On furnishing academia

When I first read the letter in Lis Jacobsen’s archive at the Royal Library, my thoughts turned to a certain sofa in my previous workplace.  The chintz-covered rattan sofa brightened up the drab 60’s concrete building which housed the earliest offices of the Centre for Textile Research at Copenhagen University from 2005 onwards.

The sofa was eye-catching, comfortable and cosy. In later years, as the centre expanded a larger and more fashionable, drab-coloured, sofa took its place. Now the colour came from a beautiful carpet, and a basketful of brightly coloured yarn. All this while, serious, path-breaking research took place at CTR, and the sofa played its own role.

During work hours, it could be a place for one of the centre’s countless visitors to sit while waiting to meet someone, or even be interviewed. A busy and tired scholar or an employee’s child recovering from an illness could take a catnap there. It could be a place for a quiet and serious conversation. And above all, a number of forthcoming articles and books were edited there.

At first, the letter seemed misplaced. For it was found in the archive box of the Society for the Publication of Danish Contemporary History (Udgiverselskabet for Danmarks nyeste Historie or DNH for short).*  Yet, it dealt with furnishing the office of the project leader of the Cultural History Encyclopaedia for the Nordic Middle Ages (Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordiske middelalder-KLNM)

Dated 29th November 1956, the writer requests the Danish Ministry of Housing for new office furniture and lamps, as the existing furniture personally belonged to Lis Jacobsen, the project’s administrator who was resigning at the end of that year.  The request made by the chairman of the board of the KLNM project, Johannes Brøndsted, a distinguished Danish archaeologist, was rejected by the Ministry on the grounds that despite getting a state subsidy, the KLNM was not a state institution.

On her return from Sweden where she had fled to in 1943 from Nazi-German-occupied Denmark, Lis Jacobsen seriously began work on the KLMN, which was published by a team of Scandinavian scholars between the years 1956 – 1978.** However, at the same time, she was involved in various other projects, not least, in establishing the DNH in 1959.

At its inception, the DNH had had a double function. First of all, it was envisaged by her as a vehicle to publish the memoirs and correspondance of political and cultural figures from the turn of the 20th century onwards, among them, those of her father Marcus Rubin (1854-1923), as well as the youthful correspondance between her husband Jacob Peter Jacobsen (1869-1918) and his friend Peter Munch who was later  foreign minister of Denmark from 1929-1940.*** This function was soon superseded by the second, that of gathering and publishing documents concerning the German Occupation of Denmark. The ever practical Lis Jacobsen was not averse to using the office premises and the admin and secretarial staff of the KLMN to further the establishment of the DNH.

On reflection, it is likely that she filed the letter with the DNH’s papers, to remind herself not to make an identical mistake when furnishing the DNH’s larger offices. As the DNH was partly to be financed by the Ministry of Education (and partly by the Carlsberg Fund), in March 1961 she made enquiries as to how best to proceeed. Her archive contains various notes of telephone conversations and letters to government officials about the matter.  Thus it was that she and the historian Paul Bagge, whom she had worked with earlier on the project Diplomatarium Danicum  & Danmarks Riges Breve and who was now the chairman of DNH, could (with the support of the Ministry of Education) make an official request to the Ministry of Housing on the 18th March 1961, to be placed on the Office Inventory List of the Housing Ministry to furnish the offices for the great task – the history of the German Occupation (”den store opgave – besættelsestidens historie”) that the DNH would be undertaking.

A day earlier, on the 17th March, we have a hand-written note from Lis Jacobsen to the Head of Dept. at the Ministry of Housing thanking him for his great interest and goodwill in this matter, and reminding him in a PS, that while the DNH was not really a state institution, its premises and administration were taken care of by the state.

Lis Jacobsen died on the 18th June 1961. One could say she died in harness, as she had arranged for a dinner meeting at her home for the DNH’s steering committee at the end of June, as well as a preparatory meeting for this with administrator Georg Rona. However, she died knowing that the DNH was soon to move to new premises in Niels Juelsgade from those it had shared with the KLNM project in Torvegade. She had also been told in confidence that official access to state papers for DNH researchers had been agreed to at the highest levels of government. On the 19^th June, the day after her death, a Royal Resolution decreed that the Danish state papers from the Occupation period would be made accessible to researchers.

She left the administration of the DNH in the capable hands of Dr. Georg Rona, an Austrian Jewish refugee who had learnt Danish as a child when he had been one of the thousands of impoverished Viennese children temporarily brought to Denmark after WWI.**** His phenomenal Danish language skills and administrative ability had earlier been an asset to Lis Jacobsen on the KLNM project. And as several DNH historians acknowledge in their publications, they too appreciated his help over the years . *****

Today Lis Jacobsen and Georg Rona are both largely forgotten. Yet their work, as academic administrators, lives on to furnish and enrich future generations in Denmark.

