The Nobel Peace Prize E-Book

Emil Bobi

• Herausgeber: Ecowin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 270

Beschreibung

For more than a hundred years, the Nobel Prizes have been the world's most well-respected awards. The announcement of the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize regularly causes astonished or even disapproving reactions. How can people become laureates who are not publicly perceived as peacekeepers or –builders, but rather as war criminals? Journalist Emil Bobi investigates the truth behind the imperial setting of the Nobel Foundation and asks inconvenient questions about the handling of Alfred Nobel's money and last will. What lies beneath the selection of winners? There's a massive scandal going on right beneath the award's shiny surface. Corrupt practices and accusations about the abuse of the foundation's money are threatening the future of the renowned award. A million-dollar-lawsuit is under way and the powerful Nobel Foundation is nervously working all angles to prevent investigations and ban them by law. Authorities and the government are trying their best to avoid dealing with the case. It's time to scrutinize and reconsider a national treasure. Emil Bobi has travelled to Stockholm and Oslo to talk to awardees, members of the foundation, politicians, members of authorities, advocates and opponents. The result is a shocking story of politics and crime.

Leseprobe

Emil Bobi

THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The Truth behind the Honor

The original edition was published in 2015 under the title

Der Friedensnobelpreis – Ein Abriss by Emil Bobi, Wals near Salzburg.

© by Emil Bobi

All rights of the German edition

© 2015 Ecowin Verlag by Benevento Publishing

A brand of Red Bull Media House GmbH, Wals near Salzburg

All rights reserved, in whole or in part, especially the right of public lecture/recitation, the right to transmit by radio and television, and the translation right. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical (which includes but is not limited to: photocopying, recording, taping or storing information) – without the written permission of Red Bull Media House GmbH.

Translated by: Jake Schneider

Alfred Nobel’s letters on pages 132–139: © Kenne Fant. Alfred Nobel: A Biography. trans. Marianne Ruuth. New York: Arcade, 2014.

E-Book conversion: Satzweiss.com Print Web Software GmbH

Owner, publisher and editor:

Red Bull Media House GmbH

Oberst-Lepperdinger-Straße 11–15

5071 Wals near Salzburg, Austria

ISBN 978-3-7110-5147-9

For Johanna

Inhalt

The Last Will and Testament

A Hundred Years On

The “Peace” Mongers

Since Time Immemorial

The Antagonist

Heikensten, Head of the Foundation, Has No Fear of Investigations

Alfred

The Road to Court

The Oslo Syndrome

Acknowledgments

The Last Will and Testament

November 27, 1895, Paris

What force could drive a man to create circumstances throughout his life that could blow him to bits at the slightest error? The answer is not so important. What is important is that Alfred Nobel did just that. And even more important, perhaps: the fact that he never was blown to bits.

Nobel made numerous decisions in his life that he only survived because they were the right ones. Before reaching for a handhold in his arduous climb, he knew in advance why that particular handhold needed to be grasped at that precise moment, with no room for error. If he wanted to live, he could not afford a single mistake. For decades he had worked with explosives day and night, and not just to blast holes in rock faces from a safe distance. He experimented with these substances in search of the unknown, unsure what the next moment would bring but confident that it had to be correct. Every step of his procedure was necessarily a product of crystal-clear considerations, guided by a sense of smell that, among a range of unfamiliar aromas, always sniffed out the right one. His tireless experiments with these aggressive compounds prove two things about him as a person. First, Alfred Nobel knew what he wanted. And second, he knew what he was doing. He was still alive after all his lengthy experiments because he had learned to think on his feet.

On this particular Wednesday, Alfred Nobel wanted to settle his accounts. He had ridden his carriage to Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, site of the Swedish-Norwegian Club, to compose a document that would captivate posterity. Western civilization was going through a period of almost daily discoveries and inventions that would change life forever. Human civilization, it seemed, stood at the verge of a breakthrough into a new cultural dimension – and many believed utopia could also be created through human inventiveness. It was presumed that the solutions to all of life’s problems existed, ready-­made, within nature and only needed to be identified and isolated. That year a certain Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had discovered “a new kind of ray”: the X-ray. In Germany, the world’s first bus line began operation with a gasoline-fueled omnibus. The word “electron” was coined. The first-ever comic strip was printed in the New York ­World. In Paris, the first public film screening was held, and in Vienna, Sigmund Freud set foot on the previously uncharted territory of dreams. But all of Europe stank of war. And not only Europe. Italy had invaded Abyssinia, France had annexed Madagascar, and Belgium had laid claim to the Congo.

