1
Amerikansk på Dansk
Arbejdspapir 1
Ameridanes
Working Paper 1
Americanisation and anti-Americanism in Denmark,
ca. 1945-1970. A pilot study1
Nils Arne Sørensen
Klaus Petersen
Coverage of the American primary elections in early 2008 was so intense in the
Danish news media that it seemed fit to speculate whether Denmark was entering the
competition to become the 51st state in the United States of America. This is nothing
new. Both fascination with the American experience and critical reflections on the
impact of America (or to be more precise, USAmerica – to use the apt concept coined
by British sociologist Roland Robertson2) on Denmark has a long historical pedigree.
Alexis de Toqueville’s study of democracy (1835) in America was translated into
Danish in 1844, and later in the 19th and early 20th Century, journalists and other
writers followed in the footsteps of Danish emigrants in order to report on America to
Danish readers.3 Both interest in and imports from the USA intensified in the interwar years but World War 2 and its aftermath signalled a quantum leap in both areas.
In this Denmark is similar to the rest of Europe, where these
developments also generated academic interest. On the one hand, this interest
crystallized in the study of American society, culture and history, in short in American
Studies. On the other hand, in the study of the impact of the United States, or the
1
An earlier and substantially shorter version was published in Alexander Stephan (ed.): Americanization in Europe
since 1945, New York: Berghahn Books 2006.
2 Roland Robertson, Rethinking Americanization, in Ulrik Beck et al (eds.), Global America? The
Cultural Consequences of Globalization, Liverpool 2003, p. 257. To be precise, Robertson uses the
phrase USAmericanization.
3 Alexis de Toqueville, Om Demokratiet i Amerika, Copenhagen 1844. Among the most important books
on America by Danish literary travellers are Henrik Cavling, Fra Amerika (2 vols.), Copenhagen 1897,
and Johs. V. Jensen, Den ny Verden, Copenhagen 1907.
2
Americanization of Europe, a concept recently defined in these broad terms by the
Dutch social scientist, Mel van Eltern,
”processes in which economic, technological, political, social, cultural, and/or sociopsychological influences emanating from America or Americans impinge on values,
norms, belief systems, mentalities, habits, rules, technologies, practices, institutions,
and behaviour of non-Americans.”4
The development of American Studies in European Academia can be traced back to
the inter-war years. However, the real take-off phase came only after 1945 when
European interest unsurprisingly grew. This trend was stimulated by American
initiatives at both official and private level.5 Systematic interest in the study of
Americanization processes came later, i.e. from the 1970s. It often developed as a logic
spin-off of American studies, but the theme also caught the interests of scholars in
social and political science, history and academic disciplines such as literary criticism,
art history, and media studies, as well as avowedly interdisciplinary fields such as
gender studies and cultural studies. This is, of course, reflected in research projects
and publications. The major part of Americanization studies focus on culture, and
especially on popular culture.6 Another key topic, often linked to explorations on the
Mel van Elteren, Americanism and Americanization. A Critical History of Domestic smf Global
Influence, Jefferson NC 2006, p. 103.
5 For an overview of the development of American Studies in Europe, see Richard Pells, Not Like Us.
How Europeans have loved, hated and transformed American culture since World War II, New York
1997, pp. 94-133.
6 For some examples, see David W.Ellwood & Rob Kroes (eds.), Hollywood in Europe, Amersterdam
1994; Heide Fehrenback & Uta Poiger (eds.), Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American
Culture in Western Europe and Japan, New York 2000; Gerd Gemunden, Framed Visions. Popular
Culture, Americanization and the contemporary German and Austrian Imagination, Ann Arbor 1998;
Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall, Urbana 1996; Rob Kroes, Robert Rydell, D.F.J.
Bosscher & John F. Sears (eds.): Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in
Europe, Amsterdam 1993; Kasper Maase, BRAVO Amerika. Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur der
Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren, Hamburg 1992; Tom O’Dell, Culture Unbound:
Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden, Lund 1997; Agnes C. Mueller, Agnes C. (ed.), German
Pop Culture. How American Is It, Ann Arbor 2004; Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels. Cold War
Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, Berkeley 2000; Sabrina P. Ramet & Gordana P.
Cruksvic (eds.) (2003), Kazaam! Splat! Ploof! The American Impact on European Popular Culture since
1945, Lanham Md. 2003; Kerstin Shands, W. Rolf Lundén & Dag Blanck (eds.), Notions of America:
Swedish Perspectives, Huddinge 2004; Alexander Stephan, (ed.), Americanization and AntiAmericanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945, New York 2005; Reinhold
Wagnleitner (ed.), Satchmo Meets Amadeus, Vienna 2006; Reinhold Wagnleitner & Elaine Tyler May
4
3
impact of American popular culture, has been mass consumer culture, a topic that in
its own right is linked to the study of the Americanization of the European economy.7
Since the 1980s, the Marshall Plan and the ambition to “remake the old world in the
image of the new world” – to quote American historian Michael Hogan8 - has been the
subject of several detailed analyses that often highlight the links between economic
and political history and trace the connections between Americanization and the Cold
War.9 From the 1990s, this trend was also central to the growing interest in the
cultural history of the Cold War. Some of this research has been carried out from a
comparative perspective but the vast majority has been transnational studies of
Americanization in a single country.10
The Danish variety of this is somewhat different. American Studies
arrived late in Denmark. Thus, at the largest university department of English, at the
University of Copenhagen, the focus was predominantly British (or, rather, English)
(eds), Here, There and Everywhere. The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, Hanover 2000:
and Janet Wasko et al, Dazzled by Disney. The Global Disney Audiences Project, Leicester 2001.
7 For a good synthesis on the American impact on the European economy, see Harm Schröter, The
Americanization of the European Economy, Dortrecht 2005. Important aspects of consumer culture and
Americanization are analysed in Emanuela Scarpellini, Comprare all’americana. Le origine della
rivoluzione commerciale in Italia 1945-1971, Bologna 2001, Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar
West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Women, Ann Arbor 1997, and Robert H. Haddow,
Pavilions of Plenty. Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s, Washington D.C. 1997 (where
“culture” means material culture and consumer culture). Last, but not least, n this context, see Victoria
de Grazia’s magisterial Irresistible Empire, Cambridge Mass.2005. De Grazia distances herself from the
concept of Americanization and analyses the spread of American mass-consumer oriented capitalism in
Europe as struggle between two distinct forms of capitalism.
