From the 13th to 16th June a group of 44 Danish students and 5 teachers from the university of Kiel went on a short trip to Copenhagen. This is an account of our Copenhagen adventures, mainly from my personal perspective. We both moved individually and collectively through the city and visited several interesting sites. Enjoy!
The easiest way to get to Copenhagen from Kiel is taking the train, bus or a car via crossing the Fehmarn Belt with a ferry. Sailing from Puttgarden – Rødby (even topic of modern danish literature – take a read: Helle Helle’s calm novel Rødby-Puttgarden, 2005) is usually exciting, but this time the wind stood still. The Baltic Sea did have nothing to offer but humidity and warmth in the air. Still the ride fulfilled its purpose – the excitement and longing for Copenhagen increased the closer I got to Denmarks capital: The longing had so intensively taken hold of me a couple of weeks earlier when I played the well-visualized Copenhagen song „København“ by Ulige Numre to my Danish students.
The purpose of our university trip was to study Copenhagen today and its glamourous past with lots of artists and writers being actively involved in shaping Denmarks Golden Age[1] in the 18th century. As the famous Danish philosopher, theologist Søren Kierkegaard would have turned 200 this year, there are for instance many events to celebrate the Golden Age and of course Kierkegaard himself. He was honoured on the 5th of May with a festival service at Church of our Lady, where also the Queen of Denmark Margarethe participated. Furthermore there are several exhibitions taking place around Denmark. We had beforehand decided to walk out of the main centre of Copenhagen to visit Assistens Kirkegaard (Cemetary) in Nørrebro – a place where several famous Golden Age Danes are buried under massive beech trees. Kierkegaard and his contemporary, the famous H.C. Andersen are despite their worldwide fame both very modestly put to eternal peace on Assistens Kirkegaard.
On the very cemetary, where people are kindly and for me surprisingly asked not to sunbathe, as if it was typical to do so, the comedian/actor/Kierkegaard reader Claus Damgaard performed his very own interpretation of Kierkegaard in a 1,5 hour one-man show (he did have two imagined Kierkegaards on his shoulders though). This very special and enjoyable celebration of Kierkegaards mind might have been meant to be comedy, but actually left me behind with a little existential crisis. The extreme intensity of the show vividly presented the pressing issues, that Kierkegaard in his œuvre articulated in so manifold ways. Death, doubt, love and depression – eventhough not treated with scientific accuracy in Damgaards show, as I learned from our very own Kierkegaard expert Henrike, made me question, well, existence?
The first night in Copenhagen for a couple of years though helped me to overcome my little crisis and I started enjoying the next day. ‘Den sorte Diamant‘ aka the Danish National Library waited with two exhibitions, one about the art of bookmaking with astonishingly artistic book covers from the turn of the last century and many before. The other about Kierkegaard and his publishing life. While studying Kierkegaards deeply depressing life and philosophical highlights, the clouds turned almost black and covered the harbour promenade with heavy rain. Even that coincidence, which well illustrated Kierkegaards heavy thoughts, could not stop my sheer excitement about the afternoon ahead.
A visit at the Baltic Development Forum (BDF), which makes this blog possible, provided me with new insights into the political as well as economic ties in the Baltic Sea Region. I had a chat with Dan Axel about the Forum and its progress and it was a pleasure meeting the BDF team.
Coming from BDF I headed on to meet my fellow travellers from Kiel again. We were about to meet beatpoet Claus Høxbroe. An upcoming poet who’s eagerly working on his poetry in his workshop in Amager. That quarter is one of the old working class neighbourhoods in Copenhagen, and there are still corners and places, that haven’t been polished yet. The changing character of Copenhagen is one of the main topics of Claus Høxbroe’s poetry. That’s also why he often moves his workshop around the city, to actively observe and document how the old Copenhagen fades away with the metro and huge infrastructural investments. He furthermore claims that it is a misunderstanding, that beat poetry died with Ginsberg, Kerouac and their companions. It’s still out there and free to be interpreted today.
When we got back from our excursion into Claus Høxbroes world, it was yet rainy again, but the silhouette of the city that awaited us once we crossed Knippelsbro, invited us to dive in and experience even more. Later that night friends and I sat down on a bench at Gammel Strand, enjoying the bright night and looking over at Christiansborg and Thorvaldsens, the museum that we should visit the next day. Sitting close to the small waterway it was really calm around us, eventhough people were rushing by. Copenhagens dark and majestic facades across the canal seemed to absorb the sound of a friday night and contributed to the unagitated atmosphere.
Stopping by at Ingolfs Kaffebar in Amager
Thorvaldsens interesting architecture
Before heading home again
Thorvaldsens the next day in combination with the National Gallery and Glyptoteket on sunday overwhelmed our group with Danish Golden Age art, but also impressed many of them. My personal favourite was Carl Bloch’s „In a Roman Osteria“ in the National Gallery. A painting that definitely doesn’t depict anything „Danish“, but pictures with extreme adequacy the emotionally diverse situation of the depicted. Looking at it you feel invited by the charming young ladies, but rather irritated by the male sitting in the right hand corner with an angry expression on his face. What also striked me about the painting were the three men discussing something in the background - they are in such stark contrast to the rest of the painting. How do these aristocratically looking people fit into the situation?
Something else also took my attention: a quote of the Danish writer and former professor at the University of Kiel, Jens Baggesen, who at the threshold of national romanticism wrote in The Labyrinth: ”Germans! Frenchmen! Englishmen! Dutchmen! Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes! Prussians! Poles! Hungarians! Italians! Spaniards! Portuguese! Are you not all Men? All, being Men, equal?“
As the days went by really fast, it took me some time to realize that I had been in Copenhagen. I looked up at the massive Town Hall tower once more, slendered a bit on the shopping street Strøget, had a beer on yet another bench accompanied by few of my fellow travellers, watching people trying to escape the rain and others taking pictures of us and thus making us and our yellow Netto plastic bag a part of the city.
What I had hoped for the travel to Copenhagen became reality on the way back. A heavy wind blew across the Baltic Sea and a single sailor competed with the wind, sailed past our engine driven vehicle. The ferry even slightly moved up and down on the ride, before it safely washed us ashore in Puttgarden and thus ended our trip to Copenhagen.
[1] Try to say it in Danish: Guldalderen, but don’t be too expressive with the „d’s“, they need to be smoothly articulated.