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In 1943 Knut Hamsun, Nobel laureate of 1920 for Growth of the Soil, mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels as a gift after meeting him. That same year he met Hitler and used the audience to complain about the brutality of Reichskommissar Terboven's occupation regime in Norway, which enraged Hitler. After the war he never gave a full account of why he had honoured the Nazi leadership, leaving his motives open to endless dispute.
The biography rejects the comforting explanations that Hamsun was a psychopath or a senile old man. His Nazi sympathies grew out of long-held convictions: hostility to Britain, contempt for modern urban life and democracy, and romantic attachment to the soil and to Germanic culture. Treating his collaboration as illness spares both him and his readers from facing the fact that a great artistic intelligence could make these choices knowingly.
After the war, Norwegian authorities sent the elderly Hamsun for psychiatric examination rather than a straightforward criminal trial. The psychiatrists concluded that he had 'permanently impaired mental faculties', and he was then hit with a ruinous civil fine. Hamsun contested that label, and at about ninety he published On Overgrown Paths (1949), a clear and controlled memoir that rebutted the diagnosis in its very prose while still offering no real apology.
Hamsun was born Knud Pedersen into rural poverty, went through a brutal childhood and years of hunger and failure as an emigrant in America, and became a lifelong outsider who defined himself against prevailing opinion. That contrarian, anti-bourgeois stance produced his modernist breakthrough in Hunger (1890), with its interior, irrational consciousness. The same stance drew him to Germany against Britain and against the Norwegian consensus. Seen this way, the trait that made his genius and the trait that ruined his reputation are one trait.