8 Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan. America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe,
Cambridge 1987, p. 19.
9 See Andrew Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan. The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of
management Science, Detroit 1987; David Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and
Postwar Reconstruction, London 1992; Matthias Kipping & Ove Bjarnar (eds.), The Americanization of
European Business. The Marshall Plan and the Transfer of the US management model, London 1998
10 For truly comparative studies, see de Grazia, op. cit., and Richard Pells, Not Like Us, New York 1997.
Notable national studies are Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French, Berkeley 1993, and Reinhold
Wagnleitner: Coca-Colonization und Kalter Krieg, Wien 1991. As far as the study of Americanization
goes, (Western) Germany is in a league of its own – as should be evident from the works listed above. In
part this can be explained with the special history of German-American relations, especially fromthe
1930s to the end of the Allied occupation regime in 1955 and beyond, which has resulted in a strong
interest from American scholars. But also the strong position of social and later cultural history in
German historiography since the 1960s is important to understand the special German case. For good
introductions to the German-American encounter, focusing on the period after 1945 see the articles
collected in Anselm Doering-Manteuffel & Christoph Mauch (eds.), The American Impact on Western
Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective, 1999, at http://www.ghidc.org/conpotweb/westernpapers, and in Detlef Juncker (ed.), The United States and Germany in the
Era of the Cold War, 2 vols., Cambridge 2004.
4
well into the 1960s, and the department’s first professor of American literature was
hired as late as in 1975.11 The first Center for American Studies was established only
in 1992 at the University of Odense (today University of Southern Denmark). While
both interest in and the institutional support for American studies have grown
dramatically over the last 15-20 years, the same cannot be said for the study of
Americanization. In 1982, a collective of literary critics published a study analysing
the American impact on Danish culture in the 1940s and 1950s framed in a rather
heavy-handed version of Marxist, cultural imperialist theory.12 American influence
has been integrated as a subaltern theme in general works such as a multi-volume
media history, and recent years have seen a growing interest in American public
diplomacy in Denmark as part of Cold War Studies as well as a fascinating case study
of Disney in Denmark. For all the merits of these contributions, the study of
Americanization has been rather haphazard, and Denmark can still be characterized
as a back-wards country in this academic field. In the following, we will combine the
insights of this literature with the first results from our own research to make a first
attempt at mapping Americanization processes in Denmark in the first post-World
War II decades. The results are, it must be stressed, preliminary. Furthermore,
important areas such as business, technology and science are hardly touched upon
while others such as American impact on key policy themes – for instance welfare - are
not addressed at all.
Looking at the Danish case of Americanisation and Anti-Americanism in
Europe, one should not overstress 1945 as a dividing line. While the United
States had not been very high on the agenda in political discussions and debates
in the interwar years (although the great depression and the crisis policies of the
Roosevelt administration were reported on quite extensively in the Danish
newspapers), American culture and life-style – mediated in Hollywood movies,
dime novels, comics, and popular music and dance – were embraced
11 Cf. letter from associate professor at the English Department at the University of Copenhagen,
Jørgen Sevaldsen to the authors, January 10, 2008.
12 Knoop Christensen et al
5
enthusiastically by many Danes, especially the young generations in the same
period. “We were crazy with jazz music,” reminisced an 80-year old retired nurse
in the summer of 2003, thinking back at the jazz music of her late teens spent in
the provincial town of Randers. American words started entering the Danish
vocabulary. As early as in 1906, Danish readers were introduced to the hot dog
in a short story by Johannes V. Jensen (one of the few Danish pro-American
intellectuals). It was followed by such words as “jazz”, “drink”, “cocktail”, “hot”
and “swing” from the late 1910s. In 1934, “OK” was explained in the Arbejderens
Opslags- og Fremmedordbog (“The Working Man’s Dictionary”) published by two
Social-Democratic intellectuals. Other American phenomena were given more or
less proper Danish names, such as chewing gum (“tyggegummi”, first used in
1922) or the Western films that became known as “cowboyfilm” (from 1925). In
other cases well worn Danish words were substituted by American imports – as
was the case for “sminke” that became more and more widely known as make-up
from the 1930s13. As the quoted examples show, America was synonymous with
a new popular culture, focusing on entertainment, leisure and youth. Underlying
it was the dream of the problem-free life in material wealth that seemed to be
the essence of the American way of life to eager consumers in Denmark as
elsewhere.
If American cultural imports (and local copies) were highly visibly before
World War 2, so was intellectual Anti-Americanism. This took two forms. One
was a sweeping critique of American “civilization”; the other expressed concerns
about how “Amerikanisering” (another of the new Danish words of the period)
would impact on Danish culture and society. A low key example of the second
type one finds in the social-democratic critic, Harald Engberg’s introduction to
the movies for general readers from 1939. In this, he also discusses the social
impact of films on audiences at some length. Although Hollywood is not
mentioned directly, the message is clear,
13 The examples of American impact on the Danish language have been found in Ordbog over det danske
Sprog, xx vols., Copenhagen 1922-, and in the archive of Dansk Sprognævn. For American popular
culture in Denmark, see Dansk Mediehistorie, vol. 2, pp.; for intellectual anti-Americanism, see Hans
Hertel etc.The retired nurse quoted is Ms. Astrid Christensen-Dalsgaard.
