How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (16 page)

Can this be true? I ask Bernth. Not quite, she laughs. But because she has a policy of not recycling actors,
The Killing
has got through 400 of them – “which is a lot for Denmark”. Mikael Birkkjaer, who plays Lund’s mysterious partner in the second series, very nearly didn’t get the part because he’d played such a different role as the prime minister’s academic husband in
Borgen
. “We originally said: ‘No, we don’t want Mikael, he’s just been a doctor for 20 episodes.’ But he was the best and he was the one who had the connection with Sofie.”

By now Bernth and I are touring the set. First we pop through the editing suites, where – on a huge Apple screen – Sarah Lund has just woken up in a hotel bed in Jutland. “Episode six of the new series,” says Bernth. We move on, through a vast white hangar where once stood the home of Nanna Birk Larsen, the murdered schoolgirl, and then we’re suddenly inside a police station. We could be in a scene of
The Killing 2
– after all, we just walked past the actor who plays Brix, Lund’s boss. But there’s one key difference: the place, so pristine in the earlier series, is now a tip. The mirrors are smashed; there’s debris everywhere. It’s a symptom of one of the themes for the third series: the financial crisis, and the effect it’s having on state institutions like the police force.

Sveistrup says that once again he’s using the series to tap into current political debate. During the first two series,
Denmark was consumed with a conversation about race and identity – and
The Killing
reflected that. Now the national debate has changed. It’s concerned with the economy, and, accordingly, so is
The Killing
.

“Before the financial crisis, we had a fight of values,” he says. “Western values versus the foreigners, the immigrants. Is it okay to wear a scarf at work? There was a big discussion about that kind of thing. But not any more. The financial crisis has taken centre stage. Everything has turned into a conversation about money – and I’m going with it.”

At the time of the interview,
The Killing
’s third and final series was yet to air – and Sveistrup was tight-lipped about what it would contain. But as we later found, its plot centred on a rich mogul whose child gets kidnapped. Is he based on Mærsk Mc-Kinney, the Danish shipping tycoon? “I can’t remember,” deadpanned a grinning Sveistrup. And what about the jumpers, I wondered at the time. Would Sarah Lund wear yet another bit of knitwear? Sveistrup just smiled.

•

Súsan Johansen knits with the nonchalance of a teenager sending a text. Her needles click furiously through the yarn heaped in her lap – but apart from the occasional downward glance, her gaze is directed elsewhere. At her coffee, at passing bikes, at me. A social worker by profession, the knitting is just something she does on her way to work. Which is unexpected, because for many people – particularly the millions who watch
The Killing
– her knitting has reached cult
status. From the very first episode, Sarah Lund wears a feminised fisherman’s jumper – creamy white, skin-tight, and ringed with a row of large black snowflakes. Episode after episode, Lund never seems to take it off – and pretty soon viewers wanted to copy her. The
Radio Times
ran a feature called, “How to knit your own Sarah Lund jumper.” The
Guardian
had “Sarah Lund’s jumper – explained.” There’s even a website devoted to it:
SarahLundSweater.com
, which tells you both where to buy the original and where to head for cheaper knock-offs. The real thing is from the Faroes, a splattering of islands in the far north of the Atlantic that technically belong to Denmark. It was designed by the small fashion house Gudrun and Gudrun, and Johansen is the middle-aged Faroese woman who first knitted it. Sitting in front of me now, at a table outside Kalaset café in central Copenhagen, she is about to knit another one.

“Nobody knew that this strange jumper would eventually get so much attention,” remembers Gudrun Rógvadóttir, the business half of Gudrun and Gudrun. In the mid-2000s, homespun knitwear was out of fashion. In the Faroes, local wool was burnt as a waste product when the islands’ sheep were sent to slaughter. Horrified, Gudrun Rógvadóttir, a former consultant, joined forces with Gudrun Ludvig, a local designer, and the pair set out to revitalise the dying art of the Faroese fisherman’s jumper.

The jumper goes back a long way in the Faroes, a place where fishing and sheep-herding still play a role in local life.
There are similar jumpers in Iceland, but there the colours are brighter, and the patterns are rounder. In the 1800s, says Rógvadóttir, each Faroese village would have had their own unique designs.

“At that time, all healthy men over 14 went to sea in the old boats,” she tells me, on the phone from the Faroese capital, Torshavn. “They all went away in springtime, and they didn’t come back until autumn, and in that time there was no communication between the fishermen and their families.” On their return, the villagers would gather on the shore to watch the boats sail in from the horizon – and to see which fishermen had returned safely. “Everybody knew that every year the sea would take some of the fishermen. And the story goes that the patterns on the sweaters were so special, and so clear, that even before the face of the man could be seen, you’d be able to identify them by the patterns on the sweater. So all of a sudden the patterns could tell the difference between life and death.”

By the 1970s, the Faroese sweater carried a different symbolism. “It was really big in the hippy period,” says fashion designer Henrik Vibskov. “For some people, the sweater was a symbol of a day off. Nature. Walking at the beach. My brother and sister were hanging out in these sweaters, wearing the Palestinian scarf, with hippy long hair.”

Sofie Gråbøl, who plays Sarah Lund, also remembers wearing the jumper during her hippyish upbringing. She says that it symbolises
hygge
, the Danish concept explored
in earlier chapters that translates badly into English as “cosy” or “togetherness”. “That sweater,” Gråbøl has said, “was a sign of believing in togetherness.”

But by the late 90s, many local women had stopped knitting, and the tradition looked to be dying out. Gudrun Ludvig decided to do something about it.

“She took a sweater of her dad’s,” says Rógvadóttir. “And her thought was to simplify it. The old ones were very thick, made for fishermen – but she wanted to adapt the sweater so that it could be used by a woman, a mother. Altered to be so small that you could wear it inside a small jacket.”

