#22 - A dead letter?

On reading Vigdis Hjorth's Leve Posthornet!

At my work, we receive post from all over Norway. At lunchtime, the postman who is assigned to the Embassy beat comes in with packages from the high north and the far wet west of the country, from Tromsø to Tønsberg and all points in between. In turn we hand him the post to be sent out from our chancery on these visits. The process, of a dedicated postman coming to drop off and collect post from the Embassy, is one of the quaintest rituals in a job that retains on occasion its sense of being from another time entirely.

I have never been especially interested in collecting stamps but have long been interested in postal services and the extent of the state through the post. I can think of very few things, except for the postal service, that have the same reach and importance across the vastness of Norway as its postal service. So it is with much dismay that I see how poorly treated it is in the twenty-first century.

At first hand in work, I see the deleterious effects of neoliberalisation and the increased privatization of the post in Norway. Where once our postman came five days a week, he now only comes three days or two days, alternating with the weeks.

The logic is that in a country that has so robustly embraced digitization there simply isn’t enough post being sent any more.

That though is not my experience.

Instead, it seems to me that it is increasingly a service that is used chiefly by those who are non-Norwegians. As such, the role of Posten (as the service is called) and its commercial arm Bring, increasingly is not to connect Norway together but is instead to bind many people in Norway who are not Norwegian to the places they came from.

I receive packages frequently to my home, especially from Ireland – often of books, or magazines or journals to which I subscribe. There is a real thrill to opening your postbox to a package, or a letter, or the newspaper. Few things made the move into the home me and Miriam now occupy feel more real than the day we got our names placed on our postbox, not far from our front door. This was now our address. All post may be addressed to us here.

It was with this in mind that I read Vigdis Hjorth’s Leve Posthornet! recently. The novel is about the political awakening of a woman who works for a PR company who had a contract to work on behalf of Norway’s Posten employees against an EU directive for the greater privatisation and deregulation of postage. The book is now ten years old, and is ever more relevant in its criticisms of the neoliberal attack on public goods and natural monopolies.

Today as well as Posten and Bring, there are a host of ways to have packages delivered to your door including: Postnord, UPS, as well FedEx and DHL for courier services as well as a range of other, smaller companies like Postbuddy in Oslo.

The Norwegian postal service was established in 1647 as a private company and was from 1719 a state monopoly although city post remained private for some time after. However, since the 1800s, the Norwegian post has been largely a state affair and a service that knitted this vast land with its difficult to reach places together. The pride in the postal service in Norway - and in a country with especially challenging weather conditions - is perhaps best summed up in the memorial to the postman Gunnar Turtveit who while out delivering his rounds was buried during a snowstorm in April 1903. Buried for more than two days under the snow, he dug his way out using his posthorn!

That was until the EU’s third postal directive which was voted on in Norway in 2011, when the then Labour government decided – because of a vote by its membership – to delay the acceptance of the directive by a year. It wasn’t until I moved to Norway in 2016, that the deregulation of the delivery of the postal service took full effect.

To give some sense of the change this effected, the number of people employed in the postal service in 2022 was just over 12,000, twenty-thousand less than a decade ago. The decimation of the postal service has led not to better postal delivery for people but instead to an underfunded, under-supported and increasingly unloved and unloveable service.

While the climax of Hjorth’s novel Leve Posthornet! is the moment when the membership of Norwegian Labour Party at its annual conference decides to use its right of reservation against the third postal directive, the high point in the novel for me is the moment when our protagonists mind is changed. Her mind is changed during a communication session her PR company (that she runs with two friends, one of whom has fled the scene) is running by an older postman, Rudolf Karena Hansen. Rudolf is responsible for delivering post to over 1500 homes in the high north of Norway. He tells the story of the effort he goes through to deliver a “dead letter” on which there is just a name and a city, and nothing else. What follows – the story of not just this letter – but the person to whom it is addressed is an homage to the power of words, and the post. Rudolf tells them:

“My point here”, he said, “is to show how important it is to turn dead letters into living ones. And that people are the decisive factor when that needs doing, and that’s why postal workers must have job security, decent working conditions and enough time to dedicate themselves to this demanding and honourable job.”

In Norway today there are just six actual post offices remaining in the country. Five of these are in Oslo, the capital. The other is in Longyearbyen, the main settlement on the island of Svalbard. Instead of post offices, there are well over a thousand pick-up points in supermarkets that still bear the unmistakable – if now twisted with contemporary graphic design sensibilities – symbol of the post horn in supermarkets all over the country.

In the course of my work, I am a frequent visitor to one of those six post offices.

Right around the corner from where I work on Haakon VIIs Gate in the heart of Oslo, a short from which you find the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Nobel Peace Institute and the new National Museum, is a door which you’d almost miss if it weren’t for that red sign with the word Posten jutting out from the wall.

Inside, this highly functional post office is barren of any home comforts or sense of itself as a last bastion of a proud postal service. Post offices, like public libraries, railway termini, town halls, concert and even court houses, are the physical manifestation of a civic culture with roots dating back centuries. The General Post Office in Dublin, notwithstanding its accidental place in the great national drama of Irish independence in 1916, is a magnificent building and still a functioning post office. The central post office in Prague, a huge cavernous thing is a stunning example of the civic pride which such buildings can engender in a service like the post.