Sensing that his life was drawing to a close, Alfred Nobel stepped into the Swedish-Norwegian club, which he visited on occasion to observe his compatriots’ cultural activities over a glass of water. Wearing his trademark black suit and white shirt and carrying a cane as he had since his forties, he proceeded with short, cautious steps, as if on thin ice, to a desk, where he took a seat. He was accompanied by the retired lieutenant Sigurd Ehrenborg, the civil engineers Robert Wilhelm Strehlenert and Leonard Hwass, and the inventor Thorsten Nordenfelt. Nobel asked the men for a small favor: to testify before the law that he had not lost his wits.

That can be arranged, the group joked, and the four men signed a statement to the effect that “Mr. Alfred Bernhard Nobel, being of sound mind, has of his own free will declared the above to be his last Will and Testament” and that he had signed it, as had they, the four witnesses, in Nobel’s presence “and the presence of each other.”

Beyond their status as legal formalities, these were also precautions, for a reader of his will could easily have questioned the author’s sanity. The multimillionaire Alfred Nobel, one of the world’s first international industrial magnates, had decided to give his entire fortune away. Nobel sank into an upholstered chair at the desk in the club, traded his cane for a pen, and set down his thoughts.

He was a strange bird, that Swede: rootless, restless, constantly seeking, constantly escaping. Always departing and almost never arriving. Seeing things that were not there – or not yet there. Either shy or socially anxious and both coldly analytic and judgmental, but with a look of pleading, almost childish intimidation in his eyes, at times punctuated by flashes of irony and mischievousness. A peculiarly cryptic and sophisticated misfit. A gung-ho maverick, a reckless lateral thinker, a sarcastic cool customer. He spent his days and nights pondering in his laboratory or sitting in railway cars between Paris, St. Petersburg, London, Stockholm, and the rest of Europe. There was no country or social group where he fit in. Intellectually homeless and brimming with ideas, weighed down by the pressure of his complicated existence, he was impetuous, exhausted, aggravated. He would have preferred peace and quiet, but there was no time for that. Victor Hugo, one of the few people with a personal connection to him, called him “the wealthiest vagabond in Europe.”

An Unhealthy Mind in an Unhealthy Body

Nobel might have been a vagabond, but he was no hedonist. On his headlong rush through life, he had never paused to turn around and take a good look at his pursuers. With unquestioned doggedness, he had endured routine eighteen- or twenty-hour days, complaining if the results were a single millimeter off target. He had established not just one factory, not three or five, but a grand total of eighty factories in twenty countries. The reason he never built even more was not that he was content, but that he had reached the end of his life. He was not concerned about the companies, about contentment or dissatisfaction. The point was never to stop. Compared to Nobel’s workaholic disintegration, the condition we now call “burnout” seems like ridiculous holistic nonsense dreamed up by a leisure society grown weary of itself. In his spare time, Nobel filed 355 patents, among them rayon, artificial rubber, a system of explosion-proof steam boilers, an automatic brake, camera-equipped hot-air balloons for spying on enemies, and on and on. All this work was far too much yet never enough, and he accomplished it under the most adverse circumstances. His immense compulsion to create was curtailed by depression, endangered by anxiety and obsessive thoughts, and isolated by a uniform mistrust of all other people. Then, apart from his unhealthy mind, there was his unhealthy body: lifelong migraines, chronic muscle inflammations, scurvy, a weak heart, rheumatism, and an unsettled stomach. He never sat still because his body was incessantly searching for a less painful position. His staring eyes, as though nauseated into silence, peered out of dark, cavernous hollows. It was hard to imagine that the man had ever been young. At the same time, there was something distinctly childlike about him. His scampering gait was like that of a toddler just learning to walk, and his eyes were nervous, affectionate, inquisitive, revealing. His few close friends wrote that they would take on an impish glitter whenever he was formulating one of his sarcastic sideswipes at the world. Cheeky and playful with language, until his last he smoldered with a capacity for happiness clearly reserved for some future world that would only materialize when humankind had reached a higher cultural plane.

At heart he was a writer, a philosopher. Someone deeply concerned with life and the way the world works, someone with something to say. But he hid what he had to say from the world and only wrote it down in secret. The characters of his tragedy Nemsia, a memoir disguised as a play, say things about his family and childhood that he would never dare utter himself. Many of his letters told of the agony of living “half a life,” of passing through a “valley of tears,” of having been robbed of a childhood. He griped about squandering his time on mind-numbing meetings with managers and bureaucrats, not to mention constantly riding those despised night trains to anywhere.

