Street life - Pink mermaid and other pandemonium
Copenhagen has been in the news! In true Scandinavian style, when the murmurs first started, the city continued to tick with a semblance of business as usual, but there was chatter in the air, a chatter of solidarity quickly followed by antipathy,...
Copenhagen has been in the news! In true Scandinavian style, when the murmurs first started, the city continued to tick with a semblance of business as usual, but there was chatter in the air, a chatter of solidarity quickly followed by antipathy, opinion-spouting was everywhere, in the bars and cafés, on TV and on the radio. It was exciting, but as quick as it started, so it ended, and calm and quiet was quickly resumed. Whether you found yourself in favour or against the doomed fate of the Ungdomshuset, everyone in the city was somehow involved. Now, the disturbance continues to murmur, but it is more of a wake than a revolution.
The Danes are known abroad as a liberal, laissez-faire people, but the truth is never that simple, for there are always many truths to be unearthed... on the night that the riots began (what a line) I happened to be working with a journalist friend and recent agent provocateur in Denmark for his documentary on the Danish special forces in Afghanistan. The TV in the main room at the office was switched on and the Danes gathered round to watch. The faces were concentrated, but perhaps cynical with eyebrows only half-raised, what was the opinion of these characters standing around me? What was the significance of the demise of the Ungdomshuset, the youth house? Was this really all that was left of the lost ideologies that Copenhagen (rather than Denmark) could once boast?
The youth house that is no more had quite a history, and the rapid demolishment of the building takes with it many stories of left wing activity and change. Originally called Folketshus, many influential left-wing activists and organisations had passed through this building. The day I write this, March 8, is International Women's Day. It was in 1910, in this very house, that this day was first declared.
The building has been one of controversy and intrigue, its historical significance meant that it was protected from being demolished, but in recent years, due to total neglect on the part of the occupiers, the house had become unsafe and was said to have been rotting.
And so with the rot came the movements to try and evict the people in the house now mostly famous for hosting Nick Cave and Bjork concerts. It has taken some years and many are still dumbfounded that the building has gone - stormed, emptied and demolished in a matter of days.
What the loss of the house really means is the further loss of a fading ideology. The capitalist gods are here to stay - get out of bed, shave your beard and get a job, for it appears that there are no other options in today's world. So it is with mixed feelings that many of the Danes talk about the realities of survival and tolerance in a world that grows evermore demanding.
There is resignation now in the voices of the people I quiz; the loss of the collective idea in Freetown Christiania in 2004 is perhaps only being mourned now. I believe that this explosion of protest in the streets of Copenhagen must be seen in this context. Outside of the darker realities of what the implications of Christiania and Ungdomshuset might mean to the more moderate civilians in Copenhagen, they also represented an openness to different ways of living, successful or unsuccessful, desirable or undesirable. With the expulsion of the crusties and the squatters from the "open house" in Nørrebro it is the concept of openness that is ultimately being lost.
On Wednesday afternoon, as a form of comic relief we trek over to see the little mermaid who had been camped up in a hot pink colour at the time of the riots and demonstrations. Alas I am disappointed to find that like the rest of Copenhagen, there are no visible signs of all that had come to pass. Upon closer inspection, however, I find her bellybutton is still coated in pink, the only evidence that what had happened was not a figment of an idealist collective imagination with vandal tendencies.
We sit with the lille havfrue for a while, trying to cheer her up by wearing a paper replica of a Victorian sailor's mask. Only a year ago she had been quite brutally insulted with green paint and a lewd object on women's day, and now, the house that brought us women's day had instigated a pink coating. She looks wistful as always, but she is resilient, outlasting us all, alone out there at the mouth of the harbour...
