A poor man slipped into a shabby and dark yard. In order to save his life, he picked up a meat bone with a disgusting smell of dried blood, swallowed it and spit it out. After repeated nausea, he finally couldn't help it: "I clenched my fist angrily and cried helplessly, biting like a demon." The bones were covered with tears and snot. I chewed, cursed and wailed repeatedly, as if my heart were going to break, and then I vomited. I swear loudly that I will put all the great powers in the universe into hell! "
This is a snippet from the famous work Hunger (1987) by the Norwegian writer knudsen, a Nobel Prize in Literature winner (1859- 1952). The novel is a masterpiece of neo-romanticism, which vividly and delicately describes all kinds of hallucinations and abnormal psychology in hunger. The author claims that this description is "a memory of his hunger period".
A writer who once vowed to defeat the great powers ended up in the arms of the evil Nazi forces. During World War II, Bertwin, the Nazi leader who occupied Norway, ruled Norway for five years and brutally tortured and slaughtered Norwegians. But in hamson's eyes, the Germans who are "martial arts" from head to toe are still a great "cultural nation".
First, the outbreak of literati heroes
Ham was born in a sewing worker's family, and his ancestors were farmers. At the age of nine, he worked as an apprentice with his uncle, doing heavy child labor all day, and was often beaten and suffered indignities. Two years later, he became a shop assistant and fled because of unbearable abuse. Since then, he has been doing odd jobs for a living. Hamson is a tramp, worked as a peddler, a shoemaker's apprentice, a road repairman, a clerk and a rural primary school teacher ..., and traveled across the ocean to the United States twice alone to break into the world, crawling at the bottom of American society, working as a tram conductor and an agricultural worker. Later, poor and ill, hamson returned to Norway and wrote a book, Spiritual Life in Modern America (1889), mocking the American way of life.
After experiencing rough roads and busy work, Hamson, aged 18, began to write. His works are often set in Norway, which is rapidly moving towards industrialization, describing how the emerging proletariat tries to change its social status, how it becomes more and more timid and petty, or how it becomes a victim of the leisure class's pursuit of recreation. His novels also depict the life of Norwegian farmers with delicate brushstrokes.
1908, Hamson, who divorced his wife, married Mary, who was twenty years younger than him. After the marriage, Hamson's novel Victoria was a sensation, and this tragic story was included in the world love novels by critics. Hamson won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature with his outstanding epic novel Harvest of the Earth. Since then, he has been regarded as "the soul of Norway" and a national hero of Norway.
Second, reward the Nazis with the Nobel Prize medal.
Hamson was deeply influenced by German culture since childhood and loved the Germanic nation. After the Nazis came to power, hamson regarded Germany as a model of "patriarchal politics". After the outbreak of World War II, he publicly supported Hitler, but did not formally join the Norwegian Nazi Party. In order to applaud the Nazis, hamson gave his Nobel Prize medal to Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, and Goebbels, minister of culture and education. When mailing Goebbels the medal, hamson also attached his "acceptance speech":
"The Nobel Prize stipulates that his prize money should be awarded to works with ideal tendency. I don't know anyone who can tell European and human affairs with such an ideal tendency year after year like you, Mr. Minister. "
However, Goebbels, who once burned "non-German books" in Berlin with great fanfare, did not take the Nobel Prize seriously, because among the burned books were the works of thomas mann, the most deserving writer in the Nobel family. Goebbels shamelessly declared: "They ["non-German writers "] may survive for some time. These gentlemen may be in immigrant coffee shops in Paris and Prague, but their lifelines have been cut off. They are just walking dead. " "The era of intellectualism, the peak of the Jews, is over." "The longevity bird of new wisdom spreads its wings from these ruins, and the old one has been reduced to ashes, and the new one will fly high from the flame inside us." This is probably the "ideal tendency" of Goebbels, which hamson admired!
1940 after the Nazi invasion, hamson began to serve the Nazis directly. 1943 In May, hamson went to Germany and was received by Goebbels and Hitler in June. Judging from a film about hamson, when interviewed by Hitler, hamson expressed his admiration for the Nazis on the one hand, and questioned some inhuman behaviors of the Nazis in Norway on the other, which led to the end of the talks. Hitler said angrily, never see such a smelly scholar again! Nevertheless, the news that Hamson went to Germany reached Norway, and thousands of Hamson readers flocked to the bookstore to demand the return of his novels as a strong protest.
1On May 7th, 945, after Hitler committed suicide, hamson wrote an obituary for Hitler in a Norwegian newspaper: praising Hitler as a "first-rate reformer … we, his successors, bowed for his death". In postwar Norway, 86-year-old Hamson and his wife, Mary, were quickly arrested.