remember, for example, that in the first decades following the war neither Jews nor women were part of the memories of the Norwegian war," says Langås.

She refers to the book about Herman Sachnowitz, Det angår også deg (It concerns you too) from 1976, as one of the first books about the war viewed from a Norwegian-Jewish perspective.

"Also, stories about women who had children with German soldiers have new interpretations. After the war, they were publicly shamed and called 'tyskertøs' [a derogatory term for women who had liaisons with German soldiers]. In recent stories, they are also seen as young women in love," she says.

For Langås, it's important to emphasise that these perspectives aren't about undermining the truth about the war, but about expanding our understanding.

"The national core narrative has had its golden age. Now authors, artists and others telling stories about the war want to show more sides of heroes and villains from the wartime days," says Langås.

The book Krigsforbrytere i dagens estetiske minnekultur (War criminals in today's aesthetic memory culture) is part of the research project 'Making Memories: Contemporary Aesthetic Articulations of Norway in the Second World War' (2022-2026), funded by the Research Council of Norway and the University of Agder.

Research within memory studies is interdisciplinary. The research group led by Unni Langås includes researchers from fields such as history, media studies, arts, theatre and literature.