Soren Kierkegaard

grave. Every time I stand there, it hurts me to see it so forsaken; it pains me
in a way, and I cannot imagine that setting a name on the grave would in
any way be a cause of publicity or of any unpleasant agitation.” Even though
the first lieutenant emphasized that the gravestone would be quite unosten-
tatious—“bearing only the name Søren A. Kierkegaard”—Peter Christian
refused. He justified his refusal with a letter consisting of several pages of
impenetrably nebulous reasoning. Sometime later, Wolff again wrote to the
bishop, explaining diplomatically that the placing of a memorial at the grave
“would in fact keep your brother in the profoundly self-denying conceal-
ment he had chosen.” Wolff further suggested that perhaps “the difficulty
could be solved in an easy and felicitous manner” merely by having “that
single individual” inscribed on the stone, a possibility broached by Kierke-
gaard himself inThe Point of View.
As when his first wife, Elise Marie Boisen, died, Peter Christian did
nothing at all. At his own expense, the enterprising first lieutenant had a
marble plaque bearing the famous Dane’s biographical data affixed to the
old Kierkegaard home at 2 Nytorv. When Peter Christian learned of this,
the note he wrote in his diary was marked by a bitterness that perhaps
explains the vagueness of his letter to Wolff: “Plaque attached to our old
place—about Søren.”
Not until four years after that, in 1874, when the daily press began to
complain that Kierkegaard had now lain buried anonymously for almost
twenty years, like some sort of Mozart, was there finally any action. The
energetic Johan Christian Lund’s nieces and nephews requested that Lund
take action. At this point, true to form, Peter Christian declared himself will-
ing to underwrite maintenance expenses for the grave for the next sixty years.
Nowadays, people come from near and far and leave wreaths of flowers,
especially on ten-year anniversaries of the magister’s birth. People dwell on
his memory with great devotion, but they also ought to bear in mind these
words of Kierkegaard: “Why is it, then, that no contemporary age can get
along with witnesses to the truth—but as soon as a man is dead everyone
can get along with him so wonderfully? This is because, as long as he is
alive... they feel the sting of his existence; he compels them to make more
difficult decisions. But when he is dead, people can be good friends with
him and admire him.”
Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel returned home from the West Indies in 1860.
Fritz’s health had been destroyed out there, and he never really recovered.
He died in 1896 and was buried in Assistens Cemetery, a couple of stones’
throws away from his old rival. When Regine left her apartment out on
Alhambravej to visit her spouse’s grave—since she was in the memorial
parkanyway—might she not have walked over, quietly and unobserved, to