treat the entire matter as a joke. But when I reported to Møller about my
unsuccessful mission he took the matter more seriously and said that it
would be a great problem for him just now if that opinion became general.
He said it would therefore be preferable for us to break off our association
for a while, which he then did, though not entirely.”
Malice in a Macintosh: Peder Ludvig Møller
Goldschmidt’s memoirs were written down in the 1870s, and of course his
retrospective view of events from the mid-1840s is characterized by more
than a few ex post rationalizations, but the fact that Kierkegaard wanted to
identify Møller withThe Corsairis not one of them. When Kierkegaard
changed his relationship with Goldschmidt late in 1845, it was not merely
because ofThe Corsair’srampant satire, to which Kierkegaard always re-
ferred in justifying his protest; it was also, and perhaps especially, because
of a powerful distaste for Møller, whom Kierkegaard wanted to damage to
the maximum extent possible.
But who was he, then, this Peder Ludvig Møller, whom the Swedish
writer O. P. Sturzen-Becker—a man familiar with the Copenhagen intellec-
tual milieu of the 1840s—called “malice in a macintosh?” The son of a
penniless merchant, Møller was born in 1814 in Aalborg, and it was there
he passed his university entrance examinations in 1832, after which he set
out for the capital. The next year, 1833, Møller passed the so-called second
examinations with top marks in all subjects, but he never went any further
at the university. He was enrolled in the theological faculty but his principal
studies were medicine, languages, and theater criticism. In general, like Kier-
kegaard, he spent his youth on varied aesthetic and philosophical studies.
Like Kierkegaard, he attended Martensen’s lectures during the 1838–39 aca-
demic year, when Martensen had set out in earnest to introduce Hegelianism
into Danish intellectual life. And, like Kierkegaard, Møller chose to attend
the lectures of Sibbern and of Poul Martin Møller. He offered homage to
the latter in a loving memorial poem, which might indicate that, like Kier-
kegaard, he viewed himself as Poul Martin Møller’s pupil. He admired and
imitated the revolutionary poets of the romantic era—Byron, Hugo, Musset,
Heine, Ru ̈ckert, Bo ̈rne, and Pushkin—and the models Møller chose from
the Danish literary scene were Adam Oehlenschla ̈ger, full of pathos; Steen
Steensen Blicher, marked by an acute sense of melancholia; the sensualist
Christian Winther; and the forthrightly erotic Emil Aarestrup.
Møller also had a keen appreciation—quite far-sighted, when viewed
from the vantage of a later age—particularly of the merits of Hans Christian