Soren Kierkegaard

words, “Thenit was.. .”? As we have seen, Barfod assumed that the journal
entries had been written downafterKierkegaard’s twenty-fifth birthday,
May 5, 1838, butbeforehis father died, on August 8 of that year, and Barfod
justifies his assumption by pointing to the fact that Kierkegaard had written
“25 Years Old” above the Shakespeare quotation. The assumption does not
hold up, however. This quotation must have been written down signifi-
cantly later than Barfod claimed, because Ernst Ortlepp’s German translation
of Shakespeare, which Kierkegaard cites, was not published until May 10,
1839, thusat leasta year after the events Barfod mentions took place. Age
twenty-five must therefore not be taken too literally, but was more likely a
way of referring to the age of majority itself. Thus, when it is claimed that
the author supposedly found himself in some sort of state of shock at the time
he wrote the lines about the great earthquake, this is not only a dramatically
erroneous conclusion, it is also psychologically implausible, because when a
person is in shock he is scarcely likely to sit down and write in his most
meticulous handwriting on the finest, gilt-edged paper he owns, nor is he
likely to express himself in asliterarya fashion as here was the case.
In the mid-1870s, when he was at work on his biography of Kierkegaard,
Georg Brandes was the first to attempt to discover what events or confiden-
tial information had made such an impression upon Kierkegaard that he
would have labeled it an earthquake. Brandes had once spoken about the
matter with Hans Brøchner but could no longer remember what Brøchner
had told him, and in the meanwhile Brøchner had died. Brandes therefore
contacted Kierkegaard’s nephew, Frederik Troels-Lund, and in a letter to
him dated September 20, 1876, Brandes wrote: “I have a dim recollection
that it was something about the old hosier’s relationship with Kierkegaard’s
mother (whom Kierkegaard, strangely enough, never mentions with one
single word), something about an improper premarital relationship or about
having wronged her in some pecuniary fashion.” Troels-Lund, who an-
swered three days later, could neither confirm nor deny this supposition,
but to set the record straight he had interviewed “several members of the
family—distant relatives, it is true—but none of them knew anything except
that in general the old man had been tightfisted and that in his younger days
he hadperhapsbeen a bit wild.” This was a skimpy result, but Brandes could
get no further with the matter, and in his biography he had to restrict himself
to remarking: “What sort of secret offense this was is of course unknown.
But by all indications it had something to do with the relationship between
the parents.” Their youngest child supposedly came to learn of it, and this—
Brandes implied—triggered the great earthquake in his life.
Not long after Brandes published his biography, the Norwegian professor
Fredrik Petersen turned to Peter Christian Kierkegaard and asked his opin-