Scandinavia - The Bridge

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Hi, it's Misha. A few weeks ago, the producer and I spotted a relaxation in the regulations.

Yeah, but definitely allowed in again. But we gotta go now. So here we are, lovely Copenhagen on a very rainy day.

Yeah, very rainy, but it's a lovely little canal which is flanked by really elegant if restrained buildings. It's extremely attractive. We're looking down this canal and at the end of the canal we see it widens out to a a bigger stretch of water. And over that stretch of water I can see Sweden. And it's that stretch of water.

The invention of Scandinavia. Episode 1. The bridge.

When the bridge uh was inaugurated in year two thousand There was this big vision and dream here that the south of Sweden and the Copenhagen area in Denmark should be one and that the people here we should feel like you know one population, we would be Urresund people all together doesn't matter if you're Dane or Swede and so on. And for a while, just after the bridge opened, this was very this was very strong. People really believed in this. For example, when the TV series The Bridge came out.

This is the ninth invention series we've made, and every time we go traveling, I feel we've stumbled onto something new.

Misha, you'll never believe it. This train is in the middle of the sea.

Scandinavia, the subject of this series, has been overlooked for too long. There's the Vikings and their impact on us. Moving on we come to the rise of Denmark, a great power for centuries, which used to boss around both Sweden and Norway, before Sweden's own rise to prominence in the 17th century. and a role terrorizing much of Central Europe. It's not all Aberan social democracy with the Swedes. Norway's arrival has been more recent, a country transformed by the discovery of oil.

Yeah, so my name is Anna Torn. Turn in Swedish, but you don't have that letter.

Mm-hmm.

I live in Malmö but come from the northern part of Sweden called Sundsar.

Anna lives just across the bridge in Malmur, perhaps the most multicultural city in all Scandinavia. It's in a Swedish region called Skone that was Danish right up until sixteen fifty eight. We wanted to know more about relations between Danes and Swedes over there, and also what effect, if any, the pandemic had had.

They closed the border for us, but they continue to come here to do their shopping, go to our restaurants and so on. Sweden is not telling the Danes you cannot come, which many people here think we should say. So the Danes come over here with all their corona. So this is how people talk here now. Back to

You are dead.

And we are not the same.

Why do you think Sweden has responded to the pandemic so differently to Denmark?

Tough question.

Did you think that's an overreaction or did you think we can cope with this?

Yeah I think pretty much. action and the countries that are making a complete lockdown they are just panicking and we don't do that in Sweden.

The pandemic has really demonstrated the cultural differences between Danes, Swedes and Norwegians. They have very different approaches to a whole range of issues, not just the pandemic. immigration, certain aspects of the economy and how you should engage with the outside world. Because to the outside world they're a unit. To themselves, I think they they know very much that they're not.

But we're starting in Denmark, aren't we? We're starting in Denmark because of that very narrow strip of water. That's the first thing we're gonna focus on. And uh everybody talks about the Mediterranean all the time and I always think the North Sea, the Baltic, these are important places, linking money, ideas and everything.

Incredibly important and the reason why Denmark was so influential and then Sweden as well was because of the fact that they controlled all the grain, all the metals coming out of Russia, Poland, Lithuania and uh the Danes not surprisingly, made everyone pay to go through this narrow strip of water and it made them very, very rich.

Did you know they had plague here in seventeen eleven and a third of the population died?

I didn't, but thanks for letting me know.

We are in a flat on the fourth floor in a quite posh part of Copenhagen called Österburg. And when I arrived through my windows and my balc on my balcony I could walk And I could see the Swedish coast. Well my name is Karsten Jensen. and I am a writer and eager participant in public debate and when I met my wife, Liz, twenty years ago I said to her, I am the most hated man in Denmark.

And why are you the most hated man in Denmark?

Because I somehow always happen to disagree with the majority. Which in a consensus seeking country like Denmark is not a good thing because you spoil the famous Hugh. Huger is n not being on your own, it's being with others. lighting up the candles, drawing the curtains, turning your back on the world and being with a narrow circle and you all know each other's sorts and inner life and you agree on everything.

Now why is this stretch of water here? The other side of which is Sweden, as you said. Why is this stretch of water so important?

Historically Ursun, as the stretch of water is called, has been so important because those who controlled Urson controlled the access to big important trading ports in northern Germany and Poland and even all the way to Russia.

So in that case, Denmark must have been hugely influential.

If you go back five or six hundred years, Denmark was the big power of Northern Europe. And there was a time when the three Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark were united and the Queen was Danish. So we were in control and a big chunk of Southern Sweden used to belong to Denmark until three hundred and fifty years ago, when we lost it in one of these many wars that our totally incompetent kings. Love to indulge in.

