5

Intellectuals and War in Scandinavia and Beyond

‘The Whole World is Ruled by Schadenfreude’: Georg Brandes’s War

For decades, there has been a general awareness that not only soldiers and politicians waged war in the First World War. Entire societies were systematically mobilized to join this war. Hence also, or indeed especially, the intellectual community, which often became involved at an earlier stage and which showed greater determination than other social groups. Right after the onset of the war, the phrase ‘war of minds’ surfaced within the increasingly nationalized academic and intellectual cultures of Europe, first – as Krieg der Geister – in Germany.¹ Despite its antagonistic character, this battle of intellectuals effectively formed a dialogue, a deeply divisive, polemical conversation, but nonetheless one in which the intellectuals of both warring sides reacted to one another.² Their loyalties somewhat oscillated between the internationalist character of most of their intellectual, often scientific endeavours of the pre-war years and the nationalist allegiances of their home societies.³ With regard to the humanities, especially philosophy, in Germany and Britain, Peter Hoeres went so far as to refer to a ‘war of philosophers’, in which military issues and the debate on own academic traditions and perspectives were mingled.⁴

When reference was made to the neutral states in the context of this alleged war of cultures, in which a principally universal good like academia was made the object, indeed the pawn of national interests, the focus was usually on their suspected corruption by the warring states and empires. The Swedish geographer and explorer Sven Hedin, an avid supporter of German war propaganda in the First World War, and the American journalist H. L. Mencken, who likewise made no secret of his pro-German stance, are probably the best known examples of the enlistment of intellectuals from the cultural circles of neutral states.5 The part of intellectuals, however, who were – in the literal sense of the word – neutral in the First World War has only been sporadically addressed. Subsequently, I would like to explore this role of the people in-between, intellectual neutrals who, just as their counterparts in Britain, France, or Germany, had been part of an extensive cultural landscape on the continent, a broad transnational and thoroughly modernist network of adherents of Europe as an idea and a reality. What was the place of the intellectual non-belligerent, and particularly that from the smaller, neutral countries whose position was generally highly precarious? How did these intellectuals relate to a war, one of whose first fatalities was the international solidarity of the modernist milieu? My approach to these questions is based on the intellectual biography of Georg Brandes, the exemplarily cosmopolitan philosopher and aesthete from Copenhagen, whose stance on the First World War reflects the pathology of the war just as clearly as that of modernity as a whole.⁶ Brandes’s biography, his intellectual, cultural, and political work, and, one might add, certainly also his predictable failure are a symptom, almost a paradigm of the dilemmas associated with the traditionalist, largely realistic policy of neutrality adopted by smaller states in the wake of the First World War, not least by Brandes’s home country. Exaggerating somewhat, it could be said that Brandes hence also embodied Denmark.

As Brandes is largely unknown outside Denmark these days, a closer look at this great forgotten figure in Danish, Scandinavian, and – far beyond this – European cultural history and criticism at the turn of the twentieth century is called for. Who therefore was Georg Brandes? Who was this man who in Denmark was elevated to mythical status, who was held in equally high esteem, indeed often revered, by the intellectual circles of Germany, France, and Britain? Who was this supposed ‘ugly duckling’ whose Shakespeare lecture in New York in June 1914 required a major police intervention to disperse the masses of disappointed Brandes admirers who had failed to find a seat in the already overcrowded auditorium?⁷

As far as his own self-image and the public perception of him were concerned, Brandes was one thing in particular, namely the embodiment of that what today is, in more differentiated, complex and ambivalent terms, but unfailingly, described as modernity. Born in Copenhagen in 1842, into an assimilated Jewish merchant family that was part of the liberal middle class, Brandes was considered brilliant even at an early age.⁸ He completed his studies in history of art, philosophy, and aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen in 1870 after submitting a highly regarded doctoral thesis on contemporary French aesthetics. By that time, he not only had travelled Europe extensively, particularly France and Britain, but also had published a series of influential writings on modern Danish literature.9 The series of lectures entitled ‘Main Currents in 19th Century Literature’ (Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur) he delivered at his alma mater and, shortly thereafter, their publication from 1871 onwards resulted in Brandes ultimately becoming the actual figurehead and confrontational icebreaker of the modernist movement in Danish and indeed Scandinavian cultural debates of the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ The beginning of the so-called breakthrough of modernity (det moderne gjennembrud in Danish) in Northern Europe is often associated with his lectures at the University of Copenhagen, whose extensive impact spread fairly quickly to the rest of the continent.¹¹ In Germany and Russia in particular, but later also in France and the English-speaking countries, Brandes’s literary criticism essays met with a tremendous response and thus contributed in no small way to literary criticism being recognized as a genre of literary studies that is worthy of being taken seriously.¹² The features that characterize literary criticism in general, a hybrid entity falling between two stools, Brandes saw most markedly reflected in himself. In his correspondence with Nietzsche, taken up on Brandes’s initiative in 1887, he repeatedly referred to the limits of his intellectual existence as he perceived them.¹³

