(One of the most controversial influences that Nietzsche h...)
One of the most controversial influences that Nietzsche had was on the Nazi party and Hitler's personality because Nietzsche's theories were the bases of Hitler's aryan race. Some people, think that Neitzche's philosophies were used as a guide for Hitler's destruction. Nietzsche influenced George Brandes who developed a philosophy called "aristricatic radicalism" which was inspired by Nietzsche's Overman theory.
Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was a Danish critic and scholar, who had a great influence on the Scandinavian literature from the 1870s through the turn of the century. Brandes formulated at the age of thirty the principles of a new realism and naturalism, condemning hyper-aesthetic writing and fantasy in literature.
Background
Georg Brandes was born on February 4, 1842, in Copenhagen, Denmark as Morris Cohen. Georg Brandes was born to middle-class Jewish parents. He was the eldest son of Herman Cohen Brandes (1816-1904), a wholesaler, and Emilie Bendix (1818-1898). Brandes was born two months prematurely. "I was forever hearing that I was pale and small, pale in particular," Brandes said in his book of memoir, Reminiscences of My Childhood and Youth (1905). "Others remarked in joke: "He looks rather green in the face." And so soon as they began talking about me the word "thin" would be uttered."
Education
Brandes showed his brilliance as a student, receiving his master's degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1864. He first studied jurisprudence. From this, however, his interests soon turned to philosophy and aesthetics. In 1862 he won the gold medal of the university for an essay on The Idea of Nemesis among the Ancients.
After working as a lecturer and drama critic, Brandes earned his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 1870.
After receiving his Ph.D., Brandes expected to be offered a university position, but he did not get the position until three decades later after he had become a respected literary critic and scholar without the affiliation. In 1870 and 1871, Brandes met with intellectuals and writers throughout Europe, including John Stuart Mill and Henrik Ibsen.
Brandes made an impact on Danish and Scandinavian cultural life with the first of his public lectures on Hovedstromninger I Det 19De Aarhundredes Litteratur (1872-87, Main Currents in the 20th Century Literature).
The lectures were made up of six works written over a twenty-year period: The Emigrant Literature, The Romantic School in Germany, The Reaction in France, Naturalism in England, The Romantic School in France, and Young Germany. The work is a comparative history of French, German, and English literature from the first half of the nineteenth century, in which the central theme is the revolt against eighteenth-century principles and the reaction that the revolt engendered. The Emigrant Literature dealt with works by such French emigrant authors as François René de Chateaubriand, Etienne Pivert de Sénancour. and Madame de Staël, while The Romantic School in Germany dealt with Rudolph Haym, Goedeke, and Madame de Kriidcner. In The Reaction in France, Brandes treated works by Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny, and in Naturalism in England, he discussed works by Wordsworth and Southey. The Romantic School in France included Saint Simon, Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Stendhal, and Saint-Beuve. Finally, in Young Germany, published nearly ten years after its predecessor, Brandes discussed Heine, Borne, Immermann, Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube. and Mundt. Although Brandes often searched for patterns among the literatures - common fictional types - he interpreted works in relation to their portrayal of political and religious authority. From the inception of his Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature until its completion in 1890, much changed in European society, including methods of literary analysis that made the final volume. Young Germany, seem outdated.
Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature garnered much critical attention. Brandes biographer Bertil Nolin praised Brandes’s critical acumen highly in his Georg Brandes: “Brandes’s style was characterized by clarity and lucidity and reflected his feeling for rationality and tangibility. His point of departure was often an illustrative anecdote or quotation. The scope of his reading was impressive, and his memory held an inexhaustible supply of thoughts and expressions. His critical technique demonstrated great flexibility and ability to adapt to the theme he was treating.” Nolin added, “He was a critic of ideas who searched for the author’s ethical and social philosophy. Involvement, vitality, and passion distinguish his way of writing. He was a perceptive critic who was primarily interested in originality, utility, and uniqueness.” According to René Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism, Brandes “conceived of criticism as exhortation and propaganda.” Thus Brandes praised writings that voiced his own views on social theories and politics. Commentators on Brandes’ criticism were of two camps: they frequently agreed or disagreed with his critical assessments based on his politics. Yet, William Morton Payne, a contemporary of Brandes, wrote in Bookman, “That the work of Brandes, taken as a whole, has been a contribution of great value to contemporary criticism can hardly be denied even by those the least in sympathy with his ideals. It more than makes up in light what it lacks in sweetness, and it has the stimulating quality that comes from the freshness of thought and unconventionality of utterance.” Wellek commented that Brandes’s method was flawed and asserted that he was not a precursor of literary sociology in Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature because the work contains “no real attempt to explain literature in terms of milieu, moment, and race. ” Even so, Wellek maintained that Brandes “cannot be dismissed as a mere ideologist. His enormous energy and curiosity made him an important intermediary among several literatures. For his own country, he became the pioneer of a new era.”