6
“(…) the majority of the exiting movies about mysterious expeditions, blooddripping westerns, brutal gangster movies only serve the purpose of placing
children in a state of “false excitement” and to give them odd notions on how to
solve problems, to inculcate racial prejudice towards “evil natives” and to tire
them with saccharine love scenes. … [The movies’] fantastic solutions to every
kind of problem, especially because of the superimposed and unrealistic “happy
end”, have beyond doubt contributed to misleading the general public when
demands for decent living conditions and hopes for the future is lulled to sleep
with a couple of hours dreaming about how it could be, if only …”14
For a more sweeping criticism, we can turn to the Vice-President of the
Conservative Party´s youth organisation who, in 1935, lamented, that the
“superficial culture of American movies, jazz idolization and propaganda
literature … is the direct road to cultural degeneration.”15
Here we are close to a more general Anti-Americanism that was
widespread among intellectuals both on the left and to the right. If they
disagreed about solutions to the problem of the American civilisation, they
agreed to a high degree on the diagnosis. America was characterized by a vulgar,
materialist culture. The conservative critic, Harald Nielsen, put it this way in a
radiotalk in 1939,
“Americanisation – that means smartness, the ability to do business and to
organise matters in such ways that they can be dealt with speedily. It means lots
of cars, lots of refrigerators, lots of radios, lots of telephones, but first and
foremost it means lots of money for both the purpose and the precondition of all
of these things are money, lots of money. (…) Everything is put at the service of
money and the pursuit of money. Everything is influenced by this, all ideals are
fashioned by this. (…) The pursuit of money is also more and more dominant in
the domain of culture. One talks of best-sellers and gets used to measuring the
importance of a book by its sales figures. (…) The nurture of cultural life has
became the task of idle women. The results are bloodless and faceous; what
ought to be serious matters have been reduced to dilettantism.”16
Harald Engberg, Filmen, Copenhagen, 1939, pp. 181, 187
Poul Meyer, quoted from E. Wiedemann, Jazz i Danmark – i tyverne, tredvierne og fyrrerne,
Copenhagen, 1982, vol. 1, p. 239
16 Radiotalk i the Danish State Radio, 18 January 1939, reprinted in H. Nielsen, Uden Traad – og med!
Bidrag til Kulturforsvarets Historie, Copenhagen 1941, pp. 37, 41-42. However, according to the late
prominent Danish historian, Henrik S. Nissen, among university students of the early 1950s
14
15
7
These patterns continued after 1945, as in most other European countries,
especially when looking at popular culture. But Denmark did also have a special
background, an individual experience, which has to be taken into account when
discussing the influence of American culture. First, Denmark was liberated by
Britons and not Americans. Even though Danes acknowledged the American war
effort the first decades after 1945 witnessed a special relationship between
Denmark and (its most important trading partner) Great Britain and even in the
case of popular culture Britain continued to play an important role. Second, for
economic reasons the import from USA was limited until the late 1950s. As
Denmark was suffering from a lack of US Dollars, imports were strictly
regulated and as the post-war economic growth started rather late in Denmark
few people could afford being Americanized.
Overt and covert cultural operations. Official US programmes in Denmark
In the first years after 1945 US interest in Denmark focused on military strategic
needs and here especially on the US military bases in Greenland. There seems to have
been no serious efforts of cultural encountering the Danes and in many ways Denmark
was seen as part of the British sphere of interest.17 Denmark’s place in the western
coalition was unquestionable even though Danish politicians were hesitant to take
side in the emerging rivalry between the two super powers. One important step was
the Danish decision to join the Marshall Plan. Denmark was, taking the size of the
population in account, among the countries receiving the most help: 278 million US
dollar. First of all this helped to fill up the existing dollar gap and made it possible to
import both good and know-how from the US and other OOEC countries. Second,
participation in the ERP integrated Denmark in the Western alliance. As the cold war
”American” was synomymous with ”smartness”. Cf. informal interview with Henrik S. Nissen, Septemer
11, 2003.
17 R. Mariager, I tillid og varm sympati. Dansk-britiske forbindelser og USA 1945-1950-1955,
Copenhagen 2006.
8
became colder and heavily influenced by international developments such as the coup
in Prague (1948) Denmark in 1949 joined the NATO alliance.18
Parallel to Denmark’s political orientation towards the US followed a growing
American preoccupation with Denmark and Danish attitudes towards United States.
The goals of “psychological warfare” were first of all military and political but linked to
these goals was also a desire to “Demonstrate the extent and quality of U.S. cultural
traditions and achievements.” to quote a report from the Copenhagen embassy in June
1953.19
From around 1948 the US-embassy in Copenhagen started to work with
“information programmes”. The activities involved a variety of actions such as
exchange programmes, publications on US policies, establishment of public libraries in
the US Embassy and contacts to press. From the outset the strategy was to influence
Danish opinion makers within media, politics, the educational system as well as arts
and culture. But political propaganda even if dressed up as culture or friendly
gestures is a sensitive issue.
Through out the 1950s officials at the Copenhagen Embassy warned against
overdoing this kind of activities. The Danes were firmly anti-communist but at the
same time very sensitive towards American propaganda.20 In the words of the
Copenhagen ECA mission in 1953, the “only way to sway Danish opinion is through
Danish sources, as they thoroughly resent outside comments and criticisms.”21
Initiatives from American agencies in Denmark had to take the form of “objective”
information or more covert support to local Danish activities. Consequently three
types of official programmes can be found: Firstly programmes making information on
P. Villaume, Allieret med forbehold. Danmark, NATO og den kolde krig. En studie i dansk
sikkerhedspolitik 1949-1961 (Copenhagen 1995).
18
19 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, desp. 1239, June 30 1953, “USIS country plan – Denmark, 511.59/63053”, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
20 Embassy Chp. To Dep. State, desp. 866, April 15 1952, “Revised Joint USIE/MSA Country Plan for
Denmark”, 511.56/4-1552, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives. See also Villaume,
Allieret med forbehold, 772, 783-83, 808-09.
21 Quote from O. Bech-Petersen, Encounters: Danish literary travel in the United States (Unpublished
Ph.D.-thesis, University of Southern Denmark 2000), 220.
9
the United States available for Danes. Secondly, activities to make Danish institutions
adopt and use American propaganda products as their own. Thirdly there are
examples of secret support to pro-American Danish operators. For obvious reasons the
first kind of programs have left numerous historical traces whereas the two other
kinds are much more difficult to trace and evaluate.
