Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0110/01100.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 28KB | 443 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01100}
$Pretitle{411}
$Title{Denmark
Danish Literature After 1945}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Henning Dehn Nielsen}
$Affiliation{Ministry of Foreign Affairs}
$Subject{life
novel
danish
rifbjerg
time
work
denmark
novels
political
form}
$Date{1990}
$Log{}
Country:     Denmark
Book:        Facts about Denmark
Author:      Henning Dehn Nielsen
Affiliation: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Date:        1990

Danish Literature After 1945

     Denmark, like other Western European industrial countries that developed
late, has undergone a period of drastic social change since the end of the
second world war. This revolution has been felt in almost every sphere. There
has been a mass movement of population from the country to the towns,
involving departure from the peasant society that, if narrow, was rich in
tradition, and necessitating taking work in the labyrinth of production,
training, service and administration developed in a high-technology welfare
state. It is a confused picture that for some is hard to grasp, and the
feeling of loss and lack of contact is widespread. The literature that has
come into being during these years is correspondingly varied in the complexity
of its expression. It raises more questions than it answers. Just as political
life is marked by a mass of conflicting interests brought about by the entry
of a number of new groups into organisations and the media, so too literary
life is characterised by a welter of conflicting interests. Nothing resembling
one great dominating type of authorship or one leading literary movement
exists today.

     The fight to win attention from the media and the reading public has
grown increasingly harder, and a number of present-day authors have learned to
write along with public opinion with great professionalism, so that with the
aid of their own persona they keep themselves supplied with the kind of
publicity that benefits their writings. More and more books are written in an
indefinite genre somewhere between journalism, political critique,
confessional writing and fiction proper. This is true of such mutually
dissimilar writers as the one-time flower-child Ebbe Klovedal Reich
(b. 1940), the bizarre and prolific Dan Turell (b. 1946) and the sexually
outspoken Suzanne Brogger (b. 1944) who in recent years has been trying to
rig herself from the grip of a media image.

     There is great consciousness of contemporaneity, but in many areas
correspondingly little of the more classical sense of form and genre. On the
other hand the dominating awareness in literature of problems has given it
entry into various new readership milieux with an extremely pragmatic,
although aesthetically fairly undiversified relationship to authorship.

     Books listed under the concluding heading of Translations have been
published in English. Where this is the case the article gives the original
English titles; all other titles have been translated verbatim from Danish.

The postwar period

     Denmark remained a largely rural society until after the second world
war. This is the reason for the late advent here of modernism in literature,
that had been a part of French and English writing for close on a century. It
was the group connected with the periodical Heretica, 1948-53, who combined
serious interest in the artistic desire for form with involvement in the
series of disturbing political and moral questions occasioned by the end of
the war and the new atomic weapons.

     For some years the lyricist Paul la Cour (1902-56) was the recondite
authority with his grandiloquent poetics in Fragmenter af en dagbog (Fragments
from a Diary) 1948, while the short story writer and novelist Martin A. Hansen
(1909-55) possessed the ability of working on advanced experimentation, in the
collection of short stories Tornebusken (The Hawthorn), 1946, as well as the
popularly successful, frequently humorous, style, in the novel Jonathans rejse
(Jonathans Journey), 1941, and sometimes the historical novel form, in
Lykkelige Kristoffer (Lucky Kristoffer), 1945.

     He was the true counterpart to the great storyteller Karen Blixen
(1885-1962), who as early as the thirties had won international renown with
her Seven Gothic Tales, 1934, and her memoirs, Out of Africa, 1937. She went
on to publish further collections of fascinating and hermetic tales (Winter's
Tales, 1942, and Last Tales, 1957, etc.), that despite their historical dress
reveal to an increasing extent their consciousness of the modern situation and
a critical attitude toward established sex roles. The profound aftereffects
of the works of these two writers are also due to their great human authority.

     The lyric was for long the dominating form in the work of authors such as
Ole Sarvig (1921-81), Ole Wivel (b. 1921) and Jorgen Gustava Brandt
(b. 1929). From the artistic point of view, the poetry of Thorkild Bjornvig
(b. 1918) is probably the most concentrated, intellectually translucent and
erotically informed. His deep concern with art and his ecstatic experiences
with nature (in the poems collected in Anubis, 1955, and Figure and Fire,
1959) have given way in recent years to ecological-political work (poems,
essays), that have had much influence on the younger generation. The note of
insouciant charm evinced by the lyricist and short story writer Frank Jaeger
(1926-77) in his youthful work, in time revealed an underlying savage fantasy
and labyrinthine eroticism. He is perhaps the most independent regenerator of
the Danish lyrical tradition with his absolutely distinctive linguistic tone
(as in the collection of poems Idylia, 1967).

Novels

     Martin A. Hansen and H. C. Branner (1903-66) were the first important
novelist of the postwar period. Hansen's The Liar, 1950, and Branner's The
Riding Master, 1949, have been sold in great numbers. Branner experiments with
a novel form whose stream-of-consciousness allows the incorporation of
penetrating Freudian-inspired psychological treatment. Novels such as these
pave the way for the postwar period's main-stream novels that follows the
realistic tradition. As a genre the novel is aware of its period, but in
general it does not react strongly to the more short-lived literary trends.

MARTIN A. HANSEN. Han er min Satan (He is my Satan). By changing round the
order of the letters in Martin A. Hansens name (a so-called anagram) Karen
Blixen composed this sentence, which is presumably meant to convey all the
diversity of esteem in which Our Lord can hold an opponent of stature. In the
course of his comparatively short life Martin A. Hansen too grew into
something of a myth, an author whose brilliance and authority were not
confined only to his works. His forceful and conscientious nature was revealed
in his scruples regarding the liquidation of informers during the German
occupation of Denmark and the witch-hunting character that sometimes marked
the judicial purge of traitors after the war. The son of a Sealand crofter, he
felt strong ties with the common people whose simple and apparently
uncomplicated lifestyle appealed to him. At the same time he himself had drunk
deep of modern introspective city life and was well aware that the simple life
was a thing of the past that could not be recaptured. He tried to convey its
best qualities, particularly the Scandinavian idea of justice, in a form that
rendered it viable in our own time. His works contain both the countrymans
reticent and humorous soft-spokenness and a modern polyphonic and fragmented
style of writing. His scepticism over the ambiguity of art led him in the
direction of the discipline of history and threatened him finally with
silence.

THORKILD BJORNVIG. In our time the forces of aggression have grown so
powerful that no defensive measures can hold out against them, Thorkild
Bjornvig has said. This is true in the military sense, but it is true also of
the capacity of nature to withstand the abuse inflicted on it by industrial
civilisation. Bjornvigs own writings demonstrate the truth of his asserti