The former general post office in Oslo by contrast is these days divided up into a series of business units housing everything from bars with names vaguely associated with the buildings prior use to clothing shops and restaurants. The total lack of sentimentality on the part of Norwegians when it comes to their built heritage is something I often find incomprehensible. There is little or no love, especially in Oslo, for anything old. Even relatively new buildings, like the Y-blokka, a masterpiece of modernist building design, the work of one of their finest mid-20th century architects, Erling Viksjø (someone given to iconoclasm in his own day) has been torn down.

There is a joke that Oslo was the city that was only bombed after the war ended in the 1940s. While my natural instincts is not to side with a reactionary conservatism that beauty in architecture ended with the rise of brutalism, nonetheless one feels that a total disregard for the built heritage of a city is often on display in Norway’s capital. A total collapse of a sense of the past. It is perhaps the hallmark of a city that has only been a capital for a very short time in the long history of this nation.

Back at Vika post office, the staff, who I have come to know by sight from my frequent visits there during the working week (sometimes we need to post things by overnight express when our postman has either already been and gone or we know he won’t be in for at least another two days) seem to be battling, gamely. They are battling all the same as an endangered species in Norway, among the very last post office employees in the country.

The lack of post offices proper – and thus people who care for what the post office represents – is felt most clearly when you encounter a problem at the post office. A not infrequent issue faced is that for a package that is registered, you must present a form of photo ID as proof. For many foreigners in particular this can be the cause of great distress. If for example you have applied for a visa, then you must send away your passport to have the visa sticker placed in it. When the passport is returned to you, since it is a sensitive document, it is a registered item that must be picked up with a photo ID. Many foreigners may only have their passport as their main form of photo ID and Posten’s list of accepted photo IDs is very narrow. You can imagine how this quickly becomes a problem.

One is reminded of the joke early in Terry Pratchett’s novel Going Postal, one of the later Discworld novels, in which Moist Von Lipwig finds himself given a stay of execution if he can revive the ailing fortunes of Ankh-Morpork’s postal service. Surveying the decayed state of the Ankh-Morpork Central Post Office, Von Lipwig trying to read the crumbling motto of the post service is told by the character Mr Pump

I Said It Was A Proud Institution…

The title of Pratchett’s book of course is a play on the idea - linked especially with the now much maligned US Postal Service - of Post Office workers going ballistic and even becoming violent against their own managers or members of the public.

In his 2015 book The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber discusses Max Weber’s attitudes to bureaucracy and the near impossibility of getting rid of it: bureaucracy’s ability to make itself indispensable. Graeber points out that one reason why Weber could have such a positive view of bureaucracy was rooted in the fact that in the Germany of his day, bureaucratic institutions really did work well and the German Post Office was a key example of this. Indeed, Graeber writes “In Germany, one could even make the argument that the nation was created, more than anything else, by the post office.” A similar argument surely holds for Norway.

Without real postal workers, without in other words, characters like Rudolf Karena Hansen in Vigids Hjorth’s Leve Posthornet! there is no real care for or interest in the nuances such occasions throw up.

I think about all of this every time our postman comes through to the big glass window divider in our office in the Embassy, or when I’m standing in the queue with my little queue ticket in the Vika post office, or opening the post box where Miriam and I live and pull out a package with its stamps on it. I think about while I’m reading about the pyrrhic victory of the post office workers in 2011, that terrible year in modern Norwegian life.

At around the same time, Tony Judt published his late rallying call for social democracy, Ill Fares The Land. In it, and in other books of his, he made the argument – often eloquently – for the things in states that are natural monopolies. He focused in particular on railways. Of railway stations he writes:

… railway stations built a century or even a century and a half ago… not only inspire affection: they are aesthetically appealing and they work… Stations are not an adjunct to modern life, or part of it, or a by-product of it. Like the railway they punctuate, stations are integral to the modern world itself.

He might have just as easily focused on postal services. The post preceded the railways though they eventually came to be symbiotic eventually. Going a little further back we have the colourful description of the English mail coach by Thomas De Quincey who wrote:

To my own feeling, this Post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organization… The mail-coaches it was that distributed the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo…

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, became itself a spiritualized and glorified object to an impassioned heart.

The eagerness with which first the Norwegian Labour Party (stopped only by the revolt of its membership) and then Høyre enacted the dismantling of the postal service’s natural monopoly was matched only towards the end of their time in government by the introduction of the parcelling up of the railway services of the country, once the preserve of the NSB (Norges Statsbaner) and owned by Bane Nor.

This new system sees Norway replicating, with the same disastrous impact for the people who actually use railways in this country, as the same process of privatisation and dividing up the railways has had in the UK. The opening up of the various railway lines in Norway to competitive tender has only weakened the Norwegian railway companies and has allowed in both Swedish national rail and even UK-operated train companies to the Norwegian market. The price of railway tickets has, like the price of stamps, gone up while the quality of service has gone down.

Despite the still vaunted benefits of privatizing public goods, I have yet to see any such public service that has become better since its privatization. Novels like Leve Posthornet! are a good reminder that some things, like the post and the rail, belong to all of us, connect us to one another.

On The Bookwheel:

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, Penguin: 2003.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Melville House: 2016 (2015).

Vigdis Hjorth, Leve Posthornet! Cappelen Damm: 2016 (2012).

Vigdis Hjorth (trans. Charlotte Barslund), Long Live the Post Horn!, Verso: 2020.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, Penguin: 2011 (2010).

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal, Corgi: 2005 (2004).