It was, however, Brandes who supplied Nietzsche with what seemed to him the key term to encapsulate his own philosophy, ‘aristocratic radicalism’. Brandes had used the term in his lectures on Nietzsche and later published an analytical essay on Nietzsche’s philosophy intellectually organized around the conception.¹⁴ This prompted Nietzsche to comment at the end of 1887, ‘with respect, that is the shrewdest remark I have ever read about myself’.¹⁵ As Nietzsche himself had admitted, his reception would have been inconceivable had it not been for Brandes’s astute, indeed congenial Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism of 1888. Although no vir obscurissimus anymore, as Nietzsche called himself coquettishly, the five Copenhagen lectures Brandes held in April and May 1888 certainly contributed to the international reception of his works and came with an impressive interpretative verve.¹⁶ Here, the critic was in his element as an international explorer, as a receptor and interpreter of literature and contemporary thought. Since the 1860s, he had systematically ‘imported’ intellectuals other than Nietzsche from the European continent to Northern Europe, intellectuals whom he respected and with many of whom he was friends. About two decades before Nietzsche, Brandes’s work focused in particular on the French naturalist, literary critic, and historian Hippolyte Taine and on the British liberal philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In addition to numerous classical writings, he translated the works of both these intellectuals into Danish, thus making a sustainable contribution to Denmark’s and – by implication – Scandinavia’s highly vibrant modernist debates.17 The predominance of naturalist-realist premises in Scandinavian literature, aesthetics, and society in the last third of the nineteenth century owed much to Brandes’s tireless cultural adaptations from the continent. Often in the face of opposition from conservatives in his own country and Scandinavia at large, these interventions fuelled a literary and cultural Scandinavianism that brought Brandes in close association with the leading modernist writers in Northern Europe, among them Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and August Strindberg. With Bjørnson, Brandes shared an ideal of Scandinavianism whose telos was not rooted in a somewhat unified region, but in a cosmopolitan, profoundly European identity based in ‘a utopian society of world peace’.¹⁸ Brandes’s perception of the World War, his multiple interventions and peacemaking efforts would have to be viewed in the context of this Europeanized ideal of Scandinavianism.

Conversely, he played a similar role in the dissemination and popularization of Scandinavian modernity in the cultural life of Paris and Berlin. In his efforts to ensure the further dissemination of the mainly Danish and Norwegian modernizers, Brandes, needless to say, proceeded with ruthless selectivity. In Berlin, for example, he tried to obstruct Henrik Ibsen, whose work he misjudged and misrepresented. He furthermore impeded the reception of Kierkegaard's work, which was gradually taking shape, absurdly enough even in Denmark.¹⁹ Nevertheless, Brandes can, with some justification, be regarded as the outstanding and in many ways also the most peculiar, intermediary between the supposedly irreconcilable and mutually disinterested intellectual circles and national cultures. This was also the way he saw himself. In his autobiographical account ‘Reminiscences of My Childhood and Youth’, he describes his surprise when his intellectual mentor, the aforementioned John Stuart Mill, confessed to him that he had not read a single line of Hegel’s work, neither in the original nor in the translated version, and that he considered Hegel’s entire philosophy to be sterile, petty hair-splitting devoid of any substance. Brandes also observed a similar arrogance on the part of his former academic mentor, the philosopher Hans Brøchner, who had no interest whatsoever in contemporary English or French philosophy. ‘I, however’, Brandes stated ‘have become convinced that there is a task for someone capable of understanding philosophers from different schools of thought who do not understand each other’.20

The encyclopaedias of the time impressively demonstrate the significance of Brandes’s work from the last third of the nineteenth century until well into the 1920s. In the articles on Brandes contained in the 1903 Meyer’s Encyclopaedia and the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, he was portrayed as a revolutionary and the main standard-bearer of a new cultural radicalism, as endowed with sharp judgement, a ‘shining stylist’, and as an intellectual ‘epoch-making’ force, whose ‘influence on Denmark's culture was greater than that of any other critic’. As Meyer's Großes Konversationslexikon summed up: ‘The fact that Scandinavian literature is flourishing today, having again developed into a freer, creative poetry on the basis of the Brandes school’s relentlessly destructive and cleansing realism, can in part be attributed to Brandes’ work.’²¹ Reflecting his characteristic vehemence, Brandes’s efforts to confront and eliminate seemingly old and antiquated, unfounded, and unjustified ideas and to replace these with a new, practically relevant, modernist conception of humanity were not confined to literature and philosophy. They were also present in all aspects of his everyday life. Incidentally, although a Jew whose socialization had been largely secular, Brandes became a religious critic and atheist in the footsteps of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He was also strongly influenced by Mill, whose early emancipatory polemic essay ‘The Subjection of Women’ he translated into Danish as early as 1869.²² In line with Mill’s early intervention, Brandes argued strongly for equal rights of men and women and, in this context, also advocated the cultural conquest of the Victorian sexual morals he detested. His only reaction to the quite literally misogynist attitude of his Swedish counterpart, August Strindberg, and to Nietzsche’s at best ambivalent view of women, was one of mild scorn.²³

Brandes acted uncompromisingly where another central issue of modernity was concerned, the question surrounding the place of the Jews and Judaism in Europe’s increasingly nationalist societies. As an outspoken political commentator, he witnessed the development of modern anti-Semitism with growing concern. While Denmark’s Jewish population had been granted full citizens’ rights by the country's first post-absolutist constitution of 1849, i t seemed to Brandes that the status and treatment of Jews in Eastern Central Europe and the Russian Empire, but also in France and Germany, remained largely unchanged or even tended to worsen. The so-called Berlin Anti-Semitism Dispute from 1879 to 1881 certainly formed the focal point of Brandes’s observations on this matter, not least because the dispute’s public outgrowth affected him personally when in 1880, the Berlin Senior Court Chaplain Adolf Stoecker made him the subject of anti-Semitic insults.24 Brandes, who lived and worked in Berlin at the time as a correspondent for a number of Scandinavian newspapers, used Stoecker’s invective as an opportunity to air his personal opinion in several essays. In his article entitled ‘The Anti-Jewish Movement in Germany’, which was published in a Swedish journal in mid-January 1881, he used the medical jargon of the time, describing the anti-Semitic movement as an epidemic, as uncontrollable mass hysteria. ‘Once reaction and chauvinism have aroused the envy and barbarism of the common and the genteel mob, a phenomenon emerges, which in many ways manifests itself in other spheres and is best described as a mental plague. Mental illnesses,’ he continued, ‘are evidently just as infectious as cholera and the plague’.²⁵ Brandes’s criticism – one of the constant factors in his journalistic work – focused on the ‘hatred towards this particular tribe’, as he put it, in all its facets: in the form of anti-Judaism, for instance, veiled by Christian-Orthodox culture and traditions and frequently leading to pogroms as they occurred in the Russian Empire.²⁶ Early on, however, he clearly saw the paradoxical reaction to the often unbearable complexity of modernity, that ‘ogre of modernity’, as illustrated by incidents such as the Dreyfus Affair in France or the anti-Semitic movement of the Wilhelmine Empire.²⁷

