Kierkegaard's Life · Copenhagen · 1845–1856
In December 1845 Kierkegaard asked a satirical weekly to attack him. It did. The first answer came six days later. The joke followed him for years.
Corsaren was Denmark's first successful critical-political weekly, known for attacking absolutism as much as for attacking individuals. Kierkegaard answered it in Fædrelandet, a serious political daily and a far more respectable address. A dispute over a review became a test of anonymity, press power, and what a drawing could do that an argument could not. Below is the exchange in order: Corsaren and its allies on the left, Kierkegaard in print and in private on the right.
Before the first caricature
Kierkegaard was not a remote scholar. He walked Copenhagen for hours, stopped people in the street, and read the papers in public rooms. That daily contact was part of how he worked. It also made him unusually easy to recognise.
Corsaren did not have to introduce its target. It gave readers a few repeatable details: the stoop, the cane, the thin legs, the uneven trousers. Copenhagen supplied the rest.
Context: Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre.
126,787 people in Copenhagen at the 1845 censusCorsaren had treated Kierkegaard's books with respect. This notice predicted that other Danish writers would be forgotten while Victor Eremita, the supposed editor of Either/Or, would endure.
“Victor Eremita will never die.”Corsaren no. 269, 14 November 1845, column 14
Source: Issue and context
Møller reviewed Stages on Life's Way in a literary annual he edited. He praised parts of the book but treated Kierkegaard's broken engagement as a key to it, collapsing a pseudonymous construction into its author's private life.
Møller hoped to obtain a university chair in aesthetics. He had contributed to Corsaren and briefly served as a substitute editor, but he was not Goldschmidt's permanent deputy. Kierkegaard's reply made that compromising association public.
Sources: Historical sequence · Recent reassessment
Kierkegaard replied under the pseudonym whose part of Stages Møller had reviewed. He defended the book, named Møller's link to Corsaren, and turned the paper's earlier compliments against it.
The ending adopts the voice of a neglected author. If every writer of consequence has been abused, why has Frater Taciturnus been denied the distinction?
“Would that I might only get into Corsaren soon.”Frater Taciturnus, Fædrelandet no. 2078
“ubi P. L. Møller, ibi Corsaren.”Where Møller is, there is Corsaren
The Latin tag did the immediate damage. Møller never obtained the chair, but later scholarship cautions against making this article the only reason.
Sources: Read the Danish text · Article commentary
Six days later the paper accepted the invitation. Goldschmidt invented a backstage conversation in which Frater Taciturnus and the editor of Fædrelandet plot their attack on Corsaren.
The fiction let the weekly answer without defending Møller. It mocked Kierkegaard's importance and the respectable paper that had printed him, while keeping Corsaren's actual editor formally off the page.
“Denmark's greatest philosopher, Denmark's most ingenious spirit, the author of Denmark's thickest books.”Corsaren's invented editor of Fædrelandet
Sources: The invented dialogue · About Corsaren
The argument moved from editorial anonymity to Kierkegaard's body. A mock discussion between the astronomer C. F. R. Olufsen, the critic J. L. Heiberg, and Kierkegaard made his trousers a scientific discovery.
A reader did not need to know Stages on Life's Way, Møller, or the ethics of the press to get the joke. One trouser leg was enough.
“One trouser leg is always as long as the other, unless I expressly ask otherwise in order to look like a genius.”Corsaren no. 277, 9 January 1846, columns 2–3
Source: Royal Library commentary
Kierkegaard's second and last public reply named Goldschmidt. It argued that a paper protected by contempt, anonymity, and hired legal responsibility could turn silence into fear and keep the last word.
His proposed answer was to reverse its values. Reject the praise; order the abuse. The paper would then expose its power as a service that could be requested.
“One can order Corsaren to abuse, just as one orders a barrel organ to make music.”Frater Taciturnus, Fædrelandet no. 9
Sources: Read the Danish text · English commentary
The weekly now took possession of Kierkegaard's method. It printed mock advertisements in the names of his pseudonyms, invented new ones, and pretended its detective work had identified Frater Taciturnus as the horse dealer and sometime asylum patient Michael Leonard Nathanson.
The drawings gave the fiction a recognisable body. On 16 January Kierkegaard rides a woman and then a horse, combining the horse-dealer hoax with a phrase about ‘training his girl’ borrowed from Quidam, the pseudonymous diarist of Stages on Life's Way. On 23 January Frater Taciturnus meets a caricatured Goldschmidt.
