fast that it was hard to take in. In this too reactions differed
widely. Some sat paralysed in front of the radio, others
shot out of their seats as though they’d received an electric
shock. Some were in floods of tears, others were in such a
state of confusion that almost angrily they started asking
everyone around them what the voice had said, and if it
could possibly be true. But even for the paralysed it lasted
but a few seconds, though it felt so long, that instant of
stillness which for many remains in memory as the most
unforgettable thing of all.
* Christmas Møller’s son had been killed in April while serving with the Grenadier Guards. As an outspoken anti-collaborationist, Møller had been forced to surrender his seat as a Conservative member of the Danish parliament.
With the communist Mogens Fog and others he founded the non-partisan underground Resistance paper Frit Danmark (Free Denmark), and in 1942
fled with his family to London where he became a famed broadcaster to occupied Denmark.
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The Night of Great Shared Happiness n 341
Then everyone regained, in the most literal sense of the
term, their freedom of movement. It carried them in
one bound to the windows, where breaking voices could
be heard shrilling rather than shouting from house to
house across the streets: We are free, we are free! The
Germans have capitulated, Denmark is free!
From that moment on everything unfolded in won-
drous confusion. People raced out of doors, consumed by
the one desire to be together in their joy and share this
ecstasy with each other. From the city’s outskirts, from
suburban roads and from side streets, people came run-
ning with flags in their hands—from wherever they could
lay hold of them in a hurry—large and small, one so long
that it waved like a tongue of fire from the hand of a young
student who like a relay runner for peace dashed through
the narrow streets round the university, drawing everyone
along in his wake. Singing crowds followed after him with
Danish and Allied flags in quantities and sizes which
normally only conjurers can pull out of top hats.
But this was indeed a kind of magic which flew in the
face of all norms. Trams were held up and carried on
towards the city centre with knots of people clinging to
them or sitting right up on the roof. Somewhere, or in
many places simultaneously, the cry went up: To Amalien-
borg! To the royal palace! But Amalienborg that night was
a barred fortress, not yet liberated. It was under guard,
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
342 n Merete Bonnesen
albeit by the Danish police unit which had defended the
palace during the battles of 19th September 1944, and now
lay blocked off by barbed wire defences thrown across
Frederiksgade, the Colonnade, and Amaliegade, so that
the forerunners, the fastest among the throng of people,
had to halt at the Yellow Palace. All the way back to
St Annæ Plads, along Strandstræde to Kongens Nytorv
pressed the crowd of tens of thousands growing wilder and
ever more threatening as they joined together in a great
clamour for the King. But by agreement the capitulation
could not be made official until 8 o’clock next morning,
and so the King’s aide-de-camp had to resort to extending
the King’s greetings from the roof of a car along with a plea
for patience, and his request to go home was later rein-
forced by the chief of the Amalienborg police.
So it was back to the Town Hall Square. On the way
through Kongens Nytorv a vast swallow-tailed national
flag could now be seen suspended from the balcony of
the Royal Theatre. The actors, who at 8.30 had been sitting
in their dressing rooms removing their make-up after the
evening’s performance, had heard the shouts of peace
travel from the radio in the porter’s little lodge in the
lobby right up through all the corridors of the wardrobe
department, and with flowing robes and wigs askew they
pressed together faces shiny with greasepaint, in ecstatic
embraces.
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The Night of Great Shared Happiness n 343
Elsewhere in the city things were very different. Am-
bulances sped off to hospitals with sirens blaring, trans-
porting the wounded from locations where the Hipos or SS
soldiers were still active even now they knew the game was
up. There was shooting all over the city, in Ǿsterbro, by
the school in Alsgade, on Knippelsbro, and ward windows
in the Kommune hospital were shattered by gunfire in
Farimagsgade. The hospital was immediately put on a
state of high alert, and so many wounded were brought
in that the lighter cases had to wait for hours on their
stretchers.
In Store Kongensgade a crowd was going berserk in
front of the editorial office of Fædrelandet.* When it
looked most ominous, a group broke through in a surprise
attack and occupied the hated paper. It was people from
the famous underground paper Information who went
into action.
All this time Christiansborg was springing to life too.
At 8.30 prime minister designate Vilhelm Buhl, appointed
by the liberation government, was sitting in the parliament
restaurant together with a couple of MPs, and this is where
he learned what had happened from a pair of breathless
Christiansborg police who came hurrying over to them.
