35, and he had to make do with a five-room apartment plus kitchen, maid’s
room, hallway,storeroom, andother minorappurtenances. Theannual rent
was 280 rixdollars. He did not have the time to inspect the premises himself
and therefore left the matter to his servant Strube, who despite Head Physi-
cian Seligmann Meyer Trier’s success in “getting him more or less on an
even keel,” was nevertheless not quite all there. For Kierkegaard of course
wanted to live on thebelle e ́tage, the second floor, as he had always done,
but since Strube concluded that the apartment on that floor “really wasn’t
any good,” Kierkegaard had to move up one flight, something that would
soon turn out to have frightful consequences.
“And the way things are in my home, nowadays!” he wrote shortly after
he moved in. “Last summer, when I was at the tanner’s place, I suffered
indescribably from the stench. I did not dare risk spending another summer
there,andfurthermorethewholebusinesswastooexpensiveforme.Where
I now live, in the afternoons I suffer so much from reflected sunlight that I
at first feared I might go blind.” Although Kierkegaard always lived on the
sunny side of the street, he would keep the sun out by hanging curtains,
blinds or awnings; he was quite a consumer of these goods, something at-
tested to by the auction catalog of his personal effects, which served up a
real cornucopia of “jalousies,” “nettle cloth curtains,” “chintz curtains lined
with shirting,” “moreen curtains with velvet trim,” “roller shades and hard-
ware”—red, green, or striped. Sometimes Kierkegaard simply had the win-
dows painted over. But this did not work in Nørregade; the apartment was
too high up, and the afternoon sun was merciless. And, to complete the
disaster, there was the tenant upstairs, or rather, that tenant’s tenant: “In the
place where I am now living on Nørregade, the lodger upstairs could cer-
tainly be called a quiet, peaceable lodger: He is out of the house all day
long. Unfortunately he has a dog that is at home all day long. It lies by an
open window and takes an interest in everything. If a man walks past and
sneezes unusually loudly, the dog instantly barks and can go on barking for
alongtime.Ifacoachmandrivespastandcrackshiswhip,itbarks;ifanother
dog barks, it also barks. Thus there is not the least little incident in the street
that I do not receive in a second edition, thanks to this dog.” Kierkegaard
had no doubt—it was absolutely awful: “There are few outward things that
have depressed me as much as this apartment.”
Emil Boesen, Kierkegaard’s friend from the days of his youth, had also
moved—not a couple of hundred yards down the street and around the
corner, like Kierkegaard, but all the way to Horsens, in Jutland, where he
had been appointed resident curate and hospital chaplain in late October
- On March 7, 1850, he wrote to Kierkegaard and told him a little
about his new, somewhat depressing circumstances. Here the source of irri-