Preface
BISHOP MARTENSEN was in his official residence, standing slightly concealed behind a curtain. The niche by the window provided an excellent view across the square adjacent to the Church of Our Lady, with the Metropolitan School in the background, the University of Copenhagen on the left, and the Church of Our Lady itself on the right. It was Sunday, November 18, 1855, just before two o’clock in the afternoon. All at once a crowd of people dressed in black practically burst from the church, gathering at first in small groups, then disappearing in every direction.
A couple of hours later the episcopal pen, full of indignation, scratched its way across the pages of a letter to Martensen’s old pupil and friend of many years’ standing, Ludvig Gude, who was a pastor in Hunseby on the island of Lolland: “Today, after a service at the Church of Our Lady, Kierkegaard was buried; there was a large cortege of mourners (in grand style, how ironic!). We have scarcely seen the equal of the tactlessness shown by the family in having him buried on a Sunday, between two religious services, from the nation’s most important church. It could not be prevented by law, however, although it could have been prevented by proper conduct, which, however, Tryde lacked here as he does everywhere it is required. Kierkegaard’s brother spoke at the church (as a brother, not as a pastor). At this point I do not know anything at all about what he said and how he said it. The newspapers will soon be running a spate of these burial stories. I understand the cortege was composed primarily of young people and a large number of obscure personages. As far as is known, there were no dignitaries present.”
Inside the coffin—reportedly quite a small one—that was being driven out to the family burial plot that November day lay the corpse of a person who over the years had become so impossible that now, after his death, it was really not possible to put him anywhere. For where in the world could one get rid of a dead man who had carried on a one-man theological revolution during the final years of his life, calling the pastors cannibals, monkeys, nincompoops, and other crazy epithets? What sense did it make to give such a person a Christian burial in consecrated ground? That this same person also left behind a body of writing whose breadth, originality, and significance was unparalleled in his times did not, of course, make the situation any less painful.
When Martensen had almost finished writing his letter to Gude, he received word of a commotion at Assistens Cemetery, and as though he were a journalist sending a live report, he continued his letter with piquant indignation: “I have just learned that there was a great scandal at the grave; after Tryde had cast earth upon the grave, a son of Kierkegaard’s sister, a student named Lund, stepped forth with The Moment and the New Testament as a witness for the truth against the Church, which had buried Søren Kierkegaard ‘for money,’ et cetera. I still have not been informed about this through official channels, but it has caused great offense, which in my view must be met with serious measures.”
The rumor that reached the episcopal residence in such haste was true, and less than a day later the scandalous episode was in almost all the Copenhagen daily newspapers. Thus the morning edition of Berlingske Tidende sketched the course of events point by point, and its evening edition carried a summary of the eulogy that the deceased’s elder brother, Peter Christian Kierkegaard, had given in the church. That same Monday Flyve-Posten and Fædrelandet also rushed into print with news reports and contributions to the debate about possible malfeasance by the official in charge, and a couple of days later Morgenposten trumpeted: “Scarcely was a man who declared that he was not an official Christian dead before the official Church seized his defenseless corpse and made off with it.”
Naturally, as head of the Church, Martensen could not just sit with his hands folded as a mere witness to the fracas. Yet he would not speak out publicly—it was too risky. In his official capacity he took immediate action and demanded that Archdeacon Tryde provide a written account of what had taken place. From this account we learn that the interment had begun with the usual burial hymn, “Who Knows How Near to Me My Death May Be,” after which Peter Christian Kierkegaard had spoken “eloquently and very appropriately.” After another hymn the coffin was removed from the church and taken by carriage to Assistens Cemetery, where Tryde carried out the casting on of earth. This was hardly completed before Henrik Lund, a young physician, stepped forward and began to speak despite Tryde’s protestations and the presence of police officers who had been stationed at the cemetery for the day’s events. According to Tryde, Lund addressed “the assembly, consisting primarily of middle-class people” and numbering close to a thousand. He began by emphasizing his close relationship to his late uncle, then explained his uncle’s hostility to official Christianity, and finally read several passages from Kierkegaard’s last writings and from the Revelation of Saint John.
In his report Tryde advised against focusing further attention on the matter, but Martensen was of another opinion and immediately requested that the Ministry of Church and Cultural Affairs pursue the case, calling for an “emphatic reprimand.” In the meanwhile Lund had written out his speech from memory, and it had been printed in Fædrelandet on Thursday, November 22, under the title “My Protest: What I Did and Did Not Say.” With intransigence and volcanic ferocity, Lund let his verbal lava spew in every direction. But a couple of days later, when he attempted a sequel, “At the Next Moment, What Then,” the flow of his words had stiffened into clotted clichés. At the same time, Lund’s overwrought temperament had been replaced by a deep despair, leading in early December to an attempt at suicide that was only thwarted at the last moment by his father, Johan Christian Lund, an enterprising and well-to-do attorney, who soon thereafter contacted the minister of Church and Cultural Affairs, C. C. Hall, with a plea that justice be tempered with mercy: His son was neither morally nor criminally accountable. Martensen was unyielding, however, and was overflowing with concern about the future of the People’s Church, society’s sense of decency, and the aggressive shamelessness of the press.
