Mark Deavin
After fifty
years of being confined to the Orwellian memory hole created by the Jews as
part of their European „denazification“ process, the work of the Norwegian
author Knut Hamsun -- who died in 1952 -- is reemerging to take its place among
the greatest European literature of the twentieth century. All of his major
novels have undergone English-language reprints during the last two years, and
even in his native Norway, where his post-1945 ostracism has been most severe,
he is finally receiving a long-overdue recognition.
Of course, one debilitating
question still remains for the great and good of the European liberal
intelligentsia, ever eager to jump to Jewish sensitivities. As Hamsun’s English
biographer Robert Ferguson gloomily asked himself in 1987: „Could the
sensitive, dreaming genius who had created beautiful love stories ... really
have been a Nazi?“ Unfortunately for the faint hearts of these weak-kneed
scribblers, the answer is a resounding „yes.“ Not only was Knut Hamsun a
dedicated supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist New Order in
Europe, but his best writings -- many written at the tail end of the nineteenth
century -- flow with the essence of the National Socialist spirit and life
philosophy.
Born Knud Pederson on August
4, 1859, Hamsun spent his early childhood in the far north of Norway, in the
small town of Hamaroy. He later described this time as one of idyllic bliss
where he and the other children lived in close harmony with the animals on the
farm, and where they felt an indescribable oneness with Nature and the cosmos
around and above them. Hamsun developed an early obsession to become a writer
and showed a fanatical courage and endurance in pursuing his dream against
tremendous obstacles. He was convinced of his own artistic awareness and
sensitivity, and was imbued with a certainty that in attempting to achieve
unprecedented levels of creativity and consciousness, he was acting in
accordance with the higher purpose of Nature.
In January 1882 Hamsun’s
Faustian quest of self-discovery took him on the first of several trips to
America. He was described by a friend at the time as „tall, broad, lithe with
the springing step of a panther and with muscles of steel. His yellow hair ...
drooped down upon his ... clear-cut classical features.“
These experiences consolidated
in Hamsun a sense of racial identity as the bedrock of his perceived artistic
and spiritual mission. A visit to an Indian encampment confirmed his belief in
the inherent differences of the races and of the need to keep them separate,
but he was perceptive enough to recognize that America carried the seeds of
racial chaos and condemned the fact that cohabitation with Blacks was being
forced upon American Whites.
Writing in his book On the Cultural
Life of Modern America, published in March 1889, Hamsun warned that such a
situation gave rise to the nightmare prospect of a „mulatto stud farm“ being
created in America. In his view, this had to be prevented at all costs with the
repatriation of the „black half-apes“ back to Africa being essential to secure
America’s future (cited in Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun,
London, 1987, p.105). Hamsun also developed an early awareness of the Jewish
problem, believing that „anti-Semitism“ inevitably existed in all lands where
there were Jews -- following Semitism „as the effect follows the cause.“ He
also believed that the departure of the Jews from Europe and the White world
was essential „so that the White races would avoid further mixture of the blood“
(from Hamsun’s 1925 article in Mikal Sylten’s nationalist magazine Nationalt
Tidsskrift). His experiences in America also strengthened Hamsun’s
antipathy to the so called „freedom“ of democracy, which he realized merely
leveled all higher things down to the lowest level and made financial
materialism into the highest morality. Greatly influenced by the works of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Hamsun saw himself as part of the vanguard of a European
spiritual aristocracy which would reject these false values and search out
Nature’s hidden secrets -- developing a higher morality and value system based
on organic, natural law. In an essay entitled „From the Unconscious Life of the
Mind,“ published in 1890, Hamsun laid out his belief:
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity,
people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent
appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and
irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being
spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of
hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an
irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly
revealed.
Hamsun expounded this
philosophy in his first great novel Hunger, which attempted to show how
the known territory of human consciousness could be expanded to achieve higher
forms of creativity, and how through such a process the values of a society
which Hamsun believed was increasingly sick and distorted could be redefined
for the better. This theme was continued in his next book, Mysteries,
and again in Pan, published in 1894, which was based upon Hamsun’s own
feeling of pantheistic identification with the cosmos and his conviction that
the survival of Western man depended upon his re-establishing his ties with
Nature and leading a more organic and wholesome way of life.
