Soren Kierkegaard

political reforms. But, finally, as a part of his campaign to stamp out what
he called “impudent writing” the king issued a decree, dated December
14, 1834, and this was just too much for many nabobs of the day. Late in
February 1835 the king was presented with an “Appeal for Freedom of the
Press,” signed by no fewer than 575 prominent people, including Professors
H. N. Clausen and J. F. Schouw, who also happened to be the authors of
the appeal. The king’s response came just four days later, and to put it
mildly, its absolutist arrogance was dismissive in tone, and posterity turned
the opening words of the king’s response into a well-known slogan: “We
alone know.” And, for a very long time afterwards, that was that. Even as
late as 1842, twenty-two of the country’s twenty-four daily newspapers
were subjected to censorship. OnlyKjøbenhavnspostenandFædrelandethad
avoided prosecution.
Johannes Ostermann was no rebel. He studied linguistics, wrote with
an old-fashioned quill pen, and was also a senior member of the Student
Association at the University of Copenhagen. At a meeting of the Student
Association, on November 14, 1835, he delivered a lecture on “Our Latest
Journalistic Literature” that was published inFædrelandeta week later. For
Ostermann, “journalistic literature” meant in particular the period’s various
periodicals, most of which were of a literary character, but it also included
the “mass of yellow journalism” that circulated in Copenhagen and whose
coarse and vulgar nature he naturally had to condemn. Nonetheless, Oster-
mann could cite a paper as trashy asRaketten[Danish: “The Rocket”] to
illustrate the fundamentally beneficial character of the press. Of course the
paper was entirely devoid of “propriety in its mode of expression,” but it
had courage: It dared to talk where others balked. It provided a channel for
people to air their “complaints and grievances,” thus encouraging them to
read and write, something the “lower-middle classes” were not otherwise
accustomed to doing. Furthermore, a critical press could “be of help to the
oppressed” while also having a deterrent effect, so that all in all it could
strengthen the rule of law, provided that not only the judicial system but
also “the public participates in the matter.” Ostermann (who had by then
apparently got himself quite worked up) noted that what is true for the
individual citizen is also true for the government, because “we should never
forget that whenever the good prevails, it does so as a result of struggle; we
should never forget that the government can err just as much as the people.”
A person had to be cautious elaborating on this latter sentiment in the pres-
ence of an absolute monarch, so Ostermann tempered his remark by adding
that a “government which is as moderate as the Danish government gener-
ally is, truly has nothing to fear from a little bitterness in a daily newspaper.”
Today we can see that in his realistic appreciation of the democratic side of