So the matter finally ended up in chamber 5 of the Copenhagen Criminal Court, in the old city hall and courthouse building on Nytorv, right next door to Kierkegaard’s childhood home. The state’s attorney wanted to send Lund to prison; the defense attorney demanded acquittal; witnesses quarrelled with one another; and the case dragged on, so that it was July 5, 1856, before the verdict was handed down: Lund was fined one hundred rixdollars [Danish monetary units in Kierkegaard’s time: 1 rixdollar = 6 marks; 1 mark = 16 shillings], which were to be paid to the Office of Poor Relief. The young physician received the judgment without emotion. Several months earlier he had made the rounds, bowing penitently to the authorities he had originally set out to combat. “Now I realize,” he wrote in a letter to Peter Christian Kierkegaard, “that the only right step for me is to abandon entirely this battle into which I have plunged, quite unbidden, and seek the Church of Christ.” Presumably, one contributing cause of this great resignation was that during the course of the early spring of 1856 Lund had undergone medical treatment for an unspecified “nervous disorder.”
The commotion at the burial demonstrates that with Kierkegaard not even death sufficed to separate his life from his works. Nonetheless, the Danish biographies of Kierkegaard that have appeared since Georg Brandes’s critical portrait was published in 1877 can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Johannes Hohlenberg’s biography from 1940 is the most recent original work in the field. Neither has much respect been shown for those who have dealt biographically with Kierkegaard (Anything at all, but please not that!) and for decades there has been something close to a systematic exorcism of the man from his work. The typical introduction to Kierkegaard presents what writers prefer, with unmistakable condescension, to call the private person Kierkegaard as a sort of eccentric appendix to a brilliant oeuvre. The cause of this is not merely the circumstance that Kierkegaard distanced himself from his pseudonymous writings and that he requested, furthermore, that his readers not direct their curiosity to his person. Clearly, an additional contributing factor has been the concern of later generations that a biographical presentation ultimately leads to banal reductionism in which theological and philosophical problems are linked to the author’s repressions, to oedipal conflicts, or to fateful encounters with cold chamber pots in the middle of the night.
This aversion to biography is paradoxical when applied to an author who not only thought—and wrote—himself into his works, but was also fully satisfied that his “existence” was the “most interesting existence of any author in Denmark,” and that this was why he would be “read and studied in the future.” In the same vein (and with a very un-Danish self-consciousness), he wrote the following words in November 1847: “And therefore the day will come when not only my writings but precisely my life—the intriguing secret of all the machinery—will be studied and studied.” At first, however, this prophetic vision did not come to much, as can been seen in the example of Hans Brøchner, who had had the misfortune to promise an acquaintance a few lines about Kierkegaard’s life and personality, but then fell into a biographical panic: “When one restricts oneself to external events, there is of course very little that can be said about his life at all. He was born May 5, 1813; he became a student at the university in 1830; he took his degree in theology in 1840; he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1841; and he died in 1855. These are of course more or less all the external facts of a biographical nature that can be provided, and they are not interesting. His inner life, his personal development, was certainly a great deal richer, but it has left its impression in his writings, and the finest contents of that inner life are certainly to be found in these writings.” This is how one writes a very skimpy biography.
Israel Levin, who had served as Kierkegaard’s secretary for years, surveyed the problem from the opposite side—absolutely from within, so to speak—but he, too, found the prospect of a Kierkegaard biography no less suspect than did Brøchner: “Anyone who wants to deal with Søren Kierkegaard’s life must take care not to burn his fingers: This is a life so full of contradictions that it will be difficult to get to the bottom of his character. He often refers to double reflections; all his own words were more than sevenfold reflection. He fought to achieve clarity for himself, but he was pursued by all manner of moods and was such a temperamental person that he often alleged things that were untrue, deceiving himself into believing that they were the truth.”
Levin’s reminder is important because it emphasizes the capricious nature of the source materials and indirectly reveals the infinite care with which Kierkegaard planned his posthumous rebirth. So if one wishes to write a biography of Kierkegaard, one must come to terms with the fact that over much of the expansive terrain one is crisscrossing an already existing autobiography. Consequently the danger of being an unintentional collaborator in writing the myth of Kierkegaard lurks everywhere in the materials, as they provide optimal conditions for uncritical praise of this genius. My task is more critical, more historical, less reverential. It is my intention not only to tell the great stories in Kierkegaard’s life but also to scrutinize the minor details and incidental circumstances, the cracks in the granite of genius, the madness just below the surface, the intensity, the economic and psychological costs of the frenzies of writing, as well as the profound and mercurial mysteriousness of a figure with whom one is never really finished. Thus it is my intention that this book provide a comprehensive description of the Kierkegaard complex.
At the same time, I wish to reinstall Kierkegaard in his own time, to contextualize him, so that he is no longer “that single individual” at whom one stares through a keyhole in one of Copenhagen’s city gates, but instead moves again among people who also lived in the city in those days and who were not quite as impossible as we (in part because we have been led astray by Kierkegaard) have subsequently viewed them. Therefore I have not only allowed Kierkegaard’s gaze to follow others, I have also allowed the gaze of others to rest on Kierkegaard. In other words, I have attempted to reestablish the active dialogue between life and writing out of which Kierkegaard grew. Indeed, when one takes the man out of the work, one also takes the life out of it. If along the way my story should take a notion to document anything, it will be this complex entanglement of Kierkegaard’s works with his times.