Kierkegaard (24 page)

1913. Germany. Interest in the antichurch Kierkegaard has led to the back-catalogue. Theodor Haecker publishes his first monograph. Haecker will go on to become the major German translator of Kierkegaard. A convert to Catholicism and a committed opponent of the Nazis, Haecker is keenly aware of the relevance of Kierkegaard's message for his present age.

It is largely through Haecker that most German readers and writers meet Kierkegaard.

1913. Germany. Karl Jaspers is working in a psychiatric hospital. He is growing disillusioned with the barbaric treatments being meted out on the patients—straps and extended plunges in hot water are commonly used to cure illnesses of the brain. It is from encounters with Kierkegaard now and into the 1920s that Jaspers finds ways to express his idea that mental illness is an “event” in someone's life and part of the development of the existence of that person. Jaspers will become a highly influential philosopher and psychiatrist who will write about Kierkegaard and Kierkegaardian themes for the rest of his career, changing the shape of the establishment's view of mental illness and health.

1918. Czechoslovakia. Franz Kafka writes in his diary about his encounters with Kierkegaard. He is particularly captured by Kierkegaard's treatment of the story of Abraham and wonders at ways of telling this ancient pre-Hebraic story from a modern Jewish perspective. Kierkegaard will remain a major influence for Kafka's entire writing life.

1919. Switzerland. A young pastor in a working-class village parish begins writing his commentary on the apostle Paul.
The Epistle to the Romans
lands like a bombshell on the theological scene, and Karl Barth is appointed to a professorship in Germany as a result. Its emphasis on the radical difference between the revelation of God and the natural endeavours of mankind challenges prevailing theologies of human progress and offers a new way of thinking in light of the devastating Great War. “
If I have a system
,” he writes in the introduction, “it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity.”

1929. Germany. The graduate student Hannah Arendt writes her doctoral thesis on Augustine and neighbourly love. She is supervised by Karl Jaspers. A German Jew forced to flee her native country, Arendt will go on to write insightfully about power, violence, and totalitarianism, coining the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the way heinous crimes can be committed through mass complacency. In a 1964 TV interview conducted by Günther Gaus she recalls eagerly studying politics and philosophy from a young age. “
Then I read Kierkegaard
and everything fell into place.”

c. 1930. United Kingdom. While living in Cambridge, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks to a friend, “
Kierkegaard was by far
the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.”

1934. Bornholm. Gregor Malantschuk, a Ukrainian orphan who ended up in Germany following the chaos of the Great War, is forced by the rise of Hitler to migrate yet again, this time fleeing to a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. Here he first hears of Kierkegaard from a farm mechanic
repairing a t
hreshing machine
. He finds in Kierkegaard's “single individual” an alternative to the dehumanising ideologies of both communism and fascism. Later, Malantschuk forms a Kierkegaard study circle where he mentors many influential teachers and translators, including Julia Watkin, and Howard and Edna Hong. After his death, Malantschuk's considerable library seeds the Kierkegaardian centres at McGill University in Canada and at St. Olaf College in the United States.

1935. United Kingdom. E. L. Allen publishes
Kierkegaard: His Life and Thought
. It is the first monograph in English, but like Brandes, Allen is no fan. His portrait damns Kierkegaard with faint praise, and he thinks Kierkegaard's response to Christendom was too pessimistic. The next Dane Allen wrote about reveals where he wants British sympathies to lie.
Bishop Grundtvig: A Prophet of the North
is a glowing endorsement of Grundtvig's view of national, Christian life.

1937. Germany. The dissident theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer publishes
Discipleship
, his manual for seminary students preparing to become pastors in Nazi-dominated Germany. The book's striking attempt to articulate how to live as Christians in a Christendom seduced by Hitler is similar in theme and structure to
Practice in Christianity
, the book that Anti-Climacus wrote to unsettle the Christians in
his
Christendom. Bonhoeffer was steeped in Kierkegaard's writings. Major tenets of Bonhoeffer's thought such as “cheap grace” and “religion-less Christianity” are shaped by his encounters with the Dane, as is Bonhoeffer's choice to opt for real, concrete life against the seduction of triumphalist idealism. For his part in opposing Hitler, Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945.