He went straight to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and
* The Danish Nazi Party newspaper.
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344 n Merete Bonnesen
from there attempts were made to contact as many of the
new government’s 18 members as possible. It was not at all
straightforward. The fact that they were still spread out
across the city, a good number of them in hideouts known
to very few, the fact that they were not together and that
many hadn’t even heard the announcement on the BBC,
whose word was normally wolfed down every night like
our daily bread, shows better than anything how unex-
pected was the news.
Hans Hedtoft* was dining at the Nordland with his
contact man Herman Dedichen, the engineer, when the
news was broken to them by the waiter, who served it up
together with the dessert. Hedtoft set off for Christians-
borg, and on the way chanced to see the German sentry on
fortified Vesterport reverse the order of the day, lay down
his gun, and walk back into the fortress which now became
his prison.
After much searching and telephoning, Mogens Fog
was collected in a ministerial car from his undercover
address in Charlottenlund where the clamour in the street
had disturbed him in the midst of drafting the very Liber-
ation proclamation which, as spokesman for the Freedom
* Social Democrat Party leader, twice prime minister in the post-war years.
&nbs
p; Like Christmas Møller, forced to resign his seat in parliament due to his stand against the Nazi occupation, and later instrumental in the rescue of the Danish Jews (October 1943).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
The Night of Great Shared Happiness n 345
Council, he would deliver on the radio when peace came.
He too was taken by surprise—in the middle of a full stop.
In another safe house on Strandboulevarden, the leader
of the armed resistance, Frode Jakobsen,* had just con-
cluded a meeting with members of the military command,
in addition to three representatives from the army, the
navy, and the police, together with Ole Lippman, the Brit-
ish forces liaison officer—and alone again in his hideaway
Frode Jakobsen, too, had received the news through an
open window. All that hectic night he spent between meet-
ings in Christiansborg and the command centre in the
‘Stjernen’ brewery, while also working on the announce-
ment which at eight in the morning of 5th May he would
read anonymously over the radio, to the effect that from
now on members of the resistance would be taking over
responsibility for law and order.
But by then they had already seized power. For during
the night these young men with their blue-red-and-white
armbands, steel helmets, and Sten guns had occupied
every street corner and all large buildings. A hidden
army had sprung out of the pavement armed with weap-
ons which many of them had had a hand in concocting in
their clandestine factories.
* Journalist and politician, author of an important memoir of the Resistance.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
346 n Merete Bonnesen
Even so—they weren’t to be used in war! And it was
probably this sense of what the country had almost mirac-
ulously been spared that lent that night its undertone of
profound thankfulness. In Denmark there were 110,000
heavily armed German soldiers, and one can only guess at
what horrors a battle between a small intrepid force and
those 110,000 veterans of war would have led to.
That is why it was not simply a jubilant but also a mild
and kindly city which celebrated those first hours of free-
dom. All that filled our hearts was released in songs and
rejoicing in the Town Hall Square. Around midnight chief
editor Niels Hasager spoke to the crowd from the Politiken
building. On 9th April 1940, he said, the American papers
had broken the news of what had befallen us under the
headline ‘Denmark Murdered’. But tonight we could look
out over the square and see we were still alive and join in
the cheers for our country, and the wish for Norway’s
happy liberation.
He then handed over to Aage Schoch, a prominent
member of the Freedom Council, who now found the
words to express what lay deepest in everyone’s mind—
thoughts for the young dead, the sailors, the soldiers, the
airmen, the paratroops, and those who had fallen as sabo-
teurs or perished in the concentration camps, and those
the Germans had executed and tortured without mercy up
to very last hour. It seemed a great sigh rose into the night
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The Night of Great Shared Happiness n 347
sky, and a long silence fell like a blanket over the throng of
people.
Through tears, at that midnight hour, peace had come
at last, a painful, hard-earned peace—with a morning still
to follow, when, as three hundred years earlier when the
siege of the city was lifted, we could lay down our heads
without fear ‘every time a gate or a door opened’, and
where all hearts could share in the fulfilment of the 300-
year-old prayer:
May this lovely land
Now flower and fruit
Let truth have dominion
And justice be done.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Notes on the Authors
1. Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) H. C. Andersen,
as he is always known in Denmark, is the country’s best
loved storyteller. The son of a cobbler and a washer-
woman, he came to Copenhagen at the age of fourteen to
be trained at the Royal Theatre, but was finally rejected
as lacking ‘both the talent and the appearance necessary
for the stage’ (see Tale 14!). He went on to become one
of the greatest literary celebrities in Europe. No works
other than the Bible have been translated into more
languages than Andersen’s fairy tales. Although these
are what he will always be remembered for, he also
wrote a number of plays, vivid travelogues from his
many journeys, as well as poetry and an acclaimed
autobiography.
