The Incidental Tourist
Stark Naked in Berlin
Despite the fact that the scholarly evaluators found fault with the dissertation’s stylistic pranks, the master of irony became a magister in irony. The university rules were followed in every detail. An audience that was almost as learned as it was curious showed up for the oral defense. In Latin. The show was a great hit at the box office and lasted seven and one-half hours, though in the middle of the day there was a recess of a couple of hours. No fewer than nine opponents rose to debate Kierkegaard. Sibbern and Brøndsted appeared as official opponents. The ex auditorio opponents were F. C. Petersen, Johan Ludvig Heiberg himself, and older brother Peter Christian; plus licentia theologiae and doctor philosophiae Frederik Beck; F.P.J. Dahl, a former lecturer in philosophy at Christiania University; H. J. Thue, a Norwegian magister in philosophy; and the theological graduate C. F. Christens. Sibbern and Brøndsted used superlatives in the report they sent to the directors of the university two days after the defense: “The intelligence and intellectual liveliness, the proficiency and dialectical skill, which are so much in evidence in candidat Kierkegaard’s dissertation, were also prominent in his defense of it, and we must regard him as entirely deserving of the honor of the magister degree to which he aspires.” Sibbern was so delighted with the dissertation that he not only urged Kierkegaard to have it translated into German but also to apply for a university position.
By Tuesday, October 26, 1841, when the directors of the university reported that the degree of magister in philosophy could be conferred upon Kierkegaard, the magister had already donned his cap and, like those imps whose caps make them invisible, had caused himself to disappear from Copenhagen. Peter Christian and Emil Boesen were the only ones who knew that he was aboard the Prussian mailboat Königin Elisabeth, which had departed Copenhagen for Kiel on Monday, October 25, at eleven o’clock in the morning. Kierkegaard was bound for Berlin, which had long been the city of cities for every theologian and philosopher who had respect for himself and his discipline.
Scarcely had Kierkegaard arrived in his Berlin lodgings—61 Mittelstrasse, eine Treppe hoch [German: “one flight up”]—than he sent off the first of what would be seven letters to Emil Boesen. After several remarks about the journey, the coming lecture series, and other things of that sort, the letter turned without warning to a series of imperatives: “Meet her without being noticed. Your window can help you. Mondays and Thursdays music lessons from 4 to 5. But don’t meet her in the street, with the exception of Monday afternoons at 5 or 5:30, when you ought to be able to meet her as she walks through Vestergade from Vestervold to Klædeboderne; or on the same day at 7 or 7:30, when she generally goes through the arcades to Børsgade with her sister. But carefully. Visit the pastry shop down there, but carefully. For my sake practice the art of controlling every expression, of mastering chance events, of being able to dream up a story instantly, without fear or anxiety. And one can deceive people as much as one wants, I know this from experience, and in this respect at least, I have boundless daring…. I trust no one.”
We have no idea how Boesen reacted to these orders to sneak around Copenhagen as if he were some sort of spy, because all of his letters to Kierkegaard have been lost. Kierkegaard intended more or less the same fate for his letters to Boesen. On the outside of the packet in which he preserved them he wrote: “After my death this packet is to be burned unopened. For the information of posterity: The contents are not worth 4 shillings.” But in a matchless decision, the people who edited and published Kierkegaard’s literary remains decided to refrain from this incendiary advice, thereby preserving a primary source which, unlike most of what Kierkegaard permitted to survive for future publication, has not been censored by so much as a comma. He was perhaps capable of duping Boesen every now and again, but it was impossible to fool him completely, so Kierkegaard was scarcely off the mark when he wrote at one point: “You know how I am. When I talk with you, I leap about stark naked. With other people I am always enormously calculating.”
The absence of Boesen’s letters means that we unfortunately have no idea how Boesen reacted when Kierkegaard recruited him as a spy. But in examining Kierkegaard’s next letter we can clearly sense that Boesen had been hurt by all the mistrustfulness and had displayed a certain dissatisfaction with the entire situation, which had been made all the more unpleasant by the fact that Boesen himself was unhappily in love and thus already had his hands full. Kierkegaard was not particularly concerned about this latter problem, and from his Berlin lodgings he sent Boesen a panacea for romantic crises: “And now you yourself. Do you bear any responsibility, have you broken any obligation, and does it really disturb you if you walk past her window and see her laughing? Poetize her, so that she sits inside even more beautifully, and laughs and weeps and does everything you wish.” The stolid and therefore somewhat inflexible Boesen failed to get the point: He had loved madly and sadly and therefore would neither poetize nor forget his beloved. So Kierkegaard had to take a more pedagogical tack in his next letter: “If you cannot forget her, cannot poetize her, well then, hoist all sail. Be sheer attentiveness. Let no opportunity to meet her pass you by. One always encounters coincidences: Make use of them…. Death and pestilence, what a fuss to make for the sake of a girl.”
