Norway names 2009 the Year of Hamsun; Israelis protest Nazi-sympathizer

Norway, which was recently appointed to head the twenty-six-nation-member Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, has turned heads by designating 2009 "Hamsun Year" in honor of Knut Hamsun and naming a cultural center--due to be opened in August--after the writer.

Knut Hamsun, who died in 1952, is considered to be Norway's most talented writer for his psychologically-riveting, realist novels The Growth of the Soil and Hunger. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 and was called the "father of modern literature" by Yiddish Nobelist Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was, however, a Nazi sympathizer, a supporter of the Quisling occupation, and the author of an Adolph Hitler eulogy. Jewish and non-Jewish protestors in Israel and Norway have called the commemoration of Hamsun irresponsible and contradictory.

"Knut Hamsun wrote magnificent literature, and also an obituary for Adolf Hitler," Bodil Borset, the designated director of the Hamaroy Hamsun Center responded last month in Aftenposten, the country's second largest newspaper. "He was among our greatest authors and a Nazi sympathizer. Can we reconcile this?"

The center, Borset said, would be "more than happy" to invite Zuroff and Gerstenfeld to attend a conference next year on the Hamsun Center's activities.

"Borset appears to believe that Hamsun's literary brilliance warrants the celebration of his birth, regardless of his active support for a regime which annihilated innocent civilians," Zuroff wrote in reply. While expressing willingness to attend, Zuroff insisted the event is held as soon as possible, while Norway still chairs the Task Force, so that it may have "practical consequences."

Norwegian representatives of the cultural center have invited Israeli thinkers to debate the author's legacy next year, at a time which Israelis deem too late to be relevant.