Martin Andersen Nexø

Martin Andersen Nexø (born June 26, 1869, Copenhagen, Denmark—died June 1, 1954, Dresden, East Germany) was a writer who was the first Danish novelist to champion social revolution. His works helped raise social consciousness in Denmark and throughout Europe.

Nexø came from an extremely poor family in the slums of Copenhagen but spent most of his childhood on the island of Bornholm, where he worked as a shepherd and later as a shoemaker’s apprentice. He thus came to know the extreme deprivation suffered by the working class. With the help of a patron, he was later able to go to school; after finishing he worked as a teacher in a Grundtvigian folk school until he became tubercular and went to Spain and Italy to convalesce. Thereafter he concentrated on writing. On his stay in Spain he wrote Soldage (1903; Days in the Sun).

Nexø’s two major novels became known throughout the world. The first is Pelle erobreren, which was published in four volumes between 1906 and 1910. It is a bildungsroman tracing Pelle’s transformation from farm labourer’s son to militant labour leader. Several portraits of Danish social life emerge, including life on a rural estate and in the slums of Copenhagen. A four-volume English translation, Pelle the Conqueror, appeared in 1913–16. In 1989 and 1991 a revised version of parts 1 and 2 of the 1913–16 translation was published. Although the Academy Award-winning film made in 1987 from Nexø’s novel bears the same title, it changes the story’s focus considerably. The second novel, Ditte mennskebarn, 5 vol. (1917–21; Ditte: Daughter of Man), depicts the life of a poor, courageous, and loving girl and woman for whom there is no escape from oppression. A third novel, Midt i en Jærntid (1929; In God’s Land), is critical of wealthy farmers during the period of agricultural inflation brought about by World War I. Nexø’s collected short fiction appeared under the title of Muldskud, 3 vol. (1922–26; “From the Soil”).

A great admirer of the Soviet revolutionary experiment, Nexø became a communist after World War I and traveled to the Soviet Union a number of times. Mod dagningen (1923; “Toward the Dawn”) gives his impressions of the Soviet Union. His memoirs appeared as Erindringer, 2 vol. (1932–39; “Reminiscences”). Extracts from both volumes appear in English translation as Under the Open Sky (1938). In 1945 Nexø published a two-volume sequel to Pelle, Morten hin Røde (“Morten the Red”), in which the poet Morten, Pelle’s childhood friend, is the revolutionary and Pelle is shown as having turned bourgeois, like many of the labour leaders in the West. Nexø left Denmark in 1949, after the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty—which established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO—and settled in East Germany, where he remained for the rest of his life.