Even though Kierkegaard of course knew what he was talking about, and to this extent Boesen had turned to the right person, there is every reason to suspect that Kierkegaard was parodying the difficulties in which he himself was immersed right up to his neck. Indeed it took Boesen so long to reply to this letter that Kierkegaard, out of sheer impatience, subjected a poor shoeshine boy to a painful cross-examination in order to determine whether he had actually posted the letter entrusted to him or had mislaid it at some stupid place or other in Berlin. But about a month later Boesen was heard from, and by inspecting Kierkegaard’s reply we learn that his friend had indeed begun a bit of espionage in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard, however, could never have enough, and he asked Boesen to pump the portrait painter Bærentzen, who was Regine’s neighbor and thus “a good source.” Kierkegaard continued: “It is good that the [Olsen] family hates me. That is what I intended, just as I have also intended that she, if possible, be capable of hating me. She does not know how much she owes me in this respect…. Not even here in Berlin has my, alas, all-too-inventive brain been able to refrain from scheming something or other. She must either love me or hate me, she knows no third possibility. Nor is there anything more harmful to a young girl than half-way situations.” Later in the letter he wrote, with a peculiarly considerate cynicism: “You lack one thing which I possess. You have not learned to have contempt for the world, to see how petty everything is. You break your back for the world’s copper shillings…. If people think, then, that I am a deceiver, so what? I will still be just as able to study philosophy, write, smoke cigars, and thumb my nose at the whole world. Anyway, I have always made a fool of people, so why should I not do so right up to the end?”
Kierkegaard is certainly speaking plainly here. He may or may not be putting his money where his mouth is, but in any case what he says in the letter is worth more than a mere four shillings. Still, Kierkegaard would not be Kierkegaard if he did not understand how to earn indirect revenues from his plainspokenness, so the following information was written on a separate sheet of paper he enclosed with his letter: “I have no time to marry. Here in Berlin, however, there is a singer from Vienna, a Mademoiselle Schulze. She plays the role of Elvira and bears a striking likeness to a certain young girl…. When the wildness in my spirit overcomes me, I am almost tempted to approach her and not exactly with the ‘most honorable of intentions.’ … It could be a little diversion when I am tired of speculative thought…. I do not, however, want you to mention to anyone that there is such a singer in Berlin, or that she plays Elvira, et cetera.”
A clever little scrap of paper, no doubt about that, because of course Kierkegaard’s fascination with Mademoiselle Schulze was not to be kept secret. If Kierkegaard had truly wanted secrecy, it was certainly careless of him to have written it on a separate piece of paper, which could fall into the hands of unauthorized persons. On the contrary, the point was to tempt Boesen to put into circulation the information entrusted to him. Kierkegaard was quite aware that the floodgates of gossip had opened when he left Copenhagen. Shortly before his departure he had heard that Sibbern was making the rounds, assiduously running down his reputation, calling him “an ironist in the bad sense.” Just one single hint at the right time and in the right place would get the malicious rumor mill to spin even faster and pump the spicy details about Mademoiselle Schulze in the direction of Regine, who would hardly be delighted to hear that she had an erotic double in Berlin. She would therefore hate her faithless lover with redoubled vehemence, and her salvation would be within reach.
So Boesen took the bait and must have interrogated Kierkegaard about the Regine look-alike in Berlin, but Kierkegaard would not reveal anything and was content to remark in his New Year’s letter that he was still engaged in his studies, which he was carrying out from a loge near the stage: “By the way, one shouldn’t joke about this sort of thing. Passion has its own unique dialectic, as is well known.” Kierkegaard had such confidence in his plans that when Boesen reported that Regine seemed cheerful, he was compelled to correct his friend’s impression: “The house of Olsen has great powers of dissimulation, and association with me has certainly not diminished their virtuosity.”
