BRANDES, GEORG. - Danish writer of Jewish origin, b. in Copenhagen on 4 February 1842 and d. there on 17 February 1927, author of works of aesthetic, historical and philosophical criticism. His influence was very great both in the field of literature and in that of social life throughout Scandinavia in the 19th century, to which he made known the significance of the European literary currents as they had been developing both in Germany and in France, thus paving the way for the new naturalistic literature of Ibsen, Bjørnson and Strindberg.
Having begun his critical activity under the direct influence of Hegelian thought, he later detached himself from it to become a follower of Sainte-Beuve, of Renan and of Taine and, later and on the social plane, of Stuart Mill, finally arriving in his last years at a kind of aristocratic radicalism and at the cult of the superman in the manner of Nietzsche. In the religious field he soon moved away from the influences of Kierkegaardian Christianity to become a champion of an ardent materialism that denied every religion: in his last years he would even go so far as to deny the historical existence of Jesus, in Sagnet om Jesus ("The Legend of Jesus", 1925). His principal work Hovedstrommninger i det 19. Aarhundredes Litteratur ("Main Currents in the Literature of the 19th Century"), published in 6 vols. from 1872 to 1890, is nothing other than the transcription of the lectures he gave in Copenhagen, with which he dominated for years, not without conflicts, the intellectual life of Scandinavia. His whole work is characterized not by fidelity to a scientific method, but by polemical impetus and vastness of knowledge, and its influence has been all the greater the more indirect and imponderable it was. Let us recall: Aestetiske Studier ("Aesthetic Studies", 1868), Kritikker og Portraetter ("Critiques 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).
Bibliography
Alda Manghi