On Christmas 1944 and the liberation of Denmark May 1945 – from a local perspective

A few weeks ago at the Local History Archives, I remarked to one of our oldest and most faithful visitors that Christmas 1944 must have been a terrible one for the village. In the summer of 1944, a number of its inhabitants who were helping the Danish resistance had been arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in prisons in Denmark or concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and an equal number had fled to nearby Sweden or gone underground.  

Our visitor, who had been 7 years old at the time, reflected for a while, then said in amazement, how exciting it had actually been. Through the illegal sailing network his father had sent sweaters with reindeer motifs for him and his younger brothers, and best of all, he had send them almonds, something that was unavailable in the village at the time. Whereupon, he and another archive volunteer who had also grown up in the village exchanged stories of postwar sailing trips to Sweden to buy various foodstuff unavailable in Denmark. While I was left to reflect humbly: on the dangers of speculating too much and drawing false conclusions, but also on how his mother would only have wanted to give her sons a good Christmas while she spared them from the worries she had.

My remark was occasioned by the coming together of two disparate threads. A few of us volunteers had just completed work, albeit with over a half a year’s delay, on a small exhibition to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Denmark in May 1945.  It was thematic, as the efforts to give a chronological account of events proved futile, given the number of different events that took place within a short period in those joyful but chaotic days of liberation after the BBC’s Danish service had announced the capitulation of the German occupational forces to Montgomery on the evening of the 4th May 1945.

When we made a timeline, we could see, for instance that many of our local people who were incarcerated in concentration camps in Germany had already been freed and sent to Sweden in April 1945, but did not come home in time for the celebrations as they were receiving medical treatment. Nor were all those men, who sailed for the allied merchant navies from April 1940 onwards when Denmark was invaded, present when a peacetime celebration was held on the 22nd May 1945.

Alongside work on the exhibition I had also been reading through Safe Haven the valuable database belonging to the Danish Jewish Museum. Here, official reports from Swedish authorities on the Danish Jews who fled to Sweden in October 1943 have been digitalized on a large scale providing researchers with fresh possibilities of collating information, in our case on Dragør harbour. When my own share of the preparatory work for the exhibition was over, I contacted and received material from the Swedish National Archives on those from Dragør who had fled to Sweden in the summer of 1944.

Among the themes chosen were “those who returned” and “those who didn’t”, which had one day led me to reflect on those who’d remained behind when loved ones were imprisoned or had had to flee. While collating the information with material in our archive, I made a surprising discovery: a certain woman in Dragør, one of those who stayed behind, would have had 11 family members who would not have been home that Christmas of 1944. Her one sibling was in a concentration camp in Germany; another sibling and two nephews in a prison camp in Denmark; her husband, four sons, a daughter-in-law and little grandson had sought refuge in Sweden, where at least two of her sons then sailed for the Danish resistance from Sweden until the war ended. Hence my remark to our visitor.

He was one of three or four elderly visitors to the exhibition who got in touch afterwards whose families either directly contributed to the war effort against Nazi Germany and/or whose families suffered as a result of the war: a fisherman who sailed Jewish refugees and who also worked for the resistance;  an able seaman (later ships mate) who sailed the world for the allies and who was on board ships that were  mined and torpedoed; a policeman who survived a German concentration camp; and a member of a military group who was shot dead on the early morning of the liberation. And this from a country that is known to have gone relatively unscathed in WW2 compared to other occupied countries.

II. The photographs we used for the exhibition had for the most part lain unused since 1945, if they at all had been developed. Most were taken by a local school teacher and his erstwhile pupil, a young man who was a member of one of those Danish military units secretly formed around the country in 1943 when Denmark officially rejected its hitherto policy of collaboration with the Nazi German occupational forces.

Several years ago, the nestor of our group of archive volunteers casually began to mention all the undeveloped negatives from 1945 that lay in our archives. Two years ago, he gave me a task, or rather a flash drive. It contained hundreds of photos from the heady days of the liberation that he had scanned, and among them were groups of smiling British servicemen. He thought their families back in the UK might be interested in seeing these photos. Given our proximity to Copenhagen airport, I wrongly assumed they were RAF mechanics stationed in the village of Store Magleby and wrote off to the RAF Museum which kindly put me right, by identifying some as belonging to REME, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. The REME museum’s response “REME History: REME in Denmark” was published on the museum’s blog on the 19^th May, 2020. 

