Henri Nathansen

Henri Nathansen (17 July 1868 – 16 February 1944) was a Danish writer and stage director, today best known for the play Indenfor Murene (the Danish rendering of the Latin expression intra muros, meaning "within the walls").

Henri Nathansen
Henri Nathansen, 1909
Born	(1868-07-17)17 July 1868 Hjørring, Denmark
Died	16 February 1944(1944-02-16) (aged 75) Lund, Sweden
Pen name	Frater Taciturnus
Occupation	Novelist, dramatist, stage director, biographer
Literary movement	Naturalism
Notable works	Indenfor Murene, Mendel Philipsen & Søn

Biography

Nathansen grew up in a merchant family in Copenhagen. Abandoning a legal career, he turned to writing and later directing. His best known work, Indenfor Murene, premiered in 1912 at the Royal Danish Theatre, directed by the author.^[1] The play centers around a wealthy, loving, but conservative Jewish family whose only daughter breaks away from tradition by attending lectures at the university and secretly becoming engaged to her teacher, a gentile. Still frequently performed, the play was included in the official Canon of Danish Culture in 2006.

Nathansen's 1932 novel Mendel Philipsen & Søn, about a Jewish woman who falls in love with a gentile painter but instead enters into a loveless marriage with her Jewish cousin, was adapted for the 1992 movie Sofie.^[2]

Late in his career, Nathansen wrote a number of biographies, notably one of Georg Brandes (1929).

In October 1943, when the Nazis attempted to round up the Danish Jews, Nathansen fled to Sweden. Four months later, he killed himself.

Legacy

A bust of Nathansen stands in the small garden complex Digterlunden next to the Town Hall Square in Frederiksberg.