Nor had Kierkegaard’s daily association with himself diminished his own virtuosity as a dissimulator, but as so often happens, deception and self-deception walked faithfully hand in hand, escorting Kierkegaard into a world that was utterly unreliable. He was always compelled to cover himself, to choose his attitude with utmost care, and to calculate the possible consequences of even the most insignificant unpremeditated utterance. As he put it in his fifth letter to Boesen: “Here in Berlin, when I associate with the Danes I am always cheerful, happy, light-headed, ‘am having the time of my life,’ et cetera. And even though currents surge within me, so that sometimes it is as if my feelings, like water, will break the ice with which I have surrounded myself—and even though once in a while there is a sigh within me, as soon as anyone is present, every sigh is instantly transformed into something ironic, a witticism, et cetera…. Here [in Berlin] a sigh, which might in fact signify something entirely different, could reach the ear of a Dane, and he could write home about it. She would perhaps hear of it, and it could have a harmful influence.” And a little further on in the same letter: “I have been sick. That is, I have had a great many rheumatoid headaches, often have not slept at night…. If I called a doctor, the Danes would know of it immediately. Perhaps it would occur to one of them to write home. It would reach her ears, it could disturb her. Therefore I do not call a doctor, and by not doing so I feel better, because I remain true to my principles.”
Boesen was not the only one receiving letters from Berlin. Sibbern received a dutifully written one, Pastor P. J. Spang a jovial one, and Peter Christian three fraternal letters of which two have been lost, a circumstance that comes close to symbolizing the development of their relationship. And then there are the letters—ten in all—to the nieces and nephews, his sisters’ children: Carl, Henrik, Michael, Sophie, Henriette (known as Jette), and Wilhelm, all bearing the surname Lund, the eldest age fifteen, the youngest ten. If we can rely on what Jette recollected in her memoirs shortly before her death in 1909, this frequent correspondence was the fruit of a promise made at a little evening gathering at the family home on Nytorv a couple of days prior to Kierkegaard’s departure, when he suddenly burst into a severe fit of crying that soon spread to the children, who then ceremoniously promised Uncle Søren that they would certainly write regularly.
None of their dutifully penned epistles survive, but we can see from Kierkegaard’s replies that they really did not know what to say. And the letters they cobbled together often left much to be desired. So eleven-year-old Carl, for example, would learn with a mixture of surprise and discomfiture that the uncle who was so unhappy that evening had now regained his composure to the point that he not only could quote German and Latin, but was also coolly capable of correcting Carl’s spelling mistake when he wrote “spew” instead of “spa.” Nonetheless Uncle Søren ended his letter with the words: “Just go ahead and write about whatever comes into your head, don’t be bashful. Your letters are always welcome.” An utterly selfish motive was concealed behind this ostensibly generous gesture, for if Kierkegaard took the trouble to correspond with an illiterate like Carl, it was because he wanted to know how things were with Regine! This becomes clear when one reads his second letter to Boesen, which was written more than three weeks before the first letter to his sisters’ children: “Of all the things you write about, there is only one item that alarms me a little, and that is that she has Henrik, Michael, et cetera, visit her. She is clever, and a year under my supervision has not exactly made her more naive; it has taught her, among other things, that I take note of even the most insignificant of insignificant things. My plan of action with respect to the children must be altered. It pains me, but I trust no one.”
It is not quite clear what the above-mentioned “plan of action” consisted of, but this much seems certain, that the nieces and nephews unwittingly functioned as six gullible little snoops in the service of a higher cause. In themselves their activities were certainly not very important, but as connecting links between the separated pair they were sufficiently important that, were the need to arise, they would have been available for service as something like ambassadors of reunification. Thus in his next-to-last letter to Boesen, Kierkegaard could proclaim: “In the event I return to her, I would wish to include the few creatures she has learned to love through me, that is, my four nephews and two nieces. To that end I have maintained a continuing correspondence with them, often with some sacrifice of time. Naturally, in order to divert attention I have given this the appearance of a sort of eccentricity on my part.”