1938. United Kingdom and the United States. The Anglo-American world is presented with Alexander Dru's
The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834–1854
and Walter Lowrie's monumental biography
Kierkegaard
. They are not the first Kierkegaardian books published in English, but they are the most widely read. Alexander Dru, friend of Theodor Haecker, wrote to the Oxford University Press in 1935 proposing they
publish some translated volumes of the philosopher. Dru, an English Catholic (and brother-in-law to the novelist Evelyn Waugh) also enlisted the help of Walter Lowrie, who was labouring on his own translation project. Lowrie, an American Episcopalian pastor and theologian, had found Kierkegaard
via
Barth. In 1932 (at the age of 64) he taught himself Danish and began his translation work shortly thereafter. Some scattered material had been translated by Lee M. Hollander ten years previous, but unsold copies of the pamphlet were collecting dust in Hollander's office. David Swenson (a Swede living in America) had been eking out Kierkegaard translations and essays since 1916 after discovering a Danish-language copy of the
Postscript
in his local library. Professor Swenson's translation of
Philosophical Fragments
came out in 1936 and he was drafted to assist with the OUP project. Although Lowrie was not the first American translator, he proved himself to be an unrivalled powerhouse of public relations and productivity on behalf of the Dane. What his translations lost in elegance or accuracy he gained in vitality and rapid quantity. It is through Lowrie (some of whose translations remain in print today) that most English readers will come to trace their introduction to Kierkegaard. OUP published Lowrie's editions, starting with
Christian Discourses
and
The Point of View
in 1939. Further
Discourses
,
Training in Christianity
,
Judge for Yourself!
, and
For Self Examination
soon followed. Dru and Lowrie collaborated on
The Present Age
in 1940. It was not lost on anyone that the book's theme of the malignant mob was especially relevant in light of the looming World War with regimes particularly adept at manipulating the media and popular sentiment. Kierkegaard's philosophical and pseudonymous works emerged in 1941:
Stages on Life's Way
,
Repetition
,
Fear and Trembling
, and
Sickness unto Death
.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
also came out in 1941, mostly translated by Swenson but completed by Lowrie after Swenson's death the year before. Swenson's
Either/Or
,
Concept of Dread
, and collected material from the
Fatherland
and the
Moment
, which Lowrie called the
Attack upon Christendom
, all came out in 1944. Apart from this final
material, the order of the production did not correspond in any way to the timing or pseudonymous scheme painstakingly worked out by Søren a century before.

1939. United Kingdom.
The New Statesman
publishes T. S. Eliot's rave review of an idiosyncratic new book by a niche writer normally associated with “
spiritual thrillers
.”
The Descent of the Dove
by Charles Williams tells the story of the history of Christianity from the point of view of the movement of Goodness and the Holy Spirit across the earth. The high point of the climactic chapter is devoted to Kierkegaard. “
His sayings
will be so moderated in our minds,” predicts Williams, “that they will soon become not his sayings but ours.” Other fans of the book include W. H. Auden, who credits Williams for his conversion to Christianity and who embarked on a lifelong appreciation of Kierkegaard as a result. Williams, friend of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and other fellow “Inklings,” is no Kierkegaardian novice—in his day job he is an editor for Oxford University Press. It is Williams who first received Dru's proposal and who was an early champion of the project. It is he who oversees the translation work and who manages Lowrie's considerable energy and expectations. It is also Williams we can thank for convincing Lowrie not to lumber his biography with the doggy sounding subtitle, “
the Great Dane.
” During conditions of wartime austerity, Williams labours long and hard to ensure the Press pays for paper at the same time as keeping the price down for the normal reading public. Much of the printing costs are subsidised by Lowrie himself, and Williams often has to broach the subject of money with the translator. “
K. may rebuild
civilization, but we shall have to be more economical than ever in building K.” In the end the war and the prospect of working with a publisher and market closer to home convinces Lowrie to take his work to Princeton University Press, leaving Oxford as the European agent rather than main publisher. The relationship between Williams and Lowrie remains cordial, with Williams suggesting that while the Americans may have bought more actual books, at least the support of the prestigious University of Oxford
was a “
more intangible
but no less effective” vehicle for the reception of Kierkegaard into English.