Explosion Hazards and a Safe Haven

The only thing that staved off an early meltdown and drove him onward was a force even stronger than his fatigue: addiction. He was addicted to investigating, inventing, discovering, and developing, seduced like a gambler by the tempting possibilities. For him, the key to mental and physical survival lay in the invisible expanses of the not yet invented. That was where he came into his own. By researching, he could simultaneously withdraw into and escape himself. His sharpened concentration on his work gave him refuge from his outside life. What he sought in the potentially fatal danger of his experiments was nothing but safety and security. A modern psychiatrist could draw up a long list of medical terms for his symp­toms.

While Nobel was hunched over the cream-colored paper, scratching at it with his pen, no one else was allowed nearby, not even the four men who had testified to his soundness of mind. The contents of his last will were to remain secret until his death. Not seeming to give his writing much thought, he dashed off one sentence after another as if he had previously memorized them all.

So strangely did this man’s mind work that he had had his epiphany during an explosion. As a boy in St. Petersburg, he was fascinated to hear about a liquid that the chemist Ascanio Sobrero had discovered in Turin in 1847. It would occupy Alfred Nobel’s full attention from then on. Dubbed pyroglycerine by the discoverer, it later became known as glyceryl trinitrate, or nitroglycerin. If a drop of the substance was struck with a hammer, it would explode with such shocking furiousness that it put all its predecessors to shame and even scared the living daylights out of military officers, as later demonstrations would show. This liquid’s colossal power opened up a new magnitude of explosiveness that concluded the centuries-long era of black gunpowder, which suddenly seemed the stuff of mere firecrackers. But that would only happen once Alfred Nobel had done his part.

Because nitroglycerin was useless. It could not be controlled. The substance only exploded in the very spot where the hammer struck the liquid and only if the liquid was placed on an iron surface. On wood, for example, nothing happened. Heated slowly, it would blast at 180 degrees centigrade. But heated quickly, the blast came at 230 degrees. That was all anyone knew, not enough to make it usable and not enough to trigger a controllable explosion at a particular place and time from a safe distance. One could not simply pour the stuff somewhere and bash it with a hammer. And neither could the liquid be used as a weapon: it was hardly realistic to hand containers of nitroglycerin cautiously to the enemy and ask them to subject the contents to a major shock. Sobrero, the discoverer, had brainstormed and tested all sorts of approaches, but in the end he recommended avoiding it at all costs. In part because the ungovernable, diabolical substance had disfigured his own face.

But the very same substance mesmerized Alfred Nobel. He devoted his entire being to it. He risked his life numerous times in the quest to tame it. His goal was to make it controllable, easy to handle with calculated risk, and suitable for industrial use. But before he managed that, the man’s first order of business was to make the explosive, already by far the most aggressive known to humanity, more violent still. So he simply mixed the old in with the new. He named this blend of nitroglycerin and black gunpowder blasting oil, and it was indeed even more explosive than pure nitroglycerin.

But how could he set off these explosions safely and deliberately? How could he contain the blast within a chosen area in order to achieve a constructive outcome, such as blowing a mineshaft ­through the rock of a mountain? How could he create the severe shock needed to detonate nitroglycerin from a safe distance? And how could he make nitroglycerin more chemically stable so that no one would have to risk their lives to handle and transport it?

The Bomb Inside the Bomb

So Alfred Nobel invented two things: first the detonator, then dynamite. And the problem of how to create a shock to detonate the nitroglycerin? He solved it using his exquisitely simple thought processes. He asked himself: Why not do to it what you do to everything else – blow it up? Why not shock the nitroglycerin by blasting a charge of gunpowder? A blast, of all things, could trigger the explosion. Incredible. A bomb inside a bomb. A small bomb explodes within the larger bomb, detonating the latter. Nobel constructed a wooden plug, filled it with gunpowder, and attached it to a fuse. He then surrounded the whole contraption with the actual explosive and that was all it took – he had built the sensation of an era. The “Nobel blasting cap,” the most important development in explosives since the invention of gunpowder, is still used today in virtually unchanged form for “booster detonation.”

