Hamsun’s Nazi collaboration vindicated Lowenthal’s reading of his novels as pseudoprotest.

Evidence

In perhaps his most insightful essay, Lowenthal turned to the distortion of this counterimage in the novels of the Norwegian Knut Hamsun.’ When in 1934 Lowenthal first argued that Hamsun’s works contained only a pseudonegation of the status quo, he was met with skepticism by other members of the Institut. Hunger, Pan, The Growth of the Soil, and other of Hamsun’s works were understood as genuine protests against the alienation and emptiness of modern life. Lowenthal, however, had the satisfaction of having his counterargument “proved” a few years later when Hamsun joined Quisling’s collaborators in Norway. This explicit confirmation of the trends Lowenthal had discerned under the surface of Hamsun’s novels was one of the most unambiguous successes of the Institut’s program. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 452

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A striking vindication case: the Institute’s ideological critique was literalized by history when Hamsun joined the collaborators, an almost unnerving confirmation that their suspicion of literature’s pseudo-negation was predictive.
• SEED: Angle: how the Frankfurt School’s hermeneutics of suspicion was ‘proved’ by a novelist’s real-life treason — a case study in critique predicting biography.
• XREF: Related to the Institute’s critique of fake negation and pseudo-individuality that recurs in Adorno and the later culture industry analysis.