ABSTRACT
When Søren Kierkegaard traveled to Berlin in the autumn of 1841, he attended lectures given by Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), Henrik Steffens (1773-1845) and the Hegelian Karl Werder (1806-93), those scholars he had been engaged with in his master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony, directly prior to his visit to Berlin. He did not, however, meet Heinrich Gustav Hotho, also a Berlin professor, nowadays remembered primarily as the editor of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, from which Kierkegaard quotes several times in his thesis. Hotho at that point was away on a research trip to Italy, but Kierkegaard probably would not have made an effort to contact him in person anyway. In his letters and papers there is not a single mention of Hotho’s name, nor did their paths cross during Kierkegaard’s later visits to Berlin.
