Forbryterens fravær. Gaute Heivolls litterære fremstillinger av nazisten Rudolf Kerner

The author Gaute Heivoll has written two literary texts featuring Rudolf Kerner, a Gestapo leader in the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand during World War II. Both the novel Himmelarkivet (2008) and the play Jeg kommer tilbake i kveld (2012) focus on the death of the resistance figure, Louis Hogganvik, at the local Gestapo headquarters led by Kerner. This article argues that Kerner’s impact in these two texts is primarily mediated through his absence. In the novel, the narrator (a representation of Heivoll himself) only manages to write Hogganvik’s story when he takes the place of a doll representing Kerner at his desk in a museum exhibit. In the play, Hogganvik’s widow does not find Kerner at home when she travels to Germany after the war to confront him, but instead discovers a shared sense of suffering and dispossession with Kerner’s wife and daughter. Both texts have a focus on the postmemory of the war, reflected in the persistent and traumatic impact on family relations and the fraught negotiation of symbolic power.