Jens Jonathan Wilhelmsen was born in Norway in 1926 – halfway between the two great wars which marred the face of the 20th century. During the second, Norway was occupied by Germany, and Jens participated in the clandestine resistance movement during the last months of the war.
Jens was in a depression when he met MRA. However, the MRA challenge “If you want to have a better world, the best place to start is with yourself”, struck him as truth. When he experimented with putting right some difficult family relationships, the results were a positive surprise.
He was studying philology at Oslo university when a German provincial government in 1948 requested MRA’s help to give “new hope to our people”. Jens decided that this was his chance to make a difference. The next five years he spent in the Ruhr, heartland of German heavy industry. He experienced that both industrialists with a Nazi background and trade unionists committed to Marxism changed and started a teamwork which contributed to Germany’s fast reconstruction.
In 1953, Wilhelmsen was invited to work with MRA in Japan. In industrial and political life and in the four million strong youth organization Seinendan, many became his friends. When Seinendan in 1957 decided to send one hundred of their leaders to an MRA conference in USA, Jens was asked to go along as an escort. Remaining in the US for two years after their visit, he was given a variety of tasks, from contacting politicians in Washington to supporting labor leaders applying MRA in the port of New York and Steel Valley in Pennsylvania.
Wilhelmsen has since had extensive experience in several African nations, India, Eastern Europe and throughout Western Europe. Since 1967, however, he and his wife Klär were based in Oslo. Klär died in 2015, but is survived by their two daughters and sons-in-law, 8 grandchildren and one great-grandson.
In between other activities, Jens has written three books, two of them published in both English and Norwegian.
