Icons of Danish Modernity

Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen

Julie K. Allen

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780295804361
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Julie Allen utilizes the lives and friendship of the Danish literary critic George Brandes (1842-1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) to explore questions of culture and national identity in early twentieth-century Denmark. Danish culture and politics were influenced in this period by the country's deeply ambivalent relationship with Germany. Brandes and Nielsen, both of whom lived and worked in Germany for significant periods of time, were seen as dangerously cosmopolitan by the Danish public, even while they served as international cultural ambassadors for the very society that rejected them during their lifetimes. Allen argues that they were the prototypical representatives of a socially liberal and culturally modern "Danishness" ( Danskhed ) that Denmark itself only gradually (and later) grew into. This lively study brings its central characters to life while offering an original, thought provoking analysis of the origins and permutations of Danish modernism and Danish national identity--issues that continue to be significant in today's multi-ethnic Denmark. Icons of Danish Modernity is a book about the uneasy waves that arise when celebrities take on national symbolism, and the beginnings of this formula in the early twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE

The Critic and the Actress

Crafting Art and National Identity

When the Hamburg-America Line launched its newest and largest-ever passenger ship, the Vaterland (Fatherland), in May 1914, the company faced the daunting public relations task of helping potential passengers overcome fears stemming from the disastrous sinking of the Titanic two years earlier. To boost customer confidence, officials invited celebrities from across Europe to come along on the transatlantic maiden voyage of the Vaterland and gave leading European and American newspapers generous access to these celebrities to ensure that this message would reach the masses. Among the luminaries chosen for this task were two of the most famous Danes of the era, the literary critic Georg Brandes and the silent film actress Asta Nielsen. The elderly but consummately elegant Brandes was the fashionable Miss Nielsen's table companion on board. Press photographs show Nielsen and Brandes promenading on deck, accompanied by Nielsen's first husband, director Peter Urban Gad, and the journalist Josef Melnik. Although Nielsen disembarked when the ship docked at Southampton due to the constraints of her filming schedule, Brandes continued on to New York for a lecture tour across the United States.

The maiden voyage of the Vaterland was notable both for its successful marketing tactics (which were, however, soon undermined by the outbreak of World War I¹) and as an end point of Europe's belle époque, during which period Brandes's and Nielsen's respective international reputations were at their height. Their inclusion on the celebrity guest list of the Vaterland transmitted a public relations message independent of the Hamburg-America Line's agenda about the safety of sea travel; it confirmed the view of newspaper readers across the globe that these two individuals were the preeminent representatives of Danish culture abroad. As German journalist Friedrich Sieburg noted in an article in Die Weltbühne in March 1925, “There are many people outside of Europe who know little more about Denmark than that not only Asta Nielsen but also Georg Brandes was born there.”² Brandes's and Nielsen's high profile in the mass media, shaped by both their own professional contributions and their coverage as celebrities by the press, positioned them as influential representatives of Denmark and Danish culture to the world, even when the image of Denmark associated with them diverged significantly from Danish society's self-image.

Nielsen's and Brandes's effect on exo-stereotypes of Danish national identity can best be understood as a metacultural phenomenon. “Metaculture” refers to the way in which individual cultural objects function as emblems of broader cultural trends and characteristics, a process that is closely linked to the mass reproduction and wide distribution of cultural objects associated with modernity. Greg Urban argues that one of the central ways in which culture becomes shared, both within nations and across borders, is through “[extraction] from cultural objects involved in mass dissemination, where the dissemination is relatively uncoupled from replication.”³ The images of a particular culture that are extracted from mass-produced cultural artifacts are laden with value assessments that give rise to metacultural discourse. In his foreword to Urban's book, Benjamin Lee defines metaculture as “judgments people make about similarities and differences, [when] they judge token instances of cultural production to be manifestations of the same cultural element.”⁴ In essence, the part stands in for the whole: audiences extract meaning about national identity from the particular instances they encounter of a nation's cultural production. The more ubiquitous the products, the more effect they have on endo- and exo-stereotypes of cultural identity.

Although not necessarily the most popular cultural productions in Denmark itself, Brandes's and Nielsen's works were so successful and widely distributed internationally as to render them the best-known token instances of Danish cultural production, from which European, particularly German, audiences derived a conception, however artificial, of the essential nature of Danish culture and national identity in this period. Although the artistic merit of Brandes's texts and Nielsen's films has been well-established in literary history and film scholarship, the significant metacultural implications of their works have received little scholarly attention, particularly in English. The perceived modernity of their works among international audiences contributed to the development of a generalized exo-stereotype of Danish cultural modernity, while the far more ambivalent reception of their works in Denmark reflects both resistance among Danes at the time to the implicit meta-stereotype of Denmark as an exemplar of modernity and the prevalence of a rival endo-stereotype of Danish society as self-consciously conservative.

