Of skeletons in driveways and closets

There was a bit of excitement at work today. Norwegians, being ever practical people, have decided to use the heat generated when they incinerate the city´s trash to heat its schools and health care facilities by piping water superheated from the incinerator back into town. Part of this pipeline goes right through the complex where I´m working, so they´ve had earth movers out there digging a trench for days now. Today they turned up some human remains, which necessitated a visit from, well, whoever it is they call when a heap of bones turns up under a driveway. The young woman who came to take a look got to spend her day carefully excavating the bones with a spade and a brush in a ditch in the pouring rain, and I hope they pay her a lot.
The first thought was that these remains were from the 17th or 18th century, but it turns out they´re not nearly so old. They are more likely sixty or seventy years old, or were at least moved around that time. Sixty-some years ago Norway was occupied by the Nazis. This is something the city´s older residents are slow to forget or forgive, and I have seen more than one German tourist´s accent get him directed 180 degrees away from where he was heading. Anyway, the building where I work is one of several commandeered by the invading Nazi forces for the administration of occupied Bergen. The building lies up against the mountainside, and the Nazis dynamited a huge bunker out of the rock as an air raid shelter; it´s now a temperature-controlled parking lot. When doing the excavation work, the Germans apparently had to move some bones from the adjoining graveyard and just chucked them in one of the ditches off to the side, where they rested peacefully until an earth mover turned them up this morning.
Speaking of Nazis...Germany´s literary conscience and Nobel Prize winner Gunther Grass came out of the closet this week as a wartime member of the Waffen SS after sixty years of lying about his wartime service. Makes you wonder how (or whether) people will read his work now. Makes you wonder a bit about Germany´s conscience as well.