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Andersen Nexø Martin
(1869—1954)

Martin Andersen Nexø was a Danish writer. He is the first author writing about the working class and the first great Danish communist fine literate.

He was born to a large family in a very poor area of Copenhagen, Denmark. His family moved to Nexø (from which he took Nexø as a last name), Denmark in 1877. As a young man he was suffering from tuberculosis which he however succeeded to overcome. After a short career as a worker he frequented a folk high school and later on he worked as a journalist.

In the mid-1890s Martin Andersen Nexø travelled in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) is to a large extent based on those travels.

As a fine literate Nexø, like Johannes V. Jensen, was at first much influed by fin-de-siécle pessimism but gradually he turned to a more extrioverted view and joined the Social Democratic movement. From then most of his books had a social bias. Probably his best known and most translated book is Pelle Erobreren (Pelle The Conqueror), the last volume of which was completed in 1910. The beginning part of the book was the subject of the movie Pelle Erobreren made in 1987. His other great work was Ditte Menneskebarn (1917-21), a hailing of the working woman and her self-sacrifice as a mother of others. A Danish film version of part I of this book was released in 1946. The much debated Midt i en Jærntid, 1929, (i. e. "In an Iron Age", eng. transl. In God's Land) satirises the Danish farmers of World War I. During his last years he wrote a - never fulfilled - trilogy (Morten hin Røde, Den fortabte generation, Jeanette 1944-56) which was partly a continuation of Pelle the Conqueror, partly a masked autobiography.

Martin Andersen Nexø joined the Danish Communist Party though he did not break completely with the Social Democrats until 1933. He always whole-hearted supported the Soviet Union and this attitude in many ways influenced later generations of left wing writers. As a communist he was jailed in 1941 by the Danish police during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis. However, he got out and went to neutral Sweden. From Sweden he went to the Soviet Union where he did broadcasts to Denmark and Norway (which was also occupied by the Nazis).

After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was named an honorary citizen. Among other things the Martin-Andersen-Nexø-Gymnasium High school in Dresden was named after him.

Nexø died in Dresden in 1954 and was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen.

In his prime Nexø enjoyed a name of international reputation and quite until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe he has remained a great name there. Though this position is probably going to fade there is no doubt that he is ranking among the great European social writers like Maxim Gorky.

DDR, 1969, Martin Andersen Nexø

Denmark, 1969, Martin Andersen Nexo

Denmark, 1969.08.28, Copenhagen. Boy