Brandes’s criticism was furthermore rooted in his conception of the true double pathology of his time, nationalism and militarism, which he persistently attacked especially in the context of the First World War. The way Brandes approached this problem was, on the one hand, a reflection of the intellectual heritage of a lastingly assimilated Northern European Jewry. On the other hand, it also pointed to the self-consciousness of a small nation and one of its foremost representatives abroad. Denmark, barely left over after the disaster of the Second Schleswig War, was by no means a stranger to excessive nationalism, as rather typical for the time, and especially in the event of defeat.²⁸ Its smallness, however, greatly limited its capacity for national self-confidence and precluded the country from heightened forms of great power nationalism that even its neighbour Sweden residually experienced. In contrast to the mass societies of the great powers, small states, according to Brandes, have a civilizational task, a mission to ‘help humanity to attain ever greater enlightenment’, as Annie Bourguignon has aptly stated.²⁹ A remarkable feature of Brandes’s explicit criticism of contemporary nationalism is its unabashed paradoxical nature. One the one hand, he developed and propagated the notion of modernity as the consolidation of advanced European culture. On the other hand, in his conception of modernity in the arts, he consciously faded out the truly modern mass phenomenon of nationalism, which he dismissed as an anachronistic, conservative, and explicitly anti-modernist reaction. His coquettishly cosmopolitan demeanour, largely modelled on the French style, was far more reminiscent of the Enlightenment than of the mass societies and cultural discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Opposed to the contempt in which many intellectuals held the allegedly common masses, however, Brandes’s brand of modernism possessed – in most cases – compassion and emancipatory force.30

Brandes’s inner distance to nationalism and mob rule became particularly apparent in his sharp rejection of German nationalism's illiberal development following the unification of the Reich. As early as mid-1881, Brandes – with unerring instinct – anticipated the tidal change occurring in German politics. Bitterly, he foresaw a Germany ultimately deprived of its ‘political liberalism’, of the great liberal tradition of the first half of the century, and ‘lonely, isolated and hated by its neighbours’. Such a state ‘will become a bulwark of conservatism at the centre of Europe’, he predicted.

All around, in Italy, France, Russia and Scandinavia, a generation with cosmopolitan ideals will grow up, a generation that will work intensively to implement these ideals. Germany, however, will lie there, old and withered, armed to the teeth, armoured and equipped with every state of the art weapon of murder and defence. Major conflicts and wars will follow. If Germany wins, Europe compared to America will – in political terms – become what Asia compared to Europe is today. If Germany were to be defeated, however, ... But it is not appropriate for me to play the prophet.³¹

Leaving aside the shrewdness of this prophesy, Brandes’s perception of the German Empire’s political culture could be described as controversial, especially in view of recent tendencies in political and cultural history. From a transnational perspective in particular, this assessment of the pre-war German Empire today appears significantly relativized, the ‘Sonderweg’ (special path) theory having been largely refuted in historiography.³² This broader, essentially comparative perspective, however, can as well – and with remarkable clarity – be found in Brandes’s contemporary assessments of Europe’s situation prior to the First World War. To his mind, the unadorned diagnosis of the German Empire's condition and that of its militarized society also applied to France and Britain to a very similar extent. The French and the British militarisms were, in his perception, only tenuously contained by the liberal political cultures that prevailed in these countries. In the reactionary and deeply anachronistic Tsarist Empire, however, the outlined pathologies appeared practically unbound. Altogether, Russia, with its virulent anti-Semitism and, so Brandes thought, systematic oppression of other nations, formed the actual negative image to Brandes’s idealized conception of modernity. Far more generally, however, it is in the pan-European phenomena that the quasi apocalyptic nature of his times most vehemently surfaces. In this respect, enforced by the outbreak of the war, Brandes’s remarks were increasingly characterized by an apparently boundless cultural pessimism, which was in no small measure due to Nietzsche’s influence.33

Against the backdrop of his rich pre-war writings, Brandes’s verdict on the causes of the First World War’s outbreak in the summer of 1914 is hardly surprising. The contempt of the staunchly anti-militarist and pacifist Brandes was above all directed at the excessive emphasis on the ‘military systems of the major nations’, which were increasingly spiralling out of control. In its intrinsic logic, Brandes thought, this great power militarism was consistently aimed at war.³⁴ In August 1913, Brandes wrote: ‘An officer who hasn’t smelled powder is a man who hasn’t shown his mettle, and who, as the years pass, may be compared to the sailor who has never been to Sea – an absurdity.’³⁵ At this point, the unintended prognostic power of Brandes’s analysis once again becomes apparent, especially when it is read in the context of the sensibilities and experiences of the German imperial navy’s officer corps in the First World War. The final mobilization of the Imperial High Sea Fleet, eventually prevented by the sailors’ mutiny in autumn 1918, was largely due to the need felt by the naval command to ensure that they would not be made the subject of ‘ridicule’ after a comparatively uneventful naval war. The naval command’s war diary is explicit about this motive, referring to a ‘question of the honour and existence of the Navy to have done its utmost in the last battle’.³⁶ The militarism of the European great powers and the way in which they systematically ‘stirred up hatred between the nations’, as Brandes wrote in February 1915, had turned ‘Europe into a madhouse, a house of mourning, a hospital, a cemetery, and a bankrupt estate’.³⁷ Striving to take both an anti-bellicist and a neutral stance, at first glance, this diagnosis does not seem surprising. The extensive mobilization of European societies for the war, which also indirectly affected the neutral states in Northern and North-western Europe, made Georg Brandes’s remarks all the more noteworthy, though.