The information activities were organised around American institutions and
agencies in Denmark. The most important once being the US Embassy. Setting up a
library in the US embassy and the film distribution program might have help open the
Danish eyes for American literature and especially having made information on the
US more available. In 1950 the USIE library collection in Copenhagen totalled some
6.500 books and 3.000 pamphlets not mentioning the music collection.22 From the
1950s the local US information Agency published both periodicals (entitled Panorama
USA or USA Today) as a number of booklets in Danish on contemporary political
themes such as presidential elections, the US in international politics, the Vietnam
War (e.g. “Why Vietnam” in 1966) or on American society and culture. The latter
included both controversial themes such as “The Negro in USA” (1961) and more
popular themes such as “American Music Life” (1961). It is difficult to evaluate the
effects of this kind of activities. The embassy in 1953 found that the library as well as
published material was quit popular among young Danes.23
In this respect the invitations of Danes to US study tours was more effective. In
all participating countries the Marshall programmes was used to influence the
attitudes towards United States among political leaders, trade unionist and others.
The idea was that the backward Denmark should learn from and eventually imitate
US industrial organisation, management, planning and marketing – and that the
study teams should adopt a positive image of the United States.24 From the late 1940s
22 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, May 2 1950, “Revised draft of USIE Country Paper for Denmark”,
511.59/5-250, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
23
Villaume, Allieret med forbehold, 789-90
24
Bech-Petersen, Encounters, 214-217.
10
hundreds of Danish technicians, managers, farmers and trade unionists visited the
United States as members of such study teams.
Most participants were pro-American from the outset and normally their
reports, many of which were published, pointed out very positive pictures of the
United States (as expected by the host). There were exceptions however.
In 1949 a group of Danish trade unionist set off to study production efficiency
and industrial relations in the United States. Among the participants was the
chairman of the Danish Congress of Trade Unions Euler Jensen who was well known
by the American representation in Denmark of being an anti-communist hard-liner.25
The delegation visited several cities, trade unions and factories in the United States.
Returning to Denmark one of the delegates Jørgen Paldam worked out the mandatory
report entitled “America is different” and published in more than 50.000 copies widely
distributed throughout the Danish labour movement.26 It did not focus only on
American productivity and standard of living the report leaving the traditional
positive image of the United States but included also sections on the Negro Problem
and comparisons between welfare benefits in the two countries. This ambiguous view
on United States caused some dissatisfaction at the local ECA office.
After the end of the Marshall Plan, the support for study trips to the US was
continued under several other programs in cooperation with private organizations
such as “The American-Scandinavian Foundation” and “The Danish-American
Society”. An official report from the American embassy estimated 500 Danish students
had visited the US in 1949. The report also pointed out the need to set up a Fulbright
Programme in Denmark – “in the long run the exchange of persons would be our most
The following case is based on material in Archive of the Danish Labour Movement
(Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd, box 18, ”Amerikarejsen. Efteråret 1950”) and Bech-Petersen,
Encounters, 220-227.
25
26 Paldam had when leaving been denied a visa for the United States because it turned he had been a
member of the communist youth organisation in the 1930s. ECA in Copenhagen had to interfere to get
him into the United States. See Note of August 25 1949, Records of the officer of British Commenwealth
and Nothern European Affairs, Subject files 1941-53, box 12, Lot Files, Record Group 59 (State
Department), National Archives.
11
effective approach to the Danes.”27 From 1951 Danes could participate in the Fulbright
program and altogether 200-300 Danes were sent to United States annually. Among
the more prominent scholars visiting the United States was the later the Danish
prime minister Anker Jørgensen (1972-1982) who as a young trade unionist in the mid
1950s received a Fulbright scholarship to visit Harvard University for a three weeks
summer school and was lectured by prominent Americans such as Jimmy Hoffa.28
Returning from United States Anker Jørgensen brought Elvis Presley records for his
children and a fascination for automobiles.
Besides these formal programmes American officials in Denmark also used
other means to create a positive Danish image of the United States. Entering the grey
zone of US activities in Denmark our knowledge for obvious reasons is very scarce.
But we know that US officials tried to influence Danish State Radio, nursed the
Danish press, supported Danish books and publications through various channels and
that they also supported Danish organizations. But we don’t know if this is part of a
general pattern or just the top of the iceberg.
When it came to placing American propaganda productions in Danish public
sphere special attention was given to the press and radio broadcasting. As it was
stated in a report from the press section at Copenhagen embassy “Unlike any other
operation of the USIS, the Press Section can bring a direct policy message to a critical
or opposition audience without identification of source.”29 The Press Section in
Denmark in 1952 produced 239 feature articles used by numerous Danish newspapers
and magazines and the section estimated that the top 30 articles reached more than 1
million readers each. Although this work focused on political ends, the press section
also wanted to convince Danes of the “high cultural standards of the United States.”
The embassy staff also managed to get the Danish State Radio to broadcast
programmes produced by US headquarters in Paris leaving – in the words of the US
27 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, May 2 1950, “Revised draft of USIE Country Paper for Denmark”,
511.59/5-250, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
28
A. F. Madsen, Anker (Copenhagen 1999), 141-142.
29 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, February 2 1953, ”Survey of USIS/MSA Press Features in 1952”,
511.59/2-253, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
12
Embassy – “… the impression with the listener that the State Radio itself had
arranged for coverage and financed it.”30 The political news programmes dominated,
but the Americans also supplied recordings of American orchestras and bands from
classic to jazz and features on music and literature. According to an embassy report
from 1953 the following cultural highlights in the Danish State Radio was based on
US-produced material:
“Among such programs were during this period, for example, a repeat
performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, as well as a ninety-minute
performance of Saroyan’s Don’t Go Away Mad; the reading of short stories by
Hawthorne, Melville, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Irwing Shaw, and Truman
Capote; recitals by such American artists as Todd Duncan, Dean Dixon, and
Andor Foldes; performance of American organ music, Barber’s piano sonata Op.
26, Louis Gruenberg’s sonata OP. 2 for violin and piano, as well as pieces by
more popular US composers (Gershwin, Kern, etc.) …” And further more the
embassy had assisted Danish productions on “… a two-hour musical salute
addressed to the city of Denver by the State Radio’s symphony orchestra
(including an address by Ambassador Anderson); a one-hour program of new
American music (Barber, Charles Ives, Norman Dello Joio); a one-hour program
devoted to the American composer Roger Sessions; a 45 minutes broadcast on
American folk music; and a one-hour broadcast on post-war American
literature.” 31
Far from all attempts to influence radio broadcasting were successful. There
was an outspoken suspicion towards programmes that mixed politics and
entertainment. In the same way DR according to the US Embassy didn’t show
interest in using programs produced by Voice of America. But economic considerations
in the Danish State Radio gave some room for enterprising Americans, as
30
Villaume, Allieret med forbehold, 790-792.
