Odd introductions
When I met my Danish partner, who had moved to Sydney for a two-year working holiday, one of the first things I did was get him to watch a few classic Australian movies—mostly comedies from the 90s, like The Castle or Muriel’s Wedding—that I thought would give him a good sense of what ‘we’ are like.
I have never felt particularly Australian. My grandparents moved there in the 1960s. They had lived in Canada for a couple of years and liked it; they left England expecting Australia to be similar. Instead, they found themselves in a tiny mining town south of Sydney, with dirt roads that led along sheer cliff faces and down through the bush to the sea. They clung on to their Englishness. My father, who was six when they moved, deliberately kept his accent until he was in his late teens. I inherited their feeling of dislocation.
But now I felt a weird responsibility to the foreigner I was spending time with, like I was somehow more Australian for spending time with him, and I wanted him to understand the strange country he was now trapped in. (Literally: it was 2020, the borders were closed, and if he left for Denmark, he couldn’t come back).
At some point we switched to Danish television, because it made sense. I knew very little about Denmark, other than that it was small, cold, and north. So first we watched Historien om Danmark (‘The Story of Denmark’), a prestige documentary series from 2017. Lars Mikkelsen is the presenter, because of course he is, and the series is ambitious in a BBC sort of way, with historical reenactments and computer graphics and Mikkelsen walking through tundra beside the reindeer hunters. I lost track of the kings, who are all called Christian or Frederik or Valdemar. I enjoyed the mythic origins of the Dannebrog (the Danish flag), which simply fell out of the sky onto one of the Valdemars on a battlefield in Estonia. The only way we could watch the series was on DR, through a VPN. We had to download English subtitles and a program to play them and then, with every new episode, line them up so that they were in synch with the soundtrack.
After that we watched the two original seasons of Lars von Trier’s Riget (‘The Kingdom’). I am in general on the fence about von Trier, and have been since I accidentally watched Breaking the Waves on cable television one night while I was a teenager. But Riget feels different to his later films. It is grotesque, but also very silly—imagine David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but set in a hospital, with more séances and more jokes about Sweden. At the end of every episode von Trier appears in a bow-tie, in front of a red curtain, to remind you (as he looks directly into the camera and makes a devil sign) that you must be prepared to ‘take the good with the evil’.
I’m not entirely sure what conclusions about Denmark I took from this, just as I’m not sure what my partner made of Muriel’s Wedding. Perhaps a 30-year-old television show where one of the more coherent plotlines involves a woman being impregnated by a ghost, and then giving birth a week later to a giant baby whose limbs grow so quickly that they must be held up with a complicated pulley system, is not the best way to gain a sense of a nation. Or perhaps it is the perfect way?
My partner left Australia when his visa ran out, during the second round of Covid lockdowns. After that I was lonely and miserable, and still stuck in the house, so I made my way through all the Nordic noir shows set in Denmark that I could find on Australian streaming sites: all of Forbrydelsen (‘The Killing’), all of Broen (‘The Bridge’).
I read a few books by Danish authors, too: Tove Ditlevsen, Karen Blixen, even a bit of H.C. Andersen. (Much more entertaining is reading about H.C. Andersen, who was… very strange. Born into extreme poverty, he never completely mastered the social norms of the wealthy circles he went on to mix with. He developed unrequited, obsessive crushes on both men and women, but appears never to have been involved in any kind of sexual relationship. The episode that led to his famous falling-out with Charles Dickens has inspired a tabletop game called TRAPPED IN YOUR HOUSE DUE TO HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN).
At this point I wasn’t yet learning Danish, or not properly. I felt a little stab of shame whenever I ignored the Duolingo owl yelling at me from the notifications bar on my phone, but I was too annoyed by the bizarre constructions it was teaching me (‘the man has a colourful egg’) to devote actual time to it. I briefly attended group lessons, online because of the pandemic, organised by the Sydney branch of the Danish Church. The teacher wasn’t used to classes of adults and seemed to have no systematic idea of what he was doing. Instead of giving us a textbook, he spent more than half the term reproducing worksheets for Danish kids learning to read. I had in any case moved to a new apartment where the unstable internet connection would throw me out of the online classroom at random. I did not go back for a second term.
I sought out Danish television and Danish novels not to learn the language, but because I missed my partner, and because I was hoping (though I didn’t want to say it out loud) that I might find a way to get here in the future.
Now I am writing this in Copenhagen, in the bookshop I have been a volunteer at since I arrived. Moving has been both easier and more difficult than I’d anticipated. There are days when I am elated by random, mundane things—fog, for example, or the red squirrels in Assistens Kirkegaard, or the hollyhocks that erupt out of the pavement everywhere in the summer. But a lot of the time I feel as though I am in a parallel reality. I live in this city, but at the same time I don’t. After half a year of Danish lessons, I can’t pick up a newspaper or a popular novel. I have visited the larger museums in Copenhagen, but the exhibitions in English are curated for tourists, not for people who are trying to orient themselves against a foreign history. Mastering the language will be the thing that unlocks this place, because it will let me experience the city through its culture and art—which I know that I very much need if I am going ever to feel at home here.
I sense that Danes are very protective of Danish. They are right to be; this is a small country, and English has been creeping into colloquial speech at speed in recent years. But I have been genuinely surprised by how difficult it sometimes is to access Danish cultural spaces as a non-Dane. Even something as simple as finding a movie theatre that screens Danish films with English subtitles can be a struggle. The national broadcaster, DR, has nothing like Australia’s SBS, or “Special Broadcasting Service”, which was established in the 1980s to provide multilingual news and entertainment to migrant communities.
Given this, I have a couple of ideas about what I’d like this column to be. I plan to write a little about Danish cultural products—film, television, art, literature—that go beyond the hygge marketed to foreigners, and that might lead us to a more nuanced sense of what this country ‘is’.
I also plan to write about internationals who have managed to make a creative life here. Most of the internationals I meet—the ones who have managed to find a job—seem to either work in tech or in pharma. It can be difficult for those of us with a background in the humanities or arts to imagine ourselves fitting into this place without being forced to abandon our skills and training and passions. But I know that there are udlændinge here who have found meaningful ways to continue their creative work, and I am looking forward to meeting them.