Escalating in terms of war propaganda, the ‘battle for the souls of the neutral states’, as Kurt Riezler put it, made Brandes’s situation more difficult, and not only because of his status as a European intellectual.³⁸ The dilemmas surrounding Denmark’s policy of neutrality also affected his everyday life. In the immediate pre-war period of Danish politics, his younger brother, Edvard Brandes, a distinguished cultural critic, author, and politician in the social-liberal party Radikale Venstre, had risen to the position of minister of finance, an office he continued to hold throughout the entire war.39 Although Brandes strongly refuted the allegation that he consciously acted with restraint out of consideration for his high-profile brother, he repeatedly mentioned the given dilemma in his extensive correspondence.⁴⁰ However, his consistently neutral stance, which seemed like an almost natural derivation of his role as a cultural intermediary, was already in evidence long before the First World War and, indeed, the constant factor in the way he saw himself and in the way he acted. His 1916 collection of war-related essays, ‘Verdenskrigen’ (shortly thereafter released in an English translation as ‘The World at War’), carefully gathers the multiple angles through which Brandes attempted to interpret the war and its origins, once castigating, as he insisted, the aggressive militarism and war-mongering of segments of German society, then again thoroughly analysing the – as well non-German – preconditions that made war in 1914 possible.⁴¹

His intellectual involvement, however, targeted both an international and a domestic audience. Apart from his brother being a member of the government, Danish society – and not least the intellectuals – appeared increasingly polarized. Even among the nation’s intelligentsia, Brandes’s firmly neutral position remained marginal throughout, with his opponents ridiculing him mercilessly in the press. One of the few more sceptical intellectuals of the younger generation was the Germanophile author and later Nobel prize winner Johannes V. Jensen, who, in an early article published in December 1914, described the idea of being in any way able to take sides ‘where blood and iron shake up the balance of power between nations’ as laughable.⁴² Jensen’s position, however, was not Brandes’s, as the former readily admitted his explicit sympathies for the German war effort and felt much more closely linked to the German cultural sphere, while Brandes imagined and staged himself as a cosmopolitan creation of Europe. Most members of the Danish intelligentsia, in any case, took sides, the demarcation line generally being the generational boundaries, as Bjarne Søndergaard Bendtsen has thoroughly expounded.⁴³ The older generation of Danish intellectuals, on whom the traumatic experience of 1864 had had a profound impact, somewhat naturally gravitated towards the Entente camp, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. Against that, younger intellectuals – like the vehemently pro-German writer Karl Larsen – adopted a more relaxed attitude to the German Empire and in particular to Berlin which, in the decades before the First World War, had begun to take Paris’ place as the obvious refuge for Nordic intellectuals and artists. This new generation, usually born in the last third of the nineteenth century, was more indifferent towards the trauma of 1864, their orientation in many cases even pro-German, and regarded Brandes as the true icon of the modernist movement in Scandinavia.44

The war resulted in Brandes being forced to reconcile different perspectives and expectations without compromising the integrity of his work and his activities. Domestic and foreign policy and personal loyalties and expectations at the national and European level were the determining factors of his complex actions. The most impressive example of this is his correspondence with Georges Clemenceau, the former (and indeed later) French prime minister, with whom he had been friends since the 1890s and for whom he also had a certain admiration.⁴⁵ His relationship with Clemenceau, however, was fundamentally shattered by the escalating war. Since the beginning of the war, Clemenceau, like many intellectuals in France and Britain, had assu med that Brandes would declare his support for the Entente’s cause sooner rather than later. The Dane was rightly considered not only a prime example of an intellectual modelled on the French tradition, but had in the past also stood out as an uncompromising and shrewd detractor of Wilhelminism and influential critic of Berlin’s treatment of the Danish minority in North Schleswig.⁴⁶ Moreover, Brandes had even publicly chastised William II for his so-called Hun Speech and been similarly critical of Berlin’s association with the Ottoman Empire in the face of the Turkish massacres of the empire’s own Armenian population.⁴⁷ For him, the, as he phrased it, ‘real German spirit’ rested with the Germany that, in Brandes’s view, was not to be: an empire liberally transformed by the ‘noble generosity, manly warm-heartedness, liberal intelligence and genuine culture’ of the prematurely deceased Frederick III.⁴⁸ To Wilhelm II and the empire that eventually was, he related with difficulty and hesitation throughout.

