JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

in an interesting way, and on the other hand creates a play which
anticipates what later in the century will be known as serial TV-
plays.
These images of Jacobsen as auteur are indeed very different.
In Denmark the peculiar obsession with Jacobsen’s Naturalism
and especially his kinky personality persists due to Paul V.
Rubow’s taste for French literature, which makes him consider
Jacobsen nothing but a totally failed Naturalist, and in vast books
on Jacobsen’s apparently sado-masochist tendencies by Frederik
Nielsen and Jørgen Holmgaard. In Germany Jacobsen’s role as
the modern author par excellence fades out after the First World
War. Of interest here are these very different images. From Vil-
helm Andersen on the Danish reception of Jacobsen becomes
dogmatic and rigid, he is but a representative of Naturalism and of
the so called Modern Breakthrough. From the 1970’es and
1980’es, due to scholars as Finn Stein Larsen, Peer E. Sørensen
and Jørn Vosmar, the obsession with Jacobsen’s fancy or kinky or
whatever personality is broken, instead it now finally becomes
fashionable to focus on his texts.
In German literary history around 1900 one often comes across
the term “die Jacobsen Mode”. Jacobsen was fashionable as an
image of what the German and Austrian writers and composers
could not find in their own culture: The anti-hero Niels Lyhne and
Jacobsen’s ability to bring together in the same figure a weak and
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