In his report Tryde advised against focusing further attention on the mat-
ter, but Martensen was of another opinion and immediately requested that
the Ministry of Church and Cultural Affairs pursue the case, calling for an
“emphatic reprimand.” In the meanwhile Lund had written out his speech
from memory, and it had been printed inFædrelandeton Thursday, Novem-
ber 22, under the title “My Protest: What I Did and Did Not Say.” With
intransigence and volcanic ferocity, Lund let his verbal lava spew in every
direction. But a couple of days later, when he attempted a sequel, “At the
Next Moment, What Then,” the flow of his words had stiffened into clot-
ted cliche ́s. At the same time, Lund’s overwrought temperament had been
replaced by a deep despair, leading in early December to an attempt at
suicide that was only thwarted at the last moment by his father, Johan Chris-
tian Lund, an enterprising and well-to-do attorney, who soon thereafter
contacted the minister of Church and Cultural Affairs, C. C. Hall, with a
plea that justice be tempered with mercy: His son was neither morally nor
criminally accountable. Martensen was unyielding, however, and was over-
flowing with concern about the future of the People’s Church, society’s
sense of decency, and the aggressive shamelessness of the press.
So the matter finally ended up in chamber 5 of the Copenhagen Criminal
Court, in the old city hall and courthouse building on Nytorv, right next
door to Kierkegaard’s childhood home. The state’s attorney wanted to send
Lund to prison; the defense attorney demanded acquittal; witnesses quar-
relled with one another; and the case dragged on, so that it was July 5, 1856,
before the verdict was handed down: Lund was fined one hundred rixdollars
[Danish monetary units in Kierkegaard’s time: 1 rixdollar = 6 marks; 1
mark = 16 shillings], which were to be paid to the Office of Poor Relief.
The young physician received the judgment without emotion. Several
months earlier he had made the rounds, bowing penitently to the authorities
he had originally set out to combat. “Now I realize,” he wrote in a letter
to Peter Christian Kierkegaard, “that the only right step for me is to aban-
don entirely this battle into which I have plunged, quite unbidden, and seek
the Church of Christ.” Presumably, one contributing cause of this great
resignation was that during the course of the early spring of 1856 Lund had
undergone medical treatment for an unspecified “nervous disorder.”
The commotion at the burial demonstrates that with Kierkegaard not even
death sufficed to separate his life from his works. Nonetheless, the Danish
biographies of Kierkegaard that have appeared since Georg Brandes’s critical
portrait was published in 1877 can easily be counted on the fingers of one
hand, and Johannes Hohlenberg’s biography from 1940 is the most recent
original work in the field. Neither has much respect been shown for those
{Preface} xix