Excerpts from
The Trial of Hamsun I-III
By Thorkild Hansen
Extract from Chapter 7 - Meeting Hitler
He was, in Thomas Mann´s words, first and foremost a man of artistic temperament. He had come from nothing. He had been everywhere rejected as a young man. During winter in the city, he had starved and slept on park benches. Finally, he left his fatherland and spent four years on foreign soil under the most trying circumstances without receiving so much as a letter from home. He was, in every sense, an outsider, a loner, an autodidact, highly gifted but lacking education, a rebel but not a revolutionary, a proletarian but nevertheless bourgeois. So, he had been - for over thirty years, before he succeeded in making a name for himself, attracting attention with his provocative, aggressive speeches.
That was Knut Hamsun. But if, by way of experiment, one were to substitute in this description the Austrian capital for the Norwegian, the Vienna Academy of Art for Gyldendal, the First World War 1914-18 for America in the 1880s, attacks on the Jews for attacks on Ibsen - then, it would be the biography of Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
And more tender moments? Hitler subdues most of Europe, but when he proposes to toast his victories, it is mineral water ("Fachinger") in his glass. He does not drink. He does not smoke. He never eats meat or fish. He has no children. Of the six women to whom he becomes close over the course of his life, five die by suicide, just as he does. Renate, Geli, Magda, Unity, Eva. He suffers chronic insomnia, swelling in his legs, difficulty in digesting. He is musical, but cannot dance. He appreciates nature, but never goes in the water, never rides a horse, never climbs into a rowboat. He cannot tolerate sunburn. He speaks incessantly about swords, but cannot use a hammer. He invents the dreaded Sturzkamffliegern with howling sirens, but he cannot drive a nail into a wall. He builds 12,778 kilometers of highway, but does not know how to change a tire. He enjoys children and animals. Detests hunting. Prohibits vivisection. Becomes unwell at the sight of a butcher shop. His fundamental moral concepts are purity, contagion, filth. He constantly washes his hands. He keeps antiseptic lozenges in his mouth and, during some periods, takes up to 28 different forms of medication a day. He has a weakness for cream pastries and opera. During his final days in the bunker, as Berlin went up in flames, he would eat up to nine pastries in a row. When he was thirty, he had gone to "Tristan and Isolde" forty times. When he attends "Götterdammerung" at Bayreuth and watches Valhalla sink beneath the flames, he presses his lips to Mrs. Winifred´s hand.
His own staging of party meetings at Nuremburg with banners, torches, floodlights, mass gatherings of SS soldiers in black uniforms, is opera, a cult of death, an engrossing exaltation of destruction, a suicidal compulsion in the name of victory. Humor makes him insecure. He holds his hand before his mouth, when he laughs. His essential keynotes are bathos, unctuousness, severity. In uniforms with crossbelts and armbands, in bowties and tails. "When it comes to solemn handshakes and glances, he is incomparable," von Miltenberg says. "A stigmatized head waiter," opines Gottfried Keller. But people also speak of his "Austrian charm." He can be amiable and engaging. He has irresistible persuasive powers. However, he listens to others only reluctantly, seldom says thank you, never admits a mistake. Contrary opinions are answered with a bullet in the back of the head. He is a connoisseur of human nature, their fears, their jealousies, their cowardices, their deep-seated need for comfort, but also their spirit of self-sacrifice, their craving for theater and excitement, an idea that can lift above their daily routine. He understands these things and uses them. He is a tactician, a strategist, a gambler. Quick to attack, without mercy on the offensive, but strongest on the defensive, when he is in the weaker position. That was how he began and the way he ended. Weak. Rejected, cashiered, ostracized. A subterranean. A genius turned inside out. As a masochist on the world stage, an unsurpassed producer of collapse - even his victories, laden with their content of revenge, resemble converted defeats. His triumphs are acts of compensation. He himself says that the people are "his only mistress." As he stands alone during his great speeches, virtually undressed by the floodlights, an almost sexual relationship arises between him and the masses right from the moment he addresses the "Führer-hungry" public with his extended right arm to the breathless stillness in the hall during the speech´s closing remarks, the first short cheers from the crowd, the growing release, the fanatic devotion, the oblivious ecstasy. In that moment when Hitler himself finds release, marked outwardly by his cracking voice, the crowd breaks blissfully forth in an orgasmic roar:
Führer befehl, wir folgen! Afterwards, one finds him, exhausted, empty, sitting in an adjoining room or a party office bent over a bowl of pea soup. Who cannot have good soup must be content with bad.
Is this a picture of Hamsun? No. It is the picture of his opposite, his negation, his total denial. And yet, these two pictures go together like two profiles on the same coin, a Janus head, one showing his light side, the other his dark. From the same starting point, their paths diverged, each in a different direction. The same conditions produced two geniuses, diametrically opposed. One, more or less indifferent, the other, fanatical. One, down to earth, satisfied, subtle, cheerful, a pipe smoker, a poker player, a lady´s man ("with him, I should have paid for it," said Norway´s great actress, Agnes Mowinchel), a man who ,with his dreams fulfilled, turned toward a solitary life, a life in hiding. The other is mistrustful, impatient, and full of hate, driven by panic and angst, who, in order to compensate for his life´s devastating defeats, strives by any means to achieve total power over others - world domination or Götterdammerung.
When on June 26, 1943, at two o´clock in the afternoon, these two men stand face to face at Berghof in Obersalzberg, it is the meeting of absolute antipodes. Hamsun thought later of the meeting between Goethe and Napoleon and asked himself: "Did a shudder pass through the world at that moment?" That was how he had felt. That was what happened when polar opposites - each charged with tremendous power, one positive, the other negative - approached each other in a field of cosmic tension. This meeting, which the nimble, little Dr. Dietrich had brought about, was nothing less than a confrontation of two primordial types in human history and in the mind of man. Here they stand. Now, they shake hands: Gabriel and Lucifer, Abel and Cain, happy prince and knave.
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