Karl Gjellerup

Karl Adolph Gjellerup was born in 1857 at Roholte, on Zealand, the son of a vicar who died when the boy was three. Raised by a relative in an atmosphere of national-romantic idealism, he trained in theology but broke with his background in the 1870s, becoming an ardent follower of the critic Georg Brandes and the naturalist movement and writing provocative novels of free thought and free love.

The Germans’ Apprentice (1882), his most important early novel, follows a young theologian’s path to atheism and German culture, and mirrors the author’s own. By the mid-1880s he had broken with Brandes for a new romanticism, writing Wagnerian dramas and the psychological novel Minna (1889); The Mill (1896) is a dark melodrama of love and jealousy. In 1892, married to a German, he settled in Germany and increasingly wrote in German. His later work was shaped by Buddhism and Indian thought: The Pilgrim Kamanita (1906) follows a merchant’s son through love, loss and rebirth toward nirvana, and The World Roamers (1910) moves souls through successive incarnations.

When he shared the 1917 prize with Henrik Pontoppidan, the response in Denmark was cool: he had long been regarded as a German author, and he identified with the German Empire and its war aims. He died at Klotzsche, near Dresden, in October 1919. Little read in Denmark today, he survives chiefly through Kamanita, translated into many languages and long studied in Thai schools.