How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark

by Kingsley, Patrick

  But does that make Denmark xenophobic? Or even racist? It’s more complex than that, argues Fatih Alev. To understand why some Danes behave as they do, we need to look at Denmark in its historical context. “Somebody needs to say it: Denmark is a country with minority complexes because it’s a small country. Previously, it was a bigger country, ruling over Sweden and Norway. But now it is reduced to only this country. So I wouldn’t just use the word ‘racism’, it’s not as simple as that. There are historical, cultural reasons why the Danes need to see themselves as a homogenous people.”

  Richard Jenkins, an anthropologist whose career has centred on the study of Danishness, explores these reasons in considerable detail in his brilliant book, Being Danish. The very loose gist of one of his arguments is that the Danes’ intolerance of outsiders is ironically rooted in the values of cohesion and tolerance preached by Nicolai Grundtvig in the 19th century. “The solution that was found to the problems of Denmark in the mid-19th century,” writes Jenkins, “has created a new problem in the present.”

  This might seem strange, given that Grundtvig’s ideas promoted democracy and social engagement, and are theoretically therefore transferable to a modern context. But it’s important to remember how these progressive ideas rose to such prominence in the first place. In 1864, Denmark had just lost the last bits of its Baltic empire, and the population that remained felt humiliated. Once a multinational commonwealth, Denmark was now a tiny monoculture. Danes suddenly found that they were a people without an identity – and used Grundtvig’s ideas to create one. And so these ideas – enlightened as they may have been – became a means of defining and justifying Denmark’s newfound homogeneity. In this way, Danes became exclusive through their inclusivity, intolerant through their tolerance – which helps to explain some of the contradictions in today’s society. Take, says Jenkins, “the warmth and relaxation of hygge on a cold winter’s evening. Hygge, however, is double-edged: it is necessarily exclusionary, because there are always boundaries to a magic circle, and it may also be controlling, particularly when it verges on the compulsory. Intolerance, actual or potential, is never too far away. The most obvious manifestations of this other face of Danish homogeneity are the Jante Law – small-minded, corrosive envy of achievement and difference – and xenophobia and racism, the total rejection of difference.”

  The exclusivity is often unconscious. Look at the ubiquity of Dannebrog, the Danish flag. At a birthday party I attend in Copenhagen, the flat is festooned with versions of it. When I go to dinner with a family in Odense, they greet me at the door waving it. Sure, my hosts were hamming things up for their English visitor – but what they were doing was not unusual. Whenever something remotely festive happens in Denmark, the Danes crack out their flag. But as Jenkins explains in great detail in Being Danish, this flag-waving often isn’t consciously nationalistic. Certainly, the DFP have an elaborate flag-waving ceremony at their party conferences. But for most people, it’s just what you do when you hold a party, or when infrequent visitors call. People thought it was strange when I suggested it was nationalistic. And this is telling, because it shows that nationalism is so engrained in Danish culture that people sometimes don’t even notice that it’s there.

  It’s the same with Christianity. Danes aren’t particularly religious. At a confirmation service I’m invited to just north of Copenhagen, it’s clear that the congregation doesn’t come here very often. They have no idea what they’re doing. The service is one long Mexican wave – a ripple of parents continuously standing up and sitting down because they’re copying the people in front, who have as little clue as they do.

  But what’s significant is that these families – even though many of them don’t believe in God – have turned up in such large numbers. There are many more people here than you’d expect at a British confirmation service, and the parties afterwards will be more numerous and more extravagant than anything a British 14-year-old could expect after tasting bread and wine for the first time. What this suggests is that though Danes may not be fervent Christians, the Danish Church and its traditions still have an important role in Danish culture, and in the way that children come of age as Danes. Even at “non-firmation” parties – confirmation for those who don’t want to go to church – you could argue that Danish Lutheranism looms large through its absence.