“The Aesthetic Is Above All My Element”
Kierkegaard was not nearly as calculating in his letters to Boesen as in those to his little nephews and nieces. In return for Boesen’s willingness to slink along the walls of Copenhagen houses, watch from windows, cross-examine a portrait painter, and circulate rumors concerning Mademoiselle Schulze, his exiled friend granted him a sort of confidential relationship. In his fourth letter to Boesen, Kierkegaard wrote quite plainly: “To the same degree that I believe I am an exceptional lover, I also know that I am a bad husband and will always be so. Alas, the one quality always or usually stands in an inverse relation to the other…. In saying this I am not underestimating myself, but my intellectual life and my worth as a husband are mutually incompatible.”
Kierkegaard here touched on what was undoubtedly one of the principal motives behind the break with Regine. He wanted to be an author, not a husband. Thus, for the sake of aesthetics, he incurred a guilt from which it was just about impossible for either religion or ethics to absolve him. This (among other things) was the seat of Kierkegaard’s conflict. In a subsequent letter he wrote openly that he would have been “a lifelong torment to her,” and in a wonderfully revealing slip of the pen he added that it was “a blessing of God that I did not break off the engagement for her sake”—but that was not the point of God’s blessing, because “her” was crossed out and replaced with “my”! And then the confessions came fast and furious, in an avalanche: “Unlike me, you are not—I trust you will agree with me and not be offended that I say so—you are not accustomed to holding your life poetically in your hand…. So you see, it provides an occasion for misunderstanding when you bring up the story of your own love life in this connection. I know nothing of these pathetic palpitations—my relationship with her has a completely different sort of reality…. You are apparently a novice. You have feeling. I have passion. But my understanding is enthroned over my passion. Yet my understanding is itself a passion…. My Emil, learn at least a little from my example.”
One could not blame Boesen at all if he felt hurt at seeing himself portrayed as a depressive amateur whose immediate passions prompted him to flutter this way and that in every little erotic breeze. In his next letter Kierkegaard granted that he may have been too hasty in his choice of words, but he continued to assert that Boesen simply had not grasped “the point of the matter.” This was certainly understandable because Kierkegaard’s motives could be difficult to discern: “I am born for intrigue, for complications, for peculiar relationships, et cetera, all of which would perhaps not be so peculiar if I were not so peculiarly constituted, especially if I did not possess what I would call the passionate coolness with which I control my moods…. This matter, which has been dealt with often enough by now, has two sides, an ethical and an aesthetic. If she had been able to refrain from taking the situation so personally, or if it could have served as an impulse for her to climb higher than she otherwise would have done, then the ethical factor would be abolished—and I would be left with the aesthetic alone…. The aesthetic is above all my element. As soon as the ethical asserts itself, it easily gains too much power over me. I become a quite different person, I know no bounds for what my duties might be, et cetera.”
Later on, Kierkegaard would expend a great deal of rhetorical energy trying to get his readers to distance themselves from what he says here: The aesthetic is his element; the lust to write is an ungovernable passion. And this came to be Regine’s fate. Significantly, a letter in which he asked Boesen to send him a copy of The First Love was signed “Farinelli.” True, he crossed out that name, but it is there anyway. Farinelli was the most famous of the Italian castrati singers. He had a stellar career in Europe and spent twenty-five years in Spain, where he dispelled the melancholia of the mad monarch Philip V by singing the same four songs every evening. So by signing himself “Farinelli” Kierkegaard was admitting that he, too, had sacrificed his erotic passion for the sake of art.
In many respects it was this Farinelli who wrote in Kierkegaard’s journals during this period, a castrated lover who had used the knife but who was nonetheless filled with longing for the lost pleasure of love. So, unlike his firm and resolute letters to Boesen, his journals from this period can sound quite vacillating: “So the matter is now decided once and for all, and yet I will never be finished with it. She has no idea what sort of advocate she has in me. She was clever. In parting she asked me at least to remember her once in a while. She knew very well that as soon as I remember her, there would be the Devil to pay.” And right enough: Kierkegaard was bedeviled with thoughts of suicide and with febrile fantasies of seeing Regine again: She approaches him in a double form, as vigorous, serene, and transparent, but also as pale, introverted, and withered, destroyed with sorrow over her faithless lover. One is hardly mistaken if one finds here the germ of those “nervous affectations” and the cause of that “sleeplessness” about which Kierkegaard complained in his letters to Boesen.