31 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, desp. 845, February 25 1953, ”USIS Semi-Annual Evaluation Report”,
511.59/2-2553, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
13
Due to its agreements with the commercial manufacturers of gramophone records, the
Danish State Radio has always been exceedingly hesitant to use IBS recordings, and
as a result USIS has included in its presentation program the presentation of
commercially-produced American records to the State Radio (which, due to import
restrictions, it has been unable to obtain through other channels).32
Besides establishing a library and delivering raw material to the Danish press
and radio US sources also supported the publication of books and magazines in
Denmark financially. Except for the reports documenting the experiences of the ECA
study-groups, these books were not so much pro-American as they were anticommunist. A striking example is the translation into Danish of Charles A. Orrs book
Stalin’s Slave Camps in 1952. In the latter case Fremad got heavy financial support
from the local ECA-administration and the book was published in not less than 50.000
copies, an enormous number by Danish standards.33 In this case the investment did
not pay off. Not only had Fremad great difficulties in distributing even the free copies
of the book, but the whole arrangement was exposed and became an example of blunt
American propaganda. Much more successful then was the anti-communist comicslike text “Who is the imperialist?” provided by USIS for the home guard magazine
Hjemmeværnet with its 50.000 copies circulation.34 Later it was printed in not less
than 150.000 copies as a black and white pamphlet for use in schools and civic
organizations.
The third type of official US programmes in Denmark was the covert support to
pro-American Danish operators. The extent of this kind of support is not known by the
nature of the work. Secret operations normally do not leave many traces behind. There
is some evidence that US have supported political organizations like the pro-NATO
32 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, desp. 845, February 25 1953, ”USIS Semi-Annual Evaluation Report”,
511.59/2-2553, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
33 Correspondance concerning publications, “Orr, Charles A, udtalelser om ‘Stalins slavelejre’”, Fremad
Publishers, EI, Archive of the Danish Labour Movement. Only 2000 of the 50.000 books were planned to
be sold on market terms. The rest was handed out for free.
34 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, desp. 845, February 25 1953, ”USIS Semi-Annual Evaluation Report”,
511.59/2-2553, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
14
Atlantsammenslutningen and they might also have supported non-communist political
organizations like the Danish Labour Movement. The best known example on the
cultural scene is Congress for Cultural Freedom.
In Denmark as elsewhere CCF became a meeting ground for “progressive anticommunists. Denmark was represented at the founding CCF congress in Berlin 1950
by the prominent social democrat and resistance leader Frode Jacobsen. But the
initiative to form a Danish branch was taken three years later by the Conservative
Arne Sejr. 35 Sejr had since 1945 been involved in anti-communist activities of various
kinds, had worked as a freelancer for Danish and American intelligence and had even
created his own private organization for grey operations entitled “the Firm”.
Especially in the first years the Danish branch did not behave as if it was under any
kind of control from the outside. It took a name of its own – The Society for Freedom
and Culture – hereby distancing itself from the international (American) mother
organization and for the first years even seem to have claimed economically
independence. The activities more resembled those of a private club than an
organisation for political and cultural propaganda. Whereas the purpose of CCF was
to be a voice in the international political and cultural debate, Sejr seem to have been
more interested in fighting communism on the inner lines. This conflict became clear
in 1954 when the progressive Danish composer Niels Viggo Bentzon was invited to a
CCF festival in Nice. Sejr and some of Danish associates became very upset and
pointed out that Bentzon politically was rather shady. CCF in Paris was mainly
interested in the public and cultural value of its activities whereas the Danish were
fighting communists and their fellow travellers. The following years Sejr’s control over
the organization was loosened and under the auspices of less conspiratorial people as
the young Social Democratic journalist Jørgen Schleimann the relationship with CCF
was strengthened. In the period 1953-1957 The Society for Freedom and Culture had
contacts to the rightwing-intellectual journal Danske Magasin and in 1956 they
35 The following history on the Danish branch of Congress for Cultural Freedom is based on I. Philipsen,
“Selskabet for Kultur og Frihed. Congress for Cultural Freedom i Danmark 1953-60”, Kritik, vol. 35,
No. 158 (August 2002): 38-51 and H. Hertel, Vor tids Reitzel. En pionerforlægger og hans samtid 19491999 (Copenhagen 1999).
15
started working closely together with the well-established journal Perspektiv.
Perspektiv was a broadminded magazine including articles on culture, science and
politics from numerous Danish intellectuals and even though the editorial tone was
anti-totalitarian and pro-Western it also published articles from well-known
communist writers.36 The cooperation with CCF made it possible to publish translated
articles from CCF’s international journals such as Entcounter and Preuves and the
financial support from CCF made it possible to reduce the selling price. In 1957 the
CCF headquarters in Paris eventually decided to bring the Danish society more into
line with the CCF overall strategy and the Danish autonomy gradually disappeared.
Eventually, in 1960 the Danes had to ask CCF to take over all financial
responsibilities and the contract with the magazine Perspektiv. During the early 1960s
Perspektiv became the leading political and cultural magazines in Denmark attracting
prominent local and international intellectuals as editors and writers but the exposure
of the CIA-support of CCF in 1967 spelt the beginning of the end for its Danish
branch. Tellingly, the last two issues of Perspektiv, published in 1967 and 1969, were
dedicated to critical evaluations of the Vietnam War and the international student
movement.
America for the cultural elites. The Reception of American high-brow
culture in Denmark.
In 1968, the literary critic and Americanist Erik Wiedemann contributed a
chapter on American literature after 1945 to a major work on “Foreign Writers
in the 20th Century” (Fremmede digtere i det 20. århundrede). He lamented that
new American literature was little known in Denmark. Part of the explanation
he sought in the “inertia that also in the field of literature is a characteristic of
the Danish public’s relationship to contemporary art [ny kunst]”, another that
American literature did not have as eloquent advocates among critics as did
“French, German and English prose.” The main explanation, however, was found
in the contemporary American literature itself; a literature that showed “more
36
Hertel, Vor tids Reitzel, 17-27.
