Read How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark Online
Authors: Patrick Kingsley
“We’re not hippies…This is a business like any other business” – Søren Hermansen
Denmark looks quite odd on a map. Its capital is on an island called Sjælland that is so far east, it’s almost in Sweden. Further west lies Fyn, a smallish blob that houses Odense, and the childhood home of Hans Christian Andersen. To the left of Fyn, there’s Jylland, or Jutland – the biggest bit of Denmark, and the only part attached to mainland Europe. It lives up to its anglicised name, jutting like a mohawk from Germany’s northern border. Halfway up Jutland’s western coast – about as far from Copenhagen as you can possibly travel in Denmark – is a little town called Ringkøbing. It’s a pretty town, too. Small, pretty buildings squashed between a lagoon and a quaint town square – and all 15 minutes from the sand dunes and summer houses that skirt the North Sea.
According to a no doubt unerringly accurate survey of residents by Cambridge University, Ringkøbing is the happiest town in Denmark. And given that Denmark is consistently named by the UN as the world’s happiest country, this technically makes Ringkøbing – pop: 9000 – the happiest town on earth. In pursuit of happiness, and hoping for a taste of Jutland, I head to Ringkøbing for the weekend. The journey takes three train legs, and so by the time I arrive, it’s nearly midnight. The streets are dark, the air is silent, and there is no one in sight. It’s deserted. If this is happiness, I feel very short-changed. But suddenly a noise flies over the rooftops. It’s the sound of shouting and, thinking it might just also be the sound of happiness, I head in its general direction. Following my ear, I weave through the backstreets of Ringkøbing, and with every step the sounds get louder. At last, I’m almost there. Just one more turning, and I’ll have reached nirvana itself.
I round the corner. I look up.
Screaming at the top of their lungs, three drunk teenagers are pissing against a wall.
•
I could be in any small town on a Friday night – and for their part, my new friends are keen to dispel any myths about the place. Excited to meet someone new, they invite me back to their den, a shed that sits at the bottom of their friend’s nearby garden. Sobering up, they tell me a tale of provincial teenage angst. There’s only one bar in town, they say – not that there’s anyone they want to see there. “We’re in a
minority in this town,” says Oscar, 17 last month, and “still very, very excited about it.” He and his friends Klaus, Alexander and Asbjørn are creative types, he says. They write poetry. They play music. Unlike their sporty neighbours, they go to a continuation school that focuses on drama and art. “We’re very rare in Ringkøbing,” he sighs. “It’s not that usual for people in Jylland to write and be creative. There are a lot of people who just ride about and drink alcohol.” And with that, he pops out for another piss.
The next day, I visit the town’s local newspaper, the
Ringkøbing-Skjern Dagbladet
. The staff there are not nearly as down on the town, but back in 2007, they too were surprised to find it was the happiest place on earth.
“We really were astonished,” says the paper’s jovial chief reporter, a small middle-aged man called Poul Osmundsen. “Later, we tried to find out on what statistical basis they had reached their conclusion. The material was rather skimpy. Statistically speaking, it was totally invalid. But it went totally viral. Before we knew it, we were being visited by television crews from all over the world. I have to say, the townspeople were rather bemused by it. Most of us have had many good laughs about it. One of the local traits is modesty. We do not regard ourselves as something special. So all this exposure was something quite unfamiliar.”
But it got the townsfolk thinking, Poul remembers. “It made us reflect. If we are the happiest town in the world, why would that be? And I don’t think it’s totally faulty. I do
think people here are… well, happy is the wrong word. That means giddy, or exultant, or a rather fleeting emotion. The right term would be ‘contented’. We are a contented society.”
The gap between the richest and poorest is very small in Ringkøbing, says Osmundsen – even by Danish standards. “We all attend the same schools, the same sports clubs, the same shops. We live, more or less, in the same neighbourhood.” In other words, no one has it much better than anyone else.
As a result, the people of Ringkøbing are happy with what they’ve got – a quality which, people constantly tell me, puts them at odds with snobbish Copenhageners.
“We see ourselves as very different to Copenhageners,” says Peter Donslund, a senior civil servant at the town hall. “In Copenhagen they spend much more money, but here people are much more satisfied. Our attitude is not so much for complaining here.” Perhaps that’s why the area votes en masse for Venstre, whose business-friendly policies appeal to an entrepreneurial local population used to doing things by themselves.
