Dear H,
I never feel fully comfortable traveling in a country whose language I don’t know, but my plan of making a short visit to Copenhagen didn’t include learning Danish. Friends assured me, though, that nearly every Dane (at least those living in cities) speaks English, and that proved true. Besides that, Danish is a Germanic language, distantly related to English, and I know German, so I assumed cognates would be recognizable. Meanwhile, signage in the Danish capital isn’t “dual language,” only Danish, and, alas, I could rarely decipher it. Example: how easy is it to see in the words “Kongen og Dronningen,” “the King and Queen”? I did look up the name Copenhagen (in Danish, “København”), in which one might discern the word “haven” and extrapolate from it to the sense of “harbor.” But the question about the first two syllables remains until someone tells you that they mean “merchants.” København means “merchants’ harbor,” a fact that throws some light on Denmark’s prosperity. The country’s access to the Baltic Sea has made it a trading hub since time immemorial. Denmark is remarkably prosperous when you consider that its population is smaller than New York City’s by a margin of more than two million. Also, the total land area is about half the extent of South Carolina and includes 407 islands, only about 70 of which are inhabited. Yet the national economy ranks 38th globally. Trade in pharmaceuticals, wind turbines, and dairy products accounts for a portion of the GDP, but the service economy now outstrips trade by far, providing 80 percent of all jobs. The populace is well educated, partly because advanced education is free for anyone qualified, and the safety net of the national health system is there to forestall bankruptcy resulting from medical costs.
Americans can be forgiven for envying a polity so rationally planned and smoothly run. Granted, taxes are high, and prices are high. In the European Union, Denmark’s cost of living ranks among the top two or three. If you’re having dinner with drinks, expect a bill of $60 or $70 per person, and if your meal is served at a grand luxe restaurant, that will be higher. The absence of English translations for Danish signage might be considered a feature of Denmark’s self-affirmation; if so, then perhaps the decision not to use the euro is another, unless finance ministers urged it for purely prudential reasons. Prices are always given in the Danish kroner, at present worth about 16 cents. Yet every restaurant, museum or shop accepts a credit card, and during my stay, I never bothered to acquire and use kroner currency.
The Danes seem to manage their economy well, organizing it in a socialist mode so that the gap between the middle class and the rich is nothing like what we have in the US. The Macrotrend agency computes the number of people living in poverty at only 0.8 percent, which is low compared to other countries. These days, travelers expect to see people panhandling in all major European cities, but in Copenhagen I saw none. Everyday people on the streets wore clean, casual clothes and generally looked healthy. I got the sense that fitness is taken seriously, with the result that there isn’t much of the life-threatening obesity we’ve become accustomed to at home, though older Danish men do tend to have a beer gut. Beer drinking regularly begins at lunch and continues thereafter, tons of Carlsberg or Tuborg bottles in the early morning dropped noisily into bar and restaurant bins throughout the city. Yet I didn’t see any spectacular drunkenness as night advanced, nothing like what you expect in London’s West End on a Saturday night.
During my daily walks, I noticed that people readily returned my glance, even young women, not something that often happens in big cities. It wasn’t clear to me whether that represented mere curiosity or else an invitation. If the latter, it was often intriguing. Most Danes are shorter in stature than their Swedish counterparts, and the typical face is small and round. It’s what the French call “gamin,” cute or elfin, rather than grandly beautiful or handsome. I’m not speaking of that part of the population that originated elsewhere. About 16 percent is foreign-born or else descended from immigrants, and among those I saw, unusual beauty was not absent. What struck me was the fact that people in this category give an impression of unapologetic assurance, of being fully at home, no matter that their melanin levels might be more elevated than what is standard in Scandinavia. Whether that should be taken as a sign that ethnic prejudice isn’t a grave problem in Denmark, I don’t know. Statistics establish that the foreign born are less well-off, indeed, often living below the poverty line; and hate crime based on race does occur. Yet the overall crime rate is comparatively low, Denmark ranking as the second most peaceful country in the world after Iceland. In major cities we normally expect to see police in the streets or cruising in police cars. During my ten-day stay, I saw none, unless they were unidentifiable plainclothesmen.
