Norway's Ghost

...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. Hamsun later flew to meet Hitler at Hitler’s mountain lair in Bavaria.

Why the festivities, then? Call it reconciliation therapy, or a national airing out.

Hamsun died in 1952 at 92, shunned by his countrymen and heavily fined for his spectacular wartime betrayal. 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.

“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. “That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave.”...

...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. 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.”

Queen Sonja, leaving the exhibition, said only, “I think we’ll have to keep two thoughts in our head at the same time.”

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