16
promise than fulfilment” and so far could not “compare with the stature and
influence of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Faulkner and Miller in the interwar
years.” This literature, on the other hand, had a ”prominent position in
Denmark.”37
Wiedemann was correct in stressing the strong position of American
literature from the interwar period. In the 1950 edition of the bestselling
almanac Hvem Hvad Hvor we find a list of some three hundred books presented
as a “allround suggestion including the most important books in Danish
literature and those of the principal languages”. Unsurprisingly, the list is very
parochial. Almost two thirds of the recommended books are Danish or
Scandinavian. However, looking at the recommendations in non-Scandinavian
literature from the 20th Century, American literature is the largest single group
with 12 titles (closely followed by French and British literature). A closer look is
telling. Most of the novels listed offer critical portraits of American society
(Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair
and Steinbeck) while Hemingway is represented with his two most politically
engaged “European novels”. Thus it was American writers’ self-critical gaze at
America that was hailed by the anonymous critic who compiled the list – and
devoured by thousands of Danish readers in the post-war decades when
especially the works of Steinbeck and Hemingway were immensely popular38
If no post-war writers gained this kind of popularity, several American
writers had a strong impact in Denmark. In 1950, the Royal Theatre premiered
Arthur Miller’s The Death of A Salesman. Reviewers were ecstatic. In a typical
example, Erik Seidenfaden of Information characterized the play as “a conscious
37 Erik Wiedeman, “Amerikansk roman og novelle efter 1945”, in Sven Møller Kristensen (ed.),
Fremmed literatur i det 20. århundrede, Copenhagen: Gad, 1968, vol. 3, pp. 493-506, quotes from
p. 493.
38 Cf. HvemHvad Hvor. Politikens Årbog 1951, pp. 395-398. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bells
Toll and A Farewell To Armswent into their 16th impressions in respectively 1964 and 1966 while
Steinbeck’s Cannary Row saw its 22nd impression in 1968, and The Grapes of Wrath reached its
15th in 1970. No other American writers came even close to this popularity in this period
although Caldwell’s Tobaco Road had been reprinted four times by 1968. Cfr. information
accessed at http://bibliotek.dk.
17
showdown with the American dream of ‘unlimited opportunities’” but also
stressed that it was
“a modern tragedy with a specific American moral. At the same time, there is a
general appeal in [the play’s] political attack on the existentialist lie underlying
the obsession with the illusions of the quest for success governing the ordinary
human being of today.”39
The theatre going public in Copenhagen shared the opinion of the reviewers. The
play was by far the most successful one produced by the Royal Theatre in the
early 1950s measured in the number of performances. Arthur Miller’s cemented
his reputation was the American playwright of the day with The Crucible that as
successfully staged at Copenhagen’s Det ny Teater in February 1954 and later
the same year broadcast as a radioplay by the Danish public service radio.40
By then, The Catcher in the Rye (translated in 1953) was already gaining
cult status among part of the young generation in Denmark, and both the theme
of bewildered, rebellious youth and the linguistic mode of the novel probably
served as a key source of inspiration for two of the most controversial (and
critically acclaimed) Danish novels of the late 1950s: Klaus Rifbjerg’s Den
kroniske uskyld and Leif Panduro’s De uanstændige. One might also suggest that
the theme of sex and especial sexual taboos that are crucial elements in both
novels might have been constructed under the influence of Henry Miller whose
sexually explicit books from the interwar years were published in Danish from
1954 causing major controveries.41
Information, 16 March 1950. In Danish: “et bevidst opgør med den amerikanske drøm om de
“uanede muligheder”” and “en moderne tragedie, hvis specielle amerikanske budskab var
åbenbart, men hvis politiske opgør med den livsløgn der ligger i et almindeligt nutidsmenneskes
besættelse af sukses-jagtens illusioner giver det almen appel.” See also the reviews in Politiken
(16 March 1950) and Social-Demokraten (17 March 1950) and in the journal of the folk high
school movement, Højskolebladet, 1950, pp. 266-267.
40 Cf. the list of ”the greatest successes and failures” of Danish Theatres, 1949-54, printed in
Hvem Hvad Hvor. Politikens Årbog 1955, p. 376. For The Crucible, see ibid., p. 376 and NN,XX.
41 For controversies surrounding the Danish editions of Miller’s I krebsens vendekreds og Sexus
(and also Nabokov’s Lolita in 1957), see Hans Hertel, Vor tids Reitzel, Copenhagen: Reitzel 1999,
pp. 37-68.
39
18
Rifbjerg was the modernist enfant terrible of Danish literature and
cultural debates from the mid-50s. He was also strongly influenced by American
culture. In the tradition of the left-wing radicals from the 1930s, he fully
accepted both film and jazz as bona fide ways of artistic expression. After a trip
to the United States in 19xx, he was instrumental in introducing the beat
generation to a Danish readership. First in 1959, when Vindrosen, the
influential literary journal that Rifbjerg co-edited, in 1959 printed translations
of Howl! and Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind” while another rising
star in the Danish intellegensia Villy Sørensen wrote a positive review of the
Danish translation of Keruack’s The Subterraneans42. On the Road was
translated into Danish in 1960, and that year also saw the publication of
Rifbjerg’s immensely influential collection of poetry, Konfrontation where the
inspiration from the beat-generation was evident.
It is therefore not quite true when Wiedemann lamented the lack of
impact of American post-1945 literature in Denmark. If middle-brow Danish
readers by the early 1960s still preferred the “classics” from the interwar years,
the literary avant-garde were impressed with and inspired by their American
contemporaries. Thus the status of American contemporary literature was
clearly elitist.43
The same can be said about jazz music. While most jazz fans in the 1920s
and 30s probably primarily saw it as energetic and liberating dance music, a
much smaller radical audience ascribed more meaning to jazz. According to one
of their most eloquent members, Sven Møller Kristensen, writing in 1938, jazz
was “natural”, “physical”, “primitive”, “non-individualistic”, “productive”,
(universally) “human” and “popular” in the sense that is was music for the
42 Cf. Kristen Kold Thomsen: Frihedens hylen. En bog om den amerikanske beat-generation.
Unpublished manuscript, Center for Amerikanske Studier, Syddansk Universitet 2003, pp. 2932.
