7. Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, but a decade later, his reputation was in tatters due to his passionate support of the Nazis.
It wasn’t just American and British intellectuals and writers who publicly flirted with fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. In Norway, the country’s undoubted literary star Knut Hamsun also spoke out in support of Nazi Germany. What’s more, the winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature even sided with the fascists during the Second World War, even after the Nazis had invaded and occupied his native country. In 1940, for example, Hamsun told his fellow countrymen that “the Germans are fighting for us”. More remarkably, he even penned a short obituary for Hitler, calling the dictator “a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations”.
In the summer of 1945, the Norwegian police arrested Hamsun and the literary legend was put on trial for treason. In court, he pleaded ignorance, claiming he wasn’t aware of the true nature of the Nazi regime. Since he was in his 80s by then, Hamsun was released, though he had to pay a fine. Ever since then, his support of Nazism has tainted his legacy, while several of Hamsun’s biographers have attempted to pinpoint the reasons behind the writer’s treachery and love of fascism. Could it have been an inferiority complex, or even an intense hatred of all things English, that led the Nobel Laureate to embrace Nazism?