Vippetangen

Vippetangen is a harbour area at the tip of the Akersneset peninsula in central Oslo, just below Akershus Fortress. The area has long been connected to shipping, ferries, fish handling, grain storage and port activity, and today it still contains several recognisable harbour buildings, including the large grain silo and the former fish hall area near what is now Vippa. Much of Vippetangen has changed over time, but parts of the old harbour landscape are still recognisable.

The area is especially important in Pastor Jarman kommer hjem (1958), Arne Skouen’s Norwegian crime drama starring Henki Kolstad as the sailor priest Jarman. In Max Manus (2008), Vippetangen is used for the sequence showing the German troop ship “Donau” moored in Oslo on 16 January 1945.

In Pastor Jarman kommer hjem (1958), large parts of the film take place around Vippetangen. The film follows Jarman after he returns to Oslo by ship and becomes involved in a mystery connected to the city’s harbour underworld. Because so much of the story is tied to sailors, dock workers and people living on the margins around the port, Vippetangen becomes one of the film’s most important Oslo locations. The harbour, quays, grain silo and fish intake area are used as part of the film’s maritime environment, and even though the area has changed considerably since the 1950s, the large grain silo and the fish-handling buildings are still easy to recognise. The location gives the film a strong sense of post-war Oslo, with the harbour functioning almost like a separate world within the city.

One of the key locations in the film is Kafé Vippetangen, which once stood in the tram loop at Vippetangen. The café was demolished in the early 1970s, and the tram tracks that curved around it are also gone today. This makes the film especially valuable as a visual record of a lost part of Oslo’s harbour history. In the film, Vippetangen is not just a background location, but a central part of the story’s atmosphere, tying Jarman’s investigation to the old docks, the ferry traffic and the rougher edges of the city.

In Max Manus (2008), Vippetangen is used for the sequence showing the German troop ship “Donau” moored in Oslo on 16 January 1945. The harbour area has been rebuilt for the film as a heavily controlled German military zone, with barbed wire, tanks, guards and large numbers of soldiers around the quay. Even though Vippetangen has changed considerably since the war, the large grain silo makes the location easy to recognise. The scene connects the film directly to one of Max Manus’ most famous sabotage operations: the mining of “Donau”, carried out by Manus and Roy Nielsen while the ship was docked in Oslo. The explosives later detonated in the Oslofjord near Drøbak, sinking the vessel.

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