BRANDES, GEORG. – Danish writer of Jewish origin, born in Copenhagen on 4 February 1842 and died there on 17 February 1927, author of works of aesthetic, historical, and philosophical criticism. His influence was immense both in the field of literature and in that of social life throughout Scandinavia in the nineteenth century, to which he made known the significance of the European literary currents as they had developed in Germany and France, thus paving the way for the new naturalistic literature of Ibsen, Bjørnson, and Strindberg.
He began his critical activity under the direct influence of Hegelian thought, but later detached himself from it to become a follower of Sainte-Beuve, Renan, and Taine and, later, on the social plane, of Stuart Mill, eventually arriving in his final years at a kind of aristocratic radicalism and the cult of the superman in the manner of Nietzsche. In the religious field he soon moved away from the influence of Kierkegaardian Christianity to become an advocate of an ardent materialism denying every religion: in his final years he would even deny the historical existence
of Jesus, in Sagnet om Jesus (“The Legend of Jesus,” 1925). His principal work, Hovedstrommninger i det 19. Aarhundredes Litteratur (“Principal Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature”), published in 6 vols. from 1872 to 1890, is nothing other than a transcription of the lectures he delivered in Copenhagen, through which he dominated Scandinavian intellectual life for years, not without opposition. His entire work is characterized not by fidelity to a scientific method, but by polemical fervor and breadth of knowledge, and its influence was all the greater for being indirect and immeasurable. We may recall: Aestetiske Studier (“Aesthetic Studies,” 1868), Kritikker og Portraetter (“Criticisms and Portraits,” 1870), Danske Digtere (“Danish Poets,” 1877), Søren Kierkegaard (1877), Tegnér (1878), Den franske Aestetik i vore Dage (“French Aesthetics in Our Day,” 1870), Det moderne Gjennembruds Maend (“The Men of the Modern Breakthrough,” 1883), Shakespeare (3 vols., 1895–96), Barndom og Ungdom (“Childhood and Youth,” 1905), Et Tiaar (“Ten Years,” 1907), Goethe (2 vols., 1915), Voltaire (2 vols., 1917), Caesar (2 vols., 1918), Napoleon og Garibaldi (1917), Michelangelo (2 vols., 1921).