On two or three occasions, I asked locals to tell me what a Danish sign or product description meant. Without any hesitation or condescension, they gave the answer and were willing to go further in conversation if I wanted to. Goodwill, a relaxed wish to be cordial and helpful, was the note struck. I never heard any loud arguments on the street, just accents of mild admonition between friends or married couples. Drivers weren’t aggressive or eager to hit the car horn. The typical pedestrian waited patiently for the green signal before crossing streets even if no car was in sight in either direction. Nor did they say anything to me when I kept to my New York City habits and jaywalked. I guess that fell into the category of tolerance for the foreigner and his non-civic ways.
Copenhagen is a city attractive in a traditional mode, most of the buildings in the center old, with no skyscrapers at all. The spires of the Christiansborg Palace and Rosenborg Castle rise higher than anything else, suggesting that the city might have an ordinance against buildings exceeding that height, just as Philadelphia, by an unwritten accord, used to prevent new constructions from going higher than the hat on the statue of William Penn atop City Hall. Among the old buildings, Amalienborg Palace, the royal residence in Copenhagen, is perhaps the most impressive. That’s partly because it consists of four separate neoclassical structures of the same design angled around a large square at the center of which is the equestrian statue of Frederik V. The ensemble was originally built for four noble families and only later acquired by the royal family. The building where the present King Frederik X and his Australian wife Queen Mary reside keeps a palace guard very much like those at Buckingham Palace, not excluding the tall bear-fur hats (or helmets, if that’s a better term).
Amalienborg is on the way to the “iconic” bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (published in 1837), so I decided to join the pedestrian crowds trundling along to see it. Andersen’s stories were some of my favorite reading during childhood, though the one I liked best was “The Little Match Girl,” which seemed much less fanciful than the tale of a sea sprite who yearned to be a human being and therefore sacrificed the “downward fish” part of her body. (And having done so, still doesn’t win her shining prince.) For whatever reason, it’s Andersen’s most beloved fairy tale and has been re-imagined many times in several genres. In 2023 there was the live-action Disney film, directed by Rob Marshall, which stirred up controversy because the heroine was portrayed as having African ancestry. I sometimes think that people don’t have enough to do and take up unimportant causes to escape boredom. I neither resolved to avoid the film nor tried to see it, assuming it was made for children. It’s handy to remember that children come in all age groups now.
But I did get to the statue, after a twenty-minute walk along the Langelinie quay with its colorful passing vessels. The trek concluded with a stroll through Langelinie Park, adjacent to the Kastellet, a former fortress now repurposed as a historic park. And there at last she was, not-so-little mermaid statue, half reclining on a rock quite close to land. When I arrived, more than a hundred people were gathered there to pay homage. The sculptor Edvard Eriksen completed the work in 1913, portraying the sea sprite after her renunciation of scales and fins for human legs. As art, it is undistinguished yet seems to inspire in viewers either sentimental or else violent emotions. The sweet-natured heroine has been decapitated twice and even blown off her rock with explosives, not to mention being drenched a few times with paint by angry vandals. Such are the risks of becoming “iconic.” But city officials always foot the bill for repairs because she is part of the Danish legend, a draw to many tourists every year. I guess I would sum up my reaction to the work by reversing Samuel Johnson’s remark about the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland: the sculpture wasn’t worth seeing but, yes, worth going to see.
