Moritz

Moritz is Smilla’s father, a physician whose composed, cultivated life stands in uneasy contrast to the Greenlandic knowledge and spatial freedom that shape his daughter. He is neither simply absent nor fully available to her: he helps her investigate Johannes Loyen, yet Smilla recognizes how easily a moment of present closeness can tempt her to believe that he can also contain the past she carries from Greenland.

Identity and Background

Moritz came to Greenland in his early thirties and met Smilla’s mother there. Smilla remembers her mother as living across the categories assigned to men and women: she gave birth, cleaned skins, and maintained social ties, but also shot, paddled a kayak, and hauled home meat. In Smilla’s account, this is not a conventional change of sex but a life that holds apparently opposing capacities together. Her reflections on Inuit creation stories and historical accounts of women hunting like men give that experience a wider cultural context, although the narration presents her mother’s life as particular rather than as a simple illustration of a rule.

A formative episode from her mother’s childhood clarifies the conditions behind that practical competence. When she was about twelve, she accompanied her father onto the April ice. He missed a seal because his optic nerve was calcifying; within a year, he would be totally blind. Left behind while he checked a long line, she considered the restricted possibilities available to her family: inadequate welfare, starvation, or dependence on relatives who were themselves poor. When the seal surfaced again, she shot it. Moritz’s arrival in Greenland thus belongs to a family history in which survival depended on precise knowledge and action, not merely on the protections or categories available from outside.

Moritz and Smilla’s Relationship

The relationship is shown through visits and correspondence rather than a full reconciliation. When Smilla comes to speak with him, Moritz fills the time with his new paintings, the memoirs he is writing, and his piano practice. She understands this as stalling: he is preparing for the impact of the business she has come to discuss, which, as she says, has nothing to do with him. His talk is also a gesture of gratitude because she lets him continue, but neither of them mistakes the conversation for a resolution of their distance. Smilla eventually asks about Johannes Loyen.

Moritz does, however, provide information that materially advances her inquiry. After Smilla walks home across Knippels Bridge, she finds a letter from him: a single friendly line on expensive watermarked paper, newspaper clippings held together with a paper clip, and a typed list of Loyen’s scientific publications. The sources include newspaper archives and Index Medicus, drawing on a database in Stockholm. Moritz has added marginal explanations to the bibliography, which ranges across crash injuries and toxicology, Arctic medicine, trichinosis and frostbite, influenza around the Barents Sea, parasites, and the use of X-rays. The letter turns his professional and research capacities into a concrete form of help, even as its formality remains conspicuous to Smilla.

Her response is restrained but reciprocal: she writes a brief thank-you, returns it in an addressed envelope, and then reads the clippings. The exchange establishes a limited channel of cooperation. Moritz does not take over her investigation, and Smilla does not treat the information as a substitute for intimacy; his usefulness and their emotional distance remain side by side.

Professional Life and Public Manner

Moritz’s manner is carefully made. Smilla remembers his handwriting as having changed after he took evening classes while she was living with him. Within two classes, he had forgotten his old hand and had not yet learned the new one; after three months, he wrote like a child. Smilla had to forge his signature on bills because he feared patients would relapse on seeing the medicine man’s unsteady writing. Later his hand became controlled, and the world admired it. To Smilla, that admired script looks snobbish. The detail makes his cultivated self-presentation tangible while preserving the vulnerable, awkward stage beneath it.

His research dossier on Loyen further establishes the breadth of his medical and historical interests. The publications move from work in the forties and fifties on trauma and toxicology toward Arctic medicine in the sixties, then through parasite studies and radiography. Smilla singles out three papers on X-raying mummies: one on Egyptian mummies at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, one on pre-Buddhist embalming in Malaysia and Thailand, and one on the Qilakitsoq mummies of Greenland. That range makes him a useful intermediary between medical institutions and the history of Greenland, without making him the authority on Smilla’s lived understanding of the place.

His cultivated world also appears in his regular outings with Benja. Every other day, Moritz picks her up after her afternoon rehearsals and they eat at Savarin in Nyhavn. He likes the food, the prices that stimulate his ego, and the view through the full-height plate-glass windows; Benja likes that passersby can see her through them. They have their own table by the window and their own waiter, and repeatedly order the same meal: Moritz has lamb kidneys, while Benja chooses a bowl of rabbit-like fodder. The ritual joins appetite and display, and shows how social position is performed in a public dining room.

Relationships, Memory, and Limits

Moritz’s relationship with Benja is organized around this repeated routine, while his relationship with Smilla remains more guarded and uneven. In one conversation, Smilla invokes confidentiality in answer to a question about what Føjl would say; immediately afterward, the narration follows Moritz and Benja through their established restaurant ritual. The juxtaposition places the secrecy of Smilla’s dealings beside the predictable visibility of her father’s social life, without suggesting that the two worlds have been reconciled.

The account of Victor Halkenhvad supplies another perspective on Moritz’s professional identity. Victor writes that it has been ten years since Moritz last visited, and says that he has Alzheimer’s: each day, he feels another piece of his brain peeling away. He addresses Moritz as a financially successful doctor and anticipates losing the ability to remember those who betrayed him. The letter preserves Victor’s accusation and fear as his own words; it does not establish the nature of the alleged betrayals. Its force lies in the distance between the remembered visit and the present, and in the possibility that memory itself will erase the grievances Victor still directs at Moritz.

Smilla’s reflections define the deepest limit on their closeness. She argues that another culture cannot be understood through an imposed grading scale; it must be approached by living within it, asking to be tolerated as a guest, and learning its language. Understanding, when it arrives, is wordless, while explanation risks distancing the observer from what is being described. She feels the urge to explain to Moritz why she is connected to Inuit life, but recognizes that talking about Qaanaaq makes what was never truly hers begin to recede again. In a moment of happiness beside him, she imagines that because he can meet her in the present, he might also be able to contain her childhood. The wish itself reveals what remains unresolved: affection opens a possibility of shared understanding, but does not erase the distance between Moritz’s life and the Greenlandic experience that formed Smilla.