43 Our argument is not that American avantgarde literature gained a dominant position in
intellectual circles. In the 1950s, the influence of both French existentialism and the British
“Angry Young Men” was probably much greater.
19
people by the people.44 In short, jazz was authentic folk music, rooted in the
experiences of the African-Americans slaves and under-class, and therefore the
ideal soundtrack to social and political experiments of a more or less
revolutionary nature. However, this authentic music was bastardized into
commercial dance-music, much to the chagrin of the real aficionados. So while
the years during and immediately after the German occupation in many ways
was a golden era for jazz music as dance music, the same years saw the making
of an much smaller group of jazz fans, normally but not necessarily politically to
the left, who worked to defend and promote jazz as an new art form. Key figures
were Møller Kristensen and the composer Bernhard Christensen (with whom
Møller Kristensen had collaborated on numerous jazz projects since the early
1930s) while the famous and controversial architect, film-maker, writer and
critic Poul Henningsen had a more marginal position. To this core was added a
group of, often very young, critics and musicians from such as Børge Roger
Henrichsen (b. 1915), Erik Moseholm (b. 1930), Jørgen Ulrich (b. 19xx) and Erik
Wiedemann (b. 1930) whom we encountered earlier as a literary critic.
For this group jazz was to be taken very serious indeed. Thus Wiedemann,
in a feature article from 1952 that introduced the contemporary jazz music,
claimed that
“Jazz is an art form that develops at tremendous speed. In 50 years, it has
developed from primitive folkmusic to a music that is comparable to the other
artistic forms of contemporary society.”
He argued that this development was an ”inevitable” consequence of the position
of jazz ”in the heart of the modern, intellectual urban culture” and compared the
bob music of Parker, Gillespie and Monk with European expressionist music.
However, this magnificent development had created problems,
44 Sven Møller Kristensen, Hvad Jazz er, Copenhagen:Munksgaard , 1938; here from E.
Wiedemann, Jazz in Denmark, cit., vol. 1, pp. 236-237
20
Jazz is seeking a new audience. (…) Adolescents that so far have been the main
group of jazz fans hardly possess the mental energy needed to actively work for
an understanding of the purely musical problems that one has to grasp in order
to fully appreciate modern jazz. And even if there seems to be a growing
appreciation of the values of jazz in progressive cultural circles, the number of
jazz supporters here is not large enough to secure a social base.”45
If this was the case, the mission for the jazz lovers was clear. This social base
had to be created. And the group worked hard to this end. In 1954 the journal
musikrevue was launched, and even if the journal claimed to cover classical
music and even pop, the prime focus was jazz (and it is tempting to assume that
the broader profile was an attempt to lure lovers of classical music to broaden
their horizons and those of pop to improve their taste!).46 In 1956, the group
created Den danske Jazzkreds (The Danish Jazz Circle) to further understanding
of the importance of jazz as an art form and to promote Danish jazz. In this
uphill struggle, the jazz enthusiasts received crucial support from the Danish
state radio. From late 1945 programmes where jazz connoisseurs played and
commented jazz records were broad-cast; in 1946-47 a series of programmes told
the history of jazz, and from 1948 a biweekly programme, the “Radioens
Jazzklub” became a fixture. By the late 1950s, that programme had become a
weekly event and had been supplemented by a number of others. There were
regular transmissions of jazz concerts, altogether “several hundreds” over the
Erik Wiedeman, ”Bliver også jazzen uforstaaelig”, in Information, 21 February
1952. In Danish: ”Jazzen er en kunstart, der udvikler sig med syvmileskridt.
Den har på 50 år udviklet sig fra primitiv folkemusik til en musikart, der
udviklingsmæssigt ligger på linie med det moderne samfunds øvrige
kunstneriske udtryksformer.” ” Jazzen søger et nyt publikum (…) Den grønne
ungdom der op til nu har udgjort hovedparten af jazzens tilhængerskare har
næppe tilstrækkelig aandelig energi til aktivt at arbejde for en forståelse af de
rent musikalske problemer, som man maa forstaa for at faa det fulde udbytte af
den moderne jazz. Og selv om der synes en voxende forstaaelse for jazzens
værdier i progressivt indstillede kulturkredse, saa har jazzen ikke her et
tilstrækkeligt stort antal tilhængere til at det kan danne social basis.”
45
46 The pretence to cover pop music was dropped in 1958, and in 1959 the magazine got the fitting
subtitle, “Journal for Jazz Music”.
21
four decades after 1952. In 1951, the first Radio Jazz Band was established, and
in 1964 the state radio formed a permanent big band (“Danmarks Radios Big
Band”).47 The notion that jazz should be considered as more than mere
entertainment was also promoted in the Hvem Hvad Hvor almanac from the late
1940s when jazz music got its own section listing the most important records of
the year. The almanac also printed features such as “Kortfattet jazz-ordbog” (“A
Short Dictionary of Jazz”) in 1956, “Jazzens historie i en nøddeskal” (“The
History of Jazz in a Nut-Shell”) in 1961, and “25 udvalgte jazzplader” (“25
Selected Jazz Albums”) in 1964 - articles that was meant to give the middle-brow
readers a chance to at least parade as serious jazz-lovers.
All of these initiatives did not secure a broad social base for modern jazz.
Most people probably found the music noisy and the intellectual jazz-lovers
boring. Thus, in 1960, the best-loved comic actor of the period, Dirch Passer, had
a major success with the sketch, “How jazz was born” where he ridiculed the
professorial jazz programmes.48 The point we want to make here is, however,
another one. That is that modern jazz over the first 10-15 years of the post-war
period was established among the young and progressive intellectuals as their
preferred music. Although they tried to promote a active Danish jazz scene (and
by the 1960s succeeded, in no small part due to the support of Danmarks Radio),
the real thing continued to be the American jazz. As Erik Wiedemann put it in
his book Jazz og jazzfolk,
Although jazz has by now found performers in most of the world, the history of
jazz is first and foremost the history of the development of jazz in the USA which
has been the scene for the most important innovations and where the best
musicans have performed. (…) [E]xperience demonstrates that the finest jazz,
Cf. the biased account of jazz in the Danish state radio (and television) in Den hemmelige
Krystal – en bog om radiojazzgruppen (Aarhus: elkjaeroghansen, 2003) written by one of its key
protagonists Erik Moseholm.
