The resistance fight did not come to an end fifty years ago. It has to be continued, if not hatred and racism may spring forth sheltered by the enemy that never quite capitulated: Our own indifference.
Paal-Helge Haugen (Norwegian poet)

Near my summer cabin southwest of Kristiansand at the southern coast of Norway, on a rocky island in the Ny-Hellesund archipelago, the Germans built a fort during WW2 that used to be called Norway’s little Gibraltar. It was a part of the Atlantic Wall and an important supportive battery for the major battery Vara at Møvik closer to Kristiansand. After the war, the fort was not made part of the Norwegian coastal artillery; on the contrary, its guns were removed and the fort was partly demolished.
A neighbour who was born in the area remembers from her childhood during the war those who built the fort in the hillside. She recalls from memory late-autumn impressions of freezing Russian prisoners of war clothed in rags being tugged at a fleet from neighbouring Høllen, to work all day at the fort. She remembers well her childhood resentment against the officers and guards who treated them like this, and all through her later life she has considered the fort as nothing but a monument of brutality.
What meets the eye today is very different from what inhibits her memory. The fort has become a must-see for visitors to the islands. Recently, demolished parts have been reconstructed and guns have been relocated to their former positions. The widespread substructure in the mountainside is explored by lots of children each summer, while their fathers discuss how far the canons would reach into the North Sea. What remains for most spectators seems to be impressions of beauty, along with technical fascination on all levels. The cruel past seems very distant. The question, «Could the war really have been that bad?», seems close at hand.
My approach to the batteries along the Atlantic Coast is neither the typologist’s, nor the aestheticist’s, nor the collector’s. It is rather to judge if they may contribute substantially to stop the growth of Neo-Nazism 1. and to prevent the outbreak of new wars. In a Europe where neither anti-Semitic movements nor aggression towards neighbours have been halted once and for all, where democracy always has to be consolidated and defended, this is to my mind by far the most important task they serve. But do they really have what it takes to meet such a task? In this paper, which should be regarded as a sketch, and a very hasty one, I will look at whether artefacts themselves are able to evidence their historical function and context, and how they eventually may contribute to the education process. Finally, I will try to determine if the remains serve educational purposes best if they are ruined or intact.
One of the main paradoxes in the field of cultural heritage and museology is that the artefacts do not bring along their past, but first and foremost are old things that have come to take part in new contexts of meaning. Very often, in their new context they will be appreciated for qualities very different from those that were originally attributed to them; frequently, they are about aesthetics in some way or another 2. Even a visit to the KZ-camp of Birkenau may somehow be distracted by some a sense of beauty, if the grass turns out to be green or the snow has just fallen. Some old artefacts do of course have a shape that leaves little doubt about their former use — the guillotine, for instance. It «tells» so clearly by its formal language what used to be its purpose that even an uninitiated spectator will know. Consequently, I would think it would never be embraced by any connoisseur, in spite of it’s rational construction. However, objects that are so honest about their former functions are very rare, and even the guillotine says very little about its original context — only about it’s function.
I would have appreciated if the batteries constituting the Atlantic Wall, the product of one of the most barbaric regimes the world has ever seen, had more in common with the hangman’s rope—that, conceived as images, they were more obvious telltales about the cruelty of the system that created them. As they remain today, they tell the unknowing spectator little apart from that they must have been utensils made to defend the coast, and that some gun batteries once must have been made like this. But that they were created by foreign enemies, not as part of the country’s own defence system, that thousands of prisoners of war lost their lives due to inhuman conditions when they built the line, and that the system which made them possible is still alive as an ideal to so many inhabitants of Europe — of all this, the artefacts tell nothing. And this is the fate they share with most material remains: They have very little ability to tell about the past in which service they have made duty. By themselves, they simply don’t tell what makes them meaningful statements on the mentality of their period. They serve as minor contributions to a knowledge that mainly is carried by the language, and as eye-catchers and imaginary pegs for the memory. They are nothing but that, and we can not demand from them that they be more. Nevertheless, the alliance of language and material remains is more powerful than language alone, and that counts for making knowledge as well as imparting knowledge to others. The remains may have an ability to place the spectator in a particular mood or open his receptiveness towards educational impressions; anyone who has been to Birkenau and seen the reactions to the heaps of children’s shoes, remnants from those who lost their lives in the gas chambers, knows that.

How can the war remains take part in education?
In its cruelty, a war transcends most of our civil experiences, and by far surpasses our powers of description. Some wars multiply these transcendences to such an extent that they cross the borders of incomprehensibility. One of the two very last surviving Norwegian Jews from the Auschwitz, Samuel Steinmann, admits 60 years after the liberation that he almost cannot believe he was, that the camp actually existed 3. Whether this is because our memory resists certain painful experiences, I do not know for sure. What is certain is that when an ex-prisoner regularly has to check his prisoner-number on his own forearm to maintain the reality in his own experience, then it must be even harder for people who did not live at that time to fully take in that WWII actually did take place. Some organizations have realised that what is possibly the most effective way to impart this experience to youngsters, is when historical witnesses tell their stories in the historical place. This is not least familiar for the Norwegian organization White buses for Auschwitz, on whose initiative former KZ-prisoners — so-called period witnesses — have travelled together with youngsters to the places where they experienced their living nightmares. The activity is based upon the proposition that establishing the Holocaust as a fact will contribute to the creation of good democratic attitudes among young people. It is supposed that the most effective, undeniable kind of teaching takes place at the point of intersection between the museological artefacts and the personal experience being imparted by the historical witness.
The Holocaust is the very symbol of the barbarism of the Third Reich. Consequently, it is quite easy to establish attitudes against it. But there are other activities of the Reich that not in the same degree attract our moral indignation. Nevertheless, we should have in mind that for instance the guns along the Atlantic Wall do have a past as utensils for the greedy strife for power of the Reich, and that lots of prisoners of war have lost their lives during the building process. Assisted by the spoken word, also the Atlantic Wall represents a mighty source to recognition of the destructive powers involved, and should in my opinion be a suitable part of imparting strategies where survivors tell their stories within the framework of the monuments. However, the time is a considerable limitation. Within not so many years, the last witnesses will be gone. This need of documentation is, compared to that of the constructions, by far the most acute one.

1. The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) has verified that anti-Semitism is rushing forward in several European countries, especially in France, where the number of anti-Semitic actions increased 600% from 2001 to 2002. Aftenposten 01.04.05
2. In the brief description of the Atlantic Wall project, I noticed for instance that these objects are appreciated for «their ability […] to define a new aesthetic canon for modernity», which I honestly think would surprise their creators.
3. Homepage of the organization Hvite busser til Auschwitz (White buses for Auschwitz): www.hvitebusser.no