Queen Sonja, leaving the exhibition, said only, “I think we’ll have to keep two thoughts in our head at the same time.”Īfter the war a court-appointed psychiatrist found Hamsun too “diminished” from age, deafness and a stroke to undergo prosecution for treason, but a civil court confiscated much of his fortune. As most collaborators lay low, preparing alibis, Hamsun wrote, “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” One of the largest framed items at the National Library was the May 7, 1945, edition of a collaborationist newspaper whose lead article on Hitler’s death was by Knut Hamsun. That double-barreled approach was evident in Oslo last week. But he now says that commemorating Hamsun is acceptable, as long as his literary talent and his dark side receive equal focus. Norway should dissolve parliament and declare a dictatorship first, he said. In 2001 a prominent wartime resistance leader, Gunnar Sonsteby, helped defeat a proposal to name a street in Oslo after Hamsun.
He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave.”
“We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years,” said Ingar Sletten Kolloen, author of “Dreamer & Dissenter,” a Hamsun biography. But as the author of revered novels like “Hunger,” “Pan” and “Growth of the Soil,” Hamsun has remained on school reading lists and in the hearts of many Norwegians. Hamsun died in 1952 at 92, shunned by his countrymen and heavily fined for his spectacular wartime betrayal. Why the festivities, then? Call it reconciliation therapy, or a national airing out. Hamsun later flew to meet Hitler at Hitler’s mountain lair in Bavaria.
It is the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who welcomed the brutal German occupation of Norway during World War II and gave his Nobel Prize in Literature as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Yet the honoree is not a war hero, nor even a patriot. A statue is to be unveiled, and a $20 million architectural gem of a museum is under construction. OSLO It’s all you would expect of a national jubilee: street theater, brass bands, exhibitions and commemorative coins.
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