Soren Kierkegaard

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 Ko ̈nigstrasse 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.....Inthis 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, Spargana-
pani, which served peerless coffee and hot chocolate and had newspapers
andjournalsavailablefortheconvenienceofpatrons.C.W.Smith,ascholar
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