Georg Brandes

From Philosopedia

Brandes, Georg Morris Cohen (1842—1927)

Brandes, a Danish literary critic, was influential in bringing European thought to a wide audience in Denmark, Iceland, and Scandinavia. He has been described as “the greatest critic since Taine” and the intellectual inspiration for an inter-war period called Cultural Leftism.

Because he was a “cultural” Jew and an atheist - in 1925, he wrote Jesus, A Myth - in 1870 he was refused the chair in aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. In 1902, however, he was granted that same chair.

Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature (6 volumes, 1872—1890) was an attack on provincialism and reaction. Brandes introduced feminism to Denmark.

Brandes opposed romanticism and helped direct Scandinavian literature toward realism and a concern for social issues. When he spent some time in Berlin, coming under the influence of Nietzsche, he was attacked during the war for maintaining total neutrality.

According to J. M. Robertson, Brandes was an active freethinker. Brandes was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association, which in 1899 had been founded by Charles A. Watts. Joseph McCabe wrote that both Brandes and his brother “were outspoken Agnostics.”

{BDF; CE; JM; JMR; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI}