Jens Bjørneboe: Frihetens øyeblikk (Moment of Freedom)

Latest on my website: Jens Bjørneboe‘s Frihetens øyeblikk (Moment of Freedom) This is a thoroughly grim account by a forty-six year old Norwegian, living in a remote Alpine part of Germany called Heiligenberg, who cannot remember his own name. He works in a menial position for a court and is writing a History of Bestiality while studying the court and the people of the region. He recounts some of the horrors of the past – the Nazis, the Soviets, the Belgian Congo. The people in Heiligenberg seem, on the face of it, to be ordinary decent bourgeois but are anything but. Mass murders are routine and our hero uncovers a guilty secret which shows that most of the town people are depraved. We also learn of his travels and early life, which have given him material for his History. From my life I can hardly remember anything but murder, war, concentration camps, torture, slavery, executions, bombed-out cities, and the half-burned bodies of children he tells us and all that feeds into his book.

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