Copenhagen Tales
Page 30
the moment, and the ethical man whose principles are
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352 n Notes on the Authors
duty, the norm, and the rules. Here are a few Kierke-
gaard sound bites: ‘I see it all perfectly; there are two
possible situations—one can either do this or that. My
honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or
do not do it—you will regret both.’ ‘Life is not a prob-
lem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.’
‘People demand freedom of speech to make up for
the freedom of thought which they seldom use.’
8. Jakob Ejersbo (1968–2008) Jakob Ejersbo, who died
of cancer aged only 40, was the most promising writer
of his generation. His first novel Nordkraft (2004) was
hailed by readers and critics alike as a great new Danish
work of gritty realism. ‘The Bra’ is from the short story
collection Superego (2000), which deals with issues of
youth culture, fashion, and alienation. Most of his early
years were spent in Tanzania. The superb ‘Africa tril-
ogy’ (Exile, Revolution, and Liberty), now also available
in English, was a publishing sensation when it came out
posthumously in Denmark in 2009.
9. Hans Christian Andersen In a much-quoted comment
on his stories, Andersen wrote: ‘They lay in my
thoughts like a seed-corn, requiring only a flowing
stream, a ray of sunshine, a drop of wormwood, for
them to spring forth and burst into bloom.’ It is the
‘drop of wormwood’, so evident in the two tales I have
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Notes on the Authors n 353
chosen, that is all too often missed in the popular
conception of the author. This tale is illustrated with
‘Flower Man’, one of Andersen’s many paper cuts.
10. Jan Sonnergaard (b. 1963) Jan Sonnergaard, a novel-
ist and playwright who has also published five short
story collections, was born in Copenhagen. Like his
contemporary Jakob Ejersbo, his debut collection of
stories aimed to break with what he saw as the
impoverished self-regarding literature of the 1980s,
replacing it with a raw and concrete realism. His
voice is often cynical, oozing with black humour. ‘Is
there Life after Love?’ (2000) bears out one of his
literary credos: ‘Exaggeration furthers understanding.’
11. Katrine Marie Guldager (b. 1966) Katrine Marie
Guldager, another contemporary specialist of the short
story, was born in a suburb of Copenhagen. She has
received many awards for her poetry and prose works,
including
the
critics’ prize for her collection
København (2004), from which ‘A Bench in Tivoli’ is
taken. It contains eleven ‘Copenhagen’ stories in which
a character who takes centre stage in one tale can
reappear as a minor character in another. Central to
the book is the sense of loneliness experienced by them
all, the way people pass by and through each other’s
universe in the big city.
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354 n Notes on the Authors
12. Naja Marie Aidt (b. 1963) Naja Marie Aidt, who now
lives in New York, was born in Greenland, where her
father was a teacher. The extreme contrasts she expe-
rienced there between light and dark, and the contrast
between Greenland and Copenhagen, where the fam-
ily returned when she was 7 and the parents later
divorced, have had a major impact on her work. She
has written poetry, song lyrics, plays, children’s
books, three volumes of short stories, and more
recently a novel, and is the recipient of many literary
prizes, including the prestigious Nordic Council’s Lit-
erature Prize, which she won in 2008.
13. Benny Andersen (b. 1929) Benny Andersen was born
in Vangede, a suburb of Copenhagen, and initially
earned his living as a light music pianist. Like so
many of Denmark’s contemporary writers he is a
jack-of-all-trades: musician and song writer, prolific
poet and short story writer, and author of many pieces
for theatre and radio. He writes for adults and children
alike and is the most widely read, most often sung,
and best loved of modern Danish lyricists. He is also
an outspoken campaigner for the rights of new immi-
grants, publishing Rubbish and Lies about Islam in
2012. A life-affirming sense of humour permeates his
work (his poetry collections include The Musical Eel
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Notes on the Authors n 355
and The Inner Bowler Hat), and on his 70th birthday
in 1999 Copenhagen honoured him with a torchlight
procession through the streets.
14. Meı¨r Goldschmidt (1819–1887) Meïr Goldschmidt, a
contemporary of Hans Christian Andersen and Kier-
kegaard, was born into a Jewish merchant family in
North Zealand and educated in Copenhagen. He was
the first writer to explore the problems facing the
Danish Jewish community from the inside, most nota-
bly in his first novel A Jew (1845). His novels and
novellas with Jewish protagonists deploy a special
mixture of irony and sympathy in their exploration
of his recurring themes of social rejection and neme-
sis, ‘Nightingale’ being a fine example in a lighter vein.
