ion of Brandes’s interpretation of the great earthquake. The professor spe-
cifically asked for clarification concerning whether the offense in question
consisted of “unfaithfulness to a spouse.” About this the older brother had
no doubts. “Dr. Brandes has been about as unlucky as possible when he
permits himself to guess that ‘unfaithfulness to a spouse’ was the reason for
the melancholic scruples Søren alludes to in connection with his and my
father,” Peter Christian noted tartly in a multipage account dated January
- And, he continued: “I would hope that even the most recent philoso-
phy admits the impossibility of producing proof that something did not
occur (a nonfact).” For his part, Peter Christian—who as he wrote, “had
early on found and studied the three small gilt-edged sheets with their little
oracular sayings”—believed that the cause of the great earthquake was to be
found in the many deaths with which the family had suddenly been afflicted.
In particular, the passing of the sisters Nicoline Christine and Petrea Severine
had had a powerful impact, all the more so because their marriages to the
Lund brothers had given the home a “stamp of gaiety and cheerfulness
which we sometimes felt a bit lacking because of our parents’ advanced age
and their plain, old-fashioned way of living.” The next death was no less
moving, however, Peter Christian continued; it came just as he himself had
come “closer to a living appropriation of Christianity” and had survived “a
serious bout of typhus.” Things in the family had begun to brighten up a
bit. “But then my Maria died.... Then there can be no doubt that Søren
wasconqueredbythedark view... that the family would die out and that
Father would survive us all.” Of course, in the end it did not come to pass;
the father diedbeforehis two sons, and this, according to Peter Christian’s
version, was what compelled his younger brother to revise his earlier view
and come up with a new interpretation “which, be it noted, was inmany
respectsidenticalwith the previous view, only even more rigorous.”
In his letter to Professor Petersen, Peter Christian wanted to make it plain
thathe, too,had been taken into confidence by the father, and that it was
hardly likely that during the last months of his life the old man would have
“told Søren of a transgression by which he was burdened.” Both assurances
were set forth in the interest of historical objectivity, but they also contain
echoes of his old rivalry with his younger brother, whose relationship with
their father had had an intimacy that Peter Christian would rather not recall,
much less put on public display. If we read Peter Christian’s account in the
light of what we know today, we are also struck by what he didnotrecount:
He flatly rejected Brandes’s conjecture about adultery, but at the same time
he remained silent about his father’s premarital relationship with Ane even
though it would have been very natural to have mentioned it in that con-
text. Also striking is the fact that he did not even allude to the event that