In 1911 Hamsun moved back to
Hamaroy with his wife and bought a farm. A strong believer in the family and
racial upbreeding, he was sickened by the hypocrisy and twisted morality of a
modern Western society which tolerated and encouraged abortion and the
abandonment of healthy children, while protecting and prolonging the existence
of the criminal, crippled, and insane. He actively campaigned for the state
funding of children’s homes that could take in and look after unwanted children
and freely admitted that he was motivated by a higher morality, which aimed to „clear
away the lives which are hopeless for the benefit of those lives which might be
of value.“
In 1916 Hamsun began work on
what became his greatest and most idealistic novel, Growth of the Soil,
which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It painted Hamsun’s ideal of
a solid, farm-based culture, where human values, instead of being fixed upon
transitory artificialities which modern society had deemed fashionable, would
be based upon the fixed wheel of the seasons in the safekeeping of an
inviolable eternity where man and Nature existed in harmony:
They had the good fortune at Sellanraa that every spring and autumn they
could see the grey geese sailing in fleets above that wilderness, and hear
their chatter up in the air -- delirious talk it was. And as if the world stood
still for a moment, till the train of them had passed. And the human souls
beneath, did they not feel a weakness gliding through them now? They went to
their work again, but drawing breath first, for something had spoken to them,
something from beyond.
Growth of the Soil reflected Hamsun’s belief
that only when Western man fully accepted that he was intimately bound up with
Nature’s eternal law would he be able to fulfill himself and stride towards a
higher level of existence. At the root of this, Hamsun made clear, was the need
to place the procreation of the race back at the center of his existence:
Generation to generation, breeding ever anew, and when you die the new
stock goes on. That’s the meaning of eternal life.
The main character in the book
reflected Hamsun’s faith in the coming man of Europe: a Nietzschean superman
embodying the best racial type who, acting in accordance with Nature’s higher
purpose, would lead the race to unprecedented levels of greatness. In Hamsun’s
vision he was described thus:
A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without
respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point to the future; a man from the
earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old,
and withal, a man of the day.
Hamsun’s philosophy echoed
Nietzsche’s belief that „from the future come winds with secret beat of wings
and to sensitive ears comes good news“ (cited in Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth
of the Twentieth Century). And for Hamsun the „good news“ of his lifetime
was the rise of National Socialism in Germany under Adolf Hitler, whom he saw
as the embodiment of the coming European man and a reflection of the spiritual
striving of the „Germanic soul.“
The leaders of the new
movement in Germany were also aware of the essential National Socialist spirit
and world view which underlay Hamsun’s work, and he was much lauded,
particularly by Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg paid tribute to
Hamsun in his The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930,
declaring that through a mysterious natural insight Knut Hamsun was able to
describe the laws of the universe and of the Nordic soul like no other living
artist. Growth of the Soil, he declared, was „the great present-day epic of the
Nordic will in its eternal, primordial form.“
Hamsun visited Germany on
several occasions during the 1930s, accompanied by his equally enthusiastic
wife, and was well impressed by what he saw. In 1934 he was awarded the
prestigious Goethe Medal for his writings, but he handed back the 10,000 marks
prize money as a gesture of friendship and as a contribution to the National
Socialist process of social reconstruction. He developed close ties with the
German-based Nordic Society, which promoted the Pan-Germanic ideal, and in
January 1935 he sent a letter to its magazine supporting the return of the
Saarland to Germany. He always received birthday greetings from Rosenberg and
Goebbels, and on the occasion of his 80th birthday from Hitler himself.
Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,
Hamsun was not content merely to philosophize in an ivory tower; he was a man
of the day, who, despite his age, strove to make his ideal into a reality and
present it to his own people. Along with his entire family he became actively
and publicly involved with Norway’s growing National Socialist movement in the
form of Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling (National Assembly). This had been
founded in May 1933, and Hamsun willingly issued public endorsements and wrote
articles for its magazine, promoting the National Socialist philosophy of life
and condemning the anti-German propaganda that was being disseminated in Norway
and throughout Europe. This, he pointed out, was inspired by the Jewish press
and politicians of England and France who were determined to encircle Germany
and bring about a European war to destroy Hitler and his idea.
