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Brandes, Georg Morris Cohen, 1842-1927

"Recollections of My Childhood and Youth"

And from this time forth, for at least a
generation, it became this wretch's task in life to persecute me under
every possible pseudonym, and when his own powers were not sufficient,
to get up conspiracies against me. In particular, he did all he could
against me in Germany.
Meanwhile, he started a magazine in order to bring before the public
himself and the ideas he was more immediately serving, viz.: those of R.
Nielsen; and since this latter had of late drawn very much nearer to the
Grundtvigian way of thinking, partly also those of Grundtvig. The
magazine had three editors, amongst them R. Nielsen himself, and when
one of them, who was the critic of the _Fatherland_, suddenly left
the country, Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson took his place. The three names, R.
Nielsen, B. Bjoernson, and Rudolph Schmidt, formed a trinity whose
supremacy did not augur well for the success of a beginner in the paths
of literature, who had attacked the thinker among them for ideal
reasons, and who had been the object of violent attacks from the two
others. The magazine _Idea and Reality_, was, as might be expected,
sufficiently unfavourable to my cause.
The sudden disappearance of the critic of _The Fatherland_ from the
literary arena was, under the conditions of the time, an event. He had
no little talent, attracted by ideas and fancies that were sometimes
very telling, repelled by mannerisms and a curious, far-fetched style,
laid chief emphasis, in the spirit of the most modern Danish philosophy,
on the will, and always defended ethical standpoints.


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