marks....Thecoffins were flat, made out of six blackened boards, and
were so poorly constructed that the lid of one came off when it was un-
loaded, which one of the fellows took care of by banging it back in place
with his fist.”
The epidemic spread during July, culminating at the end of the month.
Its ravages continued throughout the whole of August, became more spo-
radic in September, then started to decline, with the last case reported on
October 13. By then the pestilence had lasted four months. Of the city’s
130,000 inhabitants, 7,219 had fallen ill from the disease and 4,737 had
died.OneofthemoreprominentvictimswasthepainterC.W.Eckersberg.
The cholera marked the end of the old, “snug and cozy” Copenhagen. It
was clear to most people that the inner city had to be relieved of the burden
of some of the population that had been crammed into it. So the dis-
mantlingof thecity’spicturesque rampartswasbegun,permitting thepopu-
lation to move into the territory beyond the old gates and giving the city
some fresh air. Most of all, the cholera had served as a somber reminder
that something had to be done about sanitation. The uninvited guest had
not visited the city in vain.
“The Prices Must Be Jacked Up in the Salon”
It was a strange reminder of the concept of “contemporaneity”: While
Copenhageners were dying in droves, Kierkegaard was considering the
questionof whether—and,ifso,how—apersoncoulddefend allowinghim-
self to be put to death for the truth! Although it is true that his immediate
neighborhood had not been especially hard hit by the ravages of the cholera
epidemic, it is nonetheless striking that at the time he made no mention of
it at all in his journals. It was not until a year later, in October 1854, that
he wrote an entry with the heading “The Significance of Cholera,” in
which he explained that the disease had managed to “drill into people the
fact that they are individuals, which neither war nor any other calamity
managestodo; rather,theyherdpeopletogether intogroups.Butpestilence
disperses people into individuals, teaching them—corporeally—that they
are individuals.”
But Kierkegaard was far from indifferent about the society that sur-
rounded him, and in his final years he developed the rudiments of some-
thingthatcould,forwantofabetterdesignation,becalledasortofChristian
socialism. Surprisingly enough, in some places his ideas are so similar to