  Danes, then, may not be fervent believers. Even Grundtvig, a priest, said he was a citizen first and a Christian second. But the attainment of Danishness still to an extent involves buying into the trappings of the Danish Church – both culturally and financially: 80% of Danes pay 1% of their earnings to the Church. In turn, this perhaps shows why some Danes are culturally so wary of foreign religions – and why newcomers, particularly Muslims, might find it hard to attain Danishness, since it is founded in experiences they clearly cannot achieve.

  6. WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL COPENHAGEN

  “Copenhageners cycle to live, but they don’t live to cycle” – Mikael Colvile-Andersen

  One November day in 2006, a journalist called Mikael Colvile-Andersen was cycling to his office at Danish Broadcasting. At some point, he got out his camera and took a picture. “It was this woman on a bike, very elegantly dressed,” remembers Colvile-Andersen. “The lights had turned green but she hadn’t moved yet. There are ladies cycling past on the right, guys roaring past on the left. But she hadn’t moved yet. And I just thought, oh, that’s nice. Click. It wasn’t the girl. It wasn’t the bike. It was my morning commute.”

  Colvile-Andersen put the photo up on his Flickr page, where he has a large following, and thought no more about it. “But then the comments started coming in. ‘Hey, dude! How does she ride a bike in a skirt? And boots?!’ And I was like: what the fuck are these guys talking about? It was a completely alien concept to me, these questions.”

  Cycling is normal in Copenhagen. In Borgen, the prime minister cycles to work – and it’s not particularly hard to imagine Helle Thorning-Schmidt doing the same in real life. When I visit parliament, the forecourt outside is stuffed with as many bikes as the quad of an Oxbridge college. Elsewhere in the city, at least a third of Copenhageners cycle to work or school – and they don’t wear lycra. They don’t need to. The city is built for cycling. It’s flat, for a start – but it also has the infrastructure. In greater Copenhagen, there are 1000 kilometres of bike lanes – and you get them all over Denmark. Last Christmas Eve, Colvile-Andersen cycled – laden with presents – all the way to Roskilde, 30 kilometres to the west of Copenhagen, and never left a bike lane. There’s one on every busy street – sometimes two lanes deep, and always protected from the road by a kerb.

  Cyclists have their own traffic lights, which let them set off a few seconds before the cars. On some new routes, if you cycle at a steady 20 kilometres per hour, the lights will automatically stay green for miles. And as you cruise through the city, you’ll see a staggering number of bike shops. On several streets, every fourth shop is a “cykel vaerksted”. Each sells bikes that are made for the city – bikes with a kick-stand and a mechanism that locks the bike to itself so that you don’t waste time searching for a lamppost to padlock your wheels to. Many Copenhagen families don’t own a car – but one in five has a cargo bike that fits two or three kids. Few cyclists jump the lights – the system works so well that they don’t need to.

  All of this helps explain why a woman cycling to work one day in 2006 wouldn’t think twice about wearing a skirt and boots. In Copenhagen, that’s what you do. You don’t ride a mountain bike, and you don’t wear lycra. There is a campaign to make helmets compulsory, but you most likely won’t wear one either. You dress as you would normally, and, this being Copenhagen, you look pretty stylish. “Do I wear special clothes when I get on the bus?” asks Colvile-Andersen. “No. We dress for our destination, not our journey.”

  But judging from the reception he received on Flickr, Colvile-Andersen quickly realised that this wasn’t the case in most other places. “I became curious,” he s
ays. “I thought, wow, the whole world thinks it’s pretty wild here. So I started taking more pictures of these elegantly dressed Copenhageners on their bikes that month, and continued to put them up on Flickr. Then in 2007, I started a blog.” That blog was called Copenhagen Cycle Chic, and it soon developed a cult following. “It just poured in. A hundred people a day on the blog, within two weeks. I was like: woah. What’s up with that stuff? I don’t understand it. I’ll just take more photos. And that’s when it really took off.”