With the outbreak of war
Hamsun persistently warned against the Allied attempts to compromise Norwegian
neutrality, and on April 2, 1940 -- only a week before Hitler dramatically
forestalled the Allied invasion of Norway -- Hamsun wrote an article in the
Nasjonal Samling newspaper calling for German protection of Norwegian
neutrality against Anglo-Soviet designs. Hamsun was quick to point out in a
further series of articles soon afterward, moreover, that it was no coincidence
that C.J. Hambro, the president of the Norwegian Storting, who had conspired to
push Norway into Allied hands and had then fled to Sweden, was a Jew. In his
longest wartime article, which appeared in the Axis periodical Berlin-Tokyo-Rome
in February 1942, he also identified Roosevelt as being in the pay of the Jews
and the dominant figure in America’s war for gold and Jewish power. Declaring
his belief in the greatness of Adolf Hitler, Hamsun defiantly declared: „Europe
does not want either the Jews or their gold.“
Hamsun’s loyalty to the
National Socialist New Order in Europe was well appreciated in Berlin, and in
May 1943 Hamsun and his wife were invited to visit Joseph Goebbels, a devoted
fan of the writer. Both men were deeply moved by the meeting, and Hamsun was so
affected that he sent Goebbels the medal which he had received for winning the
Nobel Prize for idealistic literature in 1920, writing that he knew of no
statesman who had so idealistically written and preached the cause of Europe.
Goebbels in return considered the meeting to have been one of the most precious
encounters of his life and wrote touchingly in his diary: „May fate permit the
great poet to live to see us win victory! If anybody deserved it because of a
high-minded espousal of our cause even under the most difficult circumstances,
it is he.“ The following month Hamsun spoke at a conference in Vienna organized
to protest against the destruction of European cultural treasures by the
sadistic Allied terror-bombing raids. He praised Hitler as a crusader and a
reformer who would create a new age and a new life. Then, three days later, on
June 26, 1943, his loyalty was rewarded with a personal and highly emotional
meeting with Hitler at the Berghof. As he left, the 84 year-old Hamsun told an
adjutant to pass on one last message to his Leader: „Tell Adolf Hitler: we
believe in you.“
Hamsun never deviated from
promoting the cause of National Socialist Europe, paying high-profile visits to
Panzer divisions and German U-boats, writing articles and making speeches. Even
when the war was clearly lost, and others found it expedient to keep silence or
renounce their past allegiances, he remained loyal without regard to his personal
safety. This was brought home most clearly after the official announcement of
Hitler’s death, when, with the German Army in Norway packing up and preparing
to leave, Hamsun wrote a necrology for Hitler which was published in a leading
newspaper:
Adolf Hitler: 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 for all nations. He 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.
This was a tremendously brave
thing for Hamsun to do, as the following day the war in Norway was over and
Quisling was arrested.
Membership in Quisling’s
movement after April 8, 1940, had been made a criminal offense retroactively by
the new Norwegian government, and the mass roundups of around 40,000 Nasjonal
Samling members now began in earnest. Hamsun’s sons Tore and Arild were picked
up within a week, and on May 26 Hamsun and his wife were placed under house
arrest. Committed to hospital because of his failing health, Hamsun was subject
to months of interrogation designed to wear down and confuse him. As with Ezra
Pound in the United States, the aim was to bring about a situation where Hamsun’s
sanity could be questioned: a much easier option for the Norwegian authorities
than the public prosecution of an 85-year-old literary legend.
Unfortunately
for them, Hamsun refused to crack and was more than a match for his
interrogators. So, while his wife was handed a vicious three-year hard-labor
sentence for her National Socialist activities, and his son Arild got four
years for having the temerity to volunteer to fight Bolshevism on the Eastern
Front, Hamsun received a 500,000-kroner fine and the censorship of his books.
Even this did not stop him, however, and he continued to write, regretting
nothing and making no apologies. Not until 1952, in his 92nd year, did he pass
away, leaving us a wonderful legacy with which to carry on the fight which he
so bravely fought to the end.
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