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Abstract
In 1920, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel Markens grøde ( Growth of the Soil) (1917). This article explores some of the key contexts for this work, highlighting the author’s own ambitions, the reasons why he sided with Germany during the war, and his generally völkisch perspectives on the Germanic and Nordic. It furthermore analyses the early reception of this World War I novel, and how it was first subjected to a number of positive readings and seen as an example of idealism, before being appropriated by Nazism.
Highlights
In November 1888 a literary fragment, published anonymously in the Danish journal Ny jord (New Earth), caused something of a sensation in Scandinavia
Long before he became a supporter of Fascism, Hamsun’s literary method had moved on from his early modernism
Just as he had rejected the methods of the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’ in the 1880s and 1890s, with its realism, rationalism and general belief in progress, he came to reject the prominent tendencies of the fin de siècle – what in Norwegian literary history has been called ‘nyromantikken’ (New Romanticism) – symbolism and decadence after the turn of the century (Andersen, 2001: 282–8)
Summary
Hamsun had followed the developments of the First World War at a safe distance, but with a keen eye on the fate of Germany. To wage war in order to survive was only natural, Hamsun concluded When he finished his new manuscript for a novel, Markens grøde, he at first told his publisher that he wanted to give it the subtitle: ‘A novel for my Norwegian contemporaries’ (Hamsun, undated). He wanted agriculture to take the place of class struggle, he wished for new settlements at home rather than emigration to America, depth rather than surface, Germanic ‘Kultur’ rather than French and British ‘Civilization’ Markens grøde, as he intended it, was to tie together his literature and his political engagements in new ways. Hamsun was a nobleman loved by the Germans because he was ‘blood of our blood’, the newspaper claimed Already by this time Hamsun had become a Nazi ideal, one who, as the Völkischer Beobachter noted, renewed culture by bringing forth ‘the grace of Germanic force’, by preaching ‘German faith and will to power’ (Anon., 1929). This was partly due to the fact that Germany had become his most important source of income, as he struggled with copyright issues in the Soviet Union, and partly because of the special role he came to give Germany, and later, no doubt, due to the political developments in what was to become the Soviet Union
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