The conflict between demonic reflection and light-hearted immediacy is a recurrent theme in these melancholic monologues. Only the heartless could doubt their authenticity, but they are carried through with so much literary precision that the artistry occasionally diminishes one’s sympathy for the unhappy lover: “They say that love makes you blind. It does more than that—it makes you deaf, it makes you lame. The person who suffers from it is like the mimosa plant that shuts itself up so that no picklock can open it, and the more force is used, the more tightly it shuts itself up.” And Kierkegaard had shut himself up. Therefore the more often he attempted to open up in his journals the fewer confessions made their way onto the paper.
Because whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. And if one cannot remain silent, one must poetize.
The Incidental Tourist
Kierkegaard was far from being a tourist in the traditional sense: “Travel is foolishness,” he wrote just a few lines into his first letter to Boesen. On board the mail steamer there were several Laplanders who plied their musical instruments plaintively in the moonlight while Kierkegaard gazed out on the still, black sea. Later he went down to his cabin and wrote: “It is surely no wonder that they call the sea the mother of all, since it cradles a ship between its maternal breasts in this fashion.” A lengthier journal entry centered on Regine, whose devotedness he contrasted with his own inconstancy and the melancholy fantasies that kept him awake, accompanied by the massive sound of “the steamship’s double movements.”
Nor does Berlin, where he stayed for more than four months (from October 25, 1841, until March 6, 1842), take up much space in his journals. Even when we carefully gather and assemble all the fragments deposited here and there in his journals and reported in his letters, we end up with a skimpy little picture. Cultural sights, such as the Opernhaus, the Museum, and the Schauspielhaus, which certainly outshone what Copenhagen had to offer, literally put in only marginal appearances—namely, on the illustrated margins of the stationery Kierkegaard used in writing to his niece Jette on her birthday. In this same letter Königstrasse and Unter den Linden are mentioned, but merely en passant. In his letter to Carl, Uncle Søren could relate as a curiosity the fact that in Berlin the little carts that bring milk into town from the farms were drawn by large dogs, and that occasionally the farmer and his wife were also passengers, which made the scene no less amusing. And, Kierkegaard wrote, there was of course the Thiergarten, filled with noisy squirrels and bisected by a large canal, somewhat like the one in Frederiksberg Gardens but with cleaner water and countless goldfish, just like those Carl could see in the window of the grocer on Nørregade, diagonally across from Kierkegaard’s old home.
The city had not invited more intensive exploration, and all the less so because—as Pastor Spang was informed—it was characterized by a pressing lack of public toilets. Kierkegaard therefore had to calculate the radius of his strolls in accordance with the pressure in his bladder: “At exactly ten o’clock I arrive at a particular nook in order to p[ass] m[y] w[ater]. This is in fact the only spot in this enormous territory where there are no signs to remind one of what one must but may not do.…. In this moral city one is practically forced to carry a bottle in one’s pocket…. I could discourse further on this matter, because it interferes in a disturbing manner with every facet of life. When two people stroll together in the Thiergarten and one of them says, ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ that is the end of the outing because he must go all the way home. Nearly everyone in Berlin must perform these necessary errands.” There was, however, one small bright spot; Kierkegaard had succeeded in finding a good pastry shop, Sparganapani, which served peerless coffee and hot chocolate and had newspapers and journals available for the convenience of patrons. C. W. Smith, a scholar of Slavic languages, wrote home to his mother in late December 1841, that at this Sparganapani’s a certain Kierkegaard enjoyed “drinking a cup of philosophical chocolate and meditating undisturbed upon Hegel.” Smith continues: “This same Søren Kierkegaard is the oddest duck among those we know: a brilliant head, but exceedingly vain and self-satisfied. He always wants to be different from other people, and he himself always points out his own bizarre behavior.”
Nor was it easy to get on in a foreign country. Thus, for example, it was embarrassing for Kierkegaard when he visited a first-class restaurant one evening in the company of Carl Weis, a connoisseur of fine food and later a department head in the Danish Ministry of Church and Cultural Affairs: Kierkegaard politely greeted a group of gentlemen clad elegantly in black suits and white ties, and a couple of moments later these same gentlemen came hurrying over and offered their services—as waiters! Despite an hour of language instruction every day, Kierkegaard had difficulties managing German. At first, however, it was quite refreshing: “Next to taking off every stitch of clothing, owning nothing in the world, not the least little thing, and then hurling myself into the water, nothing pleases me more than speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become quite foreign to myself.” But it did not take more than a couple of weeks before becoming foreign had become a curse: “I can really see how important language was to me for concealing my melancholia. Here in Berlin this is impossible for me—I cannot deceive with language.” Even something as elementary as getting the hotelkeeper to provide a candlestick required an almost superhuman effort. And the fact that this hotelkeeper was a shameless price gouger did nothing to make the situation more tolerable—even if, as a sort of recompense for increases in his room rates, he promoted Kierkegaard from magister, to doctor, and then to professor! At the beginning of the new year, when Kierkegaard could afford no further promotions, he moved to the Hotel Saxen at the corner of Jägerstrasse and Charlottenstrasse, once again eine Treppe hoch.
