Georg Brandes

Born in Copenhagen to a highly assimilated middle-class family, educated in literature and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Georg Brandes became the most influential and controversial critical voice in late nineteenth-century Scandinavian letters—the era when figures like Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, with whom Brandes was aligned, achieved global literary influence. In the 1870s, committed to progressive ideas, Brandes launched a critical campaign against still-dominant Romanticism in Scandinavian art and called instead for literature that would grapple with the realities of the modern world and facilitate social reform. He wrote several works that framed the new realist and progressive trends he championed as the “modern breakthrough” and connected them to the broader European scene, particularly German progressivism. In the late 1880s, his thought took a turn toward the Nietzschean, and he began to advocate what he called “aristocratic radicalism”; in writing a series of books about geniuses from Shakespeare to Voltaire, he also courted controversy and the continued anger of conservatives, not least for a late book on “the myth of Jesus.” Brandes’s relationship to his own Jewish background was famously mixed.