Georg Brandes

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Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was an influential Danish literary critic whose interpretations of such writers as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and BjØrn sterne BjØrnson are credited with bringing Scandinavian literature into the mainstream of European culture. Similarly, his analyses of major nineteenth-century German, French, and English authors, including John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche, also served to alleviate the cultural gap that separated Danish readers from the central currents of European thought. According to Neil Christian Pages in "Scandinavian Studies", "Brandes was without exaggeration the most influential European literary critic and commentator at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth century… . A prolific scholar, biographer, and essayist, Brandes's pan-European approach transgressed literary and national boundaries combining art and political activism in an astute manner."

Literature and Social Reform

Brandes was born to Jewish parents in Copenhagen, Denmark, on February 4, 1842. By all accounts an excellent student, he studied law and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and early on developed an antireligious point of view. After completing a master's degree in 1864 he continued his studies, taking a doctorate in aesthetics and publishing his dissertation, Den franske Æsthetik i vore dage, in 1870. During this period he produced the collection of essays Æsthetiske studier (1868), which presented theoretical discussions of comedy and tragedy, and he translated John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women into Danish. Brandes maintained that literature should serve to reform society through confronting controversial social issues, and his early work was strongly influenced by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the French critic Hippolyte Taine, who sought to apply the methods of scientific investigation to the interpretation of literature and culture. In describing Brandes's critical perspective, biographer Bertil Nolin wrote that to Brandes "Literature was a weapon in an ideological debate, an instrument for the continuous change of values and social situations."

During 1870 and 1871 Brandes traveled outside Denmark, meeting with Mill (whose Utilitarianism he would translate in 1872), and with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, the author of Peer Gynt (1867), whose works embodied the realistic ideals Brandes advocated. Returning to Denmark he began lecturing at the University of Copenhagen on the relationship between literature and cultural progress and published these lectures in Emigrant-litteraturen ( The Emigrant Literature, 1872); Den romantiske skole i Tydakland ( The Romantic School in Germany, 1873); Reactionen i Frankrig ( The Reaction in France, 1874); Naturalismen i England ( Naturalism in England, 1875), the first volumes of his monumental survey of European literature; and HovedstrØmninger i det nittende aarhundredes litteratur ( Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1872-1890). Featured in The Emigrant Literature are analyses of French writers who were influenced by time spent outside their homeland, including Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who fled to London during the Reign of Terror and served later governments as ambassador to Rome, and the novelist Madame de Staël (1766-1817), who was banished from Paris by Napoleon after the publication of Delphine (1802), a novel sympathetic to divorce, Protestantism, and the British. Brandes's consideration of French literature is continued in The Reaction in France, offering considerations of the political agitator and former priest Félicité de Lamennais, who predicted the rise of a revolutionary working class, and the Romantic writer Victor Hugo, among others. In Naturalism in England Brandes considered the works of such poets as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, particularly praising Byron's liberalism.

Brandes expected to take a position within the faculty of the University of Copenhagen, but his appointment was denied owing to his Jewish background and the radical nature of his views, including his avowed atheism. During the mid-1870s Brandes undertook the publication of the journal Det nittende aarhundrede with his brother Edvard, but when this enterprise failed, he left Denmark. For the next five years Brandes lived in Berlin, during which time he became personally acquainted with many leading writers and wrote analyses of a number of European thinkers, including the English Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli and the Danish existentialist philosopher SØren Kierkegaard. The volume on Kierkegaard is considered important as the earliest extended consideration of Kierkegaard's philosophy, and, when translated in 1879, the first to introduce Kierkegaard's thinking to an international audience.

The Critic Outside the Academy

With private financial support, Brandes returned to Copenhagen in 1883 and became well known as a public lecturer, unaffiliated with the university. During the ensuing decades his renown and influence grew as he published a number of significant studies and after 1887 became a leading proponent of the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Largely unknown at the time, Nietzsche was in the final two years of lucidity when he and Brandes began corresponding. In Brandes's 1889 essay, "Friedrich Nietzsche: En afhandling om aristokratisk radikalisme," he presented the earliest systematic treatment of Nietzsche's philosophy and technique. As quoted by Pages in Scandinavian Studies, Brandes introduced readers to this obscure writer by declaring, "Nietzsche appears to me the most interesting writer in German literature at the present time. Though little known even in his own country, he is a thinker of a high order, who fully deserves to be studied, discussed, contested, and mastered. Among many good qualities he has that of imparting mood and setting thoughts in motion." Nietzsche, in a letter quoted in Scandinavian Studies, later approved Brandes's characterization of his work as "aristocratic radicalism," calling that phrase "the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself." Through Brandes's efforts - he lectured on Nietzsche in Copenhagen and developed a theoretical framework for Nietzsche's works - Nietzsche gained prominence, but not before the philosopher had succumbed to madness, and he died in 1900. Brandes later issued the volume Friedrich Nietzsche (1909), which included biography, criticism, and correspondence.

