How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (12 page)

Zach is one of the refugees. He came to Denmark from Kenya last August, fearing for his life for reasons he does not want me to print. He is still waiting to find out if he can stay – and in the meantime he has had plenty of time to contemplate the problems with the Danish asylum system.

The camps are the most obvious problem, he says. The rooms are cramped – many stuffed with up to four people – and researchers from the University of Copenhagen think they spark mental problems in children. They’re also very isolated. At Zach’s camp in rural Auderod, the refugees live five kilometres from the nearest station, which is itself one and a half hours from the nearest city, Copenhagen. The ticket costs 108 kroner – unaffordable for refugees, who receive only 50 kroner a day (around £6) in pocket money. Zach would gladly work to earn more money – but, like all refugees, he’s not allowed. And as he’s over 23, he doesn’t even get free Danish lessons. “You’re in a country where you don’t speak the language,” says Zach, “and you don’t have the opportunity to learn it.” To get any kind of Danish tuition, he must make a journey he can’t afford, to a charity-cum-safespace for refugees in Copenhagen called Trampoline House.

Not everyone has this experience. At a refugee centre in Holbaek, Mohammed – an Afghan who was granted asylum very quickly – is full of praise for the system. In Ringkøbing,
in west Jutland, I meet a Bosnian Muslim called Damir Zvirkic who fled a massacre in 1993 and was part of a group apparently granted asylum after a personal intervention from Margrethe, the Danish queen. Zvirkic feels Danish now, even when he goes back to Bosnia on holiday. “I miss my old country,” he says. “But when we’re at the end of our holiday, and I say to my children: ‘we have to go home’ – I’m talking about Denmark. And when you start to call Denmark your home, that’s a sign.”

But for Zach, the asylum process remains one of trauma. “There is always a fear that tomorrow they will send you a letter saying that you will be deported to the same country you have left. You never know when that is happening. At the end of the process, whether or not you get asylum, your life has changed. You’ve been living in the camp for one, two, three, four, five years. Every night you are woken up by people screaming. You are surrounded by people who often cannot communicate with you. You can’t go to school. You can’t work. Your life is very limited.”

Denmark is not alone. Many countries – not least Britain – haven’t properly worked out how to come to terms with immigration. And unlike much of western Europe, Denmark doesn’t have much of a colonial past, and so has had less time than most to come to terms with the concept of multi-culturalism. But the country definitely has a problem. “It’s like being Danish is something that you’re born into,” says Bendixen. “So what can you do if you come as a foreigner? How can you solve that? If you don’t look like a Dane, and
your name is not a traditional Danish one, then it’s not enough, even if you were born here. You’ll never become a real Dane.”

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.

“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 says. “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.