Against such a backdrop, Clemenceau assumed that his friend Brandes would at one point come around, further enforced, even necessitated by the German behaviour in Belgium. In his private correspondence with Clemenceau, however, Brandes repeatedly strove to convey a multifaceted and differentiated assessment of the war, balancing perspectives in a broader analytical framework.⁴⁹ Clemenceau, in contrast, regarded Brandes’s careful stance as symptomatic for Denmark’s policy of neutrality as a whole and became increasingly frustrated with what he considered an attitude rather than a reasoned and complex position. The same perception of Danish hypocrisy is reflected in another of Émile Dupuis caricatures. This time, Dupuis takes on Denmark’s neutral stance and the country’s allegedly too lenient attitude towards Germany. In his series of postcards on the neutrals, released in 1916, Dupuis depicts a clichéd elderly Danish academic systematically analysing (German) ‘Kultur’ through various natural scientific means, even storing distilled ‘Kultur’ in beakers on the shelves. The scientist himself appears too small to reach the table and therefore stands on an oversized volume of an encyclopaedia on ‘Kultur’, whose other volumes are spread around the table. Prominently placed on the table, there is a ‘Pickelhaube’, the stereotypically German spiked helmet, and in the experimental beaker in front of the scientist a nude sample of – presumably – a miniature model of a German wearing a spiked helmet too is contained. Underneath a wall map illustrating Denmark’s diminishing size, as it says (with ‘Schleswig 1863’ explicitly noted), one can see a chemical flask brewing a so-called Bouillon de Kultur. Equally bitterly as in most other illustrations, Dupuis entitled the cartoon ‘Recherches de civilisation dans la Kultur’ (‘Looking for civilisation in Kultur’), thereby castigating both the Danish intellectual and cultural tradition as excessively Germanophile and the Danish government’s attempt to maintain a strict and balanced neutrality policy throughout.50

Clemenceau shared the popular sentiment depicted by Dupuis and decided to force the alleged hypocrite Brandes out into the open. For that purpose (as for many other), he used his own newspaper, the recently censored and then renamed L'Homme enchaîné, publicly expressing his criticism of the Dane and – in extension – of the Copenhagen government.⁵¹ In his leader, he described Brandes as symbolizing the morally bankrupt opportunism of what was ‘a nation without pride’. To Clemenceau, neutrality in a conflict polarized between good and evil could only be morally perverted. The Danish case appeared even worse, as the country, if siding with the Entente against Germany, would actually have a lot to gain. Instead of stating its legitimate claim to the lost duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and joining the Entente, though, Copenhagen – and Brandes in particular – sacrificed universal moral ideals in favour of the profane and transient interests of the time.⁵²

Brandes’s answer came in the shape of two prominent essays published in the Politiken newspaper at the end of February and the beginning of March 1915. Taken together, these interventions count among the clearest and most self-confident journalistic statements of neutrality in print during the First World War.⁵³ At the same time, Brandes pinpointed in exemplary fashion the place and responsibilities of the intellectual in times of war and crisis. Drawing on his earlier remarks, Brandes describes patriotism and war as the actual gravedigger of the ‘love of truth’ in an era corrupted by a vulgar, mob-infested ‘hatred of truth’.54 To Clemenceau, he directly addressed the words:

To you the whole problem seems simple and clear. Right, truth, liberty on one side; injustice, oppression, barbarism on the other. If I have disappointed you so keenly, it is, perhaps, because unlike the schoolmaster in Kenan’s Caliban, my name is not Simplicon. The appalling part of a war like this is that it kills all love of truth. France and England are obliged to gloss over the Russian Government’s ignominious dealings in Finland, its treatment of Poland, which it promised to reunite, and where it begins by announcing that Galicia is not Polish but old Russian territory, while it tears down Ruthenian signs in Lemberg and puts Russian ones in their place. In the same way Germany explains away the atrocities committed by German troops. Bedier's pamphlet on the atrocities [in Belgium, MJ] is treated as a philological essay; the inaccuracies of the translation are discussed while the accusations regarding the atrocities are ignored. … As far as I am concerned, I consider the foaming nationalist hatred which now divides Europe as an immeasurable tragedy and a symptom of an enormous retrogression.

In his conclusion, Brandes reinforces what he sees as the intellectual’s prime duty, ‘the writer’s calling’:

If he is not truth’s ordained priest he is only fit to be thrown on the scrap heap. … He must remain silent where silence is golden. And if he speaks, he must look truth in the face, – that same truth which is smothered by stupidity in times of peace, and drowned by the thunder of cannon in times of war.⁵⁵

Clemenceau, for his part, answered immediately in the form of a comparatively scant lead article bearing the programmatic title ‘Adieu Brandes’.⁵⁶ Its publication also signified the purposefully choreographed farewell to an old friend and intellectual companion, to which Brandes did not reply. The Danish neutral, however, had already commented more than enough on these matters and began compiling the articles he had written during the First World War, and those concerning this war, with a view to publishing them as a volume of essays. Published in 1916 under the title ‘Verdenskrigen’, this volume of essays was accompanied by a call for peace in the Politiken newspaper issued in mid-May.⁵⁷ Brandes’s initiative was immediately translated into English, French, and German and had distribution figures totalling several ten million copies, the level of interest shown being particularly high in English-speaking countries. The enormous distribution of appeal was due to it being part of an ambitious and well-financed effort by the American industrialist Henry Ford, who had engaged in a high-profile peace mission by crossing the Atlantic on a hired ocean liner – the ‘Peace Ship’ – filled with renowned pacifists and potential mediators. With his customary cultural pessimism, Brandes, in any case, did not pin much hope either on his own intervention or on Ford’s eccentric initiative, which anyway collapsed before it was even able to gather momentum.58

In essence, Brandes’s aforementioned appeal for peace merely consisted of the theory that all the great powers engaged in the war had one thing in common: the claim that ‘each of the Great Powers declares the war it is waging is a war of defence. They have all been attacked; they are all fighting for their existence. For all of them murder and lies are necessary means of defence. But since none of the Powers, by their own showing, wanted war, let them make peace!’ Postulating the obvious, Brandes stated that ‘the cry for peace that will soon rise from belligerent countries is called cowardly. But if mankind remains silent, the stones will cry. The ruins everywhere call for peace, not revenge. And where stones are silent, fields and meadows cry, watered with blood, fertilised with the dead. The whole world is in the throes of malicious joy’, ‘Skadefrydens Herredømme’, in the Danish original, a term that Brandes intended to be understood quite literally, as the ‘only satisfaction is to hurt others, in self-defence’.⁵⁹ His forcefully worded intervention climaxed in the apocalyptic idea of the European civilization having knowingly robbed itself of its best people. To the ‘aristocratic radical’ Brandes, this idea was unbearable.⁶⁰ His own conception of mankind and history remained deeply indebted to an almost Nietzschean cult of the genius. In line with the biographical mode of the period, history – and especially the history of civilization – was to be understood through its great, intellectually aristocratic thinkers, ‘Geistesaristokraten’ in the nineteenth-century term.⁶¹ ‘Each human life represents a value. Mankind is not alike,’ Brandes insists.

