faithfully repeats what all other licentiats and scholarly confirmands have
already said.” The bitter tone might seem unprovoked, but it was doubtless
attributable to the circumstance that Kierkegaard was not the only person
who was sitting at his desk at work on the Faust theme. Indeed, in 1836
Martensen had publishedOn Lenau’s Faustin Stuttgart under the pseud-
onym “Johannes M——n.” Kierkegaard learned of it not long afterward,
and in an undated note he called it “a little essay by Johannes M——(Mar-
tensen) on Lenau’sFaust.” He was apparently able to see through the pseud-
onym: “M” stood for Martensen. But it seems that Kierkegaard had not
actually studied Martensen’s work, presumably because he already had a
wealth of material to work through in connection with his own Faust stud-
ies, which were then under way. Later, on another similarly undated scrap
of paper, he wrote: “Oh, how unhappy I am—Martensen has written an
essay on Lenau’sFaust!” This desperate outburst was accompanied by a
bitter acknowledgement: “Yes, right! Everything I touch turns out for me
the way things do in a poem called ‘The Boy’s Magic Horn,’
A hunter blew hard into his horn,
Hard into his horn,
And everything he blew was
Lost.”Kierkegaard’s mood had changed suddenly: In June 1837 Martensen had
published his German essay in a reworked Danish version under the title
“Observations concerningthe Idea of Faust, With Reference to Lenau’s
Faust.” The analysis of Lenau’s work remained the principal focus, but in
his introduction Martensen subjected the entire idea of Faust to a careful
examination, placing it in a larger intellectual-historical context which—
alas!—included the most important of Kierkegaard’s own points, namely
that the medieval Faust is the genuine one, while Goethe’s is a falsification
that lowers the stakes, bearing as it does the imprint of the pantheism of the
times, et cetera.
Martensen had his essay published in Heiberg’s journalPerseus, and Sib-
bern wrote a detailed and almost affable review in the prestigiousLiterary
Monthly. This was in itself a defeat for the ambitious Kierkegaard, but there
was another development that was almost unbearable: During his study tour
of Europe, which lasted several years, Martensen had stayed in Vienna
where he had become a friend of the author Lenau (whose real name was
Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau). Thereafter Martensen had
traveled to Paris where he had met the Heiberg couple, and in his memoirs
he gives such an infatuated description of their first real meeting that the
reader comes to suspect that Martensen, who was otherwise such a keen
and calculating careerist, also possessed a certain capacity for spontaneity