Ernst Immanuel Cohen Brandes

Ernst Immanuel Cohen Brandes (1 February 1844 – 6 August 1892) was a Danish economist, writer, and newspaper editor. He is best known for editing the Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende, which published articles written by leading Danish men of letters, including future Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan, during a period later hailed as the Modern Breakthrough in Danish literature.

Outraged by his politicized blasphemy conviction for an article anonymously written by Pontoppidan for the Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende in 1889, Brandes committed suicide in 1892.

Biography Ernst Brandes was born to a Danish Jewish family in Copenhagen on 1 February 1844, two years after his elder brother Georg Brandes and three years before the youngest, Edvard.

Trained as an economist, Brandes focused much of his time on economic and social questions. In his 1885 Samfundssporgsmaal, he attacked the population theories of Thomas Malthus and the theory of value advanced by David Ricardo. Though prominent as a social liberal, Brandes reserved part of Samfundssporgsmaal for a critique of the Marxist movement.

Brandes came to write for the Politiken, which Edvard had helped to found in 1884, before editing his own newspaper, the Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende, in 1889 – an idiosyncratic undertaking meant to combine stock price lists and radical literature. Successful in his efforts to attract a wide range of talented writers, Brandes published the literary efforts and social commentary of such authors as Johannes Jørgensen, Sophus Claussen, and Viggo Stuckenberg. Having met Henrik Pontoppidan through Edvard, Brandes encouraged the outstanding Danish writer to join. Pontoppidan, who later recalled Brandes saying that Brandes' idea for the Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende was to create a modern, entertaining opposition paper capable of challenging the established conservative press in the Danish capital, agreed to collaborate and joined the Børs-Tidende on 30 July 1889.

Despondent for months afterward, he committed suicide by taking poison in Copenhagen on 6 August 1892.