Ditte: Girl Alive!

Ditte Menneskebarn #1-3

by Martin Andersen Nexø

" Girl Alive!" by Martin Andersen Nexø. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Genres: Classics, Danish, Fiction, Roman

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Martin Andersen Nexø was born to a large family (the fourth of eleven children) in an impoverished district of Copenhagen. In 1877, his family moved to Nexø, and he adopted the name of this town as his last name. Having been an industrial worker before, Nexø he attended a folk high school and later worked as a journalist. He spent the mid-1890s travelling in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) (English: Days in the Sun) is largely based on those travels. Like many of his literary contemporaries, including Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Nexø was at first heavily influenced by fin-de-siécle pessimism, but gradually turned to a more extroverted view, joining the Social Democratic movement and later the Communist Party of Denmark; his later books reflect his political support of the Soviet Union.

Pelle Erobreren (English: Pelle the Conqueror), published in four volumes 1906-1910, is his best-known work and the one most translated. Its first section was made the subject of the DDR-FS movie Pelle der Eroberer in 1986[1] and the movie Pelle Erobreren in 1987. Ditte Menneskebarn (English: Ditte, Child of Man), written from 1917 to 1921, praises the working woman for her self-sacrifice, and a Danish film version of the first part of the book was released in 1946 as Ditte, Child of Man. The much debated Midt i en Jærntid (i.e. "In an Iron Age", English: In God's Land), written in 1929, satirises the Danish farmers of World War I. During his latter years, 1944 to 1956, Nexø wrote but did not complete a trilogy consisting of the books Morten hin Røde (English: Morten the Red), Den fortabte generation (English: The Lost Generation), and Jeanette. This was ostensibly a continuation of Pelle the Conqueror, but also a masked autobiography.

Danish police arrested Nexø in 1941 during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis, for his communist affiliation. Upon his release, he traveled to neutral Sweden and then to the Soviet Union, where he made broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Denmark and Norway. After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was made an honorary citizen. The Martin-Andersen-Nexø-Gymnasium high school in Dresden was named after him. His international reputation as one the greatest European social writers grew, especially, but not exclusively, in socialist countries.[citation needed]

Nexø died in Dresden in 1954 and was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro neighbourhood of Copenhagen. A minor planet, 3535 Ditte, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979, is named after the main character in his novel Ditte, Child of Man. [2]

Reviews

[Henrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Temat för årets läsning har märkligt nog varit otrendig arbetarlitteratur från grannländer. Min släkt är dansk och vid årets släktmiddag var samtalsämnet den fantastiske Nexø. Jag läste på lite om honom efteråt. Stalinist? Nej, sånt klarar jag mig utan. Men sen så hittade jag boken om Ditte på en loppis för fem kronor och gav den en chans. Vilken bok!

Boken har ideologiska undertoner. Penningbegäret är människans största synd. Men Nexø är ingen testuggande marxist - han älskar sina karaktärer för mycket. Lars Peter och Ditte är starka karaktärer. Språket är fantastiskt. Tempot är lägre än i dagens litteratur, men berättelsen är stark. Jag tror att boken ingår i danska kulturkanon och jag förstår varför.

[Laurids Flinker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deprimerende slutning takket være Karl, det pjok