ABSTRACT
During the winter of 1880, the 60-year-old German apothecary-turned-writer Theodor Fontane met the 38-year-old Danish literary critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) at a party in Berlin. They conducted a fairly lengthy conversation, which Fontane mentioned in a letter to Moritz Lazarus on March 11, 1880.1 Fontane does not elaborate on what topics they discussed, but the recent appearance of the first German edition of Brandes’ monograph Sören Kierkegaard, published by J.A. Barth in 1879,2 makes it plausible that their conversation touched on Brandes’ views about his prematurely deceased countryman, who, had he not died so prematurely, would have been much closer to Fontane’s age than Brandes. Unfortunately for modern scholars, Fontane makes no mention of Kierkegaard’s name anywhere in his copious correspondence or papers, but that silence does not preclude the possibility that his conversation with Brandes prompted him to seek out Kierkegaard’s works. His encounter with Brandes made a strong enough impression on Fontane that, while working on the novel Unwiederbringlich in 1888, he asked their mutual friend and publisher Julius Rodenberg (1831-1914) to have Brandes verify the accuracy of his portrayal of Denmark “with regard to personal and political elements.”3
