“Copenhagen Is a Very Filthy Town”
Naturally, the carriage tours were taken for the sake of the inspiration that
came from diversion, but they were also taken because Kierkegaard needed
to escape from the close air of Copenhagen, not least from Rosenborggade,
whose poetic name formed a glaring contrast to the sweetish-sour smell of
tanner Gram’s newly skinned hides, an odor that bathed the walls of the
house. All summer long the open gutters ran with the slimy effluvium of
the tannery, and the stench hung in the streets and burned one’s nostrils.
Nor was it long before Kierkegaard’s eccentricities put in an appearance:
“And the tanner where I live has tormented me with the stench all summer
long. Many, many times I have really had to make a mental effort to keep
from getting sick from impatience. ”If Kierkegaard had hoped to distance
himself from the stench by moving from number 9 Rosenborggade to num-
ber 7, he was sadly disappointed. Rosenborggade, after all, was the street
on which the city’s tanneries were located!
Kierkegaard’s reaction was strong, but not unduly so, and he was far from
being the only person who felt thus. “Copenhagen is a very filthy town,”
wrote Dr. Hornemann in 1847, “everyone who enters the city gates from
the countryside is immediately struck by the bad air. ”The city’s boundaries
were the same as those marked out under Christian IV two centuries earlier,
and in the meanwhile the city’s population had sextupled. Landlords had a
field day. Even the smallest lots had buildings on them; new stories were
added on to old houses; and cellars, storerooms, woodsheds, indeed, even
chicken coops were converted into housing. The Ministry of Health and
the city physician, Hoppe, were naturally appalled by all this and called for
the enforcement of the applicable ordinances, but as the population grew
and grew, the law had to be bent, and Copenhageners had to learn to
squeeze into less and less space within the ramparts.
Naturally, the newspapers and other documents of the period were filled
with descriptions of the intolerable conditions. Thus, in his proposal to
enlarge the city, Professor Wilkens asked: “[Is it really from] a desire for
sociability that many families have crammed together in a single room, sepa-
rated by chalk lines, which they teach their children to respect by beating
them? Is it a pastoral infatuation with the smell of manure that has driven
others to seek shelter under the roofs of latrines? ”Readers of the July 12,
1852, issue ofFædrelandetwere presented with the following complaint,
which causes one to gasp for more than one reason: “In this West Indian
heat, when all the rest of us suffer at every hour of the day from the intolera-
ble stench that surrounds Copenhagen on virtually every side—from the