“We think that we work harder,” says Osmundsen. “We think that we are better, that we are more frugal. We are country mice and they are city mice. They talk much faster – too much in some cases.”
It’s a tension that the anthropologist Richard Jenkins explores (and to some extent debunks) in his book,
Being Danish
. To illustrate the Jutland reserve, Jenkins retells a
well-known joke about a Jutland farmer interviewing a new labourer. The farmer looks at the young man and says, “I suppose you’ll do. But there’s one thing you should know. We don’t do too much talking here. We just get on with the work.” The young man nods, and starts work immediately. A year later, the farmer approaches the man again and tells him that he’s thinking of buying a new bicycle. The labourer nods, and goes back to work. Six months on, the farmer mentions to him that he’s just bought the bike he was talking about half a year previously. Again, the labourer nods, and gets on with what he was doing. Yet another six months go by, and this time it’s the labourer’s turn to approach the farmer. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’m going to have to leave.” The farmer’s surprised. “What’s up?” he asks. “Don’t I pay you enough?” “No, it’s not that,” says the young man. “But I can’t stand any more of this bicycle talk.”
It’s an exaggeration, of course – but the joke highlights the difference between the hard-working, taciturn Jutlanders and the chatty, lazy Copenhageners. “How can you find the Jutlander in Copenhagen?” begins another Jutland joke. “Just ask to see the boss.”
Yet for all their superiority, the people I meet in Ringkøbing feel a profound sense of inferiority, or at least abandonment. “Copenhagen people think this is a back-water,” says a doleful Oscar. “They stereotype us as fishermen. They think we’re peasants and rednecks. But they’re people who just think about how they look.”
The abandonment has physical manifestations, too. Everyone claims that state funding has been siphoned away from west Jutland and towards Copenhagen, or even Aarhus, Jutland’s eastern capital. Under the last government, political decision-making also became more centralised. Ringkøbing was stripped of its position as the seat of the regional government, while decisions about local housing construction were made from Copenhagen – a move which made west Jutlanders feel angry and helpless. Meanwhile, Ringkøbing sits in the centre of a (relatively) deprived area of Denmark known back in Copenhagen as the “rotten banana”. A strip that runs from north-west Jutland, down its western flank, and then east along the south of Fyn, the banana is home to rising unemployment and lacks centres of higher education.
It’s a situation at odds with the role Jutland has played in Denmark’s history. In a way, you could argue that Jutland represents Denmark’s soul. It was here that the first cooperatives took off, where the first folk high schools were built, and it was the farmers from here who, in the 1890s, pushed through parliament the first steps towards a Danish welfare state. And though Copenhageners are said to be snobby about Jutland, everyone likes to claim their family was originally from here. We’re a nation of farmers, Copenhageners will proudly tell you – and this helps to explain why Ringkøbing might still be so contented. Whatever else has happened since, locals know that their part of the world is the source of Denmark’s founding
myths. “Jutland,” as Richard Jenkins summarises so neatly in his book, “is both centre and periphery within the Danish historical narrative, a place of backward obscurity and the wellspring of enlightenment.”
Danes often talk about how much they trust each other, and how, whatever
The Killing
might suggest, their country has a relatively low crime rate. In practice, it’s difficult to estimate how trusting Denmark is – but there’s certainly a lot of it in Ringkøbing. “It’s a secure community,” says Bent Brodersen, a local councillor for Venstre, and a man once named by French TV as the world’s happiest man. “We don’t fear for crime, terror, wild animals, monsoon.”
“People usually don’t cheat each other,” says Else Mathiassen, headteacher at the West Jutland folk high school, down the road from Ringkøbing. “For instance, my daughter lost her purse. She was sure it would come back to her. She didn’t even get nervous. And it did get back to her! She knew it would be delivered to the police station. And it was! She didn’t know where she lost it. She’s done it several times. Once in a taxi. Another time by a bus stop. And it always got back to her.”
It doesn’t really need to be said, but the town has a strong sense of community. Everyone is part of a club – at a funding meeting at the town hall recently, representatives from 60 clubs turned up. That’s at least 60 clubs for a town of only 9000 citizens. The old-fashioned local bank – Ringkøbing Landbobank – is one of the country’s most stable. “Stinginess is traditionally a local trait,” says
Osmundsen. “And well, some people say the bank has this same trait.”