Acknowledgement Many thanks to all the kind librarians in the Special Collections Reading Room for their help and advice.

Notes * For background info, see my previous blog posts: On a refugee – Lis Jacobsen, née Rubin and the missing Ellen and On gift giving and Danish – French relations; Peter Brunbech’s unpublished MA thesis, Udgiverselskab for Danmarks Nyeste Histories besættelsesprojekt. En casestudie i forholdet mellem politik og videnskab, University of Aarhus, 2001; Brunbech: »Politiske og videnskabelige mål – bagom stiftelsen af Udgiverselskabet for Danmarks Nyeste Historie«, Den jyske Historiker, no. 97, 2002; and Kristian Hvidt, Forsker, furie og frontkæmper: en bog om Lis Jacobsen  (2011).**Christian Etheridge, The Transmission and Reception of Science in Medieval Scandinavia 1100-1525, PHD thesis, University of Southern Denmark, 2018, p. 22.*** Lorenz Rerup, (ed.) Marcus Rubins brevveksling 1870–1922, 4 vols., Rosenkilde og Bagger, Copenhagen 1963; Lis Jacobsen and Holger Brøndsted (eds) En ungdomsbrevveksling mellem P. Munch og J. P. Jacobsen, 1889-1901, 2 vols.,  Nyt nordisk forlag,  Copenhagen 1962. Among others, 2 editions (1962 & 1963) were devoted to Frede Bojsen‘s vast correspondance and letters. While Lis Jacobsen did not edit the 8-volumed memoirs of Peter Munch (published in 1959-1967) herself, behind the scenes she made a great effort to ensure that his son delivered the material on time for the DNH office staff to transcribe.  ****Henriette Riskær Steffensen, Dr. jur. Georg Rona Administrator og translatør, in: Steffan Steffansen et al.,, På flugt fra Nazismen, Tysksprogede emigranter i Danmark efter 1933, Reitzels forlag, 1986, pp. 271-274. *****See for instance, Finn Løkkegaard’s Det Danske Gesandtskab i Washington 1940-1942, 1968, p. 12 and Palle Rosslyn Jensen, Værnenes politik – politikernes værn. Studier i dansk militærpolitik under besættelsen 1940–1945, 1980, p.7.

On the mighty oak

An oak in its prime is a marvel of nature. Throughout history, oak trees have contributed to human history in the form of material for artefacts such as the Bronze Age oak-coffins in Denmark, the Iron Age Nydam Boat, the Tudor warship the Mary Rose, countless beams in medieval cathedrals and Elizabethan housing, and picture frames.

Today, dendrochronology can provide some answers to how oak was used throughout the ages. Thus, Aoife Daly who wrote her PhD thesis on oak ship timber in northern Europe is now beginning to combine dendochronological analyses with archive material in order to determine the geographical area from which the timber originated, as well as to pinpoint the age of the tree, and when it was felled.

Oaks feature in history, myths, legends and fairy tales. Tales abound of the sacred oak of Zeus in Dodona; Thor’s oak in Gaesmaer; of how Robin Hood and his Merry men cavorted among the oaks of Sherwood Forest; or of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree that starts off as an oak tree with acorns.

The future King Charles II is said to have hidden himself in an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 in Boscobel Wood and after the Restoration, the 29th May was celebrated as Royal Oak or Oak Apple Day for about two hundred years. Obtaining enough supplies of oak for the sailing ships of the British navy meant that oak figured in the foreign policy of the British Empire. And the walls of the House of Commons are panelled in oak.

Here in Denmark, too, the oak tree was once revered until  a few centuries ago when the beech tree became the focus of poetical imagination. For instance, Hans Christian Andersen once wrote a tale about the last dream of an old oak tree.

Oaks were felled in their hundreds of thousands to build ships for the powerful Danish navy over the centuries. Apparently it took about 2000 oak trees to build a single ship of the line leading to the decimation of huge amounts of oak trees in the 18th century.

Today, a highly symbolic oak is found in the Folketinget, the Danish Parliament, in the form of its rostrum. A huge tree trunk, which once had been the fundament of Lendemarke windmill, was presented in 1916 by its new owner, the Liberal politician Frede Bojsen to the Folketinget, and craftswoman Anny Berntsen Bure, one of Denmark’s first female cabinetmakers was given the honour of making the rostrum, which she did beautifully without the use of a single screw or seam.*

An act of enormous symbolism, as just a year earlier, in 1915, women had finally gained the right to vote in Denmark.

* Kvinden med kævlen