At the same time, we chose two other groups of photos for an article that year for our archive’s yearbook, Kikkenborgen 2019.  One was a group of women from Dragør and Store Magleby who were trained in civil defence, when at the outset of WWII in 1939, the Danish authorities had feared air raids. Although their first-aid training was to come in more useful to the injured crew members of ships that were mined in the Sound.  However, during the days of the liberation, it was their cooking skills that were most sought after for the ca. 250 young men in the other set of photos. These belonged to the earlier named secret military units that were used for mopping up operations after capitulation, as the Germans in mainland Denmark had surrendered without a fight. Sadly, this was not the case in the Danish island of Bornholm which was captured and occupied by Soviet troops until April 1946.  

Although we did not manage to have it ready on time, and were unable to have many visitors when it did open, we hope to send our exhibition onwards to our local pensioners’ activity centre in 2021, and afterwards our local museum can use the material for their outreach work with schoolchildren. After all, the liberation has no expiry date. Thanks to the countless people who sacrificed so much, at home and abroad, like the smiling, war-weary British soldiers on our photos.  

On gift giving and Danish – French relations

When digitalization hit the institute library of the history department at UCPH several years ago, a lack of shelf space in the new building purpose-built to house the department meant that a huge number of books were discarded before the move. To both the chagrin and delight of book lovers. Among the wonderful finds was a copy of Lucien Musset’s seminal work, Les Peuples scandinaves au Moyen Âge, (1951) with a large number of its pages still uncut. It was read with great enthusiasm by my husband to whom I gave the book as a Christmas present later that year.

Lucien Musset (1922-2004), an expert in Norman history, was 29 years old when this book was published.  A look at his bibliographical sources attests to his knowledge of Scandinavian languages and the long research visit he made to libraries in the Scandinavian countries. His obituary by historian Francois Neveux mentions particularly his mastery of Danish.  Several of his primary sources, and some of the secondary ones were either produced under the aegis of, or written by, Danish philologist and archaeologist Lis Jacobsen,* a pioneer in furthering Danish Humanities in the 20^th century.

It was her long-dead maternal grandfather who imbued a love of Paris and French culture in the succeeding generations, and thereby lies a tale of gift giving. Salomon Davidsen a.k.a. Schlomo ben David (1803- 1866)  who had opened an upmarket lace and clothing store in 1841 in Copenhagen, visited the fashion houses of Paris once a year. In 1863 he took his eldest daughter Rose Mathilde (b. 1844) on a long visit to Paris, where in between doing business, showed her all what was best in French culture. When her sister Kaja’s daughter Elisabeth Rubin was born in 1882, she promised herself that she would take her niece to Paris when the girl was 12. By the time Lis was 10, her aunt had found her a French teacher who prepared her for the visit. And at the age of 11, Lis Rubin was taken to Paris by her aunt. They stayed with one of Salomon Davidsen’s other children, Meyer Joseph Davidsen.  He was an engineer and inventor living in Paris, hard at work experimenting on various devices for the cement industry. Among his patents are a tubular ball mill   for which he earned a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, and which was later to be used worldwide, among others, by the Danish cement manufacturer F.L. Smidth.

The young Lis Rubin enjoyed her visit so much that she was to repeat it frequently throughout her life, and not surprisingly chose to study in Paris in 1910 after her higher doctoral degree.  Later in 1928 she was invited by another French Scandinavian expert, Paul Verrier, to hold a lecture in Paris.

Verrier himself had visited Denmark back in 1897 where he met, among others, Lis Jacobsen’s good family friend, scholar and literary critic Georg Brandeis who was quite well known in France at the time.

The Dane whose fame has lasted longer in French intellectual circles is Søren Kierkegaard whose work had a huge influence on an array of French philosophers, especially existentialists post-WWII.  Paul Ricoeur, another Frenchman with ancestral connections to Normandy, famously used Kierkegaard’s meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses (1849) in the epilogue to his own magisterial tome, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000).  In cases of difficult forgiveness, when we are too full of care, we ought to do as Kierkegaard suggests and forget our own selves in contemplating the birds and the lilies. Thereby reflecting on “how glorious it is to be a human being”.**

Memory, History and Forgetting is one of Ricoeur’s greatest works, and perhaps the one that is most accessible to the general reader. Ricoeur’s long-time friend, the Danish philosopher Peter Kemp once wrote, on the eve of Emmanuel Macron’s election as President of France, that it was thanks to Macron who in his youth worked for two years on the tome as an assistant editor that the work is so readable.