So what were you taught about these glory days in school?

I don't really remember to be frank, but I do remember that we were not taught anything about Danish greatness. There was no nostalgia for that time. what we were taught again and again was that we were a small country and that we were a moral superpower. We were the best country in the world. We would on a moral map of the world be bigger than the former Soviet Union, which were eleven time zones. That's what we were taught.

I love the idea of a moral map of the

Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

So do you think that Denmark is the size of the Soviet Union on the world's moral

Well I used to think that for many years. Yes, I grew up with that idea. And if you somehow start being critical of it, you are in deep trouble.

The population of Denmark is just under 6 million. So, more than Ireland and more than Norway, but less than Sweden, which is over 10 million. The Swedes are both allies of the Danes and, as is often the case with neighbours, their enemies too, in football and in history. Over 700 years ago, Denmark, Sweden and Norway were all allied under the so-called Kalmar Union of 1397. They had a single monarch, and as Karsten said, that monarch was a Dane.

hear the jolly music I thought it was appalling

Noted.

Nor it seems do they talk much about how powerful they once were, controlling both sides of the Urusunt, as we've heard, taking tolls, making money, and running great chunks of territory elsewhere. So they controlled Norway, for example, until 1814. Schleswig-Holstein, you may remember from history, two states in the south that was a crucial part of the kingdom until it fell to the Prussians in 1864.

This is this is just my theory, but I kind of think you can't analyse the Danish national character if such a thing exists at all, without looking at their history of having once been a massive regional power and then having slowly lost limbs in painful and humiliating ways over those hundreds of years, from once uh ruling Iceland and Norway and southern Sweden and of course Schleswig Holstein in northern Germany,

Some countries expand, some countries contract.

For a uh a an Englishman with our strange Baroque sense of manners and behaviour It was quite shocking actually. Wha it did really feel like living among the Vikings. You know, you half expected one of them to pull out a sword and chop your head off or belch in your face after drinking a a hornful of mead or something. It was really quite um For this Englishman anyway, quite barbaric, I've just learned not to take it so personally, because the Danes don't.

Well we asked Michael Booth, good tourist that we are, where should we go in Copenhagen? What's the best thing to see?

Rosenborg Castle, Rosenborg Slot, which is now in the centre of Copenhagen but was once the summer residence of various kings. It houses the crown jewels and the basement. It's just a very pretty fairy tale capital really.

And here is the rather weird Renaissance structure that is Rosenborg Castle. I actually quite like it. Looks a bit Dutch. Sadly, it's locked and closed and not only that, it's raining and I'm cold.

What have you noticed in Copenhagen so far? What have you noticed about the people?

About the people. Danes appear very content going about their business. Not too worried about the rest of the world. beautiful architecture. I mean it reminds me a bit of Holland, it reminds me a bit of northern Germany, places like Hamburg. And there's clearly a lot of money here too.

I think there is no such thing as Scandinavia, really. The longer I'm here, the reason I wrote the book really was because when I first started to learn about the region, I discovered that these countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, are radically different.

Oh here comes a boat. Actually it's a rather peculiar looking boat. Looks it looks a bit like a dredger.

In terms of what Danes think about Swedes, Danes think and talk an awful lot about Swedes. Swedes don't think and talk an awful lot about Danes. It's it's a classic kind of David and Goliath situation these days, I think.

I think a key date for us is 1658 because that's when Denmark loses a huge chunk of territory in what is now southern Sweden to the Sweden. That means that Sweden comes right up to the Danish border, to the Uresund itself. So the Straits are no longer controlled by Denmark alone. And that means it's the end of Denmark as a great power. In Europe at least.

Pretty pretty big imperial.

For the size of the country and particularly when you think that by this time Denmark's glory days are supposed to have been over.

Well, we had three islands in the Caribbean, which we sold to the US in nineteen seventeen. And we were on paper we were one of the first countries to liberate slaves, but in practice we didn't do. And the reason we needed to keep on bringing Africans and transport them to our islands was that we worked them so hard that they hardly reproduced. They were worked to death. It was real concentration camps, the Danish plantations.

So again another shrinking of the Danish moral map.

Exactly, yes. When in two thousand and seventeen when we celebrated the centennial uh Selling the islands. The Danish Prime Minister. He did not want to say I apologize, but he acknowledged that we had been real bastards.

I think that the the Danes tell themselves that, you know, everything turned out for the best because now they have one of the most successful and wealthy and happy and well balanced societies in the world, well functioning, you can't really argue they haven't ended up in a good place. So I I guess it was probably good that we lost all that stuff so painfully, but I think that's a story that they tell themselves and who's who's to argue? W when you look at the end result.

