Martin A. Hansen (1909-1955) is one of the great figures in 20th century Danish cultural life. He is among those writers whose eminence was not diminished by World War II but rather was strengthened by it.
In the post-war years Martin A. Hansen was hailed as both master and mentor; through his writing and thinking he seismographically registered and expressed the recognition that the war’s shock waves to the soul, the mind, and existence itself were being transmitted to tradition and would irrevocably change it. This is Modernism’s recognition of a break with tradition, which assumes the dimensions of a "spiritual nuclear explosion." For Hansen the war becomes a prism in whose spectrum the conflict between tradition and the modern world is refracted and reflected in an existential split between the ethical and the aesthetic.
Hansen looked back in history, not out of a nostalgic yearning for the old days, but in a constant exploration of times of ferment, with their corresponding cultural upheavals and spiritual crises. In his historical novels, the fantastical Jonatans Rejse (Jonatan’s Journey, 1941) and his masterpiece Lykkelige Kristoffer (1945; translated as Lucky Kristoffer, 1974), modern man is transplanted to another era, which confronts the chaotic and rationalistic modern world and is represented by a different type of person: "those rare people who carry their whole meaning inside them, wherever they go."
The author himself became a member of the ardent group of writers which by means of extensive reading and meditation sought to expand the cultural horizon; they sought a new relationship to tradition, and for them the problem of form was a serious and enormously compelling matter. This gave rise to a Modernism that raised the ethical imperative above desperate nihilism, the burning thornbush instead of a conflagration. The symbolism in stories such as "Septembertaagen" ("September Fog" from Tornebusken) and "Ventesalen" ("The Waiting Room" from Agerhønen) points to a metaphysical cognitive sphere for "today’s human being, standing at the focal point of reality."
Hansen had a profound understanding of the Modernist writers’ "paradoxical relationship between their culture and their search for the naive, simple, sincere, organic personal life" (Ved Korsvejen, At the Crossroads). For him, joining the Resistance meant again "being part of life and death". With this intensified life, under the heightened impressions of existential necessity, Hansen experienced an outburst of inspiration which gave birth to the best Danish short stories of the post-war period, written in an innovative Modernist style with an evangelical view of life.
The concrete experience of fighting in the Resistance -- "that words could be just as dangerous as machine guns" -- reflects an artistic conflict typical of the Modernists, in which artistic creation is a kind of fratricide and the writer a Cain figure.
Kains Alter (Cain’s Altar) is the title of an unpublished novel fragment of a planned trilogy. The psychic consequences of chronically wanting to change form are crucial, and the existential conflict of the artist is a persistent theme in many of his short stories.
Art begins to devour life, and the writer himself is a seducer. Like his namesake, the aesthete in Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller (Either-Or, 1843), Johannes Vig in Hansen’s novel Løgneren, (1950;translated as The Liar, 1954) is a meditative seducer. In 1999 much of Hansen’s extensive diary material was published as a meditative commentary on his body of work. Most copiously developed are the diaries for the years 1939-49, written parallel with and so closely bound to his fictional writings that the diary entries and fiction both stop with the genesis of Løgneren (created to be read on the radio), which in its form unites diary and fictional writing.
This novel about the diary-writing parish clerk is considered a masterpiece of Danish literature, drawing on a narrative tradition extending from Steen Steensen Blicher’s Brudstykker af en Landsbydegns Dagbog (Fragments of a Parish Clerk’s Diary, 1824) through Naturalism and on into the conflicts and obsessive meditation of Modernism.
Martin A. Hansen’s books have great significance also for 1990s readers, and when the two newspapers Berlingske Tidende and Politiken held a poll for the Danish book of the century Løgneren took third and seventh place respectively.