An activity more in keeping with personal predilections was spending several hours in the National Gallery of Denmark. Given the northerly location of Copenhagen, it was less a surprise to see a generous number of paintings by Cranach than the standard Italian masters represented—Tintoretto, Titian, Parmigianino, and Guardi, for example. The French school is also there in force, arresting examples being Matisse’s self-portrait and the portrait of his wife, both done during his Fauvist period. But the special excellence of the museum resides in its very full collection of works by Danish painters, figures seldom represented in other national museums. I’m not sure what explains it, but beginning in the early nineteenth century, Denmark saw an uprush of artistic fervor, so much so that the period is now referred to as the “Golden Age” of Danish art. Encouraged by German Romanticism, Danish painters like Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and Christen Købke led the charge, producing works of high quality and setting the example for painters coming after. Eckersberg had studied in Paris with Jacques-Louis David, and that artist’s high-finish, almost photorealist rendering became the standard approach not only for Eckersberg, but also for later painters of the Golden Age. But nothing in the arts stays the same for long, propelled onward as they are by new influences. The sharp-focus visual approach and pleasant genre scenes of the Golden Age began to fade after 1850, some artists influenced thereafter by Impressionism, others concerned to embody socialist politics in their choice of subjects. It’s likely that Carl Bloch, for example, had seen works by Manet and Degas before producing his realist painting A Young Woman Washing before a Carnival (1887). It shows his subject with her unclothed back exposed to us as she gazes into a mirror and applies a damp cloth to her body. Still later, other artists like Vilhelm Hammershøi registered the influence of Symbolism and the crepuscular mood that overtook European art in the fin-de-siècle. In recent decades Hammershøi has acquired an enthusiastic following outside Denmark for his portrayal of empty rooms with windows letting in a mysterious wintry light, settings that often include a woman with her back turned to the viewer.
Copenhagen museums that might be overlooked by the casual tourist include the Danish Resistance Museum, which deals with the Nazi occupation of the country 1940–1945, and the Danish Jewish Museum, some of whose content overlaps with the story of resistance in those years. The Jewish Museum began as a private enterprise but was eventually adopted by the state and now enjoys government sponsorship. In 2022, the museum figured prominently in the celebration of 400 years of the Jewish presence in Denmark, recalling the moment in the 1620s when King Christian IV invited Jews from Amsterdam and Hamburg to settle in Glückstadt. That city is in Schleswig-Holstein, which until the nineteenth century was part of Denmark. In time, Jews removed to the Danish capital, receiving full citizens’ rights in 1849. By the twentieth century, they were generally well assimilated into Danish society, as can be judged by significant events occurring under the Nazi occupation. There is a persistent legend that the Danish people, as an act of resistance, decided to wear the yellow star Nazis imposed on Jewish citizens elsewhere, but the facts are different. The yellow star wasn’t made mandatory in Denmark during those years, and neither Jews nor Gentiles wore it. There is, though, an unconfirmed rumor that King Christian X threatened to pin the star over his heart if it were imposed on his Jewish subjects. But that eventuality didn’t arise. More to the point was the organized evacuation of the endangered minority to neutral Sweden, an ad hoc scramble that took place in the fall of 1943, when the German military governor ordered deportation of Jews to the camps. However, a leaked alert went out just before the assault, and though around 500 citizens were arrested and deported to Terezin, about 7,500 fled to Sweden, ferried across the Øresund Strait by Danish resistance fighters and ordinary fishermen. About 400 survived Terezin. After the war, many Jews emigrated, and the current estimate is that Denmark has between 6,000 and 7,000 Jewish citizens. The Jewish Museum is housed in what was once the Royal Boat House, but the building has been updated with a Modernist portal and, inside, with avant-garde display fixtures designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, who is noted for his contribution to the site plan of the building complex that replaced the World Trade Center in New York after its destruction in 2001. The primary holdings of the Jewish Museum include historic ritual objects and documentation of Jewish life in Denmark.