In addition to Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Brandes wrote several travelogues and a handful of biographies of men whom he considered to be great. In 1888, he discovered the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and became an early popularizer of works by both Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard. Brandes came to believe that geniuses are the best products of a society. Thus in later years, he wrote biographies of such notable individuals like William Shakespeare, Goethe, Voltaire, Julius Caesar, and Michelangelo. He also wrote critical studies about fellow Scandinavians Henrik Ibsen and Bjprnstjerne Bjornson. These biographies combined history, biography, literary criticism, and psychology. Of the biographies, best known during his lifetime was his three-volume work on Shakespeare, which, in the view of Wellek “contains some well-digested history, literary history, and simple exposition and criticism.” In a review of Voltaire, Ben Ray Redman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune Books: “Rich in history, anecdote, gossip, and literary criticism, Brandes’s life of Voltaire is a full book, a valuable one, and eminently readable.”
Late in life, Brandes traveled widely, meeting famous writers. He came under attack when he opposed World War I. A religious skeptic, Brandes further caused a stir in 1925 when he published Sagnet om Jesus, a controversial essay in which he proposed that Jesus was simply a mythical personage. Although Brandes’s critical method was outdated by 1927, the year of his death, his biographies continued to offer valuable psychological portraits. With much of his critical work later discredited, Brandes is remembered primarily for his support of Strindberg, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Kierkegaard, rather than for his own scholarship.
Brandes stands as one of the most influential inspirations of Danish culture, an equal of Holberg, Grundtvig, and Ansgar. Among his supporters, Brandes' work was seen as a liberator from repressive norms, authority, and hypocrisy, and he served as an inspiration for many contemporary writers. On the other hand, conservative circles condemned him as an immoral, unpatriotic and subversive blasphemer; as he became the lynchpin of criticism against modernity in its entirety. At the same time, some socialists criticized his elitist attitudes, while some feminists have regarded his attitude of sexual equality as being inconsequential.
Since 1969, the Danish Literary Critics Association Litteraturkritikernes Lav annually awards the Georg Brandes Prize for work in the field of literary criticism or literary research.
At home the atmosphere was nonreligious, but when Brandes encountered Kierkegaard's uncompromising Christianity, he went through a serious crisis, which ended about 1863. His parents did not discuss religious faith, nor did they attend synagogue. Throughout her mother's life, Brandes had a very close relationship with her. Emilie rejected both Christianity and Judaism. "She appeared to me as the superior mind, corrected and raised me through satire," he recalled many years later. Finding it impossible for him to undertake the leap of faith, Brandes devoted himself entirely to aesthetics. Brandes argued against the historicity of Jesus and was a proponent of the Christ myth theory.
Even today Brandes in Scandinavia is considered the author of anti-clericalism.
Politics
In the 1900s, Brandes fought the Danish political establishment on several occasions but eventually had to curb his acidic attacks. However, his international reputation was growing. In many ways, he emulated his own assessment of Voltaire, as an author against habitual thinking, hypocrisy and the thin veneer of morality. He condemned the maltreatment of national minorities, the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus, etc. During World War I, he condemned the national aggression and imperialism on both sides and his last years were dedicated to anti-religious polemic.
Views
In the late 1880s, Brandes fought against what he saw as the hypocrisy of prudish sexuality, which caused a rift with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.
Quotations:
"The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models."
"It is useless to send armies against ideas."
"Being gifted needs courage."
"A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilized the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion."
"My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it."
"Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types."
"It would be as impossible for me to attack Christianity as it would be impossible for me to attack werewolves."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard
Politicians
Julius Caesar
Writers
William Shakespeare, Goethe, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen
Artists
Michelangelo
Connections
Between the years of 1886 and 1888, Brandes was engaged in a relationship with the Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote Penningar and Fru Marianne under the male pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren. Benedictsson committed suicide in a Copenhagen hotel room, and the relationship with Brandes has later been blamed as the cause for her death.
