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Ridgewood NJ,today marks the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a pivotal moment in history known as D-Day. The largest amphibious assault ever conducted, this event is being commemorated along a 50-mile stretch of northern France with President Joe Biden and dozens of heads of state in attendance. Among those honoring the occasion are nearly 200 veterans, whose average age is now 100.
Al Pacino withdraws from a play, and from the dark side of the Avant-Garde.
Charles Paul Freund | June 7, 2015
Al Pacino has withdrawn from a Danish stage version of Knut Hamsun’s novel, Hunger, after learning that the Norwegian Nobel prize-winning author had been an ardent supporter of Nazi Germany. The move dismayed some of Hamsun’s defenders, but it’s also a reminder of the appalling state of intellectual life during the rise of fascism. So many writers and thinkers embraced fascism in those years that they constituted what came to be called a “fascist foreign legion.”
considered a classic of psychological literature, and Hamsun himself is regarded by many critics and writers as one of the fathers of literary Modernism, and an important influence on such writers as Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, and many others. In a 1987 introduction to Hunger, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote that “The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.”
The head of Norway’s Hamsun Society, Hege Faust, lamented Pacino’s failure to distinguish Hamsun’s writerly achievements from the politics he embraced as an old man. “If one looks at the impactHunger made on Hemingway, Kafka, Hesse, Lindgren, Singer and other prominent authors at the time, it is somewhat strange to see to what extent this differs from today’s judgement” by Pacino, she told Britain’s Telegraph.
Hamsun’s fascism was hardly a byproduct of hardening of the arteries. He lived for a time in the 1880s in the U.S., and came to dislike the country for its egalitarian principles, and because it had a large Black population (even though that population wasn’t benefitting much from the egalitarianism). His 1918 novel, Growth of the Soil, is a pretty good example of “blood and soil” lit. John Carey, a British critic, cites a passage from Hamsun’s Kareno trilogy of dramas, written in the 1890s, as indicative of his outlook:
“I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.”