  Nearly six years on, the blog and its social media pages get over 20,000 hits every day. It has spawned around 200 copy-cat sites worldwide, a spin-off book, and, in Copenhagen, a team of contributing photographers who include the former Danish ambassador to Afghanistan. Most Danes are still a bit non-plussed – “A guy with a blog about bikes,” explains Colvile-Andersen, “is like a guy in Greenland with a blog about snow” – but he says that some Copenhageners now actively try to get photographed. “I’ve heard there’s a game. ‘Oh, I put my best dress on today and cycled down the streets they usually photograph for Cycle Chic. And, damn! I didn’t get snapped.’ ”

  For Colvile-Andersen, the blog has sparked a career swerve. “After the blog started running, people would email me saying: ‘I’m from the department of transport in, I dunno, Shitsville, Arkansas. What is that blue paint in the cycling lane in your picture? Literally, what is it made of?” Through answering these questions, Colvile-Andersen developed a greater understanding of how urban planning works – and then realised he could do a better job of it than most. He now runs a cycling consultancy – Copenhagenize – that advises politicians around the world about how to make their cycling infrastructure more like Copenhagen’s. And wherever he goes, a Cycle Chic fan is always on hand to lend him a bike.

  Around a third of Copenhageners cycle to work

  He thinks that part of the problem in other countries is that cycling is promoted using eco-arguments, or through the creation of a geeky cycling subculture. “The bicycle advocates, the avid cyclists,” he says, “they’re a sub-culture. And the nature of subcultures is that you want other people to share your hobby. Whether you’re a bowler or a synchronised swimmer, you’ve got to understand my love of it, and you’ve got to copy it. If you don’t, then you’re not really a cyclist. You can’t just ride the old Raleigh that you found in your grandmother’s old house in Bournemouth. You’ve got to have the right bike – otherwise it’s not real.” Copenhageners, on the other hand, just use bikes to get around town. According to government surveys, half of them say they cycle simply because it’s fast. Only a third cycle because it’s healthy. They cycle to live, but they don’t live to cycle.

  Not so long ago, though, most of them didn’t do either. In the economic boom following the Second World War, everyone bought cars, and there were plans to eliminate cycling as a mode of transport, and to make the roads as suitable as possible for motoring. The last tram in Copenhagen went out of service in 1972, and only one in ten commuters went by bike. There’s a famous picture from 1980 of Nyhavn, the pastel-coloured wharf in central Copenhagen that is now one of the most popular spots in the city. Today, it is pedestrianised and lined with cafés and boats. In 1980, it was essentially one big car park.

  “Why not?” says a man called Jan Gehl, dripping with sarcasm. “It’s the perfect parking space. The cars have a great view from there.”

  Gehl is the godfather of Copenhagen’s open-plan streets, and perhaps the patron saint of cyclists worldwide. Throughout 1962, Gehl – then a young architecture student – spent one day every week sitting on a street called Strøget. It’s pronounced a bit like “stroll” – fittingly so, because it was the first pedestrianised high street in Europe. At 3.2 kilometres long, it remains the longest. Gehl was concerned at the way Copenhagen’s Modernist urban planners were eating away at cycling lanes, and at public space. He was convinced that public spaces that encouraged interaction were the secret to both a happy city and the Danish concept of cooperation – but he needed some data to back him up. At the time, there was none.

  “Nothing was known,” Gehl says in this magical voice that has the same reassuring effect on cyclists that Dumbledore has on Hogwarts. “People had never been the subject of study in cities, ever. It was taken for granted that people moved about in public spaces. It was only when the traffic started to pressurise life, and when the Modernist planners started to discourage the use of space between buildings that we realised there was a need for research.”

  And that was why Gehl, notepad in hand, could be found every week in 1962, strolling up and down Strøget. “This was some of the pioneering stuff,” Gehl says, proudly tapping Life Between Buildings, one of the many books that came out of the research. “Sitting there, watching people. Finding out: what is a day like? What is a week like? What is a year like? What is the difference between summer, autumn, winter? What happens when there is a festival? A fire? The queen’s birthday? We had to collect all the basics about human behaviour in public spaces. How you kiss and how you walk, dance – whatever you do in cities, where you do it, how you do it.”

  Over time, Gehl’s research – which soon spread to other cities – became more and more influential. “We have been able to show that the more square metres you pedestrianise, the more people will use the city. It’s good for democracy and good for inclusion that we mingle in the public space. It’s good for your health, and good for the environment.”