We turn back to the city centre via bag-and-scarf heaven, a boutique that I have had my eye on for a while. I walk in determined this time to leave with something, and soon I have struck up a conversation with the tall, elegant, pregnant Danish lady behind the counter. She begins to talk about the little mermaid... inspired by a ballet about the fairytale, Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg, commissioned the sculptor Eriksen to produce the piece. "But what no one knows," she says, "is that Eriksen was meant to model the sculpture on the prima ballerina at the time. Instead he modelled the mermaid on his wife, and I think that's a very romantic story," she says to me as I walk out the door wrapped in my new Epice scarf - romantic, perhaps, but in the spirit of Denmark, more rebellious surely.
The Danes are known abroad as a liberal, laissez-faire people, but the truth is never that simple, for there are always many truths to be unearthed... on the night that the riots began (what a line) I happened to be working with a journalist friend and recent agent provocateur in Denmark for his documentary on the Danish special forces in Afghanistan. The TV in the main room at the office was switched on and the Danes gathered round to watch. The faces were concentrated, but perhaps cynical with eyebrows only half-raised, what was the opinion of these characters standing around me? What was the significance of the demise of the Ungdomshuset, the youth house? Was this really all that was left of the lost ideologies that Copenhagen (rather than Denmark) could once boast?
The youth house that is no more had quite a history, and the rapid demolishment of the building takes with it many stories of left wing activity and change. Originally called Folketshus, many influential left-wing activists and organisations had passed through this building. The day I write this, March 8, is International Women's Day. It was in 1910, in this very house, that this day was first declared.
The building has been one of controversy and intrigue, its historical significance meant that it was protected from being demolished, but in recent years, due to total neglect on the part of the occupiers, the house had become unsafe and was said to have been rotting.
And so with the rot came the movements to try and evict the people in the house now mostly famous for hosting Nick Cave and Bjork concerts. It has taken some years and many are still dumbfounded that the building has gone - stormed, emptied and demolished in a matter of days.
What the loss of the house really means is the further loss of a fading ideology. The capitalist gods are here to stay - get out of bed, shave your beard and get a job, for it appears that there are no other options in today's world. So it is with mixed feelings that many of the Danes talk about the realities of survival and tolerance in a world that grows evermore demanding.
There is resignation now in the voices of the people I quiz; the loss of the collective idea in Freetown Christiania in 2004 is perhaps only being mourned now. I believe that this explosion of protest in the streets of Copenhagen must be seen in this context. Outside of the darker realities of what the implications of Christiania and Ungdomshuset might mean to the more moderate civilians in Copenhagen, they also represented an openness to different ways of living, successful or unsuccessful, desirable or undesirable. With the expulsion of the crusties and the squatters from the "open house" in Nørrebro it is the concept of openness that is ultimately being lost.
On Wednesday afternoon, as a form of comic relief we trek over to see the little mermaid who had been camped up in a hot pink colour at the time of the riots and demonstrations. Alas I am disappointed to find that like the rest of Copenhagen, there are no visible signs of all that had come to pass. Upon closer inspection, however, I find her bellybutton is still coated in pink, the only evidence that what had happened was not a figment of an idealist collective imagination with vandal tendencies.
We sit with the lille havfrue for a while, trying to cheer her up by wearing a paper replica of a Victorian sailor's mask. Only a year ago she had been quite brutally insulted with green paint and a lewd object on women's day, and now, the house that brought us women's day had instigated a pink coating. She looks wistful as always, but she is resilient, outlasting us all, alone out there at the mouth of the harbour...
We turn back to the city centre via bag-and-scarf heaven, a boutique that I have had my eye on for a while. I walk in determined this time to leave with something, and soon I have struck up a conversation with the tall, elegant, pregnant Danish lady behind the counter. She begins to talk about the little mermaid... inspired by a ballet about the fairytale, Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg, commissioned the sculptor Eriksen to produce the piece. "But what no one knows," she says, "is that Eriksen was meant to model the sculpture on the prima ballerina at the time. Instead he modelled the mermaid on his wife, and I think that's a very romantic story," she says to me as I walk out the door wrapped in my new Epice scarf - romantic, perhaps, but in the spirit of Denmark, more rebellious surely.