Georg Brandes

Georg Brandes (Copenhagen, 1842-1927) was a Danish critic, essayist and philosopher, and one of the most influential intellectual figures in Scandinavian letters between the 1870s and the early twentieth century. He is regarded as the chief theorist of the so-called Modern Breakthrough, the movement that renewed Nordic culture through realism and naturalism. His significance lies in pulling Denmark out of a provincial cultural isolation and linking its literature to wider European currents of thought.

He came from a middle-class family of non-observant Jewish faith and Sephardic descent. He enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1859 to study law, but soon turned to philosophy and aesthetics. During those years the poet Johan Ludvig Heiberg shaped his views on criticism, and Søren Kierkegaard shaped his views on philosophy. After leaving the university he spent several years travelling through France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, England and Sweden. In Paris he met Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, and in England he came into contact with John Stuart Mill; he also declared himself a supporter of evolutionary ideas.

On his return he set out to shake Danish culture out of its provincialism. In 1871 he began a lecture series at the University of Copenhagen which led to Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature, published in six volumes between 1872 and 1890. In these lectures he rejected the fantasy and abstract idealism of late Scandinavian Romanticism and argued for a realistic, naturalistic literature in the service of progressive ideas and social reform. This position earned him the friendship of Henrik Ibsen and the support of writers such as Bjørnson, Jacobsen, Lie, Kielland and Strindberg.

His bid for the chair of aesthetics was blocked in 1872 because of his religious and political views, and also because he was seen as a Jew, although he did not regard himself as one. The post stayed empty for years. In 1877 he settled in Berlin, where he had a considerable effect on the city's aesthetic life, and in 1883 he returned to Copenhagen, where he became the figurehead of a new generation of Danish writers. His interests later widened towards the study of great personalities: he wrote on Kierkegaard, Disraeli and Lassalle, and later on Goethe, Voltaire and Michelangelo. Around 1888 he gave the first university course on Nietzsche, helping to bring the German philosopher to a wider audience. His study of Shakespeare, published in 1897-1898, was highly acclaimed in the English-speaking world. In 1902 he was finally appointed professor of aesthetics in Copenhagen, a post he held until his death.

In his final years he acted as a moral authority, condemning the persecution of minorities, the Dreyfus affair, and the excesses of nationalism and imperialism during the First World War. As a militant atheist, his book on the myth of Jesus earned him many enemies. His influence as a critic declined in the new century, but his prestige endured, and in the Spanish-speaking world Miguel de Unamuno read him with admiration. He died in 1927 in his native Copenhagen.