Between Two Bombardments

The catalog entry for Hans Brøchner gives the professor: Copenhagen chair from 1857, the post-Hegelian who read Kierkegaard as ethics rather than theology, Nielsen’s opponent in 1868, Høffding’s teacher. A biographical page from the local-history site Fredericias Historie, drawing mainly on the philologist Paul Elsner, gives the life that produced him — and it turns out to explain, better than the bibliography alone can, why the books fall where they do.¹

Fredericia, 1820–1836

Brøchner was born in Fredericia on 3 May 1820, son of the merchant Thøger Brøchner and Johanne Kirstine Kjeldsen. The name had reached Denmark by a long road: a German family from Sangerhausen in Saxony, a cloth-weaver murdered by marauding soldiers in 1625, a surviving son who took up trade in Randers in 1650 and began spelling the name Brøchner. Every one of his male descendants after that went into the church, until Hans’s own branch turned to trade again in Fredericia.

His mother died in 1826, when he was six. The rector of the town’s Latin school, Erik Peter Rosendahl, took an early interest in the boy’s memory — “magelløs,” in the source’s word, matchless — and pushed him ahead of his own age group, particularly in mathematics. A dispute with one of the other teachers led his father to withdraw him in 1836; Rosendahl dismissed him privately rather than let the falling-out cost him a proper leaving. That autumn he went up to Copenhagen.

From theology to the Persian Jews

He read theology first, as the family expected, and took the degree with distinction in 1841. Then he set it aside for oriental languages and what the source calls, more broadly, the great questions of the human spirit. The 1845 magister dissertation that resulted — on the condition of the Jewish people under the Persians, catalogued here as jødiske-folk — was not a random choice of subject. Fredericia was, unusually for a Danish provincial town, a haven for confessional minorities, and Brøchner had grown up watching services in its synagogue, whose ceiling was painted as the heavens. The dissertation is the first place the interest in a non-Christian religious tradition, later turned toward Christianity’s own claims in Problemet om Tro og Viden and Om det Religiøse, shows up in his writing at all.

Rome, twice, and Constanza Testa

He was in Rome as early as 1842, and there became engaged to Constanza Testa, a young woman from a prominent Roman family, with whom he lived in her parents’ house. A second, longer stay began on 1 April 1847, this time with the poet Christian Molbech; Lorenz Frølich painted the two of them together, philosopher and poet. The engagement did not survive contact with religion: when Constanza’s parents made their consent conditional on his renouncing Protestantism, Brøchner made the roughly 300-mile journey back to Rome in 1852 for what turned out to be the conversation that ended it. He kept a daguerreotype of her over his desk for the rest of his life.

The town burns twice

His father died in February 1846, and his brother Bertel took over the family merchant house on the strength of the capital Hans and their sister had left in his keeping. It cost them both dearly. Brøchner heard of the outbreak of the Schleswig war from Paris; his sister’s husband, a lieutenant named Obel, was killed at the battle of Schleswig on 23 April 1848. Thirteen months later, during the bombardment of Fredericia on 3 June 1849, the Prussian and allied guns took Bertel’s merchant house — sited, unluckily, opposite a brewery whose chimney was the one landmark visible over the town’s ramparts — and burned it with sixteen direct hits. The family fortune went with it. Fifteen years after that, on Palm Sunday 1864, Fredericia was bombarded a second time; Brøchner, by then a widower in Copenhagen, learned the details from the same sister, who had since moved to the capital. His brother’s rebuilt property was mostly spared this time — one shell, some broken fittings.

An interlude in politics

In the winter of 1854 the National Liberals persuaded him to stand for the Fredericia seat in the Folketing. He won it easily — 544 votes against his opponent’s 134, despite a committee organized against him and a rival backed by the minister Hall himself — and took his seat when the Rigsdag convened on 18 December 1854. It did not last: within the historical record used here, his parliamentary career is a single winter, dwarfed by everything either side of it.

Marriage, and a second solitude

On 18 June 1862 he married Ingeborg Ipsen; they had two children, Benedikt and Ingeborg. She died in 1866, and Brøchner returned, in the source’s phrase, to being “the lonely, quiet professor” for the rest of his life. (The same page also attaches an identical marriage — same bride’s name, same date, same 1866 death — to his father, who by its own account had already been dead sixteen years by 1862; that paragraph is almost certainly the present one, misplaced by whoever compiled the page, and is not repeated here as a separate event.)

The late books, and the students

Only in his last years, on the source’s account, did Brøchner set down the systematic exposition of his mature position — a religious idealism — across the five substantial volumes that anchor this catalog: Problemet om Tro og Viden and Om det Religiøse (1868–69), the Bidrag (1869) and the two-volume Philosophiens Historie i Grundrids (1873–74). Before that the record is comparatively thin: a youthful pamphlet against infant baptism (1843), the Persian-Jews dissertation (1845), the Spinoza monograph (1857), and journalism. It is a career weighted almost entirely toward its own end, and the biography suggests why: the 1840s and early 1850s went to theology abandoned, two stretches in Rome, a broken engagement, a burned inheritance and a war; the 1860s went to a marriage that lasted four years. The books came after there was less, personally, left to interrupt them.

What did not wait was the teaching. Harald Høffding, by his own later account, came closer to Brøchner than to any other of his teachers, and dated his break with Rasmus Nielsen’s philosophy directly to Brøchner’s lectures. Georg Brandes dedicated Hovedstrømninger to him. Both debts are why this catalog holds, alongside Brøchner’s own books, the excerpt from Brandes’s Levned recalling him and the unpublished lecture manuscripts — nine courses of Nachlass, still unedited — through which most students actually met him.

The last decade

A chest illness shadowed his final ten years. He died on 17 December 1875 and was buried on the 23rd; the university’s farewell was given by Rector Ussing. He had published one thing that spring and summer before — the Giordano Bruno article of April 1875, his last piece of writing — and would be read, the following year, in the Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard he had drafted in the darker weeks of the winter just after his wife’s death and left to appear after his own. The source closes him out as “en trofast søn af Mindernes By” — a faithful son of the City of Memories, Fredericia’s own name for itself.

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