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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
FREEDOM, TRUTH AND SOCIETY - RHETORIC AND REALITY
During the night of 9 January 1871, a young Dane lay awake in his hospital bed in Rome writing. He was committing to paper a poem to which he had given the title 'To Henrik Ibsen'. He had recently received a letter from Ibsen - a letter carrying a powerful appeal to him to put himself at the head of the 'revolution of the human spirit' which the age cried out for. In the poem which formed his enthusiastic response, the young Dane - the critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) - described how all those mendacious and authoritarian forces of the contemporary age would be brought low when 'the intellectuals' made their revolt. And he raised the banner of freedom and progress with the words: 'Truth and Freedom are one and the same.'
Time after time in the years that followed, Ibsen was himself to raise this same revolutionary banner - with truth and freedom as the central watchwords. In later years these concepts could sound both abstract and ambiguous; nevertheless, within their historical context, they served as a battle cry in the struggle against the prevailing situation. 'Truth' alone - that truth of the new age such as a Brandes and an Ibsen saw it — could achieve liberation. Without truth there could be no change, no genuine 'freedom'.
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