Among Brandes's works of this period are the final two volumes of Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature, as well as a monumental three-volume consideration of Shakespeare (1895-1896) and the travel books Intryk fra Polen ( Impressions of Poland, 1888) and Intryk fra Rusland ( Impressions of Russia, 1888). Nolin identified Den romantiske skole i Frankrig ( The Romantic School in France, 1882), the fifth volume of Main Currents, as "the most substantial volume" of the series. In it Brandes focused on the period 1824 to 1848, analyzing works by Hugo, George Sand, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred de Musset, and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a literary critic with whom Brandes is often compared. The final volume of the survey, Det unge Tydakland (Young Germany) was published in 1890. Brandes here examined the influence of Heinrich Heine, Karl Ludwig Börne, and Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, and other advocates of the Young Germany movement in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the literary biography William Shakespeare Brandes combined literary evaluation with psychological portrait, attempting to elucidate the life of the writer through his works. Brandes, as quoted by René Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism: The Late Nineteenth Century, 1750-1950, expressed the opinion that "given the possession of forty-five important works by any man, it is entirely our own fault if we know nothing whatever about him. The poet has incorporated his whole individuality in these writings, and there, if we can read aright, we shall find him." Brandes's travelogues were praised by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen in Essays on Scandinavian Literature as showing "a faculty to enter sympathetically into an alien civilization, to seize upon its characteristic phases, to steal into its confidence … and coax from it its intimate secrets." In the English journal the Spectator, a contemporary reviewer of Impressions of Russia asserted that Brandes "has drawn a portrait of the Russian State that in depth of insight, range of knowledge, and vividness of presentation, surpasses every contribution we are acquainted with."

Controversial to the End

Brandes was at last made a professor of the University of Copenhagen in 1902. His memoir, Barndom og fØrste ungdom (Reminiscences of My Childhood and Youth) was published in 1906. Though now ensconced in the academy, with many of his formerly controversial ideas gaining acceptance, Brandes remained an iconoclast throughout his career. He was a vocal opponent of the First World War and in 1925 elicited wide criticism when he published Sagnet om Jesus (Jesus: A Myth), a treatise in which he proclaimed that Jesus had never existed. Inspired in part by Nietzsche's concept of the Ü bermensch, or Superman, Brandes focused much of his later career on producing biographies of extraordinary historical personages, including Wolfgang von Goethe (1914-1915), Voltaire (1916-1917), Julius Caesar (1918), and Michelangelo (1921). Brandes died on February 19, 1927.

While Brandes's criticism has been surpassed and is little known today, his role as an early supporter of the Scandinavian writers Ibsen, Strindberg, and Kierkegaard remains significant as does his advocacy of the works of Nietzsche, whose influence continued throughout the twentieth century. In an assessment of Brandes written in the late 1890s, William Morton Payne wrote in the Bookman, "That the work of Brandes, taken as a whole, has been a contribution of great value to contemporary criticism can hardly be denied even by those the least in sympathy with his ideals. It more than makes up in light what it lacks in sweetness, and it has the stimulating quality that comes from freshness of thought and unconventionality of utterance." Near the end of his life, Brandes was hailed by Robert Herndon Fife in an introduction to Julius Moritzen's Georg Brandes in Life and Letters, as "unique in his contribution to the development of European thought… . He is the only critic who has ever completely identified himself with the whole of Europe's culture and the entire spirit of the age." And in Essays in German and Comparative Literature Oskar Seidlin, assessing Brandes's lasting significance, noted, "His critical conceptions and analyses may be completely outmoded tomorrow; but his instinct for the truly great, his fight for the recognition of the new, will testify for him… . He was a great discoverer, and he had the courage of his discoveries."

Books

Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, Essays on Scandinavian Literature, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895.

Moritzen, Julius, Georg Brandes in Life and Letters, D.S. Colyer, 1922.

Nolin, Bertil, Georg Brandes, Twayne, 1976.

Seidlin, Oskar, Essays in German and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, The Gale Group, 1983.

Wellek, René, A History of Modern Criticism: The Late Nineteenth Century, 1750-1950, Yale University Press, 1965.

Periodicals

Bookman, April 1897.

Scandinavian Studies, Summer 2000.

Spectator, May 17, 1890.

