Knut Hamsun

A classic case of a nationalist accused of treason in wartime is that of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who won the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature and employed his prose talent during World War II for the cause of his country.

It presents a striking parallel with Ezra Pound’s case. Like Pound, Hamsun was accused of treason for his writings on behalf of the enemy cause. Like Pound, Hamsun, it was popularly thought, was incapacitated mentally. He was, after all, 87 years old at the time of his trial. Robert Ferguson, Hamsun’s biographer, points to “a widespread and comfortable myth” that Hamsun’s political views were a result of senile dementia. Two psychiatrists had found him suffering from “permanently impaired mental faculties.”⁶⁹ But clearer than such a judgment is the evidence that Hamsun was fully in control of his mental faculties, especially when the memoir he wrote following his trial, On Overgrown Paths (1949), is taken into account. Like Pound, Hamsun continued to write after his trial and after confinement based on his mental state.

The leader of the Nazi party in Norway, Vidkun Quisling, was tried for treason and executed for his activities in plotting the Norwegian invasion by Germany, in ordering the execution of Norwegians, and in persecuting the Jews.⁷⁰ Hamsun came nowhere near such activities, not even joining the Norwegian Nazi party, the National Union. Unlike Quisling, Hamsun could claim that he was a true patriot of Norway. Unlike Pound, Hamsun mounted a coherent defense of his writings.

In 1942, when he was in his early 80s, Hamsun unwisely met with Joseph Goebbels and later with Hitler himself, incurring the anger of most Norwegians. The Goebbels meeting was the more unfortunate.

Nevertheless, at Hitler’s death Hamsun could not restrain himself from writing the following necrology—a mark of Hamsun’s political naiveté as much as his devotion to the cause:

I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. His was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism which finally felled him. Thus might the average western European regard Adolf Hitler. We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.⁷²

More important in Hamsun’s case are his ideas. First, he was an anglophobe to the core. For more than forty years he expressed his hatred for all things British. Hamsun argued, for instance, that when England refused to allow Hitler to take the Polish corridor, England was provoking the war: “No, England insisted on a war, and Hitler drew his sword. He was a crusader, a reformer. He would create a New Age, a New Life, a lasting agreement among individual peoples which would operate in the best interests of every land.” Hamsun advocated bringing England to her knees.⁷³ Not only did Hamsun view resisting the Germans as futile but also as unpatriotic. “England is in no position to come to your aid,” he wrote, “other than to send small bands of men here and there to roam through the valleys begging for food.

When the Norwegian king and government removed themselves to London, Hamsun saw it as a betrayal: “It’s the King and his government that has led me into this wretchedness.”⁷⁵ At his hearing Hamsun said, “I might have tried to betake myself to England, as so many also did who later came back from there as heroes because they had deserted their country, fled from their land.… I thought I served my country best by staying where I was, tilling the soil as best I could in midst of those hard times, when the nation was short of everything, and as for the rest using my pen for Norway which should now attain such a high rank among the Germanic lands of Europe.”⁷⁶

Hamsun’s views on race, especially his championship of the Germanic, may bring him closer to the charges of pro-Nazi treason. He accepted the Nazi myths of race. “There had been held out to us,” Hamsun stated at his hearing, “the prospect of Norway’s attaining a high and outstanding position in the great Germanic world-community which was now in the offing and which we all believed in, more or less—but all believed in it. I believed in it; therefore I wrote as I did. I wrote of Norway.”⁷⁷ Robert Ferguson observes that Hamsun “soon drifted into a vague and semi-respectable form of anti-Semitism.” Nevertheless, anti-Semitism though it may have been, it was not the fanatical variety of Ezra Pound’s.⁷⁸ On a broader scale, Hamsun’s racial views mirror a current of thought that rose to high respectability in the early part of the twentieth century: biological determinism linked with a racial mystique. Stephen Jay Gould has documented and debunked such assumptions, but the extent of acceptance of racial inferiority/superiority notions in the 1920s and 1930s must be seen as providing a perspective on Hamsun’s views.⁷⁹ As a nationalist, and like all nationalists, Hamsun used the thinking of his day to press his case for Norway.

Soon after the liberation of Norway in May 1945, Hamsun was arrested and interned in an old folks’ home. He underwent extensive questioning by Dr. Gabriel Langfeldt, who had been appointed by the attorney general to determine whether Hamsun was fit to stand trial. Their exchanges reflect the battle between two cultures, science and art. Hamsun wrote a memoir about it, On Overgrown Paths (1949), but Langfeldt wrote the official eighty-three-page report which concluded that Hamsun was a person with “permanently impaired mental faculties.” This report led the attorney general to drop criminal charges against Hamsun because “the public good will not be served” by proceeding against him at age 87. Hamsun was irate that he would not be able to clear his name but would “dangle between heaven and earth.”⁸⁰

The attorney general did retain one charge, that Hamsun had been a member of the Nazi organization led by Quisling, the National Union. At his trial on this charge, Hamsun denied belonging, but the court found that his willingness to be accepted as a member and his many statements that he had “drifted into” the party made him responsible. He was sentenced to pay a compensation to Norway of 425,000 kroner, a substantial, even ruinous, penalty.⁸¹

Hamsun sought to have the last word by writing his account, On Overgrown Paths, which was published when he was 90 years old. Not only does the book demonstrate that Dr. Langfeldt’s assessment of “permanently impaired mental faculties” was in error, but it shows that the popular explanation that he was senile is preposterous. We are left with the Hamsun we find in his 1949 book: a Norwegian nationalist who had the poor judgment to think that Nazi Germany would not merely be better for Norway than would England, but that Norway would become an important part of the new German-led Europe.