The article dwells on a problem, referring to Poul Riceurs book “The History and the truth”, of using the past for criticizing the present political and cultural situation as one of the possible relation between the historical past in the novel and the present moment, when the author wrote it. Henrik Stangerup’s historical novel “Brother Jacob” (1991) has several levels: the historical, which depicts the Reformation in Europe seen by the franciscan monk, the philosophical, reconstructing the way to God in the kierkegaardian understanding of Knight of Faith, and the sharp critic of the cultural and political situation in Denmark in the 1990s.
