Soren Kierkegaard

managed to get his foot in the door of virtually every significant theological
and philosophical personage. And with his particularly well-developed tal-
ent for looking out for his career, he made sure to get back to Copenhagen
in time for the opening of the Reformation Festival in 1836, when he
could again see—and daily be seen with—the important theologian Philipp
Marheineke, with whom he had become acquainted in Berlin.
Kierkegaard’s reaction to Martensen as an officious teacher’s pet was
quite typical. He did not open a scholarly offensive against the annoying
Martensen, but resorted instead to a genre that he well knew Martensen
was unable to defend against, namely the parody. So he jotted down ten or
so pages in his journal, and the result resembled the sort of comedies univer-
sity students wrote and performed for one another’s amusement. It was in
three acts, and Kierkegaard described it as a “heroic-patriotic-cosmopoli-
tan-philanthropic-fatalistic drama in several episodes.” He explained further
that the drama is “in the beginning very jolly; as it progresses it becomes
very sad, yet it ends very happily.” And he entitled the whole affairThe
Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars.
We do not know exactlywhenthe play was written, but there can hardly
be any doubt aboutwhyit was written. It was occasioned by displeasure
over the mechanical use of Hegelian phrases by intellectuals and by the
deification of philosophy which, as noted earlier, had reached a sort of nau-
seating zenith in Martensen’s review of Heiberg’sIntroductory Lecture, which
Kierkegaard presumably had read immediately following its publication in
January 1837. A journal entry from February 4, 1837, appears to indicate
that Kierkegaard was working on his soap-cellar satire, and the inexperi-
enced playwright reflected on the art of “writing genuinely dramatic lines,”
something that apparently required that “a person has attained considerable
clarity and has got beyond generalities and foggy vagueness.” The play has
the earmarks of a casual sketch and probably did not occupy him for very
long. It is possible that he finished it as early as the end of March, but in
any event he was done with it by May 29, 1837, when he flipped his journal
over to begin writing on the reverse sides of the pages, back-to-front (as
was his custom), and began a series of entries that had nothing to do with
the satire.
Kierkegaard’s soap opera in fact has something to do with soap. Situated
on Gra ̊brødretorv (which was called Ulfeldts Plads until 1842 and was de-
faced by the presence of a monument of shame erected to memorialize the
treason of Corfitz Ulfeldt) were small stalls and specialized shops, including
a number of businesses located in cellars where people boiled and sold soap.
These soap dealers attempted to outdo one another with emphatic signs.
One called his sho p“The Old Soa p-Cellar,” another “The Really Old
Soap-Cellar,” while a third soap dealer put up a sign with the following