1940. United States. Recent Roman Catholic convert Thomas Merton notes in his journal: “
A week ago
today I bought Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling
at the Oxford University Press, and have since talked about it so much I feel as if I had been reading Kierkegaard all my life.” Merton will go on to become a monk, spiritual writer, nonviolent civil rights activist, and nuclear nonproliferation peace campaigner with worldwide renown. Kierkegaard will remain a constant presence in Merton's life as a source of strength, guidance, and challenge until his death in 1968.

1942. France. The Algerian Albert Camus publishes his novel
The Stranger
and his philosophical treatise
The Myth of Sisyphus.
The works are considered forerunners of French Existentialism, although Camus rejects the label. Camus is forthcoming in his admiration for Kierkegaard, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, whose book
Being and Nothingness
comes out in 1943. Because of his antipathy to Kierkegaard's Christianity, Sartre often disavows any connection. Rather, his thoughts on the fundamental importance of free will are built on Martin Heidegger's highly influential
Being and Time
(1927). As it happens, the German philosopher
also
went to great lengths to hide his indebtedness to Kierkegaard.
Being and Time
grudgingly mentions Kierkegaard three times in the notes and yet is replete with Kierkegaardian themes, stripped of their Christian orientation. The association of Kierkegaard with the atheistic existentialisms of Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, and others is a powerful one. It led to an explosion of Kierkegaard's popularity in the 1950s and '60s in France and America while at the same time cast a long shadow over his modern reception as a Christian thinker.

1943. United States. Playwright Henry Miller pens a glowing review of Lowrie's
A Short Life of Kierkegaard
in the
New Republic
. His approach is symptomatic of the era in which it is not academics but literate nonspecialists who tend to take up the Kierkegaardian mantle. A lot of the appeal to writers, poets, public intellectuals, artists, and idiosyncratic
historians is Kierkegaard's approach to cultural movements that were defining the “modern age.” He is heard to be saying something to the dehumanising nature of mass culture in all its forms, whether it be communism, fascism, or jingoistic patriotism. Furthermore, he provides a way to talk about the loss of faith
and
the finding of faith in the shadow of Christianised systems that were proving untenable. Reviews and essays on Kierkegaard begin to appear in places like
The New York Times
,
The New Yorker
,
Esquire
, and, in England,
The Times Literary Supplement
. The literary influence is and will be felt in such diverse figures as Flannery O'Connor, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and David Lodge, to name but a few twentieth-century authors.

1944. United States. The author Richard Wright, best known for the novel
Native Son
(1940) and the soon to be issued autobiography
Black Boy
(1945), asks his friend Dorothy Norman to instruct him in existentialism and the works of Kierkegaard and others. Norman invites the exiled German theologian Paul Tillich and Hannah Arendt to her home in New York to form a study group with Wright. Wright becomes an enthusiastic reader of Kierkegaard, finding in him a voice for individuals seeking authenticity in the face of a hostile culture. Wright goes on to pen
The Outsider
, his exploration of the black experience in the US and the first American existentialist novel. The book opens with a quote from
The Concept of Anxiety
, and its main character is a conscious embodiment of Kierkegaardian ideas.

1944. United States. Howard A. Johnson, a former student of Lowrie and now curate of St. John's Church, has been invited to a dinner hosted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR expresses a love for the mystery stories of Dorothy Sayers. Johnson tentatively suggests that she is even more important as a theological writer. “
Many moderns
like Dorothy Sayers derive from Kierkegaard.” A few days later, Roosevelt's Cabinet colleague Frances Perkins finds the president in a thoughtful mood. “Frances, have you ever read Kierkegaard? . . . Well, you ought to read him,” he says enthusiastically. “It will teach you about the Nazis.
Kierkegaard explains the Nazis to me as nothing else ever has. I have never been able to make out why people who are obviously human beings could behave like that. They are human, yet they behave like demons. Kierkegaard gives you an understanding of what it is in man that makes it possible for these Germans to be so evil.”