There is slight consolation in the fact that our losses were one thousand, and the enemy's ten. Who knows if among those one thousand, there was not a man who would have been the honour of his country, the benefactor of humanity throughout the centuries? There may have been a Shakespeare or a Newton, a Kant or a Goethe, a Moliere or a Pasteur, a Copernicus, a Rubens, a Tolstoi among the hundreds of thousands of twenty-year-old English, French, German, Polish, Belgian, or Russian soldiers who have fallen. What does a slight change in the boundary line mean in comparison to the loss of such a personality? The gain is temporary; the loss is irretrievable. The gain is that of one country; the loss is humanity’s.

With a dark sense of foreboding, Brandes concludes his impassioned appeal by reasoning that the banal hatred caused by the war – and by the war propaganda in particular – would long outlive the war and, even worse, perpetuate war in the future.62

It is undoubted and among the more impressive feature of Brandes’s intellectual activities before and during the war that most of his general prognoses proved eventually accurate. As much as that is the case, there remains something bizarre about his constant interventions. Apart from his in essence Eurocentric, occasionally Russophobic, at times rather typically racist views, it is above all his inflated self-image that astonishes – and did so as well in the eyes of his contemporaries. As a critic and public intellectual from a small country like Denmark, the aim of restoring world peace seems at best out of touch with reality. It was hence not without reason that his repeated interventions were caricatured again and again. This neatly corresponded with his well-known tendency towards self-aggrandizement, which had been the object of public ridicule in Scandinavia long before the First World War. The sharpest expression of this took the form of a persiflage on Brandes’s appeal of May 1916 devised by the Danish caricaturist Axel Thiess. The caricature, published on 22 May 1916 in the conservative-nationalist and Entente-friendly newspaper Vort Land, depicts Brandes as an old maid venting her annoyance while trying to discipline the powers involved in the wars, which were in turn portrayed as boys dressed in different uniforms scrapping in the playground. Under the caption ‘Ogsaa en Fredsmaegler’ (‘Also a Peacemaker’), Thiess ironically noted: ‘In the Politiken newspaper, Georg Brandes demands in a quarrelsome and intemperate tone that the warring powers cease firing immediately.’⁶³ Brandes had already fallen foul of Thiess’s sharp pen earlier, when Thiess implicitly denounced his alleged pro-German sympathies. Under the caption ‘Hvad store Bro’r mener’ (‘What Big Brother Thinks’), a caricature published in the Norwegian student paper ‘Under Dusken’ in March 1916, Brandes is depicted as an annoying schoolboy in a sailor’s uniform who, in front of his younger brothers, Danish prime minister Zahle, foreign minister Erik Scavenius, and his real younger brother Edvard, sticks his tongue out (from behind) at the statesmen of the Entente Powers, who are strolling along in a dignified manner. The picture carries the comment, ascribed to Brandes’s schoolboy alter ego: ‘At his moment, Europe is being led by weakly gifted political amateurs. And there is no reason to be impressed by this sort of statesmanship.’⁶⁴ Leaving out the German and Austrian counterparts of Poincaré and Briand in France and Asquith and Grey in Britain made it clear that both Thiess and many Entente-friendly intellectuals assumed that Brandes harboured pro-German sympathies and effectively played into Berlin’s strategic and war propagandistic hands. Earlier still, Thiess had ridiculed Brandes for his position in the argument with Clemenceau, depicting him – in mid-March 1916 – on the front page of Vort Land ‘as a scared old woman, hiding behind his brother, and a sternly looking Clemenceau looking down on him’.65 Clemenceau appears furthermore as the self-composed dignified counter image to Brandes’s highly embarrassing posture and ugly as well as ignoble appearance.

Thiess’s caricatures mirror the main, almost pathological suspicion even among his sympathizers: the assumption that Brandes, probably unwittingly, aided the war cause of especially Germany and thereby undermined the righteous and justified position of the Entente in a war that morally required a stand. This applies in particular to the Scottish critic and author William Archer, Brandes’s English language translator and long-standing friend. A little later than the ill-tempered Clemenceau, Archer felt himself compelled to intervene publicly, particularly in the wake of his Danish friend’s aforementioned call for peace. The ensuing debate between the two literary critics and friends is undoubtedly one of the more cultivated in the wider picture of this ‘war of minds’, which increasingly involved the intelligentsia of the smaller neutral states of Northern Europe. As opponents in this dispute, Archer and Brandes made a determined effort to maintain a civil tone and took great care to ensure that the mutual good relations were not stretched beyond endurance. In terms of argument, however, Archer was not prepared to support, or even to empathize with, Brandes’s analysis of the situation, not least with the analogy of the existing war blocs that Brandes had made the basis of his reasoning. Having joined the British propaganda office, Wellington House, by the beginning of the war, Archer seemed naturally opposed the core argument put forward by his friend from Copenhagen that each great power involved bore an equal share of the blame for the apocalypse, or as Brandes put it, ‘Europe’s hara-kiri’, from which Japan and Asia’s future people would only benefit.⁶⁶

