RAGNHILD MARIA HAUGLID HENDEN: WAS HAMSUN ANTI-SEMITIC?

I saw the director twice, each time for perhaps fifteen minutes, he gave the impression of being straightforward and without conceit, it was possible to talk to him. He only made the unexpected mistake of sticking a report of my visit to Hitler in my nose, in which I was supposed to have made an anti-Semitic statement. To this day I have not read this report, let alone acknowledged it. Should I make a statement against the Jews? Moreover, I have had too many good friends among them and these friends have been good friends to me. I kindly urge the director to look through my entire production and see if he can find a statement against the Jews. (On Overgrown Paths, 1949)

This is a quote from Knut Hamsun's letter to the Attorney General on July 23, 1946, in which he discusses the treatment he received during his stay at the Psychiatric Clinic in Oslo after the end of the war. What does Hamsun want to say here? Is it true that he never made verbal attacks against Jews? Or was an anti-Semitic attitude a natural part of his support for Hitler's Germany? That Hamsun was a friend of Germany long before the time of National Socialism and continued to be so after Hitler came to power is a well-known fact. His views on Jews and his position as an anti-Semitic ideologue and author, however, have been and are more debatable topics.

An anti-Semitic ideologue?
Hamsun was at times an avid newspaper writer, and he could be very direct and occasionally harsh in his statements. From the outbreak of the First World War, his support for Germany was clearly evident in several articles. He writes, among other things, about his "old, unwavering sympathy for Germany" ( Simplicissimus no. 19, 1914) and states that "one day Germany will punish England to death, because it is a natural necessity" ( Tidens Tegn 06.12.1914).

Jews, however, play a vanishingly small role in Hamsun's polemics. An important exception is a letter written to Mikal Sylten on 1 December 1925. Sylten published the journal Nationalt Tidsskrift in the years 1916–1945, and Hamsun's letter was printed in issue 11, 1926. Sylten was an anti-Semite and also published Hvem er hvem i jødeverden, which contained lists of people in Norway who Sylten assumed were Jews. This booklet was last printed in 1941, and it became an important reference for the police during the deportation of the Norwegian Jews. In his letter to Sylten, Hamsun writes, among other things:

Mr. Editor! It is a thankless job you have, and it shows your strong and honest belief in the cause that you have persevered so long. Anti-Semitism exists in all countries; it follows Semitism as effect follows cause. I have been very interested in your “Who is who?”

However, it is a difficult question that you are struggling with. […] They are a very capable people. […] The desirable thing was that the Jews were gathered in a country that they could call their own, so that the exclusively white race would be spared further blood mixture, and from where the Jews could still work with their best qualities for the benefit of the whole world. But where is that country? Can Palestine be expanded? Does the Turk have any land left? […] But as long as this does not happen, the Jews have no other home than the homes of others. They must then continue to live and work in foreign societies, to the misfortune of both parties.1

This is one of the texts where Hamsun goes the furthest in his negative description of Jews. In several private letters, the same argument appears: The Jews are a gifted people, but do not belong in European countries and should therefore be given their own country. The fact that Hamsun here makes himself an advocate for the Jews' right to their own country does not necessarily count to his credit, as his support is clearly based on the desire to remove them from "the alien societies". Such attitudes did not rule out the possibility that Hamsun had close Jewish friends; among other things, he contacted German authorities to get the Jewish writer Max Tau out of Nazi Germany, which was also successful.

Hamsun never goes so far as to give written support for the extermination of Jews, but he also did not publicly distance himself from the Holocaust when it became widely known after the war. From a moral perspective, such an omission is reprehensible, but in director Ørnulv Ødegaard's notes after Hamsun's stay at the Psychiatric Clinic, Hamsun's will to settle the score does not seem completely absent:

He [Hamsun] did not know that Quisling had done anything wrong. –Yes, he could have left this with the Jews, he says spontaneously. – We benefit from having a Jewish element, we like other people. But there was not a word about the Jews in the two magazines he read, he only found out about it afterwards. When he was in Germany, he probably saw something – there were yellow benches, and he saw some small children who had to go from another bench and sit on one of the yellow ones – it was because they were Jews. – But you have to understand that I am an old man… I went along blindly because I did not hear. Foolishness of me!2

It is difficult to determine whether Hamsun had a unified view of Jews from his own statements. Much may indicate that he distinguished between his personal Jewish friends and the Jewish people as a whole, with the latter group in several cases being negatively described.