  In Copenhagen, more and more cycle lanes were reintroduced, and pedestrianisation spread to the streets around Strøget – to the extent that today, Copenhagen’s centre is one of the most relaxing city centres I’ve been to. It makes you wish that someone would do something similar to the cesspit around Leicester Square.

  Across one whole wall in Gehl’s office is a vast streetmap of San Francisco, one of the cities he is currently advising. Along one long strip of road, he has drawn a box and labelled it “living room”. It sums up his ideology, and, in fact, the ethos of Copenhagen: the city as one big sofa.

  But the transition wasn’t all down to Gehl. “I have done nothing in the city,” he says, very modestly. “There’s a widespread rumour that the pedestrianisation is because of me. No. I used the pedestrianisation as a laboratory for my studies. But then we can see a very interesting dialogue between university and town hall. Our studies encouraged them enormously to do more projects. The mayor even wrote to me to say: ‘If you hadn’t done those studies, we politicians would not have dared to make Copenhagen what it is today.’ ” Gehl’s eyes twinkle. “I like that.”

  Gehl admits the mentality is born as much from necessity as idealism. On a white sheet of paper, he draws me a timeline which is now stuck up on my wall at home, and on it he underlines the year 1973 several times. “The oil crisis,” he says, referring to the year that the petrol producers in the Arab world stopped exporting oil in protest at the West’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Denmark was particularly badly hit, and even though they later found oil in the North Sea, it made Danes fearful of ever being so reliant on fossil fuel and, by extension, cars. It helps explain why Denmark now makes just under half the world’s wind turbines, and why Copenhagen turned, once again, to cycling.

  “We started to have car-free days. Not because of a love of mankind, but because of a lack of petroleum. Everybody rejoiced because it was wonderful having car-free Sundays. And they realised it would be clever to go back to bicycles.”

  The mentality stuck. By 2025 it aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral capital. Along with a third of his fellow Copenhageners, Jan Gehl – 76 years young – still cycles to work. And year after year, Copenhagen is named as one of the world’s most livable cities.

  There’s a reason for that – lots of them, in fact. Copenhagen’s big enough to house several distinct districts (Indre By, the shopping district in the middle; suburban Amager to the east; hip Vesterbro in the south-west, nestling below multicultural Nørrebro; and then Øst
erbro, Denmark’s answer to Notting Hill) but small enough to cross it in 20 minutes – on a bike, naturally. The streets are wide and lined with graceful rococo houses and there’s rarely a crap building in site. There’s a beach within striking distance, a huge outdoor swimming pool in the middle of the harbour, or if you just want to sit, rather than take a dip, you can pop along to Christiania, the 40-year-old anarchist commune that jostles against the lake in Christianshavn.

  Culturally, the city is buzzing. As explored in Chapter two, Copenhagen is where the world’s foodies currently go to eat. Its television studios are the home of Danish noir. In Bjarke Ingels, it has spawned the starchitect of the moment. In Distortion – essentially a mobile rave that tours the city’s districts each year in June – it has one of northern Europe’s most unusual music festivals. Vesterbro is a sort of Shoreditch-lite, with new bars and galleries sprouting all the time. Copenhagen has the second-biggest homes in Europe – and they’re are almost all heated and cooled from a central hub (rather than on an individual basis), which has resulted in a 70% reduction in carbon emissions.

  Twenty-five years ago, this would have been hard to imagine. “Copenhagen was nearly bankrupt,” remembers the city’s head of planning, Anne Skovbro, whose offices are in the same city hall that features prominently in the first series of The Killing. (Skovbro’s claim to fame: her leg features in one of the shots.) “We were an old industrial harbour city that had lost most of its industry to Jutland and China.”

  Unemployment was high, infrastructure was failing, the housing system was in crisis, and welfare costs had spiralled. Urban renewal was urgently needed – and there was a consensus at government level that if it was to be done at all, it needed to be done properly. So the state bailed out the city – and it was then, in the late 80s and early 90s, that Copenhagen really got going.