On the evening of June 7, 1914, police officers were dispatched to break up a crowd of over a thousand people assembled outside the Comedy Theatre on West 41st Street in Manhattan. Hoping for a last-minute ticket, they had been turned away at the doors and were now blocking traffic on Sixth Avenue. Inside the theater, every seat and every inch of standing room was occupied by people eagerly waiting for the evening’s program to begin. What had they come to see? Not a performance by Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor then at the peak of his fame; nor a ragtime revue by Irving Berlin, or a play by George Bernard Shaw. Strange as it sounds to contemporary ears, the many hundreds in attendance had come to be lectured on Shakespeare by the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, then in his early seventies. As an article in The New York Times put it the following day, it was “one of the most remarkable welcomes ever extended to a foreign lecturer.” It ought to have been a crowning moment for a writer once described by Thomas Mann as “the northern Sainte-Beuve” and by Stefan Zweig as “the international master of the history of literature,” who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature by Anatole France and hailed as “a good European” by Nietzsche, a writer whose lectures on European literature in Copenhagen introduced Scandinavian readers to realism and naturalism, whose books had been translated into German, English, French, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and Japanese, and whose biographical study of Shakespeare in 1896 achieved worldwide recognition and was admired by Joyce and Freud. Yet there was a huge cloud over the event in New York. Brandes’ American lecture tour was darkened by concern for the fate of the European continent. For years, for decades, he had been saying what no one wanted to hear: that Europe was on a suicide mission. As early as 1881, he had warned that by the turn of the century “Germany will lie alone, isolated, hated by the neighboring countries: a stronghold of conservatism in Europe […] protected by all the weapons of murder and defense which science can invent.” In 1905 he criticized the Anglo-German naval arms race, particularly the English politicians who openly spoke of an “unavoidable” war with Germany. In 1913 he cautioned against a new generation of French intellectuals, including Charles Péguy and Maurice Barrès, who looked upon war as “a purifying force.” (Peguy was killed in action just before the Battle of the Marne.) When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek were bunglingly assassinated in Sarajevo, Brandes had little doubt about the immediate future. “A wave of misery washes over Europe,” he confided to his diary. For Brandes the war in Europe had profound personal implications. A Jew from a provincial Protestant backwater, his career was indissolubly bound up with the internationalism of the European culture of the second half of nineteenth century. He became one of the great Jewish cosmopolitans. His countless lecture tours brought him to France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Poland, Finland, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, Greece, and Scotland. He met and corresponded with Thomas Mann, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Theodor Fontane, Edmund Gosse, the brothers Goncourt, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Peter Kropotkin, Theodor Herzl, and Benedetto Croce. His essays and articles had appeared in almost every major European newspaper and literary review, many of which he was attached to in some editorial capacity. The war took it all away. Overnight, literary and intellectual salons in Paris and Berlin, hot with patriotic fever, closed their doors to him. In the new nationalistic Europe, liberal cosmopolitanism, especially that of a Jew, no longer had a home. Brandes was publicly attacked by former friends such as Georges Clemenceau (with whom he had often vacationed in Karlsbad) and the Scottish writer and critic William Archer for refusing to take sides in the war and for supporting Denmark’s neutrality. (H. L. Mencken later called him “the only genuine neutral the war has produced.”) Disgusted with the belligerence and the chauvinism of Europe’s empires, Brandes endeavored to defend the continent’s embattled minorities instead. But when he began reporting on the persecution of Jews in Poland, he was denounced by the Polish Author’s Union, which denied that any pogroms had ever occurred on Polish soil. Stefan Zweig wrote to congratulate Brandes for his courage, assuring him that “a coming age will recognize those who dared to stand unarmed against the brunt of hostile opinion as the true heroes.” But that age never came. Brandes’ life after the war was one of increased illness and growing isolation. Though he lived until 1927, his reputation never regained its pre-war eminence, at least not outside Denmark. Like so many other good things, his international literary standing effectively died with the war. The tributes that poured in on the occasion of his death — from Mann, Hamsun, Kerr, Gosse, Barbusse, and Schnitzler — already seemed to harken back to a vanished world. Perversely, Clemenceau’s cruel response was the appropriate one. Upon being informed of Brandes’ death, the former French prime minister said, “So he has died! He was right to do so. Only he should have done it sooner. Now that story is forgotten, like so many others.” 
Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was born in Copenhagen on February 4, 1842. His parents were a part of the Danish capital’s vibrant Jewish minority, which had grown steadily since the granting of full civil rights to Danish Jews by royal decree in 1814. Brandes later recalled that he was first made aware of his Jewish identity when a few young boys shouted an unfamiliar slur at him in the street. He asked his mother what it meant: “What does it mean?” “Jew!” said Mother. “Jews are people.” “Nasty people?” “Yes,” said Mother, smiling, “sometimes
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