Soren Kierkegaard

the daily press Ostermann had the future on his side. Two weeks later,
however, he had Kierkegaard against him.
Kierkegaard also chose to “read aloud” (as it was called at the Student
Association). Kierkegaard requested a copy of Ostermann’s manuscript, and
on November 28, 1835, he presented a response: “Our Journalistic Litera-
ture,” subtitled “A Study from Nature in Noonday Light.” He read his
paper in front of a large audience who applauded enthusiastically when he
finished. Kierkegaard had prepared well, and he displayed an impressive
knowledge of the history of the National Liberal press, particularly as it had
been exemplified byKjøbenhavnsposten. His point was that the liberal press
had not been anywhere near as activist as Ostermann had claimed and that
in actuality it had merely gone from “castles in the air—to mousetraps—
and home again.” Kierkegaard does not say so directly, but if one reads
between the lines he seems to intimate that the most important initiative
for improvements in the situation of the times had been taken by Frederick
VI himself. Kierkegaard, in short, was not about to participate in what he
called a “somersault into the Siberia of freedom of the press.”
Ostermann heard Kierkegaard deliver his paper, but he had no desire to
involve himself with an “opponent, whom I knew had only a slight interest
in the reality of the matter.” Ostermann was thus very well acquainted with
Kierkegaard, not only from the Student Association but also from the Co-
penhagen cafe ́s where the two had often met and from which they had taken
walks around the city’s lakes. Kierkegaard’s lively “intellect,” Ostermann
explained, “took hold of any issue in those days, and he exercised his brilliant
dialectical skill and wit upon it. The fact that my defense [of freedom of the
press] had met with a favorable reception pushed him into the opposite
camp, where he allied himself more or less as a matter of indifference.”
Ostermann was right. Kierkegaard’s contribution to the debate about
freedom of the press was in fact a grandiose exercise in stirring up a tempest
in a teapot. Nonetheless (or perhaps precisely because of this) he continued
his polemics undaunted when Orla Lehmann, the leading spokesman for
the liberals, published the fifth of his articles on “the case for freedom of the
press” inKjøbenhavnsposten. Lehmann, subsequently one of the godfathers of
the Danish constitution, argued in this article that the hard times experi-
enced in recent years—“war, defeat, humiliation, bankruptcy, crop fail-
ure”—had given rise to a widely shared popular gloom, which had been
repressed by the invocation of patriotic and sentimental themes: “Public life
was shrouded in the darkness of mourning; it was therefore no surprise that
people took refuge in their family lives, seeking comfort and warmth behind
closed doors and amusing themselves as best they could. There arose a sort