Kierkegaard’s hotelier was not the only deceiver—the weather was also very capricious. Either the east wind brought biting cold, or the west wind caused everything to thaw and disappear into a dense fog: “Berlin lies in a swamp. You need only stick your finger in the ground and you have water.” Kierkegaard sensibly remained indoors and by so doing he also avoided unnecessary contact with his countrymen, “whose numbers are as incredible as that of the locusts of Egypt.” He dined at the hotel, where the food was excellent and the prices were reasonable. On New Year’s Eve he made an exception, however, and participated in the festivities at the gathering place called the Belvedere, where things were apparently quite merry: “We especially sought to cheer ourselves up and bring back memories of home by eating apple popovers.” Kierkegaard decided on a little New Year’s gift to himself. For quite some time he had had his eye on a slender walking stick that was displayed in a craftsman’s window, and for a long while he had made do with simply walking past the object of his desires. “Finally, one day my desire reached such heights that I strode into the shop. When I wanted to close the door, what should happen but the windowpane shatters, after which I decided to pay for the pane and not to purchase the stick.”
The smashed windowpane is almost a symbol of Kierkegaard’s relationship to the lectures that were the official reason for his journey. In a letter to Sibbern dated December 15, 1841, he provided a rather detailed report on his semester in Berlin. Henrik Steffens, who was supposed to be peerless as a lecturer and whose Caricatures of What Is Most Holy Kierkegaard had purchased in mid-January 1836 and had read with much enthusiasm, was now lecturing uncertainly and hesitatingly on his almost twenty-year-old Anthropology. Steffens had always been diffuse. Now, at age sixty-eight, he was more diffuse than ever, and Kierkegaard could not follow the contours of his argument: “The streets are too broad for me, and so are Steffens’s lectures. One cannot see from one side to the other, just as with Steffens’s lectures.” Kierkegaard also wrote Sibbern concerning his disappointment with Steffens, whom Sibbern himself had heard in Breslau a generation earlier, when he had described the lectures enthusiastically in letters to his Regine, whose real name had been Sophie Ørsted, the sister of the poet Adam Oehlenschläger and wife of the jurist A. S. Ørsted.
Things were different, at least at first, with the Hegelian Karl Werder, whose lectures on logic and metaphysics were so rhetorically impressive that Kierkegaard had an insidious and mysterious suspicion that the man must be a Jew, “because baptized Jews always distinguish themselves by their virtuosity.” Werder could cavort and frolic like a juggler with the most abstract categories, and despite the fact that he spoke like a mechanized chatterbox, one could never catch him making a slip of the tongue. Nonetheless it was not long before Kierkegaard grew tired of this virtuosity, which reminded him of the strong man at the Deer Park amusement park who played with “twenty-, thirty-, forty-pound balls,” which, like Werder’s, were unfortunately “papier-maché balls.”
Then there was Friedrich Schelling, a shy man but perhaps romanticism’s greatest philosopher, who in 1841 had just been appointed to Berlin to combat the all-engulfing Hegelianism and who was now lecturing to a packed house on his Philosophy of Revelation. The crowd was enormous, as was the noise, and not a few showed up in vain and were compelled to stand outside, knocking on the windows of the auditorium in which, incidentally, Karl Marx also was sitting, trying to follow along as best he could. Kierkegaard considered abandoning Schelling as early as the conclusion of his introductory lecture on November 15, but he decided to continue despite everything. And that was good, because during the second lecture a little miracle, in fact, took place: “I am so happy to have heard Schelling’s second lecture—indescribably so. I have long groaned, and the thoughts within me have groaned, in travail. Then he spoke the word ‘actuality,’ about the relation of philosophy to actuality, and the unborn babe of thought within me leapt for joy as in Elizabeth. I remember almost every word he said from that moment on. Here, perhaps, clarity can emerge. That one word reminded me of all my philosophical sufferings and torments…. Now I have put all my hope in Schelling.”
