6533b7d5fe1ef96bd1265069

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Staging Life — Interpretation of Life in Kierkegaard’s

subject

description

“Whether custom and social life in England is of the stuff of primieval rock or whether it consists in seams and glacial debris will become more and more apparent in the course of a few years. At times, the wanderer is overcome by a sensation comparable to that felt when climbing Rosstrappe [an elevation near Magdeburg in present-day Saxony-Anhalt], where the eye ascends over millions of seemingly loose chunks of slate”.1 These lines, published on the 21st of May, 1870 in the German newspaper Neue Preussische Zeitung by the observer Theodore Fontane, might seem, at first sight, to not be a matter of special interest to readers a century apart (unless we are interested in the literary styles and historical details of the times). It appears to be merely a journalistic observation about a foreign country, unless it was an example of “Unreal” correspondence. For, “what foreign correspondents would presumably hardly welcome today as journalistic routine in the nineteenth century: the newsman stayed at his home desk in, say, Berlin, and wrote as if he were putting pen to paper in a distant place such as London. He was an ‘unechte’, a ‘fictitious’ or ‘unreal’ correspondent as Theodor Fontane described his work as political writer... ”2 It could be regarded as mere historical curiosity but, at the same time, the very concept of “unreal” or “fictitious” correspondence sheds some light on the problem to be touched upon in the present paper, that is, the conceptualization and development of the idea of life as the staged life [to stage — to perform or arrange for public show; to put on] with reference to the work Concluding Unscientific Postcript, written by the great Dane Soren Kierkegaard.