Comments on: A brief history of Denmark

By: Maya

Maya — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:28:07 +0000

Samuel: Yes we did, and something we were very proud of – we just forget to mention that we only forbid it in Denmark, and that we had slavery on our islands in Caribbean a lot longer xD
Also, Douglas: Same-sex marriages are still not possible in Denmark. You can get something that’s very close to being a marriage, but it is not quite the same (I, however, am not completely sure of the differences). But they are trying to allow it now.

By: Samuel

Samuel — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:27:21 +0000

denmark – one of the first, if not the first country to ban slavery

By: Douglas Muth

Douglas Muth — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:14:31 +0000

Additional facts about Denmark:

- First country to legalize porn (late 60s)

- First country to legalize same-sex marriage (early 90s)

So if you watch porn, are gay, or watch gay porn, be sure to thank a Dane!

By: idiot

idiot — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:43:18 +0000

and while we’re at it let’s open up that can of worms called denmark during world war II. Denmark indeed “comes through WW2 mostly unscathed. After the war the old political parties are soon back in business”. One reason is that those old political parties stood united in a 5-party coalition that supported the German occupation —for 3½ years. And it wasn’t just a matter of the Germans holding a gun to their heads either. As long as the war was running in Nazi Germany’s favour, Denmark enjoyed a special status as the “model Protectorate” of the Third Reich – and this had broad political as well as popular backing within Denmark. Why? Because in Depression-era Europe, the German delivery on their promise to buy all Danish agricultural produce at higher than world market rates, and their opening the doors to the employment of Danish workers in German armaments industries was seen by the Danish ruling elites as the road to full employment & prosperity. And they went along with it — signatory to the Anti.-Comintern Pact, rounding up the Danish communists on Germany’s behalf and packing them off to concentration camps, allowing the recruitment of Frikorps Danmark — the Danish division of the Waffen SS –to fight on the Ostfront [there's a stunning photo published in a DSB magazine a decade or so ago of thousands of Danes crowding Københavns Hovedbanegård to wave off the trains filled with their sons volunteering for SS fighting]. And during this period only a tiny percentage of Danes supported the Resistance. Only when the tide of the war turned after Stalingrad and it became clear that Germany was not to be the winning side did the Resistance take off. The actual date was 23 August 1943, when the British & the Communists collaborated in sparking the Odense General strike, which resulted in the imposition of martial law. No, Danes didn’t have the stomach for killing Jews [although the pre-August 43 Danish govt sent German Jewish refugees back to the Nazis knowing full well what would be their fate]. But the notion promoted by Danish ruling elites (& Hollywood) after the war of plucky Danes heroically rescuing Danish Jewry simply has no basis in fact. Danish Jews rescued themselves. And one can to this day see the villas constructed along the shoreline in Helsingør, paid for by the payments made by Danish Jews to the local fishermen who sailed them over to Sweden. Denmark had the highest percentage of collaborators of any ‘occupied’ nation during the War, and afterwards there was the predictable bloodletting. And the creation of a mythology of national resistance that has only in the last decade been challenged by a new generation of Danish revisionist historians. A lot of grey shady-nuanced areas there [and a very impelling reason to learn Danish - to read this stuff]

By: idiot

idiot — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 12:14:24 +0000

hmmmm – a potted history that manages to avoid even a single mention of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig??????
if you want to understand the intensity of contemporary Danish ethnic nationalism, then you can’t avoid the man. Because he invented it. His national revitalisation movement signlehandedly welded “Danishness” out of nothing. Prior to Grundtvig the Danish state was a multi-ethnic, multi-national enterprise. “Danes* hadn’t been invented yet. In fact ‘Danish’ referred to the Danish royal house. Period. Which owned (feudal absolutism) and presided over a kingdom of Norwegians, Schleswig Germans, Icelanders, Greenlanders, Farøese, Jutes of various micro-ethnicities, Fynbos, Bornholmers, etc, etc…. each of whom spoke mutually-incomprehensible dialects. The 4-fold national calamity (an insane degenerate monarch backing Napoleon, Nelson buring the Danish fleet, the resulting national bankruptcy and the soon-to-follow loss of Norway), followed by the stirrings of nationalism in the German-speaking provinces left the Danish monarch in possession of the rump of the former Empire. Grundtvig amalgamated the various micro-ethnicities by his movement for universal literacy among the peasantry – which moulded a national normative literary –and slowlty, spoken – language. He of course was inspired by the earlier romantic-era nationalisms sweeping the German speaking world [whose instigator - one Johann Gottfried Herder --coined the concept of "Blood and Soil", comprising the idea that an ethnic group has a mystical relationship with the landscape it inhabits- which is the roots of the "Völkishness" which is the full flowering of these concepts seen in the first half of the 20th century]. Yes, Grundtvig has the patent on ‘folklelighed’. And that is to this day the burning concern in Denmark [an interesting sidebar is how this Danish variant of 'völkishness' provided legitimacy for the Nazi regime via the Folkehøjskole movement in the form of one Niels Bukh...]

also, really: did “The French revolution had given everyone in Europe a lot of crazy ideas about individual freedom. The Danes decide that they want a free constitution. King Frederik the 7th agrees, and the first democratic constitution is signed on 5 June 1849″?
Or: did the revolutions of 1848 put enough fear into the Danish ruling elites that they wisely bought off their national bourgeoisie by making timely reforms rather than face the street fights then erupting throughout Miteuropa?

By: Fausto Bellezzo

Fausto Bellezzo — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:02:14 +0000

I found your text extremely informative. And your writing is very captivating and humorous. I especially liked the bit about coming back home from a long stay in a different country. You could not have described the feeling I also experience every time I visit my family and friends any better than you did. Your text has inspired me to continue to learn Danish.