Then came dynamite. Dynamite is nothing but liquid nitroglycerin bonded with a solid substance. It is nitroglycerin in a solid, and therefore more stable, state. After hundreds of trials he found a suitable material that could bond with large amounts of nitroglycerin without seriously reducing its explosive power: diatomaceous earth, or kieselgur. A worthless, whitish powder composed of the fossilized remains of single-celled algae. Mixed with nitroglycerin, it formed a paste that could be portioned into manageable cylinders and placed conveniently into blast holes. It could be transported in wooden crates at fairly low risk because, under normal conditions, the required shock could not occur between boards. Nitroglycerin, the chemical monster, had been tamed. The rods, with their wax-paper wrapping, could be thrown through the air and nothing would happen. If the paste was ignited, it burned steadily like oil. Only if someone lit the fuse and the gunpowder inside the paste caught fire would every­thing in its path be blasted to smithereens.

Annihilation Instead of Conquest

Whether deliberately, incidentally, or inadvertently, he had also invented a weapon whose significance as a method of killing was just as groundbreaking. With dynamite, he had designed a means of convenient mass murder that could be committed by individuals with little effort. Suddenly war was no longer a matter of conquering, but annihilating. Likewise, this new capability of carrying out at­tacks using explosives ushered in a precursor of modern terrorism.

The St. Gotthard Train Tunnel through the Alps and many other transportation engineering projects would have been inconceivable without Nobel’s blasting paste. In the American Civil War, his dynamite rods flew through the air. A wave of attacks using dynamite spread across Europe and beyond. Some of his factories exploded. It tore apart ships and other conveyances loaded with his invention –and Alfred Nobel made many millions.

Now his heart was growing weaker by the day and the end was in sight. Years earlier he had written his first will, only to set it aside. His second will did not hold up to further reflection, so he had thrown that one out as well. But now he had made his final decision. One of its casualties was the Swedish-Norwegian Club itself, at whose desk he was now writing. He had left the club a stately sum in his second will, but wrote it out of the new one entirely. The club, which has since moved to Rue de Rivoli, still holds the “testament desk” as a treasured possession and to this day expresses tongue-in-cheek regret about being disinherited. This book will discuss the second will once more later on as we try to grasp what sort of “peace” Alfred Nobel meant when he conceived one of his prizes.

Barbarians Incapable of Peace

Nobel had come to the conclusion that passing on large fortunes within a family was to everyone’s disadvantage. As he saw it, family members should only inherit as much as they needed to sustain themselves and acquire a good education, or else it would impair their motivation and productivity. He also believed that for humanity to progress into a peaceful collective community, there needed to be general well-being, not individual wealth. He was neither a communist, nor a pacifist, nor even really a democrat. He was a coldblooded engineer who craved peace and quiet in his core. One of his life’s great questions was how to reach a state of affairs that could be called world peace. For him it was plain as day that people of all walks of life had a kernel of barbarity inside them, that they were too underdeveloped mentally, intellectually, and culturally to usher in a social atmosphere able to establish a state of peace and safeguard it through intelligent conflict resolution strategies, such as novel international arbitration tribunals. Nobel was not necessarily in favor of the universal right to vote. He thought the uneducated masses would storm the ballot boxes with potentially menacing and dangerous implications. He publicly expressed repugnance not only for the arrogant upper class, but also for the riffraff in the streets.

In his view, any means to achieve global peace was valid. He had spent years racking his brains for ways to accomplish it. Could the threat of an all-destroying “superbomb” force humans to hold their fire? Did it count as peace if people only put their weapons down because they were afraid to pull the trigger? Not only did Nobel seriously dream of such a superbomb, he made concerted efforts to invent it, to create what the world would eventually come to know as the atomic bomb, which ensured a “balance of terror” through mutually assured destruction. Or, he alternatively pondered, was it possible to establish a new international community of thought, allowing humanity to replace the ancient principles of “healthy” mistrust and armed self-defense with some kind of trusting international diplomacy? Could preventive political measures, such as multilateral treaties, conceivably regulate what to do in a conflict and warn would-be aggressors of collective sanctions?

On Either Side

For years, Alfred Nobel had sat on the fence. Whether “peace ­through war” or “peace through peace,” he was neutral about the approach as long as it was effective. He, the socially phobic misfit who had never had any intimate friends nor a wife and had written many letters describing his oppressive loneliness, in fact received the decisive guidance on his great question from a woman, the Austrian Baroness Bertha von Suttner. With boyish faith he even showed her his poems, which he otherwise kept entirely private. It was a partnership of minds charged with a crackling tension, intellectual ex­change as a timid stand-in for something else. Von Suttner was an entirely new class of woman for her time. A speaker of many languages, highly educated, and with a ravenous intellect, she passed ­through the homes of royalty and statesmen across Europe. So the peace that Alfred Nobel ultimately intended had something to do with love. A love that would forever remain a fantasy, not unlike world peace, which is so often dreamed of but never attained.