Paul Ricoeur visited Denmark on several occasions due to his friendship and discourse with Kemp. Before his recent death, Kemp was to publish a collection of Ricoeur’s works in Danish, Paul Ricoeur Danske Værker. A copy of which was a most welcome parting gift from my former employer Prof. Marie-Louise Nosch when my work as an editorial assistant on her publication projects was completed. Her other parting gift, a 5-month placement as a Visiting Scholar led to, among others, a talk on gift giving, an essay, and several blog posts here, and in my Danish blog.

The three Frenchman mentioned above Lucien Musset, Verrier and Ricoeur all had Normandy in common. A recent attempt to genetically establish if Rollo the founder of Normandy was Danish or Norwegian , ended in failure,but new research may someday cast light on the subject.

It has, however, not been a one-way movement of Viking raiders,  medieval Danish university students and scholars (like the modist grammarian Martin de Dacia) in Paris; or Danish naval officers like cartographer Paul de Løvenørn serving in the French navy in the late 1700s.***

Frenchmen have fled over here too. Denmark provided the gift of asylum in 1685 to a small group of French Calvinist families fleeing their country after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Along with other German and Dutch Calvinist refugees, the few French refugee families in Copenhagen were permitted to worship in the newly built Reformed Church at the behest of king Christian V’s  wife queen Charlotte Amalie of Hessen-Kassel.

A later wave of French Huguenot families arrived in Denmark at the behest of king Frederik IV in the 1720s from Brandenburg to which they had initially fled.   Danish commerce and the military are studded with the names of their descendants who have contributed to Denmark over the centuries.

A personal favourite is Friedrich August Gandil (1815-1886) who was, among others, the inspector of the royal Danish maritime pilots service in Dragør from 1862-1885. His ancestor Pierre Gandil b. 1660 fled from his birthplace Bruniquel to the more protected Montauban, and thence in 1686 to Erlangen and later to Magdeburg where he married Marianne de la Mare, a widow who owned a weaving factory. It was one of their sons, also named Pierre b. 1697, who obtained a permit from Christian VI in 1736 to establish a textile factory in Østerbro, Copenhagen.****

Two Danes who were expelled from Denmark, due to their attempts to further freedom of speech, and who ended their days in permanent exile in Paris were writer and philologist Peter Andreas Heiberg (Pierre André) and the poet, journalist and geographer Malthe Conrad Bruun (Conrad Malte-Brun). Heiberg worked in the French foreign ministry translating for Talleyrand while the other contributed to geographical studies in France.

As to why they it was France they chose to spend the rest of their lives in exile needs no lengthy explanation. Ever since Descartes, French intellectual thought was considered a fount of inspiration. Danish astronomers like Longomontanus and Fromius had learned discourses and disputes with their French colleagues such as Jean Baptiste Morin.*****

One of the most influential writers in Denmark, the Norwegian-born Ludvig Holberg was for instance highly influenced by the writings of the Huguenot philosopher  Pierre Bayle.

The Age of Enlightenment (le Siècle des Lumières) continued this…

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Denmark would come to side with Napoleon. Nor that later, Christian IX (known as the father-in-law of Europe) whose children married into the royal houses of Europe also acquired a daughter-in-law from the French royal house (a great-grand daughter of Louis Philippe king of France 1830-1848). In Bismarck, Denmark  found an enemy in common with France, an aspect that coloured Danish-French relations well into the early 20^th century, not least over the issue of their respective borders with Germany. Paul Verrier’s visit and support to the Danish-speaking areas of Schleswig  is but a small example of this.

Later in the 20^th century, the marriage in 1967 of the then princess Margrethe, heir to the Danish throne to French diplomat Henri Marie Jean André de Laborde de Monpezat (1934-2018) considerably strengthened the future ties between Denmark and France. Among the greatest gifts humans can give one another is the promise of the continuity of generations.

Coming back to the UCPH history department’s library which inspired this post, it pleases me to report that among the books that the library chose to retain is the donation of the vast collection of books that formed the private library of one of Denmark’s pioneering statisticians and economic historians, National Bank director Marcus Rubin, who also happened to be the father of Lis Jacobsen mentioned above.

