From Taboo to Compensation: Krigsbarn in Public Discourse and Literature after 1945

In this chapter, the author argues that the paternal origins and the treatment of wartime children – the offspring of German soldiers and Norwegian women – quickly became a taboo in Norwegian society after the Second World War, and was only first addressed in the 1980s and 1990s. The author argues that this rupture started a process of coming to terms with the wartime fate of the children and created a new narrative of the attitudes towards them. She points to the translation of Herbjørg Wassmo’s book “The House with the Blind Glass Windows”, published in 1981, and Jostein Gaarder’s novel “The Solitaire Mystery”, brought out in 1990, as examples of the universalization of these narratives.