Nansen

Nansen (pronounced nan-sun)

(1) A surname of Scandinavian origin.

(2) A passport issued to a stateless refugee during the inter-war years (1922-1938).

1922: The noun Nansen in the sense of the passport was a direct adoption of the proper noun Nansen from the Norwegian explorer and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), then the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  The origin of the surname is unknown beyond it being a Danish & Frisian patronym meaning “son of Nanne”.  The use as a given name was an adaptation of the surname Nansen (the female form being Nansina).  As in many parts of Europe, surnames tended to be (1) occupational (names derived from the occupation or job of an ancestor), patronymic (2) a name passed down from either the father or more distant ancestor) or (3) toponymic (a place name, often taken from a geographical feature such as a mountain or river).  In places like England where parish records date back centuries family lines and the origins of surnames are relatively easy to trace but in Norway, prior to 1923, the most common male surnames were those that ended in “–son“ or “–sen” (meaning “son of”) which means tracing histories back more than two or three generations is difficult.  The female family names operated in the same way using the extension “–dotter” or “–datter” (meaning “daughter of”) so the surname of Nanne’s daughter would emerge either as “Nannesdotter” or “Nannesdatter.  Sweden abolished the practice in 1901 to ensure a single family name was passed from generation to generation; this was the convention Norway adopted in 1923.

The League of Nations began issuing travel documents (originally called “Stateless Persons Passports” under the auspices of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, then headed by Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930).  They quickly became generally known as “Nansen passports”., often shortened to “Nansen”.  The documents were needed because in the aftermath of what was the called The World War (which finished off the old Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov and Ottoman empires), national boundaries were re-drawn, civil wars erupted and something like what would now be called ethnic cleansing meant there were suddenly millions of stateless refugees on European soil.  Without passports, refugees were usually unable to travel from where they weren’t wanted.

What made the need for a non-state travel document was the new government of the Soviet Union (USSR) revoking the citizenship of Russians living abroad, a measure aimed at the 780,000-odd who had fled Russia after the Russian civil war.  The Nansen passports held by some of these Russians would prove life-saving in 1945 when, because of a still controversial agreement signed at the Yalta Conference (4-11 February 1945), Russians who had fought with the Wehrmacht and were interned by British & US forces were repatriated to the USSR because comrade Stalin wished to execute or otherwise punish Cossacks and other anti-Bolsheviks who had been troublesome since the Russian Revolutions (March & October 1917).  Actually, all those who had fled the country in 1922 and been rendered stateless then were exempt from repatriation but in the muddled haste with which the deportations were undertaken at the time, not all escaped and possession of a Nansen passport was sometime the difference between life and death.

After 1938, the passports issued by a newly created, London-based agency, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees under the Protection of the League of Nations.  Noted holders of Nansen passports include the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), the author Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the Nazi Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) and the composers Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) & Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).  It was Stravinsky who once described Rachmaninoff as “six feet of Russian misery”.