The Nobel Museum, Fusion of Old and New
This gem in Stockholm is rich with history, drama and controversy about the world’s most prestigious prize.
(Reprinted from NUVO Magazine, June 2003.)
There are a few ways to get to the old town square in Stockholm, Sweden. You can walk up from the water, where Lake Malaren meets the Baltic Sea, calves feeling the steep incline up past the palace, a bright tableau of the city framed in a glance over your shoulder. Or, you can walk the twisty paths of Gamla Stan’s narrow streets (literally the “old town”), cobblestones uneven beneath your feet, past the purveyors of souvenirs, fine crystal and strong Swedish coffee. The practical traveler might opt for the subway (“Tunnelbana” or “T-Bana” for those in the know), emerging on the sunlit southern side of Gamla Stan and retracing steps northward in a straight line uphill. Whatever path you choose, it will eventually open up into the Stortorget — the “Great Square” — and the epicenter of Stockholm’s ancient self.
Four hundred years ago where a bloody coup was staged is now a bright and bustling square, with camera-wielding tourists and Swedes lingering the cafés, faces upturned to the perma-sun in summer or candle-warmed in winter. On their way through, many of them will alight on the steps of a building that bounces sunlight off its coral-coloured walls and classic white pillars, all across the west side of the Great Square. Like Stortorget, it is a combination of the old and the new — the eighteenth-century Old Stockholm Stock Exchange, meeting place of traders and burghers — to which has been attached a sleek pane of glass, affixed with spare steel rods and bearing simple white lettering, modern and minimalist, that let you know not only that you’ve arrived at the “Nobelmuseet” but that what is contained therein will fuse history with modernity and wrap it all up in a crisp, clean Nordic aesthetic. You may have to be a genius to be featured in this museum, but you needn’t be one to appreciate what it has to offer.
Officially it’s called the Nobelmuseet — i.e. “Nobel Museum” as written in the agglutinated Swedish style — but it consists of a single exhibition, “Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize,” which opened in April, 2001 to commemorate one hundred years of achievement. It is a topic of breadth and depth, and the exhibit opts for both, layering headlines and highlights over troves of information and esoterica, easily skimmed for the ADD-afflicted but rich in detail for the more questioning intellect (or for salonistas in search of clever cocktail conversation). Either way, it presents a century of Nobel-winning exploits in the context of the individual and the collaborative creative processes. Some conclusions are neatly drawn for visitor consumption (i.e. “creative milieus breed creative thinkers”) but most are left to the thoughtful museet-goer, who may or may not leave with an understanding of Pavlov’s Dog, Schrödinger’s Cat or how the heck Arafat ever won that Peace Prize.
That is the essence of the Nobel Prize: genius, and controversy. The museum does an excellent job of showcasing the first and alluding to the second. Taking in the cool, airy space, all metallic curves and shafts of light, the eye is drawn upward to a kind of conveyor belt on the ceiling, moving panels along like venetian blinds, each featuring the likeness of a Nobel laureate. Fritz Pregl, Chemistry, 1923. Luis Walter Alvarez, Physics, 1968. Naguib Mahfouz, Literature, 1988. Past the reception desk (50 Swedish krona buys you an afternoon of one-way intellectual hobnobbing) there are options: look straight ahead, and you will see an elegant row of plexiglass panels containing newspaper clippings in English and Swedish, each panel representing a decade of Nobel news. Look to the left and find a theatre showing eight vignettes featuring creative Nobel-spawning milieus (think Hemingway’s Paris and Bohr’s Copenhagen); look right and find a theatre showing thirty-two short films about not Glenn Gould but winners like X-Ray pioneer (and physics prize pioneer as the first laureate) Wilhelm Röntgen (1901), writer Wole Soyinka (1986), and Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld (1961). On the other side of this theatre, an interactive multi-media room with headphones and individual flatscreen computers.
Perhaps the best place to begin, though, is at the back of the museum’s spacious single floor, past the sample banquet place-setting and on to the exhibit detailing the life of Alfred Nobel. It is the Nobel Museum after all, and indeed Stockholm’s only monument to the industrialist who made his home in many places other than Sweden yet somehow settled on his out-of-the-way homeland to administer and bestow the world’s most prestigious prizes. The sepia-toned display provides a fairly pristine account of Nobel’s life — his childhood in Stockholm and then St. Petersburg; his difficult inventor/industrialist father and brothers; the tragic loss of his younger brother, Emil, in a nitroglycerine explosion connected to Alfred’s experiments; his uneven and lonely romantic life; and the innovations he developed that advanced the industrial age and built the fortune that would eventually bankroll five distinguished prizes.
