Soren Kierkegaard

The failure of death to arrive in 1847 was an unexpected hitch in his
calculations, and in more ways than one: Of the 31,355 rixdollars he had
inherited, 17,760 had been invested in royal bonds and in shares in a fire
insurance company. He had cashed these in, one after another, between
1839 and 1847. On March 2, 1847, he sold his last share, and on December
14 of the same year he sold his last bond. As a rule Kierkegaard enjoyed
handsome capital gains on most of these transactions. A low estimate of his
totalinvestment income would be about 6,500 rixdollars, but now he was
strapped for cash, and he needed to gain access to the money that was tied
up in his childhood home at 2 Nytorv. In the arrangements governing their
inheritance in 1839, the two brothers had each received a fifty-percent
share in the house. Peter Christian took administrative responsibility for
the property, but three years later when he was appointed parish pastor in
Pedersborg, the job fell to the younger brother, who soon began to com-
plain about it: “You know how worried I was about assuming management
of the place,” he wrote to Peter Christian in mid-January 1843, informing
him on the same occasion that he had convinced their brother-in-law, the
businessman Johan Christian Lund, to manage the house, “until he succeeds
in selling it as advantageously as possible.” This was the first time this possi-
bility had come up in the two brothers’ discussions, but Søren Aabye was
so tired of the irritating details involving the house that he would indeed
have “sold it for nothing, if only I could get rid of it.” This did not mean
that he was blind to the business side of the matter, however: “It cannot be
denied that the location has great advantages; in the right hands it could
fetch a tidy sum.”
Five months later, on May 3, 1843, he himself fetched some of that sum.
Rather surprisingly, he purchased Peter Christian’s half of the house, thus
becoming the sole owner. According to the terms of the sale, Peter Chris-
tian received 1,500 rixdollars in cash and a first mortgage of 7,000 rixdollars
at an interest rate of four percent per annum. The house was put on the
market in the latter part of 1847, and the sale was completed on Christmas
Eve. Two days before the closing documents were signed, Peter Christian
was informed of the details. The younger brother insisted repeatedly that
his older brother could not but be pleased with the way the transaction had
been handled. “God knows that these days I am so mixed up by all these
business matters that I am only too prone to pedantry,” he explained, and
then continued in a peculiarly unpedantic confusion: “I don’t even remem-
ber how it was your first mortgage was arranged, but in any case the entire
matter is purely a formality.” It is not certain that Peter Christian would
have agreed with this. And he probably found it a typical bit of hastiness