Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun
(1859-1952) was a towering figure of Norwegian letters. He was also a
Nazi sympathizer and supporter of the German occupation of Norway during
the Second World War. In 1943, Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to
Third-Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a token of his
admiration and authored a reverential obituary for Hitler in May 1945.
For decades, scholars have wrestled with the dichotomy between Hamsun's
merits as a writer and his infamous ties to Nazism.
In her incisive study of Hamsun, Monika Zagar refuses to separate his
political and cultural ideas from an analysis of his highly regarded
writing. Her analysis reveals the ways in which messages of racism and
sexism appear in plays, fiction, and none-too-subtle nonfiction produced
by a prolific author over the course of his long career. In the process,
Zagar illuminates Norway's changing social relations and long history of
interaction with other peoples.
Focusing on selected masterpieces as well as writings hitherto largely
ignored, Zagar demonstrates that Hamsun did not arrive at his notions of
race and gender late in life. Rather, his ideas were rooted in a mindset
that idealized Norwegian rural life, embraced racial hierarchy, and
tightly defined the acceptable notion of women in society. Making the
case that Hamsun's support of Nazi political ideals was a natural
outgrowth of his reactionary aversion to modernity, Knut Hamsun serves
as a corrective to scholarship treating Hamsun's Nazi ties as unpleasant
but peripheral details in a life of literary achievement.