(It should be noted here that the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics is actually not a Nobel prize at all, but rather an award established by the Central Bank of Sweden in 1968 to honour Nobel’s memory, with a prize purse guaranteed to match that of the other laureates. It is adjudicated by the Swedish Academy of Sciences which is also responsible for the Physics and Chemistry prizes).
Nobel was, by most accounts, a difficult man — lonely, caustic, closed, not overwhelmingly happy (one of the best of these accounts is in Burton Feldman’s excellent The Nobel Prize which is a 489-page treasure trove of Nobel facts and factoids). He was a workhorse, traveling constantly, establishing dynamite factories across Europe and in the United States, where he spoke Swedish, English, French, Italian, or German depending on the locale. He wrote poetry and plays, patented his multifarious inventions, read widely, kept his own counsel. He died in San Remo, Italy, basically alone — childless, unmarried, brothers and parents deceased. And then, with his will, he gained an entirely new life in the form of the Nobel Prize.
Closed as he was, who can know what exactly motivated his now-famous will. Perhaps the erroneous obituaries, published on the death of his brother, by a few confused journalists — and not overwhelmingly complimentary. Perhaps guilt based on the deaths with which he was associated — dynamite accidents, an ill-fated balloon expedition he bankrolled, the loss of his own brother. Perhaps a desire for expiation, or for admiration — the kind that escaped him in life.
Whatever his reasons, they were enough to direct his entire fortune toward prizes — though only after five years of legal wrangling and painfully-wrought administration of a huge fund with scant guidance. Alfred Nobel’s Last Will and Testament consisted of a single wordy paragraph directing his accrued wealth to a fund which would annually provide for five prizes to “those persons who shall have contributed most materially to benefit mankind during the year immediately preceding” in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine; Literature, and one “to the person who shall have most or best promoted the Fraternity of Nations and the Abolishment or Dimunition of Standing Armies and the Promotion and Increase of Peace Congresses.” The first four prizes were assigned to various distinguished Swedish academic organizations; the Peace Prize was to be selected by a committee determined, inexplicably, by the Norwegian Parliament. So indeed, from the very beginning this was a prize marked by drama and controversy (and who knows? Perhaps Nobel had thought of that, too).
Walking through the newspaper-clipping exhibit decade by decade reveals just how fraught with controversy it was. Here was a so-called global prize, being adjudicated by an exclusively Scandinavian body of bodies (and, except for the Oslo-centric Peace Prize, bestowed to this day by the Swedish king in a lavish ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death). Entrusted to judge the forefront but geographically peripheral, the judges were not always fully informed of cutting-edge work (and as a result many prizes across the board were awarded years and sometimes even decades after the ‘winning’ work had been performed). There was a northern slant, felt almost immediately with a disproportionately high number of Nordic winners (this is seen particularly in the Literature prize, with fifteen Nordic laureates (including Iceland) to France’s twelve and the US’ eleven). Unlike the prefix “Oscar-nominated” there are no plaudits for runners up. Accordingly, competition was fierce and politics fiercer.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20 but in a museum celebrating a century of prizes one can’t help but look back. While the actual exhibit does not render judgment on this prize or that — its purpose is to celebrate the Nobel Prize as an institution — it does not whitewash its chequered past of backroom politicking, uncredited (and unawarded) inventors, scandals, and shockingly bad choices (though of course you have to look for it!). Moreover, the prizes cannot be rescinded, and the deliberations are secret — so the mistakes of history stick. There was the prize for nuclear fission, awarded to German Otto Hahn in 1944, which completely excluded his decades-long partner Lise Meitner (who had fled, ironically, to Sweden at the outbreak of the war). There was the passing over of Dimitri Mendeleev, whose Periodic Table of the Elements hangs in every science classroom worth its salt, for chemist Henri Moissan who discovered fluorine — as it had already been predicted by Mendeleev’s chart! And Banting and Best — names that are inextricably linked in the Canadian lexicon — were not, in fact, honoured in 1923 for the discovery of insulin — that award actually went to Banting and J.J.R. Macleod (though Banting made a big show of splitting the prize money with Best, his graduate student assistant, and sharing the credit — not to mention that in 1962, theNobel Foundation publicly admitted that Macleod had erroneously been honoured). These were not isolated incidents.
Also common were dramas surrounding the prizes once awarded, based on the merits. Mikhael Gorbachev’s 1986 peace prize was hailed globally but received mixed reactions in the Motherland. Ditto Linus Pauling, who besides Marie Curie is the only laureate to have received a prize in two different categories — first Chemistry in 1954, and then the Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear agitation in 1962 was seen as an international slap in the face to the U.S. (not unlike how last year’s prize to Jimmy Carter was seen as a not-so-subtle rebuke of the Bush Administration’s hawklike foreign policy). Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz was honoured with the Medicine prize in 1949 for pioneering the lobotomy, a horrendous procedure that mentally neutered thousands of patients before mercifully falling out of favour within a decade.