The significance of Brandes's and Nielsen's involvement in the creation and popularization of an image, however contested, of Denmark as culturally innovative and socially liberal has a great deal to do with timing. Their careers coincided with an era of tremendous political and social upheaval in Denmark, which involved both an inward-oriented contraction of Denmark's political agenda and an outward-oriented expansion of the distribution of Danish cultural products. These competing tendencies set the stage for the implicit debates over the nature of Danish national identity in which Brandes and Nielsen participated on a metacultural level. During the three-quarters of a century preceding Brandes's public debut as a literary critic in 1871, Denmark had suffered a precipitous decline in status and influence as its position in European politics became increasingly peripheral. With the acquisition of Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands in the late fourteenth century, Denmark had been one of the first European colonial powers, but the loss of Norway to Sweden in 1814 and Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia in 1864, as well as the sale of a string of small colonies in India and West Africa to Britain in 1850, marked the decline of its colonial ambitions, although not the end of the Danish empire, which persists today in the form of the limited political union of Denmark, Greenland,⁵ and the Faroe Islands.

Paradoxically, however, Danish cultural production flourished during the same period as its foreign political influence dwindled, illustrating the principle that became Denmark's unofficial motto: “That which is lost outwardly must be gained inwardly” (Hvad udad tabes skal indad vindes).⁶ During the first part of the century, this flowering of Danish culture, which has been somewhat grandiosely christened Denmark's Golden Age (Guldalderen), remained primarily confined to Copenhagen. By contrast, the results of Denmark's naturalistic literary renaissance during the latter half of the century, a movement known as the Modern Breakthrough, enjoyed unprecedented popularity abroad, particularly in Germany, and compensated to some degree for Denmark's political weakness. This shift in Denmark's national preoccupation, from the pursuit of imperial greatness to cultural rejuvenation, had a tremendous effect on domestic conceptions of Danish identity.

Yet Denmark's centrality to the international success of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature, which took continental Europe by storm during the late nineteenth century, was by no means self-evident. The most prominent figures in this literary movement, a judgment reflected at least in part by the enduring heft of their reputations, were, in fact, the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen and the Swede August Strindberg, who came to represent a much larger and widely disparate grouping of Scandinavian artists and authors, including the Danes Jens Peter (J. P.) Jacobsen and Herman Bang. Nevertheless, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, Brandes's pioneering role in introducing the writers of the Modern Breakthrough to continental readers had the effect of irrevocably linking his name and nationality to the movement's agenda. The fact that Brandes came to embody Denmark's cultural and artistic modernity in the European public sphere, although his own literary-critical works are not generally representative of modernist aesthetics, serves to further underscore the gap between reality and perception that is so central to the formation of exo-stereotypes. By endorsing and promoting the literature of the Modern Breakthrough, Brandes contributed to shaping popular German views of Denmark as a progressive, artistically vibrant culture, which in turn created a market for Danish cultural productions, notably literature and film, that conformed to this image.

Historical perspective is critical for interpreting the reception of texts, as initial judgments about them by contemporaries are often quite different from the way they subsequently come to be perceived. The most significant literary and artistic works in any given national canon are frequently revolutionary, advancing stylistic and ideological changes that threaten to disrupt the status quo, rather than representing an established cultural tradition. Although often celebrated as national masterpieces by later generations for their enduring aesthetic or social significance, forward-thinking works are often initially out of step with the views of the mainstream public they purport to represent. As assessments of these works shifts over time, so too do their metacultural associations.

A striking example of this process of shifting reception is the scandal caused by Ibsen's acclaimed drama Ghosts (Gjengangere) when it was first published in Copenhagen in 1881. The director of the Nya Teatern in Stockholm, Ludwig Josephson, condemned the play as “one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia,”⁷ while a reviewer in London's Daily Telegraph denounced it, in 1891, as “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly…. Ibsen's melancholy and malodorous world…[is] absolutely loathsome and fetid.”⁸ Yet a few contemporary critics recognized the drama's inherent quality. In the London Star, Arthur Bingham (A. B.) Walkley exhorted,

Do these people really find nothing in Ghosts but a mere hospital ward play? Is it really for them nothing but a painful study of disease? Have they no eyes for what stares them in the face: the plain, simple fact that Ghosts is a great spiritual drama? Like nearly all the other great masterpieces of the stage, it is a drama of revolt—the revolt of the “joy of life” against the gloom of hidebound, conventional morality, the revolt of the natural man against the law-made, law-bound puppet, the revolt of the individual against the oppression of social prejudice.⁹

In the 130 years since its publication, Ghosts has earned its place as one of Norway's greatest dramas, while Ibsen himself, who lived in self-imposed exile from his homeland for more than thirty years, has become one of the most distinguished representatives of Norwegian literature. This chronological disparity in the reception of revolutionary texts demonstrates the difficulty of judging the value of contemporary cultural artifacts as representative of the national cultures of their creators.

