What is the future of Vidkun Quisling’s grave monument?

The Norwegian leader of the fascist National Unity Party (Nasjonal Samling, NS), Vidkun Quisling, lies buried beneath a monument in Gjerpen in southeastern Norway—a gravestone that for decades went almost unnoticed, but has now evolved into a charged national symbol. 

The debate surrounding it is no longer simply about whether the stone should remain or be removed. It has become a question of what kind of memory politics a mature democracy should adopt.

For years, the monument blended quietly into the cemetery landscape—a private family marker that had shed its former public resonance. Nothing about the stone itself has changed. 

What has changed is the meaning people attach to it. Few people were aware that the Church City Mission, following the wishes laid out in Maria Quisling’s will, had been paying the grave lease since 1980. 

When the organisation announced in 2025 that it would no longer continue this arrangement, the grave’s future suddenly ignited a legal, ethical, and cultural‑political controversy.

Who has the right to shape its meaning?

The dispute over Quisling’s grave monument is not merely a practical question of preservation or removal. 

It is fundamentally about who holds the authority to interpret a private grave once it acquires public symbolic power. And when symbolic meaning spills beyond the boundaries of private memory, the issue of how such a site should be managed inevitably follows.

A crucial—and often overlooked—distinction lies between a gravestone and a monument. A gravestone is a private marker, governed by burial law and tied to personal remembrance. A monument, by contrast, is usually a public signifier loaded with political, cultural, and educational implications. 

Quisling’s grave sits uneasily between these categories: formally a family burial site, yet in practice a contested national symbol that can be interpreted, misused, or politicised far beyond the cemetery grounds.

Three stakeholders, three perspectives

Representatives of NS‑children have come forward and offered to take over the grave lease now that the Church City Mission has stepped back. For them, the matter is first and foremost about family, not ideology. 

They stress their right to mourn without the grave being turned into a stage—whether for public condemnation or, even more troublingly, for unwanted glorification.

Historians, curators, and educators, by contrast, point to the monument’s value as a historical source. 

Their case for preservation is rooted not in sympathy but in responsibility: the stone is one of the few physical traces of the post‑1945 legal purge and of Norway’s broader reckoning with its wartime past. 

Keeping it, they argue, promotes historical openness and provides important educational possibilities.

For those who suffered under Quisling’s collaborationist regime, however, the monument is something entirely different—a wound, a reminder of betrayal, trauma, and loss. For them, allowing the stone to remain can feel like a painful trivialisation of the harm they endured.

Difficult heritage: Balancing reasons for preservation and removal

Those in favour of preserving the monument point out that it is a tangible remnant of the occupation period associated with the fascist regime during World War II in Norway. 

Removing this difficult heritage could be interpreted as an attempt to erase or soften the darker chapters of national history. 

Like other forms of difficult heritage, they argue, the site can foster democratic learning and awareness of fascism and extremist movements.

Arguments for removal emphasise the risk of appropriation by extremist groups. The grave has already been the destination of occasional neo‑Nazi visits, and leaving the monument in place may unintentionally offer a pilgrimage site. 

These voices underline that history does not disappear with the stone; museums and archives can preserve the memory without granting the location symbolic power.

Precedents from Norway and Europe

Norway has previously handled NS‑related monuments through removal or deliberate neutralisation. 

The Snorri monument in the Royal Palace Park in central Oslo was dismantled immediately after the war in 1945, while the NS monument at Stiklestad—a site with deep national-historical resonance near Trondheim in mid‑Norway—was partly destroyed in an act of iconoclasm and the fragments buried that same year. 

Both cases effectively stripped the monuments of their political charge and prevented their later misuse.

Germany took an even more comprehensive approach after 1945. Nazi monuments were systematically removed, and the country developed a new memory culture that rejected heroic monumentalism in favour of self‑critical, often explicitly 'anti‑monumental forms.' 

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the 'Monument Against Fascism' in Hamburg each exemplify this shift, using absence, reflection, and discomfort to replace triumphal expressions of power.

Spain offers yet another model. In 2019, Francisco Franco’s remains were exhumed and moved from the Valley of the Fallen to prevent the site from functioning as a political pilgrimage destination. 

The massive memorial complex itself remained in place, but its meaning was redirected toward the victims of the Civil War. The Spanish case illustrates a potential compromise: removing the person while reframing—and defusing—the symbolic charge of the site.

Silence as a memory strategy

Cemeteries rely on quiet, dignity, and the presumption of peace. When a gravestone becomes a political symbol, it disturbs the very ethos of the religious space. While monuments can be relocated or recontextualised, gravestones traditionally receive stronger protection due to the respect owed to private grief.

This makes room for a third option: silencing. In memory political strategies, silencing means letting the monument stand, but stripping it of ceremony, attention, and symbolic activation. 

In memory theory, this is described as 'de‑politicisation through forgetting.' The power of the symbol fades not through physical removal but through the absence of meaning and ritual. For decades, this was precisely the situation around Quisling’s grave—a monument drained of monumentality, effectively neutralised by indifference.

For a society seeking to move beyond a painful past, silence can serve as a measured, democratic way to reduce tension without erasing history.

Toward a practical and responsible memory politics

The debate surrounding Quisling’s grave monument makes it clear that Norway continues to grapple with how to handle the physical traces of the occupation. 

This struggle is not a sign of uncertainty or weakness; rather, it reflects that history is still alive—still shaping public discussion, still influencing how the nation understands itself.

Any responsible solution must rest on a few fundamental principles, even if they are not presented as formal guidelines. It requires historical openness, acknowledging that the past cannot be edited or erased, and that pretending Quisling never existed would serve neither truth nor learning. 

It demands democratic security, ensuring that symbols from a dark chapter of history are not allowed to be appropriated or misused by contemporary extremist movements. It calls for dignity—both for the cemetery as a place of peace and for the broader culture of collective remembrance that underpins a democratic society. 

And above all, it requires respect for all those affected by the issue, with particular sensitivity toward the individuals and families who suffered under Quisling’s regime and for whom the monument remains a painful reminder.

Together, these principles form the basis of a memory politics that is both cautious and mature—one capable of addressing a troubling past without erasing it, and of stewarding historical traces without allowing them to become symbols of harm.

A test of democratic maturity

Quisling’s grave monument is more than a family marker; it is a tangible remnant of a national trauma. The stone itself poses no threat—what matters is how we choose to confront the history embedded within it. 

As memory theorist Michael Rothberg reminds us, we are all implicated subjects: even when we did not participate in past events, we continue to live with their consequences. Difficult heritage does not remain in the past; it shapes the political and cultural landscapes of the present and requires thoughtful, deliberate responses.

How Norway decides to handle Quisling’s monument—and other uncomfortable traces of its history—will say much about the country’s democratic maturity. Democracy is not a fixed achievement but an ongoing practice, strengthened by our willingness to face difficult histories rather than push them aside. 

It is in acknowledging and engaging with such troubling legacies that we reveal not only how we understand our past, but what kind of society we hope to be.