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Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and worthy form of existence….I should say that, in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the world without an immediate shudder.
Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and worthy form of existence….I should say that, in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the world without an immediate shudder.
Although similar thoughts about fascism were burgeoning in Norway during this time, there was little sense that fascism had been bred from a native intellectual tradition. Rather, fascism was a force that threatened from the outside. The sense of moral responsibility, irrationality, and disillusionment that had inseminated the heart of Dadaism in the rest of Europe never surfaced in the Norwegian psyche. Consequently, when surrealism arose with the intention of tapping into the irrationality of the unconscious as a vital intellectual resource, the Norwegian culture had no such native store.
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