In his fifty-three-page open letter ‘Colour-blind Neutrality’ of mid-1916, Archer voices his objections to Brandes’s position systematically: at heart, his criticism targets Brandes’s moral equivocation of the Entente’s war effort with Germany’s. After all, so the extensively developed core argument, the German Empire ‘willed’ the war and methodically prepared for it, while the Entente Powers would have only reacted to an unwarranted German aggression.⁶⁷ Furthermore, in view of the accumulation of German war crimes, including those in Belgium – a neutral state – and those committed as part of the submarine war, the moral equivalence suggested appeared intolerable to Archer and, as he maintained, the admirers and friends of Brandes abroad. Brandes’s alleged ‘colour-blind neutrality’ made him effectively a ‘Mr. Facing Both Ways’, who moved between the poles of ‘truth and lies’, ‘humanity and inhumantity’, and ‘right and wrong’ in a self-satisfied and indifferent manner.68 Archer’s attempted demolition of his friend’s neutrality stance culminates in him directly taking on the conception and practice of neutrality as well as the moral consequences for a neutral in a just war. Declaring and, even worse, morally arguing one’s neutrality in such a conflict would amount to

a shirking of a clear responsibility that rests upon every intelligent human being. The neutrality which declines to distinguish black from white is simply a disease of the moral vision. … And to you, my dear Master, I may say in conclusion that, with all my profound esteem for you, with all my admiration and envy for your talent, your achievements and your fame, there is one respect in which I would not for the world change places with you. Whatever sorrow the war has brought upon or may bring me, I would not for the world be a neutral.⁶⁹

Writing in Politiken again, although this time in a series of articles published between June and July 1916, Brandes responded to Archer. Just as systematically as his Scottish friend had done and with indeed plausible arguments, he intended to erode the simplistic dichotomy Archer had created and to instead present a more balanced, complex picture of the war. In doing so, Brandes drew upon the anti-bellicist essence of his convictions, as outlined already in his earlier controversy with Clemenceau. These did under no circumstances allow him to take sides in a politically corrupted, by nature and character unjust World War, even as – or indeed especially as – a neutral from a precariously situated neutral country dependent upon the mercy of ruthless and hypocritical – in short: amoral – great powers.⁷⁰ Later on, with Archer adding another rejoinder to Brandes’s four responses, Brandes expanded the essays even further.⁷¹ The reworked and enlarged fourth edition of the Danish version of ‘Verdenskrigen’ is symptomatic for his ‘tendencies for misanthropic pessimism’, not causally triggered but certainly enhanced by the war, as Søndergaard Bendtsen has aptly described it. War, especially the World War, appears as anything other than a ‘great war’, but rather as a ‘petty war, a miserable leftover of the Middle Ages, a relic of the past, stupid and vicious and detestable’.⁷² In Litteraturen, the Copenhagen-based literature magazine, right after the armistice, Brandes postulated once more and almost programmatically that the war would have thrown back humanity by at least a century, reinforcing his earlier warnings and council.

It has exterminated in their hundred thousands the young people which could have been expected to renew the intellectual and spiritual life [of our times]. It has drained Europe’s economic resources and thrown the peoples into enormous debt. Through its violence, it has outrageously brutalised the minds; through the partly bought, partly fanatical press, reinforcing one another mutually, it has systematically made Europe stupid; through the hatred that violence and slander caused, it has poisoned the inner life of the masses; through the abysmal hypocrisy in the service of self-righte ousness, it has diminished the pool on which the love of truth feeds – love of truth that mankind had painstakingly acquired in the past. In short, through its daily mass murder and the nonsensical waste of money for useless and unproductive purposes, it has impoverished, brutalised, stultified and poisoned.73

All that the war had apparently done on a general scale, Brandes had experienced and suffered in his private life. His network of broad contacts among Europe’s intellectual elites had been impoverished and diminished, the pre-war discourse among the modernist forces stultified, poisoned, and reduced to the degree of dissolution. While his relationship to Archer was never irreparably breached, the duel with Clemenceau had left scars on both sides that refused to heal. This condition was reinforced by Clemenceau’s re-entry into active French politics, leading – from mid-November 1917 – a crisis and war cabinet largely built around himself.⁷⁴ In the wake of the armistice, Clemenceau’s seemingly inflexible, anti-German approach to the peace process and especially in the context of the Versailles negotiations frustrated Brandes even further. Once, he even allowed himself to refer to his estranged friend as ‘stupid’ in his diaries. ‘The stupid Clemenceau’, he noted against the backdrop of Versailles, only to later remove this invective on editing the diaries for publication.⁷⁵ Appalled by the World War anyhow, Brandes also deplored its consequences. To him, the Treaty of Versailles was not the Wilsonian attempt to establish a new, lasting, and, if possible, global peace order; it represented much rather the perversion of Wilsonian ideals and hence a ‘tragical farce’, ‘tragediens anden del’ (The Tragedy Part II), as he developed in an intervention published in autumn 1919.⁷⁶ In Brandes’s reading, the treaty amounted to an act borne out of ‘thirst for revenge’ and the ‘flush of victory’ on the part of Britain and France. It was merely aimed at ensuring the containment and further decline of Germany and Austria, which would result in them becoming part of the – in his view – impending ‘horde of socialist republics’.77 His era was thus only a tremendous and terrible prelude to the real drama that was now beginning, namely the proletarianization of Europe, culminating, he predicted with certainty, in yet another war. Against such a darkened, pessimistic backdrop, Versailles unavoidably appeared as ‘the most stupid document known to modern history’.⁷⁸