But the ensuing months brought these hopes to naught. In the letters from the beginning of 1842, Schelling was likened to a sour “vinegar brewer,” an impression that was aurally amplified when one heard him say, “ich werde morgen fortfahren [German: ‘I will continue tomorrow’] (unlike the Berliners, who pronounce the ‘g’ very soft, he pronounces it very hard, like a ‘k’: morken).” One day Schelling came half an hour late and fiercely laid the blame on Berlin, which lacked public clocks. When, as a sort of amends for the delay, he proposed to lecture beyond the scheduled hour, the audience took up a disrespectful hooting. “Schelling became furious and exclaimed: ‘If it is unpleasing to my gentlemen of the audience that I lecture, I can gladly stop—Ich werde morken fortfahren.”
By February 3, 1842, after having followed forty-one lectures and summarized them neatly in his little notebooks, Kierkegaard had had enough. Schelling would have to continue morken after morken with one person fewer in the auditorium. Three days prior to his decision Kierkegaard had noted with terror that Schelling was now lecturing for “two hours at a time,” which apparently was at least one hour too many. Not long after this Kierkegaard remarked in a letter to Peter Christian: “Schelling spouts the most insufferable nonsense…. To make matters worse, he has now got the idea of lecturing longer than usual, which has given me the idea that I do not want to listen to him for as long as I might otherwise have listened…. I am too old to listen to lectures, just as Schelling is too old to give them. His entire doctrine of potencies reveals the highest degree of impotence.”
Ironically enough, it was precisely in these lectures that Schelling formulated a series of anti-Hegelian points that anticipated Kierkegaard’s later criticism of “the Great Lama,” as the university students called Hegel. But of course neither Kierkegaard nor Schellling could be expected to have known this in 1841. If Schelling had in fact spouted nonsense as insufferably as Kierkegaard maintained, it is odd that throughout the semester he continued to lecture to a packed auditorium. And others evaluated Schelling’s accomplishments quite differently, for example, Martensen, who on his study tour had heard Schelling lecture in Munich and in this connection recalled the following: “That man could lecture. He must certainly be viewed as one of the greatest lecturers the universities can boast of…. It was a calm, forward-moving flow, a methodically progressive development, point by point—though the entire exposition was borne along and illuminated through and through by a brilliant, imaginative vision. Here was a wonderful union of genius and level-headedness.” Like Kierkegaard, Martensen took note of Schelling’s grating diction: “There was something pregnant in his voice, and he pronounced certain words with an intonation that was unforgettable to his listeners, for example, das unvordenkliche Sein [German: ‘un-prethinkable being’ or ‘being from time immemorial’].”
Of course it is not unthinkable that in the intervening years Schelling had undergone a metamorphosis into nonsensicalness, but when Kierkegaard gave up following his lectures the reason was simple: He himself was otherwise engaged. As early as mid-December he had informed Boesen: “I’m writing like mad. I have now written fourteen printed signatures. And with that I have completed part of a treatise which volente deo [Latin: ‘God willing’] I will lay before you one day.” At this point Boesen himself was doodling away on a novella that had him stymied, so Kierkegaard’s boasting about the fourteen signatures—which amounted to 224 pages—quite understandably piqued his curiosity: “You ask what I am working on. Answer: It would be too complicated to tell you about it now—only this much, it is the further development of Either/Or.” Kierkegaard demanded that Boesen keep his mouth shut—“Anonymity is of the greatest importance to me”—and limited himself to remarking, with respect to the book’s title, that it was “quite excellent” because it was both “titillating” and also possessed “speculative significance.” In mid-January Boesen received yet another report from the Berlin writing machine: “I am working hard. My body cannot endure it. So that you may see that I am the same I will tell you that I have again written a large portion of a piece, Either/Or. It has not gone so quickly, but this is because it is not an exposition of an argument but a purely poetic production that makes quite particular demands that a person be in the proper mood…. You are used to seeing my works in the making. This time it is different. When I eventually take out my scrolls and read you fourteen or twenty signatures, what do you think of that? ‘Courage, Antonius.’ In one sense these are difficult times, and some of the sections I am working on demand the whole of my spirit, all of my wit, wherever I can find it.”