One of the things that you notice in Copenhagen is is how young it is. There are a lot of young people cycling around and Danes are regularly listed as the happiest people in the world. And certainly in the capital that's probably the case. There's a whole lot of things to do and it's great fun. But it's not necessarily the case in all of Denmark. Where we're heading next, Jutland, was described to us by one person as being very flat.

It's almost like there are two Denmarks, Copenhagen and the rest of Denmark.

And

The Jutlanders think of Copenhagen as as kind of fundamentally untrustworthy. The Copenhageners view the Jutlanders as very basic, straight talking, abrupt, country bumpkins. That's the very rough division.

Three hours, two more massive bridges and a lot of Europop later. It turned out to be true.

It's because some places it is really flat and some places it do smell. Right? Stinky. My name is uh Dorda Norris. I am a novelist and a short story writer, and I live on the North Sea in a little town called Vilosu. That is in Jotland.

Dora Nosch was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Mirror Shoulder Signal in 2017. And if you're wondering about Jutland, well it's that defiant finger of land that sticks up above Germany and into the North Sea.

Copenhagen was so far away you can't even imagine. Most people I knew had never been there. Um we had to cr cross two straits of water to go there. It was a long journey. And um I remember once asking my mom, we were on the North Sea in a fisherman's village out there and I looked across the North Sea and we saw stuff about Copenhagen in the television every night. That was what we saw.

I love it, that even the landscape here can be hoogely. The approved landscape that is. And here's something else I didn't know. It's about the event that first led Danish history to turn in on itself.

Twice.

It's a military manoeuvre that still defies belief. What exactly happened when

Well it was in the middle of the little ice age, so the seas were frozen pretty hard. I'll tell you what it reminds me of, it really reminds me of nineteen forty two in Singapore when the Japanese came down the peninsula from behind and took the British completely by surprise.

That's great. Now, another key moment in our long tale of Danish military decline came during the Napoleonic Wars, when the British bombed Denmark for being on the wrong side.

They were bombarding Copenhagen. And uh a huge national castration. I mean the British stole our fleet. We thought we were like the king of the universe because the Danes are very much a seafaring nation. So it was an incredible humiliation.

The British took away the Danish fleet. They stole it or confiscated it, whatever. language you want to use.

'Cause it was one of the first attacks on a civilian.

Yeah.

Target in European history by artillery. Yeah. I mean it was a pretty brutal thing to do.

Much.

Apparently, you can still see a book in the Copenhagen University Library, marked Defender of the Peace, which was ripped open by a British cannonball in that attack. I talked about this with Karsten Jensen, who, it turned out, had a British cannonball of his very own. What have you got a cannonball for in the middle of your living room table?

Well you might not believe this, but this is a British nine pounder and it went through the room.

Yeah.

of a house in my native town, Master, in the Baltic, and this was in the Napoleonic Wars. The sailors put up a resistance, so the British men of war started bombarding the city and they fired twenty-eight cannonballs.

Yeah, yes.

The Danes still remember quite keenly actually that bombardment by Nelson. They joke about it if you were at a dinner party or whatever when the subject arises. But the English response I've learnt to that is, well, you shouldn't have sided with Napoleon and it was, I think, the first time that a civilian target had been bombarded like that. The Danes are still a little bit sore about it. It's more current than the Stockholm Bloodbath, put it that way. It's more talked about.

Positively tropical. People are very very happy here.

The weather is often pretty miserable.

Is this miserable?

The ready.

Ha ha ha.

Okay, so we're on the uh metro heading to the airport. We've got some news.

Yeah we got some news and that is we gotta get the last plane out of Dutch because the uh the quarantine rules in Britain have changed and If we don't make it back home this evening we're gonna have to go into self-isolation for two weeks. So um

That's the end of our Scandinavian trip for now.

For now, Miles, but I feel as they will probably be back. What do you think? Is this gonna ruin our program?

Uh we'll see, we'll see. We're just gonna have to be inventive, I don't know.

Well, it is a series called The Invention of Scandinavia, so it's appropriate that we're invented, but it is very, very annoying.

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You ready to roll? Ah. Just check your levels, can you?

I'm gonna send you the stuff anyhow.

Do you think Misha people might be interested to know why we haven't had one of these programmes for nearly two years now?

Well, I think we ought to tell them that we were going to go to Japan, but then the pandemic got in the way. We'd done a wee bit of preparation for Japan. We'd identified what it was we wanted to explore there. Very, very neat country, of course.

And uh the pandemic came. I I'd read a lot about Japan. I'd also read up Mexico and then we worked together on Japan. We were gonna go to Mexico because you were in LA and therefore we didn't have to pay for you.

That's right, or at least you would would have had to have paid a lot less in terms of me me getting down there. It was just a hop, skip and a jump because I was living in the United States at the time and I had to come back because of the pandemic, unfortunately.