Sources: The hoaxes issue by issue · Public-domain image record
The title page put Kierkegaard's own name beneath that of Johannes Climacus. A declaration at the end identified him as the person legally and literarily responsible for the pseudonymous books.
Readers already suspected this. Corsaren nevertheless treated the declaration as new material for its running detective story, deliberately confusing author, editor, publisher, and pseudonym.
Sources: Read the original Danish text · How Corsaren reused it
After weeks of pretending not to know who wrote the pseudonymous books, Corsaren acknowledged Kierkegaard. It then apologised to Nathanson for having confused him with Kierkegaard, extending the insult while formally correcting the attribution.
The same issue pictured the city revolving around S. K. The joke was now that the mocked man imagined himself the centre of everything, even as the paper itself kept placing him there.
“We have done Mr. Crazy Nathanson an injustice and herewith ask his pardon.”Corsaren no. 285, 6 March 1846, column 8
Sources: Issue analysis · Public-domain image record
Two Ages reviews Thomasine Gyllembourg's novel and sets a passionate age against a reflective one; it never mentions the affair by name. But Kierkegaard wrote it while the campaign against him was still running, and its account of the press, gossip, levelling, and the abstract ‘public’ reads like a diagnosis of the machinery he was meeting in the street.
It is a theoretical argument, about the press, the public, and levelling, rather than a personal account of being mocked, but it is one his own experience with Corsaren would keep confirming.
“The public is a public audience interested in what is most private.”A Literary Review, in the Research Centre's English excerpt
Sources: Read the Danish text · Research Centre on press and public
The Royal Library's editors trace references, articles, and caricatures in almost every issue from 2 January through this one: six months of a weekly routine, in a paper that came out every Friday, rather than a single cartoon or a one-off burst.
Later attacks were real, but they came occasionally after this, a slower rhythm than this six-month run of weekly hits.
Source: Royal Library chronology
Kierkegaard wrote that it had once been ‘ironically correct’ to produce the pseudonymous books while living in streets and marketplaces. The author belonged to one sphere while the visible man mixed in another.
Once ‘literary hooligans’ made him appear to belong to the street in a different sense, that irony was gone.
“The irony quite rightly disappears, and so I take my leave.”Papers VII¹ A 147, September 1846
Source: Journal passage and context
Goldschmidt gave up Corsaren with the issue of 2 October and left Copenhagen days later. He went on to write novels and to edit Nord og Syd, a more serious political and literary journal.
The feud played into his decision to leave, though Corsaren's record of fighting censorship and absolutism is a bigger legacy than the personal attacks alone. Under new owners, the paper continued without its old force.
Sources: Corsaren's publication history · Goldschmidt biography
Corsaren again drew Kierkegaard with unequal trousers in ‘Søren Kierkegaard and Aftenbladet in a Theological Tarantella with Castanets.’ The paper had changed hands; the visual shorthand had not.
A joke first printed two years earlier no longer needed its original dispute. It could be revived whenever Kierkegaard's name returned to the news.
Source: Royal Library commentary
Journal NB7 begins on 21 August 1848, more than two and a half years after the first caricatures: a later reckoning, well past the initial shock of January 1846.
Kierkegaard records university students smirking and ordinary errands turning into stories. A visit could be distorted, repeated, printed, and then read across the city.
“Every butcher boy believes that he's entitled to insult me.”Journal NB7, Research Centre translation
Sources: Research Centre excerpt · NB7 date and critical edition
The Royal Library's scholarly commentary identifies this as the last documented Corsaren attack on Kierkegaard by name. The paper itself survived until 30 March 1855.
By now the caricature had done its work in the street, and Kierkegaard's argument with ‘the public’ had moved into journals and books. That does not mean the ridicule itself stopped, only that this particular paper stopped being the one printing it: a second satirical weekly picked up where Corsaren left off, as the last entry below records.
Sources: Royal Library chronology · The paper through 1855
In Journal NB12, opened on 19 July 1849, he generalised the experience. Modern violence need not touch the body. Ridicule could isolate a person while leaving everyone involved able to call it a joke.
He described himself as a martyr to laughter. What he meant was specific: a drawing repeated often enough becomes how a whole city sees a person.
“People shrink more from this danger than from the most torture-filled death.”Journal NB12, Research Centre translation
Sources: Research Centre excerpt · NB12 date and critical edition
By 1854 Kierkegaard's grievance with one satirical weekly had hardened into a settled verdict on the trade itself. He was about to open his direct attack on the Danish Church, and the same contempt for the press runs through the journals of this period.
