Soren Kierkegaard

he would spend several intense hours with his mistress, the Countess Dan-
nemand, while his lawfully wedded wife and the people of Copenhagen
agreed to look the other way.
Out by Langebro, at the prison in the Blue Tower, where men and
women were imprisoned together, things could get somewhat rowdy, how-
ever .There was not much oversight by the guards, and the talented mur-
derer Ole Kollerød provided a breathless portrait of the situation in that
phallic tower: “Yeah, the menfolk went out in the hallways and opened up
the door to the ladies’ prison, and then they lay down and whored away
with them, so that they was like to whore themselves and the girls to death.
Yeah, the girls who wouldn’t let themselves be used, them they just took
by force, with no back talk .Yeah, there was a housepainter’s wife in there,
and they used her so much that when I was layin’ in my bed I could hear
her; I could hear how she gave in to the guy who was using her .Yeah, it
was probably with her consent because it was Brunn, the great horse thief,
who was using her .But enough of that .”
Enough of that, indeed .Whether, and if so, how often and with what
result Kierkegaard paid visits to the ladies down in Peder Madsen’s Alley is
shrouded in the shadows of history .The actual basis for reconstructing such
events is embarrassingly scanty and consists essentially of a few torn and
tattered journal entries, of which the first, apparently from June 1836, reads
in its entirety: “Strange anxiety—every time I woke up in the morning after
having had too much to drink, it was finally fulfilled.” One notices the odd
formulation about an anxiety being fulfilled and one asks oneself whether
it perhaps describes a joy mixed with fear in connection with having finally
lost his virtue .No one knows .There is a fragmentary journal entry from
the same year, dated November 8: “My God, my God [.. .],” followed by
the no less fragmentary: “The bestial sniggering [.. .] .” The square brackets
were inserted by H .P .Barfod, the editor of Kierkegaard’s papers, who used
the introductory words of these entries as headwords in his index of the
papers, but unfortunately he then lost the original manuscripts.
If Kierkegaard’s journal entries had been too revelatory, and if Barfod
had intended to secure him a respectable posthumous reputation by making
the entries disappear, he achieved precisely the opposite, however .A frag-
ment is the perfect invitation for attempts to reconstruct the missing material
in its supposedly original form, and over the years a small army of imagina-
tive researchers has ventured far out onto the thin ice of guesswork in order
to present the world with the most provocative sorts of theories .The bestial
sniggering has been assigned to a bordello, where Kierkegaard, dead drunk,
was unable—as they say in polite language—topræstere præstanda[Danish/
Latin: “to do the deed”] and was therefore compelled to tuck his tail asham-