An anti-Semitic writer?
The negativity in several of Hamsun's public statements about the Jewish people has been repeatedly attempted to be transferred to Hamsun's poetry and the ideological content of his novels. However, in his literary universe one has to search for a long time for clarity, also when it comes to the mention of Jews.

Jews play a marginal role in Hamsun's poetry as a whole, but we find central Jewish figures in some novels. The watch merchant Papst in Landstrykere is one of these. He is inspired by a real figure, the Jewish traveling merchant Marcus Pabst, born in 1819 in Prussia, died in 1895 and buried in Berlin. Marcus Pabst traveled for several seasons in northern Norway, where he traded in watches, leather and down goods in a number of towns and various markets. In Tromsø Stiftstidende on 7 June 1877 he announced his arrival in Tromsø (see facsimile of the advertisement in the series of images at the top right).

It is not unlikely that Hamsun met Marcus Pabst in his youth, when he worked for periods as a sales clerk, but his literary Papst is still part of his poetry and not a portrait of a real person. Papst's friendliness at their first meeting has a decisive impact on the main character Edevart, and he eventually enters Papst's service and sells many watches for him. But the watches are useless, and Edevart discovers after two days that Papst is using him to cheat customers.

Papst appears to be a cunning salesman and at the same time a good judge of people. He takes advantage of Edevart's trust in him, apparently with the sole aim of making as much money as possible, and then defends himself as follows:

Hoho, you're a strong boy! laughed Papst. Besides, you'll never come here to Levanger again, but I will. Old Papst has to wander and wander everywhere and come back again, oh well. (Landstrykere, 1927)

The description Papst gives of himself gives strong connotations to the idea of ​​the eternal Jew – Ahasuerus – whom Jesus, according to legend, sentenced to wander the earth forever shortly before his crucifixion. This figure has been literary processed in a number of texts over several hundred years3, which shows the viability of negative ideas about Jews. In Hamsun’s novel, this image is repeated towards the end of the plot, when Papst is described as “the eternal bell-ringing Jew, aged and whiter in his beard, but just as thick and shaggy in his foot-side, with many bell chains on his stomach”. Papst undoubtedly has many negative qualities, but the novel’s final verdict on him is good. This is not in direct remarks from the narrator, but in Papst’s last action, where he gives Edevart a large sum of money and in this way rewards him, probably for both his character and his behavior, both of which Papst greatly appreciated.

Also in the novel The Last Chapter , the short story "Out of the Sweet Summer" (in Struggling Life from 1905) and the travelogue In Wonderland from 1903, questions about Jews and anti-Semitism play a role in the interpretation. The degree of anti-Semitism in Hamsun's poetry has been and is a hot topic of discussion among literary scholars and Hamsun enthusiasts. But it must be said that apart from a couple of very negative statements about Jewish people in the aforementioned texts, Hamsun often incorporates various anti-Jewish prejudices into a literary game and thus to a greater or lesser extent obscures his possible ideological intentions as an author.

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Notes
1 Cited after volume 27 in Knut Hamsun: Collected Works. New edition 2007–2009 . Gyldendal Norsk Forlag.
2 Quoted from Tore Hamsun: Knut Hamsun – my father . Gyldendal, Oslo 1987, p. 325.
3 Cf. Mona Körte und Robert Stockhammer: Ahasvers Spur. Dichtungen und Dokumente vom “Ewigen Juden” . Leipzig 1995.

Ragnhild Maria Hauglid Henden is a research fellow at the Holocaust Center , Oslo.