The line is aimed at journalism in general, not at Corsaren by name, but Corsaren was the schooling that produced it.
“If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should not despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist, and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.”Journal entry, 1854, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith
Corsaren was not the only paper that mocked Kierkegaard, and the mockery did not end when he died. Folkets Nisse (‘The People's Elf’) ran its own caricatures of him for years, unknown to scholars until Paul A. Bauer found a bound volume at a Copenhagen antiquarian dealer in the late 1990s.
This drawing, from shortly after Kierkegaard's death, shows two women fighting over one of his shirts at the auction of his effects. Kierkegaard scholar M. G. Piety, who tracked it down for the cover of her own book on the affair, reads it as evidence he had become something closer to a cult figure by the end than the isolated crank later biographers assumed.
The consequences were real, but it's easy to tidy them into a neater story than the evidence supports. Three careers shifted after the affair, though none turned on it alone, and Kierkegaard's move toward writing under his own name was gradual rather than a single conversion.
Kierkegaard made his association with Corsaren public while Møller sought a chair in aesthetics. Møller did not get it and left Copenhagen, but he also had weaker academic claims than the successful candidate and had antagonised the man whose chair was open. The affair hurt him, alongside those other factors.
He sold Corsaren in October 1846 and left the country. He became a major novelist and founded Nord og Syd. The weekly itself kept going under other editors for another nine years, until no. 756 on 30 March 1855; Goldschmidt's departure ended its sharpest period, not its run.
His easy life in the streets became exposure. He kept writing and increasingly addressed Christianity in his own name, though he kept a pseudonym or two in reserve too, including the demanding voice of Anti-Climacus. The press, the public, anonymity, and ridicule stopped being abstract subjects for him; they were things he had personally lived through.
Primary texts. Kierkegaard's two newspaper articles, A Literary Review, the journals, and the papers are checked against the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter table of contents and the Royal Danish Library's text-critical edition. Its editorial material is CC0. Danish titles retain the printed orthography.
The weekly issue by issue. The specific sequence and the parody of the pseudonyms draw on Ville Hämäläinen's open-access 2026 study, “Søren Kierkegaard Hoaxed”, checked against the Royal Library's annotations. The standard document collection remains Howard and Edna Hong's The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings. Its translations remain in copyright and are not reproduced at length.
How long it lasted. The Royal Library records regular attacks from Corsaren no. 276 on 2 January through no. 304 on 17 July 1846, a renewed caricature on 8 January 1848, and its last documented attack on 16 February 1849. The paper itself continued until 30 March 1855. That 1849 date is a record of what has been catalogued in Corsaren specifically, not the end of the ridicule: Peter Tudvad's research, summarised by Kierkegaard scholar M. G. Piety, found that a second satirical paper, Folkets Nisse, ran its own caricatures of Kierkegaard for years, past 1849 and up to his death in 1855.
Journals. The short English excerpts follow the Research Centre's translations. Journal NB7 began on 21 August 1848 and Journal NB12 on 19 July 1849, both well after January 1846, so they capture the affair's long toll rather than Kierkegaard's immediate reaction to it. The 1854 entry on journalism is translated by Ronald Gregor Smith in The Last Years: Journals 1853–55 (Harper & Row, 1965); this page could not confirm its precise Papirer catalogue number and gives the year only.
Copenhagen. The population figure is the 1 February 1845 census total in Copenhagen's Statistical Yearbook.
Images. All show public-domain 19th-century artwork. The header masthead is Corsaren no. 655, 8 April 1853, cropped from a Royal Danish Library scan on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0); its lightbox view is a larger, less tightly cropped version of the same scan. The masthead further down, in the Goldschmidt entry, is the earlier Corsaren no. 95, 15 July 1842. The café study, city plan, two caricature crops, and the circa-1880 Goldschmidt portrait come from Wikimedia Commons. The Folkets Nisse caricature was rediscovered by Paul A. Bauer; this copy was traced by Anne Marie Furbo of the Royal Danish Library and published by Kierkegaard scholar M. G. Piety, with credit here to all three. The 8 January 1848 tarantella drawing is cropped from a photograph of Peter Tudvad's Kierkegaards København (2004), where it is reproduced from the Royal Library's holdings; the photograph is M. G. Piety's, cropped here to the artwork alone.