Thorkild Hansen

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Thorkild Hansen (born January 9, 1927 in Copenhagen , † February 4, 1989 in the Caribbean ) was a Danish writer . For a trilogy of documentary novels about the Danish slave trade , he received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1971 . He caused a sensation with a three-volume work Processen mod Hamsun published in 1978 on the post-war trials against the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun .

Life

After attending school, Hansen began studying general literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1945 . With the support of his teacher Ejnar Thomsen, he published an essay on the conception of nature by the Danish writer Jacob Paludan in 1947 . On a scholarship, Hansen went to Paris in the same year , where he worked as a freelancer for the tabloid Ekstra Bladet . After his return in 1952 he worked for the newspaper Information as a literary and film critic.

A collection of essays that Hansen had written in Paris appeared in 1953. He published a travelogue that had already begun in Paris in 1959, followed by two travel diaries in which he processed his impressions on two archaeological expeditions to Kuwait and Sudan . His breakthrough came in 1962 with the documentary novel Det lykkelige Arabia (German title: travel to Arabia , 1965) about the Danish Arabia - Expedition Carsten Niebuhr in the 18th century, for which he used in 1963 by Søren Gyldendal Prize was awarded.

With his friend, the writer Peter Seeberg , Hansen traveled to Hudson Bay in 1964 to find the place where the Danish-Norwegian explorer Jens Munk anchored in the winter of 1620. About Munk's expedition, Hansen published the documentary novel Jens Munk in 1965 and, together with Seeberg, a short travel report in the same year. The novel was first published in German translation in 1974 by VEB Hinstorff Verlag Rostock .

Then Hansen dealt with the Danish slave trade. Danish ships had rum and weapons on the African Gold Coast exchanged for people who then as slaves to the Danish sugar cane - plantations sold on the Caribbean islands. Hansen visited Ghana in 1965 and the formerly Danish islands of Saint Thomas , Saint Croix and Saint John in 1967 . He processed his material in a three-volume novel with the titles Slavernes kyst (1967), Slavernes skibe (1968) and Slavernes øer (1970). The parts dealt with the shopping and crossing of slaves as well as life in slavery. In 1971 he was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for his work.

In 1972 Hansen traveled to Vietnam , Bangladesh , the Western Sahara and Rhodesia for the Danish Red Cross . In 1973 he was in East Greenland . Hansen's three-volume documentary novel, Processen mod Hamsun , which was published simultaneously in Sweden , Norway and Denmark in 1978, caused a sensation . In it he dealt with the behavior of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun during National Socialism , with the trials against Hamsun after the Second World War because of his collaboration with the German occupation forces and with Hamsun's last book On Overgrown Paths . Hansen's attempt to gain understanding for Hamsun led to a controversial debate. The content was filmed in 1996 based on a script by Per Olov Enquist under the title Hamsun with Max von Sydow in the title role , although the work in Denmark, but also in other countries, was rated differently by readers and literary critics, and in some cases criticized.

As an author, Hansen was largely ignored by literary criticism and literary studies, despite his popular success. It was shaped by French existentialism , in particular by Albert Camus ' work The Myth of Sisyphus . As an ideal, he understood the presentation of facts without interpretation or explanation. His concept of objectivity has been criticized as naive by various literary critics.

Hansen died in 1989 on a long sea voyage in the Caribbean .

more publishments

Other books written by Thorkild Hansen were:

  • Remains he Stilhed (1953)
  • Pause signal (1959)
  • Syv seglsten (1960)
  • En kvinde ved en flod (1961)
  • De søde piger (1974)
  • Course mod solnedgangen (1982)
  • Søforhør (1982)
  • Et atelier i Paris I-II ( posthumously 1990).

literature

  • Uta von Bassi: Hansen, Hamsun and the truth. A study of Danish documentary literature using Thorkild Hansen's "Hamsun Trial" as an example . Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1984.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German under the title: The Hamsun Trial. From d. Danish by U. Leippe u. M. Wesemann. Knaus, Hamburg 1979.
  2. Wolfgang Butt: Thorkild Hansen - Essay , KLfG - Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Foreign Language Literature, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely available)
  3. DER SPIEGEL: That is perhaps the nemesis (No. 46/1979)
  4. Uta von Bassi: Hansen, Hamsun and the truth. A study of Danish documentary literature using Thorkild Hansen's "Hamsun Trial" as an example . Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1984, pp. 80-89.