I have been reading the old Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s novel ‘Hunger’ recently – a bit Notes from the Underground but a lot bleaker. He has been called the father of Modern Literature and was even awarded the Nobel prize for his work.
But there’s always been a cloud surrounding the mention of his name in ‘PC’ circles and what may be called ‘polite society’.
During the Second world war he supported the German occupation of his homeland was extremely chummy with Josef Goebbels and wrote a glowing obituary on Adolf Hitler. In Norway his novels were burnt in the streets.
I do like his books, they often have lone wanderers entering small communities and chronicling the lives and loves of their citizens with real and strange psychological depth. He was a favourite of Charles Bukowski and the other Beats.
Francis Stuart is another writer who’s work, especially Black List Section H, has become an essential read for outsiders and Idlers for 4 decades.
Convicted of Gun running for the IRA when he was a teenager and imprisoned, during the late thirties he was part of an organisation that organised academic exchanges between Ireland and the Third Reich, and took a lecture post at Berlin University a couple of years after Jews had been banned from university teaching.
During the War years Stuart worked for Editorial Ireland, reading radio broadcasts which contained German propaganda. He freely admitted at the time and some time after, his admiration for Hitler.
Although later on he defended himself somewhat, buy claiming he never supported the Nazis, but was fascinated by the spectacle and sinister iconography of Nazism.
He was eventually imprisoned by the Allies at the end of the war, but it took decades for his reputation to recover.
Celine’s Novel ‘Journey to the End of Night’ is another counter-cultural bible for many, and he was another huge influence on the Beats.
But his publication of anti-Semitic pamphlets for the Vichy government during the Second World war, are not something you would associate with a writer who always extolled the freedom of the individual and loathed governmental/social control.
During the war, he also publicly wished for a Germanic-French Alliance against what he called the conspiracy between British Intelligence and the international Jewry. He fled to Denmark for a few years and was sentenced to a year in prison in Absentia but was pardoned later on.
Funny, but Celine was Declared a National Disgrace’ by the French Government during his exile. Now his name only conjures up images of existential freedom and hard won victories against the cold banality of traditional conservative values.
The German Philosopher Martin Heidegger, author of the Existentialist classic Being and Time, a huge influence on Jean Paul Sartre and every other serious post war thinker was an unrepentant member of the Nazi Party.
He even wiped a dedication to his biggest influence Edmund Husserl in early editions of his book upon the insistence of his publishers as Husserl was a Jew.
Karl Popper encouraged the world to ignore Heidegger’s name and works ever after.
During the same period, a certain Austrian Psychoanalyst named Carl Jung was known to have been extremely chummy with psychotherapists in Germany who openly supported the Nazis.
Until the outbreak of the Second world war, Jung had edited German language journal ‘Zen Trablett Fur Psychotherapie’ which often contained outright attacks on ‘Jewish mental states’ and exalted Aryan racial purity. In the publication, Jung did nothing to censor articles advocating the extermination of mental patients.
His collective unconscious/racial memory idea was obviously taken up by German thinkers and propagandists who wanted to imagine a biologically and psychologically pure and discreet ‘Volk’ - and of course providing a supposed scientific validation for the termination of certain racial ‘undesirable’s’.
Jung’s Austrian, Christian, Goyim credentials represented the acceptable face of Psychoanalysis which had been known as ‘The Jewish Science’ for decades.
He was also no fan of Modern Art, calling Picasso and other modern’s ‘Degenerates’ in the true spirit of Nazism.
All these thinkers are responsible for constructing modern consciousness, and especially the existentialist idea of personal autonomy and individual freedom of expression that first exploded in the 50’s and 60’s. The Beats took the main existential idea of ‘authenticity’ and making up your own rules after the death of God to question traditional roles of manhood and sexuality.
Jung’s ideas on extroversion/introversion, archetypes, the collective unconscious, Individuation and investigations into the Occult and Eastern thought, permeate all areas of art and culture today. They have become part of our everyday language.
I remember years ago at university when I began talking to a young psychology lecturer about Jung, he frowned and said: “He’s a Nazi”. The hint was that the conversation was over. The crime of Jung destroyed any consideration of his work.
Can a writer or philosophers works ever be truly separated from their personal morality? Can we forgive them their ‘crimes’ if their work may contain even a few gems of solace and guidance for the betterment of humankind?
Culturally, we seem to have mostly forgiven these writers, and read them and quote them all the time and hold them up as iconic explorers of human freedom.
Do you need to have serious moral flaws and ambiguities to be a serious groundbreaking artist? Yin and Yang.
Are the greatest artists always ‘fascists’ in relation to the world at large?
By reading their works and promoting their ideas, are we consciously/unconsciously colluding with their worst crimes by default?
I have thought of these questions often.
I believe it is possible to be detached, and maintain a certain objectivity towards artists and writers. They are the appointed transgressors, the dark parts of ourselves, morality explorers voicing what we know is there and often wish to utter ourselves, but fearing social stigma, we stay silent or condemn what we loathe in ourselves.
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