Among his innumerable writings,****** he published a few articles in Danish on France as well as French articles on Denmark. A history of  the Abolishment of the Sound Dues was translated into French in abbreviated form and published by the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, as “Le rachat des péages du Sund”.

Notes: * Lise Bender Jørgensen, The State of Denmark: Lis Jacobsen and other women in and around archaeology, in: Magarita Díaz-Andreu, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen (eds)   ; and Kristian Hvidt, Forsker, furie, frontkæmper – en bog om Lis Jacobsen, Gyldendal, 2011.

**Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 505.

***For scholars, see Sten Ebbesen, Dansk Middelalderfilosofi (Gyldendal, 2002),esp. ch. 4. For naval officers, see entry for 19th July 1778; Løvenørn was also influential in the development of the royal maritime pilotage service in Dragør.

****Gandil, C. (1936) Nogle Meddelelser om Slægten Gandil. I Anledning af 200-aaret for Pierre Gandils Indkaldelse til Danmark. Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift, 57(10_3_2), 137-140. Hentet fra https://tidsskrift.dk/personalhistorisk_tidsskrift/article/view/78981

*****1. Helge Kragh and Henrik Kragh Sørensen, Longomontanus og Descartes: Et Møde i København 1631. Meddelelser fra Ole Rømers Venner. 2007, 15(1). 57-69. 2. Helge S. Kragh (2015) Georgius Frommius (1605-1651) and Danish astronomy in the post-Tychonian era. Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum, 3(1), 43-66.

******see link to Lis Jacobsen’s complete list of her father’s works at the end of the Wikipedia article on Marcus Rubin.

 

On intertwining history and the Other

Who is our other? In Time and Narrative, vol. 3, ch. 4, 109-116,  Ricoeur seems to give a surprising answer. At least that’s how I understand it. Here, he examines historians’ use of time. He discusses how they bridge the lived time of human beings and cosmic time through three different reflective instruments: calendars, the succession of generations and archive traces; with the caveat that it is not the historian who spends much time reflecting on these instruments, but the philosopher of history.

While his reflections on calendars, archives, documents and traces are fairly straightforward, Ricoeur’s meditation on the succession of generations is less easy to fathom at first glance.

We certainly do know what is meant when we speak of generations, such as the Victorians, the Edwardians, the Baby Boomers, the ‘68ers, the Millennials and others, and ascribe certain general attitudes to them. Attitudes deriving from common influences and shared experiences.

According to Ricoeur’s reading of, among others, Alfred Schutz, Karl Mannheim and Dilthey, a generation is a combination of biological and social time, hence birth, ageing and death, along with the social activities of individuals. A generation has certain traditions from the previous one, i.e. continuity, yet at the same time, is defined by the acquisition of the new, which marks it as different from the parent generation. Thus, Ricoeur understands Dilthey’s concept of generation as being both open and closed, tradition and innovation, something acquired and yet having a common orientation (p. 111).

When time is added to this mixture of influences received and influences exercised, according to Ricoeur, it helps us to understand the idea of a succession of generations. He sees it as a chain arising from the intertwining of new possibilities and transmission of that which is already acquired. In other words, the passing generations carry traditions with them, while at the same time being open to new innovations, with the dead being replaced by the living.

Ricoeur discusses (p.110) how the idea of a generation, according to Kant, in the 3^rd proposition of his Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitan Plan, is the interweaving of human history and the human species in the ethical task of creating a civil society, where the previous generation makes huge efforts and sacrifices not for their own well-being, but that of succeeding generations.

Historians use the idea of the succession of generations in a more practical sense.* Thus, for instance, in terms of history’s outermost limits in the relations between the self and the other, the Shoah or Holocaust, historians such as Saul Friedlander, enquire into how it is perceived by succeeding generations (e.g. Introduction to Friedlander (ed.), Probing the limits of representation (1992).  And archive collections around the world, whether witness testimonies from the Holocaust and 20^th century genocides, or, e.g. on World War I enable succeeding generations to obtain a glimpse of the lives of previous generations in times of strife.

It took me a while to understand Ricoeur’s thoughts on the succession of generations, but upon long reflection, I believe, that he illustrates how our other is none other than past and future generations, in other words, our predecessors and our successors, thus implying that we who are alive today belong together as a generation.

*cf Wulf Kansteiner, Moral pitfalls of memory studies:The concept of political generations (Memory Studies, 5(2) 2012, 111–113, ) for a critical view of use of the term generation.