The secret life of Kierkegaard's lover

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Moller is today hardly more than a footnote in Danish literary history. Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, known to the public at large as Meryl Streep in Out of Africa) is reported to have playfully asked from time to time, "Whatever happened to that Moller fellow?" This seems to have been a convoluted reference to the fact that she had survived the disease of which Moller died. The husband who infected Blixen also brought to their marriage her title of Baroness which, she wrote in her journals, all things told, was worth it.

Behind this complex of fiction, philosophy, biography, diary, and memoir are the facts that Soren and Regine, when he was twenty-seven and she eighteen, were briefly engaged and parted. Kierkegaard's journals, written nearly a decade after their break, give an account of this. On August 24, 1849, he wrote in his journal about "My relation to `her,'" an account of his pre-1838 decision to have her, his 1840 proposal ("I did not say a single word to persuade her. She said yes."), his ultimate regret, and his struggle to free himself in order to pursue his genius which finally succeeded in 1841:

"... she gave herself unreservedly to me, she worshipped me.... With gigantic strength I constrained my whole nature so as to repel her with all my powers."

"Give in," he reports having told her. "Let me go; you cannot bear it. Thereupon she answered passionately that she would bear anything rather than let me go.... I also suggested giving the appearance that it was she who broke off the engagement so that she might be spared all offense. That she would not have. She answered: If she could bear the other she could bear this too. And not unsocratically she said: In her presence no one would let anything be noticed and what people said in her absence remained a matter of indifference."

"It was a time of terrible suffering," he wrote, "to have to be so cruel and at the same time to love as I did. She fought like a tigress.... And so about two months later it broke. She grew desperate. For the first time in my life I scolded. It was the only thing to do."

Her father, Kierkegaard reported, begged him not to break with her: "It will be her death." The journal records the father saying, "She is in absolute despair."

He visited her then to settle things once and for all, and she asked if he would ever marry. As "a necessary cruelty," he writes that he told her perhaps he would do so in ten years time when he had sown his wild oats and needed "some young blood to rejuvenate me."

"And so we parted. I spent the whole night crying in my bed. But the next day I behaved as usual, wittier and in better spirits than ever. That was necessary. My brother told me he wanted to go to the family and show them that I was not a scoundrel. `If you do I will put a bullet through your head,' which is the best proof of how deeply concerned I was. I went to Berlin. I suffered greatly."

Such journals and letters of suffering love feature prominently in the literature of the period. Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) brought the twenty-five-year-old author to international fame. It apparently also inspired many a young suffering swain of the time to put a romantic bullet in his head, so powerful was the effect of the book's unleashing of alienated emotion in the character of young Werther, morbidly enamored of a woman he could not have. To contemporary readers, Werther is more likely to seem a self-absorbed, self-pitying young fool, although as Frandsen aptly points out, quoting Joakim Garff's recent Kierkegaard biography, in his afterword to the Olsen diary, "Werther and Lotte belong to one another eternally because in reality they never got each other." (Quote translated by myself.) Werther's love, however, seems less a love for Lotte than for himself, for his own narcissistic, suffering, alienated self, eternally longing for what he cannot have, and in that unrequited yearning defining his character and, perhaps, the emerging character of European consciousness.