Brandes, Georg (Copenhagen, 1842-1927, Copenhagen), whose real name was Cohen, was a Danish critic and propagandist for Naturalism (see Naturalismus). He was widely influential in Germany, particularly through Hovedstrømninger i. de 19. Aarh. Literatur (1872-94, translated as Hauptströmungen in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts) and Bjørnson og Ibsen (1882). His interpretation of Goethe (Wolfgang Goethe) appeared in 1915, and Briefwechsel mit A. Schnitzler, ed. K. Bergel, in 1956 (see Schnitzler, A.).

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (July 2007)

Georg Brandes
Georg Brandes, a sketch for a painting, by P.S. Krøyer, 1900
Born	Georg Morris Cohen Brandes 4 February 1842(1842-02-04) Copenhagen, Denmark
Died	19 February 1927 (aged 85)
Occupation	Critic
Nationality	Danish
Education	University of Copenhagen
Relative(s)	Edvard Brandes (brother)

Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (4 February 1842 – 19 February 1927) was a Danish critic and scholar who had great influence on Scandinavian and European literature from the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century. He is seen as the theorist behind the "Modern Break-through" of Scandinavian culture. At the age of 30, Brandes formulated the principles of a new realism and naturalism, condemning hyper-aesthetic writing and fantasy in literature. According to Brandes, literature should be an organ "of the great thoughts of liberty and the progress of humanity." His literary goals were shared by many authors^{[citation needed]}, among them the Norwegian realist playwright Henrik Ibsen.

When Georg Brandes held a series of lectures in 1871 with the title "Main Currents in 19th-century Literature," he defined the Modern Break-through and started the movement that would become Cultural Radicalism. In 1884 Viggo Hørup, Georg Brandes, and his brother Edvard Brandes started the daily newspaper Politiken with the motto: "The paper of greater enlightenment." The paper and their political debates led to a split of the liberal party Venstre in 1905 and created the new party Det Radikale Venstre.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Quotations 3 See also 4 References 5 Sources 6 External links

Biography

He was born in Copenhagen in a non-orthodox Jewish middle-class family and became a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1859 where he first studied jurisprudence. From this, however, his interests soon turned to philosophy and aesthetics. In 1862 he won the gold medal of the university for an essay on The Idea of Nemesis among the Ancients. Before this, indeed since 1858, he had shown a remarkable gift for verse-writing, the results of which, however, were not abundant enough to justify separate publication. Brandes did not collect his poems until as late as 1898. At the university, which he left in 1864, Brandes was influenced by the writings of Heiberg in criticism and Søren Kierkegaard in philosophy, influences which continued to leave traces on his work.

In 1866, he took part in the controversy raised by the works of Rasmus Nielsen in a treatise on "Dualism in our Recent Philosophy." From 1865 to 1871 he traveled much in Europe, acquainting himself with the condition of literature in the principal centers of learning. His first important contribution to letters was his Aesthetic Studies (1868), where his maturer method is already foreshadowed in several brief monographs on Danish poets. In 1870 he published several important volumes, The French Aesthetics of the Present Day, dealing chiefly with Hippolyte Taine, Criticisms and Portraits, and a translation of The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, whom he had met that year during a visit to England.

Brandes now took his place as the leading northern European critic, applying to local conditions and habits of thought the methods of Taine. He became docent or reader in Belles Lettres at the University of Copenhagen, where his lectures were the sensation for the time.^{[citation needed]} His famous opening lecture, on 3 November 1871, is often considered the gateway of modern Danish literature.^{[citation needed]} On the professorship of Aesthetics becoming vacant in 1872, it was taken as a matter of course that Brandes would be appointed. But the young critic had offended many sensibilities by his ardent advocacy of modern ideas; he was known to be a Jew, his convictions were Radical, he was suspected of being an atheist. The authorities refused to elect him, but his fitness for the post was so obvious that the chair of Aesthetics remained vacant, no one else daring to place himself in comparison with Brandes.

In the midst of these polemics the critic began to issue the most ambitious of his works, Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century, of which four volumes appeared between 1872 and 1875 (English translation, 1901-1905). The brilliant novelty of this criticism of the literature of major European countries at the beginning of the 19th century, and his description of the general revolt against the pseudo-classicism of the 18th century, at once attracted attention outside Denmark. The tumult which gathered round the person of the critic increased the success of the work, and the reputation of Brandes grew apace, especially in Germany and Russia. Among his later writings must be mentioned the monographs on Søren Kierkegaard (1877), on Esaias Tegnér (1878), on Benjamin Disraeli (1878), Ferdinand Lassalle (in German, 1877), Ludvig Holberg (1884), on Henrik Ibsen (1899) and on Anatole France (1905). Brandes wrote with great depth on the main contemporary poets and novelists of his own country and of Norway, and he and his disciples were for a long time the arbiters of literary fame in the north.