Ludvig knew Súsan Johansen through her sister, and she knew that she knitted. So she brought Johansen the snowflake pattern and asked her to make a jumper from it. It took a week of back-and-forth before Johansen, who was used to making baggier shapes, realised what Ludvig wanted.

“She kept saying: ‘Make it smaller, make it smaller’,” says Johansen.

She got there eventually, and in 2007 the two Gudruns took the range to the Copenhagen fashion show. One day, a producer from DR turned up and said they were working on a TV series and they were looking for some clothing. The producer took two jumpers, and later asked the firm to send some more. “And then we didn’t hear anything until the series was on two years later. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about the sweater. After a couple of episodes, the papers started saying: ‘Is she going to wear this sweater all this time? Doesn’t
she have any other clothing? What is that sweater?’ The whole story was about the sweater.”

Johansen is slightly non-plussed about it all. “It was very funny,” she says. “Everyone was saying: ‘You made Sarah Lund’s jumper’.” But she’s kept herself grounded. She was proud to see her work on screen, but she didn’t watch all the episodes. She helped make the red jumper Lund wears in the second series, but she didn’t like it so much – “Too Icelandic!”, she says. Three years ago she moved to Copenhagen, and still knits three jumpers a week for Gudrun and Gudrun. She orders the wool from certain Faroese farms and gets friends to carry back the finished products. She says knitting stops her smoking – something to keep her hands busy when she’s on the train to the care home where she works. She’s even started teaching her patients to knit.

But Johansen is no longer the jumper’s sole knitter. Gudrun and Gudrun employ around 60 knitters – mostly in the Faroes, but some in Jordan, where Rógvadóttir used to work – and each will specialise in a specific size range.

“No two people knit in completely the same way,” explains Rógvadóttir. Someone might knit particularly tightly, in which case they’re asked to make small sizes. “If someone has a slightly looser hand, we’ll make them a medium. But the difficult thing is that the same woman can knit a small one day, and the next day she’ll knit a medium. If you are very relaxed, you’ll knit looser. But if you’re stressed, you’ll knit smaller and more tightly.
Maybe your husband was stupid that day, so you’ll knit tighter. It’s very emotional and personal.”

It’s important not to overstate the knitting resurgence in Scandinavia: one class of sixth-formers I talk to groan when I mention that jumper. But there is definitely something going on. Since 2006, Gudrun and Gudrun’s profits have increased more than tenfold (though Rógvadóttir is at pains to emphasise that they’re about so much more than just jumpers.)

“The whole handcraft thing has completely blown up,” says Vibskov. “It’s become something. Nowadays, everything goes so fast – you know, the World Wide Web, click click click – so people are trying to hook onto something more stable, old-school.”

It’s not just thanks to
The Killing
, either. On the other side of town, halfway towards the airport, half a dozen elderly women are knitting in the garden of an old people’s day centre. The oldest is 96, the youngest 65. The chattiest, Ketty Brøgger, was 80 last week. They natter away, sipping on coffee, munching on homemade cakes. They are the ladies of Kaffeslabberas, a knitting group for pensioners. They could be any gaggle of grannies, but to the fashion-conscious Dane, they are almost minor celebrities, and their story has also played an unlikely role in the revival of Danish wool.

It all started when Susanne Hoffmann, one of Henrik Vibskov’s designers, had her first baby. While on maternity leave, she got lonely. Cooped up at home in suburban
Amager, south-east Copenhagen, she was cut off from her friends across town in trendy Vesterbro. Then she found an unlikely salvation: Sløjfen, the local pensioners’ club. There were always things happening there – workshops, stalls, afternoon bingo – and Hoffmann wondered whether they’d want to start a knitting club. No one responded to her initial advert on the noticeboard, so one day she ambled in with an armful of yarn and asked if anyone wanted to join her. Around ten women did, and they started meeting every Tuesday lunchtime.
Kaffeslabberas
– which roughly means “coffee table chat” – was born.

At first, it was purely about the company. “They’re very wise,” says Hoffmann, under a canopy in the garden. “They gave me advice about being a mother.” But then she asked if they might knit some baby jumpers for her baby son. Maybe, they said – never ones to be dictated to. “But then a week later, they’d suddenly done it all. I was amazed at the quality. They were so fast.”

Impressed, she told her boss about her new friends, and eventually Vibskov came down to see what the fuss was about. He liked what he saw – “and so Susie was like, ‘Hey, Henrik, why don’t we sell some of this down at the shop?’ ” And so they did – baby sweaters at first, and then scarves. Before long. a huge high-street designer called Mads Nørgaard had heard about the group, and wanted in. So they started making him a few socks every month – long grey stockings with a ring of red at the top – and donated all the profits back to their club. Then everything snowballed.
All of a sudden,
Kaffeslabberas
were the fashion world’s plaything du jour. They staged knitting performances in the windows of a shop in central Copenhagen. They were interviewed on national television, and given ringside seats at the capital’s biggest fashion show – much to their bafflement.

“We all lined up and knitted during the show while the photographers were lying around us trying to take our picture,” a bewildered Brøgger told one newspaper. “They were putting all their best dresses on,” remembers Vibskov. Affectionately, he adopts the shrill voice of a pensioner: “Ewnewnew. The music is very loud. Awahhh. Is that a famous person over there? Famous!”

A book of their work followed – fittingly, a big coffee table tome – but all the while the group kept on meeting every week for cake, coffee and a good old gossip. Like Johansen, they find the interest in their work hilarious – not least because these are the same designs that their grandchildren were only recently so snooty about.

“I can’t understand it,” laughs 86-year-old Lily Nielsen. “People pay so much. We always made these things for our children and now people are paying us 250 kroner [around £30] for them.”