Georg Brandes in Berlin: Marketing the Modern Breakthrough in Wilhelmine Germany

Literary trends and political movements often inform each other, particularly in times of social upheaval, but a productive balance between literature and politics can be difficult to achieve. While overtly propagandistic literature is rarely aesthetically satisfying, literary texts that disregard their own sociohistorical contexts can be anemic. When literature engages constructively with political issues and problems, however, it can help to bring about and illuminate social and political change. The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927) is famous for his declaration that literature must prove its vitality through critical engagement with social issues, but the relevance of this understanding of literature to Brandes's own specific cultural-historical context is often overlooked. Recognizing Brandes's central focus on the sociopolitical function of literature, R. M. Meyer suggests that Brandes's work should, in fact, be considered "Literaturpolitik" [literary politics] instead of literary history, since "he strove primarily to renew Danish culture" (quoted in Magon 1926, 604).¹ From this perspective, Brandes's vigorous efforts to market realistic Scandinavian literature in Wilhelmine Germany in the 1870s and 1880s can be understood as a reaction against Denmark's self-effacing foreign policy after 1864, an attempt to rehabilitate Denmark's self-image and global prestige through his careful curation of the literary output of contemporaneous Nordic authors as "modern."

To understand Brandes's effectiveness in this endeavor, it is important to recall that in the nineteenth century, literary criticism was a high-profile endeavor that made the front page of newspapers and triggered public debates, giving literary texts, authors, and literary critics an unusual (by modern standards, at least) degree of influence on public discourse. Brandes used this mass media platform to promote a new, politically informed approach to literature, not only in Denmark and the Nordic world, but throughout Europe, America, and Asia, and to promote those authors and works that seemed to exemplify such an approach. In the introduction to the first volume of his literary historical survey, Hovedstrømninger i det 19. Århundredes Litteratur (1872; Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature [1901]), which was a best seller across Europe and was republished in multiple editions, Brandes declares: "Det, at en Litteratur i vore Dage lever, viser sig i, at den sætter Problemer under Debat" (Brandes 1872, 15) ["The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate" (Wilkinson 2017, 696)]. This mantra became the rallying cry of a socially critical literary movement in Scandinavia, encompassing a diverse group of writers from Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) to Holger Drachmann (1846–1908) and J. P. Jacobsen (1847–1885) that came to be known as the "Moderne Gennembrud" (Modern Breakthrough). The literary ideals of the Modern Breakthrough soon spread into Germany, thanks in large part to Brandes's targeted efforts at popularizing both the movement's realist aesthetic and the Nordic authors who exemplified it. From Germany, both Brandes's name and the ideals of the Modern Breakthrough spread across the globe, reaching as far as mainland China during Brandes's lifetime, but the effects of this literary wave in each place were contingent on local social and political conditions.

Brandes's success at marketing the Modern Breakthrough in Wilhelmine Germany tends to obscure the fact that his decision to do so was a provocative, politically charged, and personally risky move. The Second Schleswig War of 1864 had demonstrated Denmark's weakness on the European political stage and exacted a high cost in territory, population, and prestige. As a result, the sociopolitical climate in Denmark in the 1870s was highly conservative and hostile to cultural innovations, particularly foreign ones. Brandes's call to radicalize Danish literature by infusing it with social criticism in the style of French realists was dangerously bold, at least in the eyes of his critics, while his move to Germany in 1877 and aggressive marketing of Nordic literature there made him seem disloyal to his native country. Although his desire to reach a larger customer base for Danish literature made sense in terms of market economics, the disastrous war with Prussia and Austria had...