His Danish Poets (1877), containing studies of Carsten Hauch, Ludvig Bødtcher, Christian Winther, and Paludan-Müller, his Men of the Modern Transition (1883), and his Essays (1889), are volumes essential to the proper study of modern Scandinavian literature. He wrote an excellent book on Poland (1888; English translation, 1903), and was one of the editors of the German version of Ibsen.

In 1877 Brandes left Copenhagen and settled in Berlin, taking a considerable part in the aesthetic life of that city. His political views, however, made Prussia uncomfortable for him, and he returned in 1883 to Copenhagen, where he found a whole new school of writers and thinkers eager to receive him as their leader. The most important of his recent works has been his study of Shakespeare (1897-1898), which was translated into English by William Archer, and was highly acclaimed. It was, perhaps, the most authoritative work on Shakespeare, not principally intended for an English-speaking audience, which had been published in any country.^{[citation needed]}

He was afterwards engaged on a history of modern Scandinavian literature. In his critical work, which extended over a wider field than that of any other living writer, Brandes was aided by a singularly charming style, lucid and reasonable, enthusiastic without extravagance, brilliant and colored without affectation. His influence on the Scandinavian writers of the 1880s was very great^{[citation needed]}, but a reaction, headed by Holger Drachmann, against his "realistic" doctrines, began in 1885. In 1900 he collected his works for the first time in a complete and popular edition, and began to work on a German edition, completed in 1902.

Between the years of 1886 and 1888 Brandes was engaged in a relationship with the Swedish authoress Victoria Benedictsson (who was known under the male pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren and who wrote "Penningar" and Fru "Marianne"). Victoria Benedictsson sliced her throat, due to her unhappy love affair and a demeaning recencion by Brandes' brother, in a hotel room in Denmark.^{[citation needed]}

After 1890, Brandes partly turned away from the direct fight, concentrating around "great personalities" who enlightened the life of their mediocre contemporaries. In this period, he discovered Friedrich Nietzsche whom he introduced to Scandinavian culture. Brandes, in an 1888 letter, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read the works of Kierkegaard. He described Nietzsche's philosophy as "aristocratic radicalism", a description which delighted Nietzsche, and the idea of "aristocratic radicalism" influenced most of the later works of Brandes and resulted in voluminous biographies Wolfgang Goethe (1914-15), Francois de Voltaire (1916-17), Gaius Julius Cæsar 1918 and Michelangelo (1921).

The influence of Brandes faded somewhat after 1900 but he was still considered a leading figure of Danish literary life and his international reputation was growing. In many ways he became a modern Scandinavian Voltaire with a great moral authority, condemning the maltreatment of national minorities, the persecution of Dreyfus etc. During World War I he condemned the national aggression and imperialism on both sides and his last years were dedicated to anti-religious polemic. In this late period he made new connections to intellectuals like Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland and E. D. Morel.

Today, Brandes still stands as one of the most influential inspirations of Danish literature^{[citation needed]}, an equal of Holberg and Grundtvig. This has not prevented him from being criticized. The right wing has condemned him as an unpatriotic and subversive blasphemer and fornicator.^{[citation needed]} Left wing socialists have criticized his elitist attitudes, while the feminist movement has often regarded his positive attitude of sexual equality as being inconsequential.^{[citation needed]} Nonetheless his influence in Danish cultural history is still far-ranging.

His brother Edvard Brandes (1847-1931), also a well-known critic, was the author of a number of plays, and of two psychological novels: A Politician (1889), and Young Blood (1899). He became an outstanding political figure of the party Det Radikale Venstre.

Quotations

• Being gifted requires courage (1869)
• That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems. (1871)[needs correction?]
• Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types. (1900)
• He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish (1906)
• The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness. (1909)
• The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity
• It would be as impossible for me to attack Christianity as it would be impossible for me to attack werewolves.^[1]

See also

• Helen Zelezny-Scholz

References

1. ^ From the Selected Letter of Friedrich Nietzsche, Brandes to Nietzsche, 23rd November 1888

Sources

• Bertil Nolin: Georg Brandes. Gloucester, Mass., 1976.
• Hans Hertel (ed.): The Activist Critic. A Symposium on the Political Ideas, Literary Methods and International Reception of Georg Brandes. Copenhagen, 1980.
• Doris R. Asmundsson: Georg Brandes. Aristocratic Radical. N. Y., 1981.
• W. Glyn Jones (ed.): Georg Brandes. Selected Letters. Norvik Press, 1990.

External links

• Works by Georg Brandes at Project Gutenberg

Persondata
NAME	Brandes, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Danish Author
DATE OF BIRTH	1842-02-04
PLACE OF BIRTH	Copenhagen, Denmark
DATE OF DEATH	1927-02-19
PLACE OF DEATH

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