Sightseeing takes a lot of energy and focus, so, when I needed a break, I several times betook myself to the King’s Garden, a short walk from my hotel. The spires of the Rosenborg Castle preside over a large expanse of green, crisscrossed by alleys of linden trees and subdivided by rectilinear hedges not so high as to prevent seeing into the spaces they enclose. The park keeps to tradition by dispensing with flower beds, though white roses and Nepeta (catmint) do appear in the formal rose garden where convenient benches allow the visitor to rest and reflect. Statuary is another feature of the park, and it was hardly a surprise to chance on a monument to Hans Christian Andersen, the author portrayed with a gentle bourgeois smile possibly at odds with what we now know about him. It’s easy to imagine that his international acclaim was experienced as encouragement for other Danish authors coming later. Notable among those was poet and novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885), whom Rilke came to admire during a sojourn in Scandinavia that began in 1904. Rilke’s liking for Jacobsen and for Denmark must have been the prompt for his one novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, whose main character is Danish. On the other hand, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a little younger than Andersen, required no encouragement beyond his own theological fervor. His writings, generally regarded as the origin of Christian existentialism, received much more attention and praise outside Denmark than within it, though in the twentieth century the Danes belatedly came to admire him. The most renowned Danish author of the twentieth century is Karen Christentze Dinesen (married name, Baroness Karen Christentze von Blixen-Finecke), who published under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Again, the Danes were slow to give Blixen her due, partly because her first collection of stories, titled Seven Gothic Tales, was written in English and first published in the United States. She later rewrote/revised that book in Danish, and thereafter all her books appeared first in Denmark, and in Danish. In recent decades, because of her years in Kenya attempting to make a go of a coffee plantation, she has been criticized as a settler colonialist and even a racist, though she strikes me as more advanced in her attitudes than what was common at the time. Her nonfiction book Out of Africa expresses sincere admiration for the Kikuyu and Maasai people she encountered, with a minimum of the “white man’s burden” ideology of the British colonial set she got to know in those years.
Author Peter Høeg recently won international attention with his 1992 novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow (in Danish the title was Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow), a narrative in which the title character’s mother is a Greenland Inuk and her father a rich Danish doctor. Adopting the detective genre, Høeg deals with Denmark’s colonialist history, with particular focus on Greenland. That vast Arctic territory has been in the news this past year because, having begun to lose much of its permanent snowcap through climate change (Smilla could probably tell us what kind of snow was on the wane), it attracted the attention of the real-estate entrepreneur who is now president of the United States. His proposal that Greenland simply be detached from Denmark and annexed as a new US territory was met with incredulity and shock in Denmark. After Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Greenland this past March, Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen dismissed the arguments for Greenland’s severance and annexation by Uncle Sam, but I’m not sure his speech was more than a pro forma affirmation of national sovereignty. During my stay in Copenhagen, encounters with Danish citizens were so fleeting I didn’t have the nerve to ask how they regard the proposal. To judge by what I read in the news, the majority think that only Greenlanders should decide the future of their land, no one else. That suggests that practical-minded Danes are much more concerned with the mainland than their costly and hard-to-manage colonial territories. In any case, there hasn’t been further discussion of the proposal in the press, so perhaps we can judge it as just another example of our current chief executive’s tendency to latch onto some new project or policy and then drop it when it doesn’t gain traction.
For many decades now, the cultural influence of the US in Europe (in fact, globally) has been pervasive, at least at the level of mass culture, with our pop music, TV, movies, video games, jeans, sneakers and casual sports clothes very much on the ascendant. I found that influence less overwhelming in Copenhagen, so I was surprised to see a huge sign on a building with the picture of a smiling young woman above the slangy caption (in English) YOU GOT THIS. I couldn’t tell what was being urged or advertised, but I suspect that, for the most part, the Danes have indeed “got this,” if “this” means reasonable control of their country’s future and its prosperity. On my last afternoon in the city, I walked down to Højbro Plads, a square filled with outdoor café tables, always crowded in the summer months. That day jazz music was being performed on a covered stage by a combo whose players included a woman vocalist, all the musicians white and, I assumed, Danish. The singer very effectively and idiomatically rendered jazz standards in English, which made me wonder if she might be American. But in between numbers, she addressed the appreciative audience in Danish, with a few sentences in English thrown in for the tourists present. Her ease and good humor were infectious, so much so I had trouble leaving, though I knew it was time to return to my hotel and begin packing. With a sigh I pulled myself away and whispered, “You got this”—as good a farewell to Copenhagen in 2025, I suppose, as any other byword that comes to mind.
Alfred Corn