Some prizes were even so hotly debated within the supposed coolly objective minds of the adjudicating committees that resignations ensued: in 1989, two members of the Swedish Academy (which judges Literature) resigned over the committee’s decision not to name Salman Rushdie and take a stand against the Iranian fatwah against him — up from one resignation in 1989 for naming William Golding. And back to Arafat: a member of the ’94 Peace Committee publicly resigned and denounced him as a terrorist. Omissions, too, make up as distinguished a list as any collection of laureates: Sigmund Freud. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Henrik Ibsen. Leo Tolstoy. Virginia Woolf. Dimitri Mendeleev. Mahatma Ghandi.
Even more poignant were other omissions — omissions on the dais accepting the award. German-Jewish journalist Carl von Ossietsky was not available to accept his 1935 Peace Prize as he was incarcerated in a concentration camp, where he died. The uproar over the episode prompted Hitler to forbid Germans or Austrians to accept their prizes (beginning in 1938) which resulted in at least three laureates having to forfeit their prize money (still extremely lucky compared to Ossietsky). Controversial, outspoken laureates from the USSR were also precluded from attending — Boris Pasternak in 1958, Andrei Sakharov in 1975. The Nobel Prize is bigger than the laureate alone.
That fact is at its most affecting in the corners of the exhibit, quietly regarding the balance Marie Curie used to weigh her newly-discovered radium, the well-worn Underwood typewriter used by Isaac Bashevis Singer, complete with Yiddish lettering, or listening to Toni Morrison’s beautiful and richly-toned Nobel lecture on headphones in the multi-media room, then Nelson Mandela’s, then Bashevis Singer in his voice aged with patience: “People are asking me often, why do you write in a dying language? Firstly, I like to write ghost stories, and nothing works like a dead language. Ghosts love Yiddish, they all speak it.”
As fascinating as a wander through the Nobelmuseet inevitably is, the museum-going experience is taken to an entirely new plane by virtue of the gift shop. In addition to a fine array of the usual — postcards with distinguished-looking laureates, to whom are attributed elegant-sounding quotes; books about Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prize and various laureates; posters of exhibited pieces — it offers a creative selection of souvenirs. Highlights include the peculiarly Swedish salty licorice treat, “salt lakrits,” quaintly packaged in the form of a long stick of dynamite (perhaps in a nod to how you’d feel if you actually ate the whole thing) and gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins fashioned after the Nobel medallions (surely a necessary chaser of the aforementioned lakrits!). Also of note is a particularly charming postcard of Albert Einstein reclining against a rock in summer shorts, looking oddly fetching with his slender calves and strappy summer sandals (the quote — “It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom” — is pure Einstein, who was a passionate advocate for peace and submitted as many nominations for the Peace Prize as he did for physics).
My favorite Nobel keepsake, however, is a Nobel-inspired cookbook for those who would replicate the ceremonial banquet at home, minus the average IQ (The Nobel Banquets: Modern Recipes from the Classic Menus, by Hélène Bodin and Stefan Bjur). The book pairs menu selections from various years with information about the laureates being so honoured and the historical background of the era. 1954, for example, was a banner year celebrating German physicists Max Born and Walther Bothe, Linus Pauling’s Chemistry prize and John Enders, Thomas H. Weller and Frederick C. Robbins, three distinguished U.S. virologists. Had literature laureate Ernest Hemingway been well enough to attend the inter-laureate conversation would probably have been very different. As it was, he missed out on hot smoked rainbow trout with spinach chanterelle mushroom sauce, grilled filet of beef with tagliatelle vegetable and red wine sauce, and green pears accompanied by pistachio nut ice cream (perhaps one of the German physicists ate enough for Bothe of them).
Souvenirs in hand and laureate-worthy thoughts in head, the Nobelmuseet has hopefully provoked thoughts more compelling than weak puns on physics laureates (I hope I’m not Bohr-ing you). Outside, the sun is surely still shining; it’s summer after all, and that’s what the sun does in a Stockholm summer. Stotorget is still bustling and the cafés still do a brisk business. Walking out into the square, there are a few ways you can go — down toward the water, south to the subway, lazily through the rabbit-warren streets of Gamla Stan. Moving away, you throw a glance over your shoulder — framed there is the Nobelmuseet, pillars and glass gleaming in the sunlight, fusion of things old and new from these past hundred years.
Rachel Sklar is the co-founder of TheLi.st. She wrote this in 2003 after living in Stockholm for six months. In addition to writing about the Nobel Museum, Rachel also gained 15 pounds from delicious Swedish chocolate, recorded four tracks for a Swedish dance club and invested in H&M. Her favorite Swedish phrase was “Jag har inte pojkvan.” She thinks Sweden rules.