As a journalist Goldschmidt battled against social
injustice and the absolutist monarchy. and was im-
prisoned for a short period. He is now regarded as one
of the pioneers of modern and independent Danish
journalism. The linguistic notes to ‘Nightingale’ are
Goldschmidt’s own, as is the Yiddish spelling.
15. Anders Bodelsen (b. 1937) Anders Bodelsen, born in
Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, is a prolific professional
writer who in clear, realist prose examines how the
forces of competition and consumerism affect indivi-
duals, often clashing with their human values. In
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356 n Notes on the Authors
addition to over a dozen short story collections, he has
published many novels and thrillers in which, as he
says, ‘ordinary members of the steadily growing Dan-
ish middle class are put in extreme and painful situa-
tions’ where issues of motive, ambition, guilt, and fear
are explored. Many of his bestsellers have been made
into films, radio plays, and TV series. The illustration
is from Constantin Hansen’s ‘Portrait of Elise Købke’
(1850) in the National Museum of Art.
16. Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Karen Blixen, who also
wrote under the name of Isak Dinesen, was the most
internationally renowned Danish writer of the twentieth
century, best known today for Out of Africa and ‘Bab-
ette’s Feast’, both of which have been filmed. Proud to
call herself above all a storyteller, her many stories and
novellas (Seven Gothic Tal
es, Winter’s Tales, etc.) are
set back in time, often in exotic and imaginary envir-
onments, and told in a somewhat archaic and colourful
language overflowing with images and symbols. Her
main themes are life, art, love, fate, and identity. ‘Con-
versation One Night in Copenhagen’, the very last
story in Last Tales, clearly had special personal reso-
nance for an author looking back on her life’s work.
‘Sultan Orosmane’ is the male lead in Voltaire’s play
Zaıˋre (1732), a role played in real life by the young king
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Notes on the Authors n 357
Christian VII himself, whose citations in French all
come straight from the play. Rungstedlund, Karen
Blixen’s home just outside Copenhagen, now a
museum devoted to her life and work, had previously
been an inn, and here Johannes Ewald, the poet in the
tale, spent his happiest years before his death from ill
health and alcoholism aged 38 in 1781. Laurence
Sterne (aka ‘Yorick’), author of A Sentimental Journey
and Tristram Shandy, was a favourite writer of both
Ewald and Blixen.
17. Merete Bonnesen (1901–1980) Merete Bonnesen,
born in Copenhagen, was an all-round journalist
who worked all of her professional life for Politiken,
the left wing daily paper founded by Georg Brandes
and his brother Edvard in 1884 with the motto ‘the
paper of greater enlightenment’. One of the first
women journalists to work in the traditionally male
areas of politics and foreign affairs, she became for-
eign editor of the paper under the German occupa-
tion, and was for a short while interned in the
Horserød camp along with several hundred other
leading cultural figures. Her passionate commitment
to the people and events she describes is obvious from
this commemorative article she wrote for Politiken on
the 10th anniversary of Denmark’s liberation.
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Further Reading
and Viewing
Books
The usual guide books such as The Rough Guide to Co-
penhagen, Lonely Planet Copenhagen, Time Out Copenha-
gen, and Politiken’s Travel Guide: Copenhagen are all
useful for a first-time visitor. The City Museum
(Københavns Bymuseum) on Vesterbrogade follows the
history of the city from its medieval beginnings to the
present day, with special sections on Søren Kierkegaard
and new immigrants to the city. The Museum of the
Danish Resistance (Frihedsmuseet, beside Churchill Park,
under renovation after a major fire in 2013) is devoted
to the history of occupation and liberation 1940–5
(see Tale 17).
For those wanting to find out more about the country
and its capital the following books will be useful:
Patrick Kingsley’s How to be Danish, part reportage,
part travelogue, is a fun and easy introduction to contem-
porary Danish culture. Stig Hornshøj-Møller’s A Short
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Further Reading and Viewing n 359
History of Denmark is an ideal companion on a first visit.
Knud Jespersen’s A History of Denmark covers the story
from the Reformation, focusing on how the modern Dan-
ish state has evolved. Torben Ejlersen’s Copenhagen:
A Historical Guide is a very helpful introduction. Pernille
Stensgaard’s Copenhagen: People and Places has lovely
pictures and a lively text. Henrik Sten Møller’s Copenha-
gen, A Love Affair, also beautifully illustrated, is a personal
reflection on the city’s architectural heritage and recent
town planning.
Highly recommended novels by Danish authors with a
Copenhagen setting, all available in translation, are Henrik
Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per, Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring,
Hans Scherfig’s Stolen Spring, and Peter Hoegh’s Miss
Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Copenhagen Noir is a collection
of contemporary Danish crime stories, including one by
Naja Marie Aidt (see Tale 12).
