A narrative museum shows the power of the North in the popular imagination

“Extreme North: A Cultural History”

By Bernd Brunner (translated from the German by Jefferson Chase). W. W. Norton, 2022. 246 pages. $27.95.

The North, author Bernd Brunner tells us, has always had a profound influence on those who live further south. It has been feared, romanticized, mythologized and used for political purposes. Although historian Brunner focuses his entertaining and thought-provoking cultural history on Germany’s relations with northern Europe (Scandinavia, Iceland, and Greenland), much of what he has to say can be applied to the rest of the circumpolar north.

“Extreme North” opens with a passage about a cabinet of wonders compiled by a Danish professor of medicine, Ole Worm, in the 17th century. The collection, most of which was lost to fire and dispersal, consisted of unusual objects from the north: a large stuffed auk, a narwhal tusk, whale vertebrae, harpoons, a kayak, plant specimens, and fossils. This chapter establishes an early fascination with the North and establishes the organization of the book: a series of short chapters examining, as specimens, an aspect or oddity related to Northern history.

The chapters then loosely follow a chronology, from early Greek and Roman imaginations of a “ghostly dark spot” through early polar exploration to romantic notions and tourist travel to, finally, the 20th-century adoption of Nordic and Aryan identities in the racist, antisemitic ideology of Hitler and other white supremacists.

North, of course, has always been defined in relation to south and has fluctuated over time, from Scotland, the English colonies in North America, and anywhere beyond the Alps to the farthest islands of Scandinavia and then the North Pole itself. It is a space, as Brunner explains, that is “both real and imagined”, and the word itself comes from Indo-German roots for “dawn left”. Brunner even argues that Alaska is less a part of the North than it is of the South because it aligns itself politically with Texas and Louisiana’s reliance on fossil fuel exploitation.

For many centuries, the North, with its “ungodly north wind”, was associated with the devil and all varieties of evil. The Vikings carried out terrifying raids on England and Germany. The Vikings also came to the island they called Greenland. Sixteenth-century maps showed the North Pole as an open sea with a giant, deadly whirlpool. Although there is no real reason to put north at the top of maps, this eventually became the norm, explained in part by European cartographers who wanted to privilege their own positions in the world. Early maps also showed a variety of terrifying, imaginary sea monsters in the northern waters.

The idea that the North Pole might be open sea encouraged European explorers to seek first a passage to the Far East and then a northwest passage across upper Canada. Most of these early expeditions ended, as we know, in disaster, when the ships became trapped in the ice. Soon, the values ​​of “polar oil” from whales, cod for food, and walrus ivory drove more ships north.

As the North became more explored and exploited, its reputation as a dark and evil realm changed to a more romantic vision, which Brunner calls “the new love affair with the North, a reimagining and a new mental map.” . In 1700, travelers to Lapland noted the “simple and kind life” of the Sami. They also marveled at the long days of summer and the “heavenly glow” in winter. Explanations on the northern lights were offered; one theorized by a British astronomer was that the Earth was hollow and an opening near the North Pole allowed light to escape from the planet’s core. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who never even traveled to northern Latvia, declared that the north was “where you can see the miracles of our terrestrial creation… those huge masses of beautiful colored ice clusters, those majestic auroras borealis, wonderful tricks of the eye…”

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Meanwhile, Russia had long been regarded, at least by the Germans, as an “empire of the far north”. Siberia, especially, was largely unknown to the West until the two expeditions of Vitus Bering. Brunner includes several interesting accounts of the explorers of Siberia, including a Kate Marsden who, in 1891, traveled by horse and sledge throughout Siberia to examine lepers and search for a medicinal herb she had heard of.

With the exception of the Sami, the “Far North” pays little attention to the indigenous peoples of the North. Brunner does examine the history, beginning in the 16th century, of capturing Inuit for “study” and display. In a colonial setting, indigenous people were assigned to the Stone Age and were said to practice “a primitive stage of human community life.” As late as 1896, polar explorer Robert Peary brought six Inuit from Greenland to the Museum of Natural History in New York. Tragically, five of them soon died, probably from tuberculosis. While that part of the story may be well known, fewer readers may know that it was the esteemed cultural anthropologist Franz Boas who asked Peary to bring the Inuit to the museum and who, says Brunner, “appears to have been indifferent to fate. of the people so inhumanely and fatally put on display…”

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Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in the early 20th century, understood that the Inuit were superior to the southerners in life skills appropriate to the north; he preached the importance of adapting to the conditions and rhythms of arctic life instead of fighting against them. He took his sunny analysis far beyond survival to propose that the Arctic would become the future storehouse of resources and the center of an “innovative society.” Fridtjof Nansen was another who thought that the key to human happiness was the simple life of the northern people; he recommended the Arctic as “a perfect sanatorium for nervous and debilitated people.”

Later chapters of the book highlight “the abyss of racial science” in which anti-Semites promoted the idea that the “Nordic race”, including the Germans, was superior to the others and responsible for the greatest achievements of Western civilization. This pseudoscience was adopted by Adolf Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, and the eugenicists to serve hateful propaganda purposes. Here, the author even mentions former President Trump’s stated preference for Norwegian immigrants, along with a photo of the man who stormed the US Capitol in Viking garb and tattoos related to Norse mythology.

Finally, the author documents how our fascination with the North continues to inform contemporary culture, in literature that retells, sometimes as fiction, stories of exploration and investigation of environmental issues, and in films and television series such as “Game of Thrones.” ”. Brunner concludes: “Whatever natural resources the physical North has offered or still can offer for exploitation, the imaginary North provides an almost inexhaustible supply of heroes, dramas, and adventure stories.”