ABSTRACT
If one ignores Hermann Gottsched (1848-1916) and the first-controversialtranslator of Kierkegaard’s collected works, Christoph Schrempf (1860-1944), Rudolf Kassner (1873-1959) together with Theodor Haecker (1879-1945) are the two great figures in the German-language reception at the beginning of the twentieth century to have introduced and presented the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. Haecker emphasized Kierkegaard as a cultural critic and, among other things, translated parts of A Literary Review under the title Kritik der Gegenwart, which was published a few weeks before the outbreak of war in 1914 in the important journal Der Brenner. By contrast, Kassner’s interest in Kierkegaard was concerned with the tension between art and life, life and thought, which he portrayed first and foremost in a long and widely read essay published in Die Neue Rundschau as early as 1906.1 From Haecker, who was the more influential of the two, one can trace connections to, among others, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931) and Hermann Broch (1886-1951), while Kassner in his age exercised an influence on especially Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1879-1929), and the young Georg Lukács (1885-1971).