2. Henrik Pontoppidan (1857–1943) After breaking with
the narrow Lutheranism of his childhood in Jutland,
Pontoppidan worked as a teacher and journalist in Co-
penhagen, allying himself with the cultural radicalism of
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Notes on the Authors n 349
Georg Brandes and the political left. His many novels
and stories are imbued with a desire for social progress,
though often despairing of its realization. ‘Twice Met’ is
set in the political crisis following the attempted assassi-
nation of the long-serving right-wing chief minister
Jacob Estrup in October 1885, an event which gave the
autocratic Estrup a useful excuse to consolidate his
regime by tightening press censorship, criminalizing
opposition politics, and setting up the hated ‘Blue Gen-
darmes’, a special police surveillance force. In 1917
Pontoppidan received the Nobel Prize for literature for
‘his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Den-
mark.’ Lykke-Per, his greatest novel, has finally appeared
in English as Lucky Per (2010).
3. Bjarne Reuter (b. 1950) Bjarne Reuter was born in
Brønshøj, a suburb of Copenhagen and the location
for many of his hugely popular stories for children
and teenagers. As well as over 60 books for young
readers, he has published novels, thrillers, short stories,
plays, an autobiography, and film and TV scripts. ‘A
Tricky Moment’, with its mixture of humour and
despair at contemporary society, is typical of his adult
stories. The ‘shabby’ TV City was the forerunner of the
present DR Byen (Denmark Radio City) near Kastrup
airport, opened in 2006.
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350 n Notes on the Authors
4. Eugen Kluev (b. 1954) Eugen (Evgeny) Kluev. born in
Russia, has been resident in Denmark since 1996. In
Russia he is considered a master of the absurd, best
known as a novelist, playwright, and children’s writer.
In Denmark he has published widely on Russian and
Danish social questions. ‘To Catch a Dane’ is from the
2009 Danish PEN publication Herfra min verden går
(From Here My World Begins), an an
thology of work
by foreign writers living in Denmark.
5. Dan Turèll (1946–1993) Prolific poet and journalist,
popular thriller writer, and TV performer, ‘Uncle
Danny’ Turèll believed that an artist’s work is all of a
piece, a unique ‘oeuvre’. He was into the American
Beat poets, jazz, drugs, anarchism, and Zen Buddhism.
Above all he loved his city of Copenhagen, its life and
noise and all the little stories that lurked everywhere.
When he died of cancer aged 47, the city lost one of its
most beloved inhabitants. His friend Peter Laugesen is
today one of Denmark’s leading poets, who like Turèll
performs his poetry with backing from his own band.
‘Rex regulus’, Willadsen's favourite bird in Turèll’s
story, is presumably Regulus regulus, the goldcrest.
6. Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) Tove Ditlevsen, who
started writing poetry at the age of twelve, was born
into a poor working class family in the Vesterbro district
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Notes on the Authors n 351
of Copenhagen where the biggest employer was the
Carlsberg brewery. Though she considered herself pri-
marily a poet, it is often in her short stories that she is at
her most lyrical, and at the same time most precise. Her
work often concerns children and young people and the
damage inflicted on them by adults and by society. Later
in life, when she had become a household name for her
journalism and memoirs, she suffered from a sense of
having betrayed her working-class roots, and the work
circles round the subsequent loss of identity. Her themes
of insecurity and depression, love and pain, reflect her
own life experiences. She was married four times, and
committed suicide in March 1976.
7. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Søren Kierkegaard,
the ‘father’ of existentialism, was the author of numer-
ous works of philosophy, religious thought, and social
criticism. His daily walks through Copenhagen made
him a familiar figure (see illustration), and like Dan
Turèll 150 years later he drew inspiration from the city
and its people. In his first great work, Either/Or (Enten–
Eller, 1843), from which I have chosen a passage from
the section called ‘Diary of a Seducer’, Kierkegaard lets
two types of men speak with equal conviction: the
godless aesthete who lives purely for the pleasure of
Copenhagen Tales Page 29