Edmund Gosse wrote an entertaining book called Two
Visits to Denmark, 1872, 1874, telling of his meetings with
many famous Danes, including Hans Christian Andersen
and Georg Brandes, describing the enormous develop-
ment taking place in the city right at that time. Rose
Tremain’s Music and Silence is a hugely entertaining his-
torical novel about seventeenth-century Denmark and the
court of King Christian IV, the ‘architect king’ whose
vision shaped much of the old city centre. Each of Thomas
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360 n Further Reading and Viewing
E. Kennedy’s fine ‘Copenhagen Quartet’ of novels (Falling
Sideways, Kerrigan in Copenhagen, etc.) is in one way or
another a homage to the city and its citizens. Patricia
Berman’s In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nine-
teenth Century, now also available in paperback, is a very
attractive survey (see Tale 15).
Cinema and TV
Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s famous 1995
‘Dogme’ manifesto for movie-making without technical
wizardry relaunched Danish cinema, gaining it the inter-
national audience it had lost since the films of Carl Dreyer
over fifty years before. The classics are Vinterberg’s Festen
and von Trier’s Idioterne (The Idiots), a no-holds-barred
satire on Danish middle-class conformity (see Tales 3, 8,
and 12) set in the wealthy Copenhagen suburb of Søllerød.
Von Trier’s Riget (The Kingdom) is a wonderfully whacky
TV series set in Copenhagen’s main hospital, Rigshospita-
let (see Tale 5).
Susanne Bier, who initially worked in the Dogme
mode, has made a number of Copenhagen-based films of
great appeal, notably Open Hearts, Brothers, and After the
Wedding. Ole Madsen’s Flame and Citron is a powerful
film about resistance fighters against the Nazi occupation
set in Copenhagen. Nikolaj Arcel’s Oscar-nominated film
A Royal Affair concerns the ‘mad’ King Christian VII (see
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Further Reading and Viewing n 361
Tale 16) and his German physician Struensee, whose affair
with the king’s English wife, Caroline Mathilde, led to his
fall from favour and public execution.
The master of Copenhagen noir cinema is Nicolas
Refn, whose Pusher trilogy explores the dark underworld
of the city’s drug and gangland cultures. His influence is
evident in the best of the currently very popular Danish
noir TV thriller series: The Killing (series 1–3), and The
Bridge (series 1 and 2, with series 3 due soon), a Danish–
Swedish collaboration with at its heart the great Øresund
bridge between the two countries. Borgen is an excellent 3-
series TV drama about political and personal intrigues in
and around Christiansborg, the Danish parliament (see
&
nbsp; Tale 3).
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Publisher’s
Acknowledgements
1. H. C. Andersen, ‘Vanddråben’ from Nye Eventyr.
Reitzel 1848.
2. Henrik Pontoppidan, ‘To gange mødt’ from Skyer.
Gyldendal 1890.
3. Bjarne Reuter, ‘Et tricky tidspunkt’ from Halvvejen til
Rafael. Gyldendal 2006.
4. Eugen Kluev, ‘At fange en Dansker’ from Herfra min
verden går. Danish Pen 2009.
5. Dan Turèll, ‘Willadsen’ from Onkel Danny fortæller.
Borgen 1976.
6. Tove Ditlevsen, ‘En æggesnaps’ from Dommeren. Has-
selbach 1948.
7. Søren Kierkegaard, extract from Enten-Eller. Reitzel
1878.
8. Jakob Ejersbo, ‘Brystholder’ from Superego. Gyldendal
2000.
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Publisher’s Acknowledgements n 363
9. H. C. Andersen, ‘Den uartige dreng’ from Eventyr
fortalt for børn. Reitzel 1835.
10. Jan Sonnergaard. ‘Er der liv efter kærligheden?’ from
Sidste søndag i Oktober. Gyldendal 2000.
11. Katrine Marie Guldager, En bænk i Tivoli’ from
København. Gyldendal 2004.
12. Naja Marie Aidt, ‘Som englene flyver’ from Vandmær-
ket. Gyldendal 1993.
13. Benny Andersen, ‘Bukserne’ from Puderne. Borgen
1963.
14. Meïr Goldschmidt, ‘Avromche Nattergal’. Christian
Steen. 1871.
15. Anders Bodelsen, ‘Amelies øjne’ from 16 noveller.
Gyldendal 1957.
16. Karen Blixen, ‘Samtale om natten i København’ from
Sidste fortællinger. Gyldendal 1957.
17. Merete Bonnesen, ‘Den store lykkes fællesnat’. Politi-
ken, 4 May 1955.
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