Copenhagen Noir

No matter. The important point is that noir only seems to operate within the crime genre. There is noir that merely touches occasionally on an actual crime story; Paul Auster’s novels about New York come to mind, but authors from other genres and other parts of the globe can also be included. Japan’s Haruki Murakami, England’s Ian McEwan, and Sweden’s Karin Alvtegen all can be said to create works resembling noir. The dark style does not require bodies, pathetic sex, or cover-tocover violence. More a clear literary, late-modernist, and existential sense that in the evil streets of the big city and dark suburbs is found the consummate experience of shock-the confrontation with the seamy side of modernism.

Europe’s End and the Gateway to Scandinavia:

Copenhagen As Noir

Copenhagen: the Little Mermaid, H.C. Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karen Blixen, a big city that perhaps more than any other is the absolute capital, origin, and center of northern European romanticism of the 1800s. Denmark’s Copenhagen, with its ramparts and moats forming the shell of the city and suburbs, has retained a glint of back then, that world of yesterday. To be exact, the city’s archaic Middle Ages center, with the beautiful buildings, squares, and streets that tourists meet from their hotels, a comfortable inner circle with Tivoli as its midpoint and King’s Square its end. At one point our metropolis was presented as an idyllic, modest-sized big city, where police stopped traffic when a mother duck guided her ugly ducklings across the street populated by cars, bicycles, and streetcars. But naturally, and quite unfortunately, such is the case no longer. Copenhagen long ago abandoned its Sleeping Beauty slumber for a cosmopolitan night and day that never sleeps, neither in a good nor bad way. Four-wheel drive vehicles, limos, and expensive sports cars now sail down the boulevards and avenues that were once characterized by girls bicycling on dirt paths and healthy boys briskly walking to work or to girlfriends. Those times are gone forever.

The main character of Naja Marie Aidt’s noir story, “Women in Copenhagen,” returns to the city after seventeen years and realizes that the place has become more multicultural, turbulent, and global than the Brooklyn where he lives. Everything is in flux, in a variety of colors. Gone is the provincial city appointed as capital; instead, one is confronted with a metropolis where the food is from the Middle East, the wine from California, the women from Africa, and the mafia from Russia. Mafia! A new word at these latitudes, where crime formerly took place among bands identified with city neighborhoods and regions. Beatings were bloody noses from a few punches, not like now with knifings and shotgun blasts in the gut and an unmarked grave out in the sticks or under the deep blue sea. Between the wars, in the 1930s, we in Denmark spoke of “white slavery,” poor women kidnapped to a life of prostitution in foreign brothels-today it’s called trafficking, and now we speak of the vile import of East European women. And moreover, we are indeed the last country in Scandinavia to criminalize the customer of such activity, the buying of a hooker.

The short stories in Copenhagen Noir deal often with this phenomenon, the introduction of women from the outside-often the third world-to our own little den of capitalist lust, to abuse them. Our northern nation, where Europe ends and Scandinavia begins, and which time and again boasts of its romantic lifestyle and puritanical decency in song, in verses concerning our mellow nature, our hale and hearty men and gentle women. This anthology articulates with skill and resolve the dark side of our romantic identity depicted by our nineteenthcentury golden-age literature and contemporary hits on radio and TV, rhyming on love and pain. Here we see the modernist noir, linked to organized prostitution run by criminals from outside our borders. This is a different Copenhagen from what the still lifes suggest in tourist brochures.