Growth of the Soil [Paperback]

While Growth of the Soil is not overtly political, Hamsun took a clear and direct philosophical stance against what he saw as the coming bastardization of Europe's esoteric traditions (Hamsun recognized anthropocentrism was no less appealing when masked as "progress"). For Hamsun, Germanic man was intrinsically linked to the very soil that provided him with life and sustenance. This relationship, between man and earth Hamsun claimed, was almost religious and holy in nature. Only through the preservation of this communion with the earth could Northern Europe hope to maintain its uniqueness as a cultural and racial entity.

Hamsun's worldview mirrored many of the then embryonic nationalist movements in Germany, most of which openly rallied against leftist socio-political systems that were seen as an affront to the notion of "Blood and Soil". Hamsun in many ways influenced the blending of ecology and nationalist politics in Northern Europe (was he the first "Green"?).

Years later National Socialism gave Hamsun a political outlet for his worldview, while Hamsun gave the National Socialists a literary and philosophical giant to champion.

While controversy has surrounded Hamsun's support for the German and Norwegian National Socialist movements of the 1930/40's, Hamsun (contrary to popular opinion) never apologized for his activities, and remained a somewhat staunch if cautious opponent of Europe's post-war "new order" ... even after the forced "reeducation" of his wife and both sons in Allied concentration camps.

Growth of the Soil is beautifully and powerfully written. It is bold, uncompromising and radical.
It is, quite simply, magnificent. Every forward thinking person concerned with the fate of Western Civilization would do well to plunge into its wisdom-soaked pages.

...There is uninhabited land in a northern clime and a man is put amidst it. Isak clears land, tills the soil, constructs buildings. He has a call for a woman and Inger is put there. So too is a cow, then a bull, a goat, and a pig. There is a call for additional buildings and more clearing and tillage. A call for a saw mill. A call for irrigation and an engineer is put there. Children are put in the woman and two of these are sons. Eleseus is of different temperament from Sivert and his father and is called to town, to an office. Copper has been put in the land and Geissler and others call upon the landowner Isak to buy so that it might be extracted. Poles are needed for the telegraph. Neighbors arrive and with it a capitalistic thinking, but in the end it is those who work the soil who are truly lauded; and that all the artifacts that come about with development of towns are merely what they are called and worth only what a man will pay for them, unlike the soil. Isak is well described as 'a barge of a man' because of his size and scope of labor, yes, but also because all that follows in the rest of us might be argued as contained in his life of doings and in those of his wife as well.

Before there were thrillers, courtroom dramas, potboilers, and romances, there was literature like this. Thank god, it still lives.