For the ageing intellectual, even the few encouraging aspects of the new peace order of Versailles were spoiled. First of all, there was the re-integration of North Schleswig in the Danish nation-state in 1920, following a highly sophisticated plebiscite in the affected territories and creating a stable, politically legitimate border for years to come.⁷⁹ This was essentially in keeping with the premises of Brandes’s own journalistic commitment since the 1880s. For a long time, he had been the main and most vehement advocate for the Danish minority in the German Empire and, at the same time, the sharpest available critic of the Prussian-German nationalities policy.⁸⁰ His sharp and principled pen, however, could equally well apply to deficiencies in Danish politics and society, as he illustrated when critically scrutinizing the imminent return of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Denmark. Brandes was particularly disgusted by the anti-German jingoism and expansionist nationalism that shaped segments of Danish politics during the period. The absorption of the border region (and probably beyond), accompanied by the marginalization of the German-speaking inhabitants, was not only unwise, but ‘tragic-comic’, all the more for those who had for years protested in favour of the minority rights of Schleswig’s Danish population.⁸¹ Rather consequently, but also to his own deep disappointment, he was not invited to the actual celebrations of the North Schleswig’s return to Denmark on 11 July 1920. These were held at the highly mythicized battle field of Düppel (Dybbøl) and saw the Danish King Christian X ceremonially reclaim the territory by receiving the Dannebrog – the Danish flag – out of the hands of four white-clad maiden. There could hardly be more political symbolism on a day afterwards known as reunification day.⁸² Brandes, however, the fearless promoter of the rights of Northern Schleswig’s Danes, was absent and unwanted. In this somewhat tragic constellation, two things become apparent: his growing insignificance, especially in the political domain, and the way in which his positioning as an intellectual remained misunderstood, even in his homeland.

Resuming Brandes’s political behaviour, his outlook and activities during the First World War, it would be appropriate to emphasize his intellectual autonomy and sovereignty, as argued by Jørgen Knudsen, Harald Wolbersen, and Bjarne Søndergaard Bendtsen. His determination to tenaciously assert his politically and ideologically independent point of view in the face of unfavourable circumstances distinguishes him from the intellectual circles of the warring societies, but also – by and large – from those of the smaller neutral states in Northern and North-western Europe. Beyond that, Brandes’s momentous biography also reflects a general dilemma: the predicament of the principled, determined neutral in both private and public life, resolutely asserting his position. In it, the cardinal problem not only of the disinterested neutral individual surfaces as if in a nutshell, but also of neutrality as a state practice in the international system. It was – again – with the First World War that neutrality came under escalating pressure to be morally legitimized. While the nineteenth century undoubtedly formed an ‘age of neutrals’, not least based in an ever growing body of international law guiding neutrality, the First World War made these tendencies increasingly redundant.83 As a catalyst of ideological and cultural polarization, the war made any dissociation from the conflict impossible, not only for the government of neutral states, but also for individuals trying to abstain from the conflict.

In this context, the drive towards moral enlistment, particularly with regard to the neutral states, was most forcefully practised by the Entente Powers, often with uncompromising determination. As far as German war propaganda was concerned, it seemed that most of the neutral states of Europe amounted quickly to lost territory, not least because of Berlin’s decision to violate the neutrality and sovereignty of one of the continent’s traditional neutrals. German diplomacy and politics were therefore content to curb tendencies by small- or medium-sized neutral states to join the war. In view of the legitimizing pressure and the expectations held by the belligerent societies of France and Britain and their intellectual elites, Brandes’s stance was always prone to be misinterpreted as pro-German or, at the very least, hostile towards the Entente. To the malevolent observer, his firm, in part Russophobic condemnation of the alliance between the Western European powers and the Russian Empire, made his alleged pro-German bias even more apparent. Brandes’s opponents as well mistook his omnipresent cultural pessimism, schooled through Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and at times almost apocalyptic, as an attempt to evade the specific challenges of the war, as – in short – a well-cloaked form of moral cowardice.

Such an approach, equally practised by Clemenceau and Archer, reduces Brandes’s complex criticism of Europe’s condition and of the war’s implications for the European peoples to mere lamentation. Contrary to that, his realistic prognoses about the continent’s development were based on specific observations, often also on systematic research, to a far greater degree than his opponents cared to admit. The Dane’s predictions cannot be simply dismissed as prophesy dressed up as pathos, but much rather consist of anti-deterministic probability interpretations, to use Annie Bourguignon’s phrase, which Brandes arrived at by drawing on his profound knowledge of different European societies.84 Hence, beneath their often polemical exterior, his essays feature an analytic and critical realism that was rooted in his own perspective as an outsider on multiple levels. As a Dane – and a neutral – in an international system dominated by – belligerent – great powers, as a Jew in a world in which ‘anti-Semitism was increasing everywhere’, as he himself observed in 1925, as a radical liberal in a society characterized by the ‘structural deficiencies of the old European order’, all in all: as someone belonging to several minorities at the same time, he was throughout his life acutely conscious of allegedly marginal phenomena.⁸⁵ These phenomena, though, also had inherent representative power and thus permitted and continue to permit an adequate and, above all, critical understanding of supposedly more significant processes and events. For this reason alone, Georg Brandes seems to have been unjustly forgotten as a commentator and critic of his times. One of the few intellectuals to have understood Brandes’s position on the First World War was Stefan Zweig. Around Easter 1915, the Austrian Zweig wrote to congratulate his Danish colleague on his ‘resolute championing [of Polish interests, MJ] in Poland’s martyrium’. Unfortunately, Zweig continues, ‘you have now yourself become a victim of the intellectual viciousness between the nations, but a coming age will recognise those who dared to stand unarmed against the brunt of hostile opinion as the true heroes’.⁸⁶