Karl Ove Knausgaard swept through New York City last week as the literary sensation of the moment. No writer has emerged on the world stage to more acclaim in at least a decade, and readers had to be turned away at all three of his events. On Friday at the New York Public Library, where prominent writers and journalists packed the front rows, the crowd seemed spellbound even while the Norwegian paused for nearly a full minute to consider a question from the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides. Book One of Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical series, “My Struggle,” a ruminative account that treats no detail of middle-class life as too banal to recount, has hit the extended Times best-seller list, one slot above James Patterson. With the recent release of Book Three, readers of every stripe, it seems, are talking about Knausgaard.

But one element of Knausgaard’s story is spoken of more often in a whisper: What is it with that title? In Norway, the appropriation of Hitler’s words is only more obvious; Knausgaard’s series is called “Min Kamp.” I interviewed his editor, Geir Gulliksen, in Oslo for a profile of Knausgaard, and when he described his initial response to the title, his thinking sounded familiar: “Why should you link it to Hitler? Why?”

In February, a retired high-school teacher and critic named Emil Otto Syvertsen showed me around the area where Knausgaard, who is his former student, grew up. Along the way, Syvertsen stopped the car at an unmarked spot in the town of Grimstad, on a road that winds along the southern coast. He wanted to show me a large white farmhouse situated behind a gate and a veil of trees. Buried on the property are the remains of the most famous novelist in the nation’s history, Knut Hamsun, who lived there for several decades in the latter half of his life.

A major influence on Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, Hamsun in many respects anticipated the twentieth-century novel in works such as “Hunger” (1890), his début, a nearly plotless first-person account of an impoverished and self-denying young writer as he wanders about the capital shedding all sources of stability or belief. Hamsun published his early output during a period of great artistic ferment in Norway; Knausgaard pointed out to me that the country’s consensus triumvirate of artistic giants—Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, and Edvard Munch—all came to prominence in, broadly speaking, the same era.

While we looked at the farmhouse, Syvertsen told me something that raised the hair on the back of my neck: in the postwar years, Norwegians would stand just where we were and throw copies of Hamsun’s books over the fence, as a gesture of rejection.

Hamsun had become, in old age, a supporter of the Nazis. His backing persisted even while the Germans set up roadblocks and military installations all along the southern coast during their occupation of Norway. (Fewer than eight hundred Jews currently live in the country.) Hamsun flew to visit Hitler in Bavaria in 1943, and described him in a newspaper obituary as “a preacher for the gospel of justice.” It is one of literary history’s more eerie and repulsive facts that Hamsun, the author of “Hunger” and other classics, gave his Nobel Prize as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Just after the war, Hamsun was set to be tried for treason but instead was committed to a hospital. (According to one theory, the idea was to protect his reputation—he’s lost his mind, that’s all.) Much of his fortune was seized by the government. He died, at the age of ninety-two, in 1952. His novels are still widely read and assigned in schools, but as late as 2001 political opposition doomed a proposal to name an Oslo street after him. A museum in his honor finally opened in the north of the country in 2010, amidst controversy. “We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years,” Ingar Sletten Kolloen, the Hamsun biographer, told the Times in 2009. “That’s our Hamsun trauma.”

The two seaside places where Knausgaard grew up—Tromøya and Kristiansand—are located about an hour’s drive apart on the southern coast, and Hamsun’s house is on a major road that connects them. Knausgaard’s family would probably have driven past when they moved in his early teens, a moment recounted in Book Three of “My Struggle.”

The image of Hamsun’s books being thrown back at him, right there on Knausgaard’s home turf, underscored for me the bizarre audacity of Knausgaard’s title. He is an admirer of Hamsun’s work and is of course well versed in his country’s deeply conflicted relationship with their novelistic giant. And yet Knausgaard went ahead and borrowed the title of Hitler’s autobiography for his own.

It would be unfair to tie Knausgaard too closely to Hamsun; Knausgaard’s views on Hitler bear zero resemblance to his forebear’s. “My Struggle” bears no mark of anti-Semitism and in fact contains few expressions of political opinion of any sort, beyond some good-natured shots at the extremes of Swedish political correctness. When Knausgaard has addressed the topic of Hitler directly, he has argued that a frightening characteristic that connects “Mein Kampf” to the writings of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Utøya massacre (which Knausgaard writes about in Book Six), is that in the mind behind both texts there seems to be an “I” and a “we” but no “you,” reflecting a dangerous blindness that allowed an otherwise impossible evil.

Still, readers who are holding out hope that their concerns about the title will be resolved by the end of the series may be disappointed. Book Six includes a four-hundred-page essay on “Mein Kampf” and Hitler’s early years, but Knausgaard decided to write it only after settling on the title, and the essay has not put the matter to rest in Norway. Knausgaard’s attempts in those pages to humanize the young Hitler and cast doubt on the notion that he was already evil at age of twelve seems to have generated some unease. Knausgaard counters that the real danger lies in deceiving ourselves that Hitler is some unreal monster that no man could ever match.

When asked why he called the project “Min Kamp,” Knausgaard often remarks that he had working titles that he found unsatisfactory (“Argentina” and “Parrot Park”). Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” came up in conversation with his best friend, the author Geir Angell Øygarden, and Geir—as he is called in the book—said, “There’s your title.” Knausgaard says that he agreed right away, though Geir told me that he recalled some hesitation. But all this is more of a narrative than an explanation, and it seems notable that Knausgaard frequently refers to Geir’s role, as if to deflect some responsibility.

Knausgaard also told me that when the German publisher said that the work would have to be published there under a different name, he of course understood and did not object. This, too, was a comment that served to distance himself from the title. Geir, meanwhile, believes that the German publisher made a huge mistake, because they had a chance to “overwrite” Hitler and missed it. Geir, who has written about boxing and reported from war zones, is something of a provocateur, as readers of “My Struggle” can observe. When I remarked that some people believe that the title shows poor taste, he laughed and said, “Yeah. I obviously don’t think so, but yeah. And if it was, so what?”