Lecture this evening: “An Oriental Prince Comes to Karlsbad: Brandes and Clemenceau Encounter the East”

This evening the Department of Scandinavian Studies will host Dr. William Banks, of the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch, at the University of Minnesota as he presents some of his recent work on the Danish cultural critic Georg Brandes, focusing, in particular, on Brandes’s writings on human rights issues.

The lecture begins at 7:00 p.m., in Confer 128. It is free and open to the public.

Abstract:

In the summer of 1901 Georg Brandes accompanied his good friend Georges Clemenceau on the first of what would become an annual holiday in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), where the future French Premier was scheduled to take the cure for the nervous condition that ailed him for most of his long life. Clemenceau was at this time already famous across Europe for his essential role in the campaign to exonerate Captain Dreyfus; as for Brandes, he was then still known only for his activity as literary critic and kingmaker, although the previous year he had indeed published first of what would become a large corpus of essays on international human rights issues.

While the two friends appear to have had no more intention than enjoying the delights of the famous resort city, they immediately became enthralled by the presence on the promenade of a curious figure, described by Brandes as an “oriental prince,” shrouded not only in silken robes but seemingly as well in inscrutable mystery. Because they had assumed this person to be unable to communicate in any European languages, the two men were astonished when he appeared at their door one evening, addressing them in fluent French. And indeed the prince had much on his mind that evening, about the relations between Islam and Christendom, about the European missionary presence in Africa and Asia, about the entirety of the colonial enterprise itself.

Bio:
Dr. William Banks is a lecturer in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 2013, where he wrote his dissertation on the interwar Danish social movement known today as Cultural Radicalism. He has previously published on Ibsen, Kierkegaard, Strindberg, and J.P. Jacobsen, and is currently preparing an English translation of Georg Brandes’s collected essays on human rights issues.