Meanwhile the continued success of Osmundsen’s own employers – the
Ringkøbing-Skjern Dagbladet
– speaks of a community that cares about its local institutions. Unlike local newspapers in Britain, the
Dagbladet
hasn’t been decimated by redundancies, their advertising revenues have held up well, and, most indicatively, their circulation remains a steady 8500 – not bad for a county with less than 60,000 residents. “Our readers are very loyal,” says Lars Kryger, the paper’s chief subeditor, munching on a very sugary slice of cake. “They feel that if we were not here, something would be missing. They know we’re a cornerstone in this town’s life.”
Another secret to Ringkøbing’s contentedness lies in its relative lack of racial tension. “There is no talk of immigration or integration,” claims Donslund. “People don’t talk about foreigners as part of a group, but more like every other citizen. It’s a special thing about this area.” This is partly because there aren’t many immigrants. In the 70s, when many people arrived from Turkey and Pakistan, they moved to areas where there was a large textile industry – something not present in Ringkøbing.
There are nevertheless two groups of foreign communities – one Iraqi, the other Bosnian. But unlike many other immigrants I meet in Denmark, the ones in Ringkøbing seem genuinely at home. At the Danish-Bosnian Community Centre, behind a petrol station on the outskirts of town, I
chat to a Bosnian Muslim called Damir Zvirkic, whom we met briefly in Chapter five. He loves Denmark, perhaps because the 400 Bosnians in Ringkøbing were – by his account – part of a group granted asylum in 1993 after a personal intervention from Margrethe, the Danish queen. Zvirkic feels Danish now, even – as he mentions earlier – when he goes back to Bosnia on holiday. He says that it helps that Bosnians aren’t particularly fervent Muslims, and so find it easier to become part of the community.
“People from Yugoslavia and Bosnia generally want to integrate. And Danish people like it when they see people trying to integrate. If you’re trying, there’s no problem. I’m trying – and I think sometimes it is enough to try.”
Certainly, the attendance at the Danish-Bosnian Community Centre suggests he’s right. It’s bingo night, and it’s not just Bosnians writing down numbers – around a third of the club’s members are ethnic Danes.
Ringkøbing has one further secret. Jobs. It may lie at the core of the rotten banana, but the town hasn’t been hit by the banana’s worst problem: spiralling unemployment. Before the financial crisis, unemployment here was at 1%, one of the lowest rates in Denmark. Post-2008, it’s still only at 3.5% – one reason why immigrants are still absorbed into the community without a grumble. It’s all down to the area’s surprisingly wide economic base, which creates a lot of jobs for skilled and non-skilled workers alike. First, there’s the cattle industry, still one of the country’s largest. Then there’s the metalworks – per capita, this is Denmark’s most
industrial area. The tourist trade is also booming – the summer houses on the dunes of the North Sea have long been a favourite summer haunt for both Germans and Danes. And finally, there’s Ringkøbing’s most famous son: Vestas, the world’s biggest windmill-maker. They’ve now moved their headquarters east to Aarhus and cut their workforce here from 2500 to 2200, but their presence is still felt economically – and visually. Wherever you turn, in the distance you can always see a long line of rotating turbines – a constant reminder that you’re in one of the greenest countries in the world.
•
Erik Andersen does not look like a man of the future. His hair is white, he’s 66, and his cheeks are grooved by crows’ feet. Hair mushrooms from his ears. His cat sleeps on the window-sill, and in the corner a grandfather clock – handed down from his parents – ticks the tock of decades past.
But looks deceive. If you step outside Andersen’s farmhouse and squint towards the southern horizon – south of the mill-pond, south of his herd of rare Red Danish cows – you will see a slim line of windmills. When the wind’s up, they cartwheel across the fields like ballet dancers in slow motion. When the breeze stops, they stand like Greek heroes resting on their shields.
We’re on the tiny island of Samsø, a few kilometres east of Jutland, and these windmills – which belong in part to Andersen – have made Samsø one of the largest carbon-neutral settlements on the planet, and the doyen of the green
world. Søren Hermansen, the local teacher who spearheaded the island’s green movement, remembers visiting New York for the first time a few years ago. He was eating out with his wife. The waiter – realising they were Danish – said he’d just read an article about Danish windmills in the
New Yorker
. “He said the writer had been to this little island called Samsø. Had we heard of it?”