As was the case with Ibsen and Norway, the tensions inherent in the task of constructing an image of Denmark's national identity that was attractive to the larger world but still an accurate reflection of prevailing endo-stereotypes of Danishness has frequently led to conflict between Danish society and the standard-bearers of Danish culture beyond Denmark's borders. At issue is most often the question of authority to define Danishness. During his lifetime, Hans Christian Andersen, who has since become Denmark's most favored son, was far more renowned and admired in Germany and Britain than in Denmark, in part because of the working-class background that rendered his works unpalatable to many of the Copenhagen bourgeois elite. Similarly, neither Nielsen nor Brandes enjoyed the same degree of popularity at home in Denmark as they did abroad. Much like the ugly duckling in Andersen's fairy tale, an analogy that several contemporary critics applied to Nielsen, Brandes and Nielsen found the Danish duckyard both unappreciative and limiting, a situation that forced them to go out into the wider world to achieve recognition.

However, even after the rest of the world had recognized them as swans, many Danes still regarded Brandes and Nielsen as ungainly misfits undeserving of recognition or respect and unqualified to represent their home country. The most significant of the many reasons for this was that the exo-stereotype of Danish modernity evoked throughout Europe by the metacultural associations of Nielsen's and Brandes's work did not yet correspond to the self-perception of mainstream Danish society, which was still caught in the throes of its prolonged transition from a provincial, conservative culture into the liberal, modern country Denmark has since become. Although much of the criticism Brandes and Nielsen faced in Denmark took the form of very personal attacks or professional disapproval, their divisive reception functioned to a significant degree as a manifestation of ongoing struggles over competing narratives of Danish cultural identity, between top-down pedagogical models supported by the educated bourgeoisie and performative avant-garde challenges to them. Examining the disjunction between European and Danish perceptions of Brandes and Nielsen in this period, as well as the way in which the controversiality of the image of Denmark that they mediated is gradually eroded, offers valuable insights into the competing exo- and endo-stereotypes of Danish national identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociopolitical discourse. Both Brandes and Nielsen were closely associated with Scandinavian modernity, the former for his impassioned advocacy of a socially engaged modern literature, the latter for her compelling cinematic depictions of strong-willed, sexually emancipated women.

Brandes and Nielsen contributed to the emergence of an exo-stereotype of Danish cultural and national identity as freethinking and permissive at a time when social and cultural conditions in Denmark did not yet embody these qualities. Their transmission of a culturally modern and socially progressive image of Denmark in Germany during this period of Danish political diminution affected European views of Denmark and Scandinavia as well as Denmark's self-image around the turn of the century, projecting an image of de facto Danish modernity, although Danes were still deeply divided over the question of modernization. Although many Danes at the time rejected the liberal causes that Nielsen and Brandes represented, the fact that Danish society today so closely resembles the image of Denmark popularized by Brandes and Nielsen suggests that their efforts to influence the cultural geography of Denmark were neither futile nor misguided, despite the opposition they encountered at home. In this way, although one cannot assert that they were directly responsible for the actual establishment of political and social modernity in Denmark, their performative enactment of this modernity before it became widely accepted positioned Brandes and Nielsen as representative icons of Danish cultural modernity as seen from abroad.

By its nature, culture is both a reflection of the past and a product of the present. The term “national culture” can designate many things, including a given country's predominant beliefs, habits, preferences, and values, as well as the relationship between the various political, economic, and intellectual realms within a given society. It has, however, no ontological reality or temporal permanence on its own; it exists only in the minds and practices of its bearers. Urban explains that “culture is necessarily characterized by its ‘onceness.’ It has been. But culture is also on its way somewhere—whether or not it gets there—and hence, it is also characterized by its futurity.”¹⁰ The dynamic nature of culture means that it encompasses both traditional and progressive elements, despite the protests of the adherents of one mindset or the other. Thus, at the same time as public figures affect external perceptions of their national cultures, they are also engaged in shaping the internal development of those same cultures, as evidenced by the gradual disappearance of the discrepancy between the conservative social climate of early twentieth-century Denmark and the controversial modernity of the image of Denmark associated with Brandes and Nielsen. Opponents perceived their progressive views and unconventional lifestyles as threatening to the familiar, traditional Christian morals of nineteenth-century Danish society, while their supporters celebrated the liberation of Danish society from outmoded, restrictive social mores. Over time, as Danish culture gradually embraced modern views in such areas as secularization, democracy, civil rights, and sexuality, disapproval of Brandes and Nielsen gave way to approbation for their pioneering efforts in imagining and performing modern Danish identity.

One reason why Brandes and Nielsen were able to mediate and disseminate ideas about Danish national identity so effectively was their use of mass media. It is a common complaint in today's society that the purveyors of mass media shape public opinion in support of particular agendas, but this is by no means a new phenomenon, as the targeted advertising of the Vaterland's voyage in 1914 illustrates. The mass media are both a byproduct and agent of modernity, in the sense that their very existence presupposes the rise of the masses as consumers of information and culture, while their function is to disseminate seemingly endless streams of information to ever-larger groups at ever-increasing speeds.¹¹ The scope and complexity of modern life make it impossible for individuals to form firsthand opinions about every issue, with the result that people have little choice but to base their opinions of much of the world around them on the information they receive through the media: newspapers, magazines, television, film, and the Interne...