Ramatu Musa
Université de Lausanne
Coercion and complicity are among the two discursive themes that can be found in historic debates about the non-German women who associated with Nazi men during the Second World War. Norway was a fringe theatre of the Second World War; and the 1940-1945 Nazi occupation of the country is an under-researched topic in Anglophone scholarship. “Achtung, Gnädiges Fräulein” (hereby translated as “You Pay Attention, Gracious Young Lady”) is among the short stories presented in Torborg Nedreaas’ Bak skapet står øksen / Behind the Cabinet Stands the Axe (1945). This paper illuminates how “Achtung, Gnädiges Fräulein” functions as an artistic testimony in memory of the traumas which Norwegian female folk suffered during the Second World War. The stories in Nedreaas’ short story collection mirror the enigmatic nature of human behaviour during wartime oppression. They invoke revenge, complicity, acquiescence, betrayal, deception, desire, and caprice. “Achtung, Gnädiges Fräulein” is a sympathetic portrayal of the Norwegian women and girls, “Tyskerjentene / German girls”, who had sexual relations with German men during the Nazi occupation. The story’s narrative schema is a jingoistic monologue by a married German officer to a Norwegian schoolgirl with whom he has had an affair. Nedreaas employs mockery, infantilisation, misogyny, scapegoating, triangulation, and psychological abuse to expose the relationship’s power imbalance. The phallocratic voice of the first-person narrator inadvertently reveals the subjectivity of the female subaltern. Since Torborg Nedreaas’ Bak skapet står øksen was published in the same year of Norway’s liberation, “Achtung, Gnädiges Fräulein” reads like an apologia for Norway’s “Tyskerjentene”. After the Second World War, women and girls marked by this epithet suffered alienation, detention, and forced tonsure. (In 2018, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg issued an official apology.) “Achtung, Gnädiges Fräulein” is therefore a feminist intervention in Norwegian collective memory.
Ramatu Musa is an American Ph.D. Candidate at Université de Lausanne in Switzerland. Her research is concerned with the representations of female alterity in fiction and non-fiction. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Jerusalem, Israel, and a Callaloo Writing Fellow in Oxford, England. Musa has presented papers at academic conferences in Sicily, Switzerland, and Italy.