In the next letter Kierkegaard extended the list of his sufferings: “cold, partial sleeplessness, nervous affectations, disappointed expectations with respect to Schelling, confusion of my philosophical ideas, no diversions, no opposition to stimulate me.” And then he provided a progress report: “This winter in Berlin will always be of great significance to me. I have accomplished a great deal. When you consider that I have attended three or four hours of lectures every day, that I have had an hour’s language lesson daily, and that I have nonetheless got so much written, … have done some reading, I cannot complain.” But he did so anyway: “I really cannot conceive how I have been able to endure this servitude here in Berlin for so long. Free time only on Sundays, no excursions, not much entertainment. Thanks anyway, but no! I am Sunday’s child, and that means that I should have six days off and work only one day a week.” So now the exiled millionaire wanted to return home: “I miss my hired coachman, my manservant, my comfortable landau, my easy tours through the lovely regions of our Zealand, the cheerful smiles of the young girls, which I knew how to turn to my advantage without doing them any harm.”
Four days before his departure he sent the last of his seven letters to Boesen: “As you well understand, however, I am not leaving Berlin and rushing to Copenhagen in order to be bound by new ties. No, I need my freedom. I feel that now more than ever. A person with my eccentricity ought to have his freedom until he encounters a power that has it in itself to bind him. I am coming to Copenhagen to complete Either/Or. This is my most cherished idea and I live for it. You will see that this idea is not to be made light of. My life should in no way be seen as completed at this point; I feel that I still have great internal assets.” These were perhaps rather grandiose words for February, but in fact Kierkegaard had not overstated his case. Indeed, on March 6, 1842, when the steamship Christian VIII docked at Copenhagen, the twenty-nine-year-old magister was able to saunter down the gangplank with the bulk of the manuscript of Either/Or in his suitcase.
The composition of the various sections was essentially completed, and in the following sequence: “The First Love,” “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” plus at least half of “The Seducer’s Diary,” were completed by April 14, 1842. A couple of months later, June 13, he was finished with “The Immediate Erotic Stages,” while “Silhouettes” and “The Unhappiest One,” were finished later the same month. “Rotation of Crops” had existed in outline form even before his departure for Berlin. This was also the case with “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” which had its source in a manuscript titled “An Attempt to Rescue Marriage Aesthetically.” “The Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality” was presumably completed in September 1842. The outlines of the “Ultimatum” are to be found in a draft from Kierkegaard’s days at the pastoral seminary, while most of the “Diapsalmata” stem from his own journals.
When Kierkegaard later replied to the suspicion that Either/Or work was merely “a collection of loose papers I had lying in my desk” and insisted that the book had been written “lock, stock, and barrel in eleven months, at most only a page (of the Diapsalmata) was already in existence,” it was more literary braggadocio than documentable fact. It also requires a bit of metaphorical generosity to agree to the claim, which he made on the same occasion as the remark just mentioned, that the work had been written in a monastery. Nor did Kierkegaard work alone in completing the book. The fair copy of this enormous manuscript was produced by “my little secretary Mr. Christensen,” as he called Peter Vilhelm Christensen, who after having passed his theological examinations was unemployed, available, and poor as a church mouse. During the winter of 1842–43, Christensen and Kierkegaard proofread the work, assisted at times by the editor of Fædrelandet, J. F. Giødwad, in whose office many of the intellectuals of the day would meet for a morning chat. According to Hother Ploug, “one might say that the proofs of Either/Or were read at Fædrelandet’s offices,” which was not exactly the most suitable locale. Ploug wrote peevishly about Kierkegaard’s presence in the office: “One must imagine what it is like to have to have a newspaper ready at a definite time—and in those days it was early in the afternoon, because the police inspector had to look at the issue before it could be distributed—and to have an impractical and very self-absorbed man sitting in the office, ceaselessly lecturing and talking, without the least awareness of the inconvenience he is causing.”
But the whole business succeeded: In the middle of November, Victor Eremita’s foreword was completed, and three months later the Bianco Luno press had finished printing the 838 pages. Not quite a week later, on Monday, February 20, 1843, the book, of which 525 copies had been printed, lay on the counter at Reitzel’s Bookshop, at a price of four rixdollars seventytwo shillings per copy.