Nobel had decided to return his amassed riches to the public as a kind of fertilizer for general progress. Instead of funding soup kitchens, building hospitals, or alleviating other symptoms of social and cultural underdevelopment, he wanted conversely to promote development. He would not throw all his money out the window as a one-off payment “for the greater good.” He wanted it to keep working, to keep incentivizing the world year after year. Alfred Nobel had thought far ahead. As a child of the Age of Invention, he believed that inventions alone could create the conditions for universal well-being upon which true peace could be built. The claim that Nobel bestowed his millions on the public because he had no children of his own is just as inaccurate as the idea that he donated the money to a good cause out of guilt over his inventions’ destructive implications.

Alfred Nobel did not make a donation, but an investment in a suite of development policy measures so far ahead of his time that only a small few understood them in the least. He selected five categories under which to award prizes for the greatest accomplishments in discovering or developing advancements that would bring humankind forward intellectually, culturally, or socially and prepare us, in the long term, for peace. These included prizes for three branches of science – physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine; from the humanities, a prize for the field of literature; and a kind of all-round prize for direct, tangible actions to bring about more peaceful conditions.

The Third Will

Nobel sat there and distributed his millions with his pen. He started by listing relatives, other people close to him, and employees who would receive smaller amounts. Here is the will, verbatim, as translated from the original in Swedish:

To my nephews, Hjalmar and Ludvig Nobel, the sons of my brother Robert Nobel, I bequeath the sum of Two Hundred Thou­sand Crowns each;

To my nephew Emanuel Nobel, the sum of Three Hundred Thousand, and to my niece Mina Nobel, One Hundred Thou­sand Crowns;

To my brother Robert Nobel’s daughters, Ingeborg and Tyra, the sum of One Hundred Thousand Crowns each;

Miss Olga Boettger, at present staying with Mrs. Brand, 10 Rue St. Florentin, Paris, will receive One Hundred Thousand Francs;

Mrs. Sofie Kapy von Kapivar, whose address is known to the Anglo-Oesterreichische Bank in Vienna, is hereby entitled to an annuity of 6,000 Austrian Florins which is paid to her by the said Bank, and to this end I have deposited in this Bank the amount of 150,000 Fl. in Hungarian State Bonds;

Mr. Alarik Liedbeck, presently living at 26 Sturegatan, Stockholm, will receive One Hundred Thousand Crowns;

Miss Elise Antun, presently living at 32 Rue de Lubeck, Paris, is entitled to an annuity of Two Thousand Five Hundred Francs. In addition, Forty-Eight Thousand Francs owned by her are at present in my custody, and shall be refunded;

Mr. Alfred Hammond, Waterford, Texas, U.S.A., will receive Ten Thousand Dollars;

The Misses Emy and Marie Winkelmann, Potsdamerstrasse 51, Berlin, will receive Fifty Thousand Marks each;

Mrs. Gaucher, 2 Boulevard du Viaduc, Nîmes, France, will receive One Hundred Thousand Francs;

My servants, Auguste Oswald and his wife Alphonse Tournand, employed in my laboratory at San Remo, will each receive an annuity of One Thousand Francs;

My former servant, Joseph Girardot, 5 Place St. Laurent, Châlons sur Saône [sic], is entitled to an annuity of Five Hundred Francs, and my former gardener, Jean Lecof, at present with Mrs Desoutter, receveur Curaliste, Mesnil, Aubry pour Ecouen, S. & O., France, will receive an annuity of Three Hundred Francs;

Mr. Georges Fehrenbach, 2 Rue Compiègne, Paris, is entitled to an annual pension of Five Thousand Francs from January 1, 1896 to January 1, 1899, when the said pension shall discontinue;

A sum of Twenty Thousand Crowns each, which has been placed in my custody, is the property of my brother’s children, Hjalmar, Ludvig, Ingeborg, and Tyra, and shall be repaid to them.

And now:

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical work by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting [parliament]. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.

Next he nominated the will’s executors, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, along with a long list of financial institutions in various countries where Nobel’s millions were deposited. Signed: Alfred Bernhard Nobel, Paris, November 27, 1895.

