BRANDES, GEORG. — Danish writer of Jewish origin, born in Copenhagen on 4 Feb. 1842 and died there on 17 Feb. 1927, author of works of aesthetic, historical and philosophical criticism. His influence was immense both in literature and in social life throughout Scandinavia in the 19th century, where he made known the scope of European literary movements as they had developed in both 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, later distancing himself to become a follower of Sainte-Beuve, Renan and Taine, and, later still and 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 sphere he soon abandoned the influence of Kierkegaardian Christianity to become an advocate of a heated materialism that denied all religion; in his final years he even went so far as to deny the historical existence of Jesus in *Sagnt om Jesus* (“The Legend of Jesus,” 1925).
His principal work, *Hovedstrømninger i det 19. Aarhundredes Literatur* (“Main Currents in 19th-Century Literature”), published in 6 vols. from 1872 to 1890, is nothing other than a transcription of the lectures he delivered in Copenhagen, with which he dominated for years, not without controversy, Scandinavian intellectual life. All his work is characterized not by fidelity to a scientific method but by polemical impetus and wide-ranging knowledge, and its influence was all the greater for being indirect and imponderable. Among his works are: *Æstetiske Studier* (“Aesthetic Studies,” 1868), *Kritiker og Portrætter* (“Critics and Portraits,” 1870), *Danske Digtere* (“Danish Poets,” 1877), *Søren Kierkegaard* (1877), *Tegner* (1878), *Den franske Æsthetik i vore Dage* (“French Aesthetics in Our Time,” 1870), *Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd* (“Men of the Modern Breakthrough,” 1883), *Shakespeare* (3 vols., 1895–96), *Barndom og Ungdom* (“Childhood and Youth,” 1905), *Et Tiår* (“A Decade,” 1907), *Goethe* (2 vols., 1915), *Voltaire* (2 vols., 1917), *Cæsar* (2 vols., 1918), *Napoleon og Garibaldi* (1917), *Michelangelo* (2 vols., 1921).