Hamsun

Last weekend we drove South to an area called Nordland, where one of Norway's most famous writers, Knut Hamsun, grew up. Since 2009 there has been a Hamsun Centre in his home town of Hamarøy. I remember reading about it at the time it opened: this architecturally unique tribute to a writer, lying in a small village in the far North, where even most Norwegians never travel. I've wanted to go there ever since.

I seem to remember reading that the architect wanted the experience of moving through the five floors of the building to echo that of reading the writer's prose in some way. The structure is an asymmetric box with a staircase climbing through it at strange angles to platforms which are partly open. There is a small library, and each of the other floors is a multimedia installation dedicated to a different theme in Hamsun’s life and work, so you piece together some kind of picture through a series of fragments. 

Nature was profoundly important to Hamsun and one thing that definitely works in the centre's favour is the the way the outside landscape is incorporated into the experience of walking through the building. There is a roof terrace which gives a kind of overview of the region, though a clear view is deliberately obscured by a perimeter wall of tall cane. Then on each floor there are carefully placed windows and different types of terrace from which you get a "framed" view of an aspect of Hamarøy. 

Because the doors to these outside areas are open, cold gusts of air blow through the rooms in certain places. This slight element of discomfort sits quite well with Hamsun's history.

 

Until a few years ago Hamsun was relatively obscure outside Norway but he influenced a lot of 20th Century novelists. His first book, Hunger, foreshadows much of what Beckett and Auster would write and, published in 1890, is considered by some to be one of the first Modern novels. He would be a national hero, were it not for the fact that he collaborated with the German occupation. Although, unlike some other writers around this time (I'm thinking of Celine and Pound, maybe Eliot too), he claimed never to have been anti-Semitic, he was very pro Nazi. He went so far as to encourage Norwegian soldiers to desert. Even when the writing was quite clearly on the wall for the German war effort, Hamsun wrote and published a glowing eulogy for Hitler. The top floor of the centre is dedicated to a discussion of how one might reconcile Hamsun's work with his political affiliations. Projected onto two walls is a fascinating film featuring a series of Norwegian intellectuals taking a range of positions on both Hamsun's literary worth and his legacy.

What's most interesting to me about Hamsun's collaboration is how he got there, especially given that his early books were initially classed by the Nazis as degenerative literature. In the 19th Century he was in many ways radically left wing. Yet Hamsun didn't exactly become a collaborator through the proverbial reactionary drift. Like many European artists and radicals of the 19th Century, he detested Britain and its Empire. He looked instead to Germany as a country in touch with the traditions of the soil and as the home of the Peasant's Rebellion. Germany was the great European alternative.

By the time of the Second World War Hamsun was an old man, but he held on fiercely to the ideas of his youth. For him, his enemy's enemy would always be his friend. The rise of Germany had been his life long dream.