he could be so well informed about what was going on all over town.
Goldschmidt answered modestly that he in fact was no better informed than
many others who did a bit of reading in the newspapers. “But don’t you
receive a lot of anonymous contributions?” Yes, he did, Goldschmidt ex-
plained, but most of them were unusable. “Why so?” Kierkegaard asked.
Because, Goldschmidt replied, they revealed the most intimate sorts of fam-
ily relationships; indeed the editors had even had a case in which a man and
his wife informed against one another. “I don’t want to hear about it!”
Kierkegaard shouted in order to make Goldschmidt stop, who did so imme-
diately, though not without pain. “It hurt me, as if he were accusing me of
having intended to betray some secret to him, as if I were of a coarser nature
than he.”
Goldschmidt’s psychological sense was very keen. Thus in 1846, when
Kierkegaard first mentions “Mr. Goldschmidt, university student” in his
journals, the words exuded a grand condescension and surely reflected the
attitude with which the seasoned author addressed the self-appointed editor
while on his rounds through the streets of Copenhagen. In Kierkegaard’s
journals Goldschmidt is referred to as a “bright fellow without ideas, with-
out an education, without a point of view, without self-control, but not
without a certain talent and a certain desperate aesthetic power.” The sketch
is not particularly flattering, but neither here nor in his later journal entries
was Kierkegaard blind to Goldschmidt’s talent, a talent he was wasting in
the service ofThe Corsair, “the tool of vulgarity.” And Kierkegaard had
repeatedly said this to Goldschmidt, all the while telling him to work on
comic composition. Not surprisingly, the self-respecting editor was made
uncomfortable by this sort of treatment. And indeed many years later
Goldschmidt wrote: “He could make one feel very small.”
“I Am a Jew. What Am I Doing among You?”
For the time being, Goldschmidt’s sense of discomfort was held in check
by his enthusiasm for Kierkegaard’s literary genius, which Goldschmidt and
Møller had in fact celebrated with their symbolic symposium shortly after
the publication ofEither/Or. When Goldschmidt and Møller had met that
evening, they had not known each other for much more than six months.
Goldschmidt was never really able to grasp what it was that had led Møller
to look him up, but it was, he writes, as though he had been sitting in his
editorial offices unconsciously awaiting Møller’s arrival. The blond fellow
entered, clad in a blue coat with shiny buttons and a pair of light-colored
trousers, looking every bit the dandy. Goldschmidt knew that he had been