Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen
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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.
Julie K. Allen
Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes & Asta Nielsen Hardcover – 15 February 2013
by Julie K. Allen (Author)
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Review
Julie Allen weaves a compelling cultural analysis about national identity and its mores. The juxtaposition of the works of Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen is highly original and Allens contribution offers a much-needed introduction to an English reading audience of these important cultural figures. Karin Sanders, University of California, Berkele
About the Author
Julie K. Allen is associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Reviewed by: Neil Christian Pages
Julie K. Allen. Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 283.
In his A Literary Review of 1846, Søren Kierkegaard, arguably the world’s most famous Dane, takes some pleasure at the thought that the work of the Danish author under review is unlikely to reach a foreign readership by exclaiming: “a conscious and contented joy over little Denmark!” (Princeton University Press, 1978). This vision of an exclusive and blissfully xenophobic Denmark—Danmark er et lille land is a recurring phrase among the Danes—shadows Julie K. Allen’s exploration of the country’s national and cultural identity in Icons of Danish Modernity. Two famous Danes—the literary critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881–1972)—serve as test sites at which Allen reads how “celebrity status” and its reception shaped the image of Denmark abroad while changing the way Danes saw and see themselves (p. 12). Though Allen admits that Brandes and Nielsen “had little professional interaction with each other” (p. 227), she nonetheless contends that parallels in their careers are compelling enough to inform a specifically Danish cultural modernity. Allen’s retelling of these fascinating stories is based on research into Danish sources that have been unavailable to readers with no Danish language skills. The scholarly apparatus she mobilizes, however, seems forced at times, and her recourse to so many thinkers and theorists across disciplines burdens her narrative unnecessarily and suggests a lack of analytical depth. Insights such as the fact that Brandes was “one of the most influential cultural nationalists in modern Danish history” (p. 48) give way to the obvious—“Danish national identity is still a work in progress” (p. 43)—or to the dreary—Brandes and Nielsen “may have felt all along … that no matter how far from home they traveled, how controversial their work appeared, or how famous they became, they could never divorce themselves from their national and cultural identities as Danes” (p. 43). [End Page 102]
The structure of Allen’s arguments is happily more nuanced than that speculative conceit. Her introduction describes the Cultural Studies orientation of this sociological project as it explores the stereotypes of danskhed, or “Danishness.” The reception of Brandes and Nielsen serves to illuminate a “tension between collective conceptions of Danish national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” and to reflect on endo-, exo-, and meta-stereotypes, that is, the Danes’ self-image, their image of how others see Danish culture and the actual views that others hold about Denmark (pp. 6–7). Those “others” are mostly Germans. Indeed, German culture provides the foil that allowed modern Danish culture to differentiate itself and to assert its own singularity. Allen provides the necessary historical and geopolitical background for this process of identity construction and explores some of the reasons that Brandes and Nielsen became “stars” in Germany. Chapter 1, “The Critic and the Actress: Crafting Art and National Identity,” depicts the ebb and flow of Brandes’s and Nielsen’s popularity in Denmark with and against the fact that both “have finally earned the respect of their own fatherland” (p. 42). The second and third chapters rely on the writing of the Danish Brandes biographer Jørgen Knudsen, whose work Allen brings to the English-speaking reader for the first time. Here Allen describes how Brandes sought refuge in Germany from the cultural provincialism of Denmark and established himself as an activist critic and a mediator between cultures, “ein solcher guter Europäer und Kultur Missionar” as Nietzsche put it (Nietzsche Briefwechsel, de Gruyter, 1984). Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to Nielsen and read somewhat like another book altogether, one focused on discourses in Film Studies. These chapters are lacking an engagement with important recent work like the two-volume study edited by Heide Schlüpmann (Unmögliche Liebe. Vol. 1: Asta Nielsen, ihr Kino and Nachtfalter. Vol. 2: Asta Nielsen, ihre Filme, Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2009). That said, Allen’s own border crossing between Scandinavian Studies, German Studies...
This book utilises 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 multiethnic Denmark. Icons of Danish Modernity is a book about the uneasy waves that arise when celebrities take on national symbolism and about the beginnings of this formula in the early twentieth century.
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