The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

22 Leader-Induced Paralysis 1937

My father caught the military bug early on, as Grandma Vera used to say. She saw something in his working methods in the haymaking back home on the island that others didn’t see: a kind of relent-lessness mixed with the premonition of his own defeat. ‘He had the same blind zeal I’d all too often seen out in Oddbjarnarsker, which pushed many men to drown at sea.’

Dad embraced Nazism, was one of the very few Icelanders who fought with the Germans in the Second World War, and was the only one to cross into Russia with a gun. I think it was the uniform that seduced him more than anything. His grandfather had been the second Minister of Iceland and his father the first ambassador of the country; they both had gold-embroidered uniforms in their wardrobes and hard hats with feathers. Dad, on the other hand, had none of that garb; even if he’d managed to run an important company in Copenhagen for fourteen months, the adventure came to an abrupt end in a shady bar in Kiel. An unscrupulous colleague in the whorehouse had run off with his receipts, bills of lading and wallet, leaving my father hostage to the pimps for two days until the ambassador of Iceland intervened and settled the bill for his nocturnal escapade and seventeen thousand steel clothes pegs for industrial laundries.

A few weeks later he showed up for the haymaking in Breidafjördur, and then he headed to Germany the following spring to pick his university. By some unfortunate coincidence, having barely reached the age of thirty, he happened to be standing on a pier in Hamburg on 5 May 1937, when for the first time he saw ‘Hjalti,’ who was officiating over the launch of the gigantic cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff in a grand ceremony in front of a vast crowd. (Before the war, Dad and other Icelanders used to call Hitler by the Icelandic name Hjalti, and a few years later, after the famous series of Hjalti children’s books came out, I started calling him ‘little Hjalti,’ much to my father’s horror.) Dad often spoke about that event. Beholding the Führer seemed to have branded his soul. Already by then the Nordic Studies faculty in Lübeck had changed into some kind of Nazism-justification department: its roots were steeped in Old Norse mythology and the Icelandic Sagas; its ideology stemmed from those glorious blonds who inhabited the Great North. Dad was therefore a weak man in the wrong place, a blond Viking who spoke German with an Aryan accent and, what’s more, came from a high-ranking family. Twenty minutes before the war, Himmler’s bloodhounds sniffed him out and discovered that Herr Björnsson was not just a super Aryan but also the son of the highest official in the land, a formidable catch. They offered him a gilded grey uniform. With runic letters: SS.

Hans Henrik suffered severely from what some people call leader-induced paralysis, or starstruckness. The symptoms are clear: In the presence of a leader or film star, the subject loses his faculties of speech and free will. The ability to reason diminishes and the face moulds itself into a canine smile, coupled with a hanging-tongue syndrome. This is a paralysing condition that can afflict the most unlikely people and transform noble gentlemen into drooling puppies.

People who suffer from leader-induced paralysis (LIP) always feel a compulsion to follow strong men. In that sense my father was representative of the German nation: an upright man bent by humiliation, a man of great heritage but no future. But he was far from being a Nazi by nature. He was kind to everyone, and his only friend in Argentina after the war was a Jew. He didn’t subscribe to the Nazi heresy because he agreed with their extreme views, but simply because of his vulnerability to the dazzling glow of power. He mistook his weakness for strength and his uniform for proof that he was a man among men.

Instead of being a son of the new Iceland, he joined up with the murderers of Europe. That was the real tragedy of his life, a fact he could never flee from. Like a stray dog he roamed from one country to the next, without ever being able to remove that SS collar. Not even Mum could get it off him when, freshly widowed, she took him back into the house. And death didn’t manage to remove it either. His memory will always be soiled by the mistakes he made at the age of thirty.

How would the great Freud have interpreted my father’s error? Most sons kill their fathers sooner or later. The lucky ones do it with their own hands, others hire someone else to do it for them, but Dad would settle for no less than the entire German army to avenge himself for his defeat in the battles of Reykjavík, Vejle and Kiel.

There is nothing more risible than the vengeance of a coward, and nothing more tragic.