But it has been nearly two years since our last trip, which was I think the last place we went was Belfast.

Yeah, that's right. We did Scotland first and we then we went to Wales and then we went to uh

Arlen had

That was actually in some ways for us the most interesting programme of all because of course we were dealing with the invention of our own history.

Did you get any negative feedback from it?

I think I got one Scots nationalist getting upset about our interpretation of seventeen oh seven.

Which was the act of union.

The act of union exactly. Where we had asserted at one point that Scotland was basically broke.

Mm-hmm.

They didn't like that at all. Um they made a fair point, but uh it was quite aggressive, not as aggressive as some of the things I came across when reporting Yugoslavia, I have to say.

We got pretty nasty feedback when we were in Spain and we were diving into the whole Catalonia separation argument by going back to the origins. of why Catalonia did see itself as separate. And I remember there was quite a flurry of angry emails after that programme came out.

Yeah, I think that anywhere where you see a national or identity issue currently uh active rather than dormant is likely to uh Trigger some responses, sometimes intemperate, sometimes unfair, and sometimes just passionate.

I'm not sure they really like outsiders telling them their own history. I think that's something I mean, I would see that as an advantage, someone who's not steeped into the stories they all tell themselves and is not involved in the politics. I think that's one of the strengths, isn't it?

Yes, I think it is a strength and it's going to be very interesting to see how the three Scandinavian nations How they respond to this.

within Scandinavia, but they all pointed out that when they're abroad they can always spot a Scandy coming down the road. They know each other.

That's true, and we can do the same with Brits when we go abroad.

That's because of hairstyles and clothing.

That's absolutely right. It's to do with hairstyles and clothing and people speaking English in a loud voice.

Something I'd like to very quickly bring in is something we didn't particularly cover well enough in this first opening episode, which is the great question of Schleswig Holston.

Ah yes, Schleswig Holstein, which if you look into it was clearly when they finally lost it to the Prussians. Basically a miscalculation on the part of the Danish king that gave Bismarck the opportunity to grab it. and to consolidate Germany's growing power within Europe. So it's actually a very, very important moment, even though a lot of people have been baffled by the complexities of it.

Can I tell you what Palmerston said? I've got the quote written down here.

You do tell us what Palmerston was I couldn't remember the exact Palmerston quote, so I was

Only three people have ever understood the Schleswig Holstein business, he says.

Ha ha.

The Prince Consort, I guess that's Prince Albert, who was married to Queen Victoria, but he's now dead. There was a German professor who's gone mad, and me, and I've forgotten all about it.

Yeah.

Complex but nonetheless nonetheless very important. And of course one thing we identified talking to Danes and Danish historians, and indeed Swedes and Norwegians,'cause uh one interesting thing is is despite the narcissism of small differences, as we call one of the episodes.

Well to finish this podcast I'm gonna let someone have a stab at explaining. Schleswig Holstein, and that's daughter Norse, who I went to see in Jutland. And of course Schleswig Holstein is just below Jutland. Jutland is the big peninsula sticking up into the North Sea and Schleswig Holstein on the map. is what basically connects it to Germany. And I think at one point someone said the loss of that territory in 1864 was about forty percent of Denmark's land mass gone.

Uh when it comes to the border zone between Jotland and and Germany you could make ten programs about the kind of wars and conflicts. that has been going on for centuries down there, but to boil it down, there was one part of that area that identified with Denmark and then the other part identified with the German language, the German identity and wanted to go that way and that of course led to a lot of wars between Denmark and Germany about this very powerful area. Um

Small of dog.

and after that conflict we lost a greater part of Denmark to Germany, which is still such a big part of national identity. Um if you look at maps from back then Um you can see that the German border is so high up in in Denmark, in Judah, that it looks like a sock, like a sock that has been drawn up on a very skinny leg and it looks like it's like a castration. It looks like we've been castrated. Like we've been humiliated and um uh there are so many emotions about this still in that area.

Are there still Danish speakers south of the border?

Yes, there is. There is a Danish minority there. They have their own schools, their own uh high school

My dentist.

Is from the Danish minority called Reinhardt and he speaks a lovely Danish with a very German accent, but he is a Dane but grew up in Germany and therefore has or had a German passport as well. So um When you travel in that area, you have to pick up on everything that is told beneath the sentence, every little sign that says if you're a German minded or a Danish minded person.

It's a bit of a linguistic mudslime there.

It is. They're bilingual. They they speak both languages perfectly. Um but they're getting along and because allow these minorities to be there and to have their schools and have their languages. This is a very peaceful era now. But you can imagine the kind of conflict. um this could stir up uh in war times. And also during the Second World War, of course.

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