Nobel sent the legal document to Enskilda Bank in Stockholm for safekeeping until his death.

When it came to the prize for the “champion of peace,” he had identified three interdependent sub-areas. The first area, “fraternity between nations,” that is to say, the establishment of an international politics of peace, was a prerequisite for the second area, the reduction or abolition of standing armies as a result of transcended mistrust. This policy, in turn, would be discussed, advanced, publicized, and clarified in the third, intermediate area, “peace congresses.” Upon closer inspection, what would later become known as the “Peace Prize” is not actually a prize for peace, but for the abolition of war, a much narrower goal. This prize was to be bestowed for the most successful practical and grounded effort to put an end to military conflicts.

Alfred Nobel spent very little of his massive wealth on himself and gave it all back. He never considered taking a vacation even once in his life. The only breaks he ever indulged himself in were several curative stays at health resorts, where he hoped to alleviate his many ailments. He owned a few horses, a lake house in Zurich, and another residence in Paris, which he later replaced with his final home in Sanremo, Italy. He preferred simple meals and washed them down with a glass of water, even when entertaining guests. Beyond mere austerity, he was particularly, even extremely, thrifty and avoided spending money whenever possible – to the extent that he mostly made do without a secretary and did everything by himself, even though that kept him unnecessarily busy. But for him – who knew from childhood what it meant to own nothing, and who had witnessed the “old days” in Stockholm and St. Petersburg with their throngs of street beggars – his restrained attitude towards money came less from naked greed than from a humble respect for its value.

A Hundred Years On

December 5, 2014, Stockholm

“Cream of cauliflower soup, mosaic of red king crab, peas and lemon-­pickled cauliflower florets. Spiced loin of red deer, carrot terrine, salt-­baked golden beets, smoked pearl onions, potato purée, and game jus. Mousse and sorbet of wild dewberries from Gotland, saffron panna cotta, and brown butter sponge cake. Tea, coffee, spirits.”

Klas Lindberg smiles. He has been a champion of the Culinary World Cup and won a gold medal at the Culinary Olympics as one of the most valuable players on the Swedish national culinary team. But none of that matters anymore. Now he has finally reached the top. The fashionably bald but unshaven hotshot with the radiant smile spent the past eight months brainstorming with the country’s gathered gastronomic intellects, Sweden’s sixty best chefs, and culinary consultants of all stripes, including professors of culinary arts at Umeå University and the artistic directors of the Restaurant Academy, calling interminable meetings to harvest their knowledge. He used the time to experiment and taste, seize upon ideas, tweak and prod them, then discard them and start again from scratch. All of that to be ready for higher inspiration. The nearly hundred-person team of experts has now put together the menu for the three-course dinner described above. The dinner for the 2014 Nobel laureates. The Nobel banquet. The national feast.

The king of Sweden will be there, along with his family, the staff of the Nobel Foundation and Nobel Committees, the prime minister, six government ministers, the chairs of all parties in Parliament, 1,500 guests of honor, philanthropists, admirers, and luminaries. The banquet will take place on December 10, the day of Alfred Nobel’s death, but it all gets going tomorrow because the preparations alone will take four days and all the food will need to be ready at the same exact instant. At a very particular instant, in fact. At 7:03 pm, fanfares will sound in the flower-strewn Blue Hall at Stockholm City Hall. Led by the king and accompanied by organ and trumpets, the procession of guests will spill down the main staircase and assemble around the high table at 7:11 pm for a first flute of champagne. At 7:14 pm, with more fanfares, the chairman of board of the Nobel Foundation will give a toast to the king. At 7:16 pm, the king will say something nice about Alfred Nobel: a second toast. At 7:18 pm, two photo sessions of two minutes each will be held at the table of honor. Then another six minutes for the guests to find their seats before Klas Lindberg gives the order for his masterpiece to be carried forth. Calm and collected as a mighty river, his ballet corps of 260 waiters will flow down the main stairs, balancing platters glittering with sparklers over their right shoulders, then branch out to serve the first course at 7:33 pm to all the guests at the very same moment.

The evening will proceed this way for an hour and a half. And then, when it is almost all over – the musical and ballet interludes between courses, the other photo sessions, the laureates’ witty speeches – and the attendees have climbed one floor up for the dance in the Golden Hall, Klas will only have to serve the coffee, tea, and spirits at 10:08 pm before relaxing in his immortality and having a celebratory drink in the kitchen with his forty-six sous-chefs and hundreds of helpers.