48 The sketch (with lyrics by Tao Michaelis) can be found on the CD, Gammel Dansk!! – Humor
1960-1970, Old Record News 584 480-2, 2002.
47
22
the history-making kind of jazz, originates among the Negro musicians in New
York.”49
While Louis Armstrong and other jazz stars from the interwar years had gained
mainstream status by the mid-1950s (Armstrong was honoured as artist of the
year by the Student Union of the University of Copenhagen in 1955), the same
cannot not be said for the real heroes of the jazz intellectuals. There was nothing
middle-of-roadish about Parker, Gillespie, Coletrane, Powell, or Miles Davis.
Quite the opposite, their music was the perfect soundtrack to the
more adventurous American literature that was enjoyed by the same group. By
the early 1960s, then, we find literary icons such as Hemingway and Steinbeck
well-established in bestselling dimensions whereas more recent, critical voices
such as those of Salinger, Miller and the beat generation won the ear of
especially younger intellectuals. What most of these writers had in common was
a critical view of middle-class America and its values. Turning to Danish film
critics’ reception of American movies we find a similar picture. Since 1948, the
association of Danish film critics has offered annuals awards, the Bodil. One
Bodil is dedicated to the best non-European movie of the year. Comparing the
list of Danish award winners to that of the Academy Awards for the period 194875, we find that only five Oscar-winners in the category best picture of the year
were awarded Bodils by the Danish critics. It was not that the critics did not like
American films (although it is telling that non-American films won five awards
in the 1960s). They simply did not share the taste of the Academy. Thus from the
late 50s to the mid-60s when Oscar winners were musicals and historical
costume dramas, the Danish critics preferred socially and politically engaged
49 Erik Wiedemann, Jazz og jassfolk, 2nd ed., Copenhagen Aschehoug 1960, pp.170-171. In
Danish: ”Skønt jazzen efterhånden har fundet udøvere over det meste af verden, er jazzens
historie først og fremmest historien om jazzens udvikling I USA; derfra er de vigtigste fornyelser
kommet og dér har de bedste musikere spillet. [og videre:] (…) erfaringen viser, at den bedste
jazz, den der skaber jazzhistorie, udgår fra negermusikernes miljø i New York.”
23
films such as “The Defiant Ones,” “Twelve Angry Men,” Judgement in
Nuremberg,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Seven Days in May.”50
To conclude this section on the reception and status of American culture among
intellectuals, we will take a look at the development of the teaching in the
discipline of English in the Danish Gymnasium, i.e. the Danish equivalent to the
American secondary high-school catering for the age-group of 16-19 years old.
The post-war decades were ones of frequent educational reforms, both in order
the secure the skills for the modernising economy and in order deepen the
democratic structures and values which was an important political project for
the Social Democrats and the social-liberal Radical Party, the parties that
dominated Danish governments from 1945 to the 1970s. In this process, the
Gymnasium changed from being an elitist institution to a school for, at least
numerically speaking, the many. While 5% of a year group graduated from the
gymnasium in 1945, the number had risen to 10% in 1960 and skyrocketed to
32% in 1975. Neither the reforms nor the growing number of students changed
the fundamental understanding that one of the prime goals of the gymnasium
was to secure the Allgemeinbildung of the students, i.e. school them in the
cultural foundations of Western Civilization from Ancient Greece to
contemporary society.51 Therefore, the teaching of English in the gymnasium
offers an excellent way to access the status of America in Danish high-brow
culture
By 1945, the gymnasium had for decades been divided into a science and a
language line. In the language line, English had by the 1930s established itself
as the most popular modern language. In 1945, teaching was regulated by laws
50 The five pictures that received both Oscars and Bodils were The Best Years of Our Life, All
about Eve, On the Waterfront, Marty, and Midnight Cowboy. If we compare the Danish awards
with the Golden Globe Award instead, we find a slightly bigger overlap as seven films that were
awarded Golden Globes also received the Danish award in this period. The information on the
awards was found at http://www.filmkritik.dk; http://www.oscars.org, and http://hfpa.org
51 For an analysis of the Danish gymnasium, focusing of the role of Allgemeinbilding, see Harry
Haue, Almendannelse som ledestjerne, Odense Universitetsforlag 2003. The statistical
information is from Danmarks Statistik, Levevilkår i Danmark. Statistisk oversigt 1980, table
5.9.
24
and regulations passed in 1935. Here the prime goal of the discipline of English
in the language line was outlined as being “to give the students … important
insights into characteristic elements of English culture”.52 The key word is, of
course, English. Students were required to read Shakespeare, English poetry
and prose, and even texts on “English history, political institutions and
contemporary social conditions.” Nowhere, neither in the text of the law or the
general guide lines, does “America/n” enter. Tellingly, in the draft version of the
guidelines from 1933, even examples of low quality literature that should not be
read were English ones, i.e. Conan Doyle, Jerome, Wallace and Woodhouse!53
American texts did squeeze their way into the gymnasium in 1953.
According to the new law for the gymnasium from that year, the students are
still to learn about “English culture” – from Shakespeare to political institutions
and contemporary affairs”. As something new, however, “American texts can, to
some degree, be studied instead of English ones.”54
In the late 1950s, education in Denmark went through a major overhaul.
For the gymnasium, the objective was to make the institution “up-to date
without diminishing its quality as the foundation for higher education.”55 In its
report, the Ministery of Education’s advisory committee did not suggest major
changes in the discipline of English. However, they noted in their comments that
“With the ever-growing cultural importance of the United States it is deemed
natural to make reading of American texts mandatory. The extent of American
material is to be decided by the individual teacher.” (p. 36)
Based on this, the draft law stated that ”American literature must be
represented” in the readings (p. 52). However, in the committee’s proposal for
teaching guidelines it was made clear that this requirement would be fulfilled by
reading as little as a poem and a short story (adding that it was, of course,
Betænkning for Gymnasiet, 1933, p. 31.
Betænkning, 1933, p. 33. In the final version, these examples were dropped; instead teachers were
told that “texts of a purely entertaining character” should not be read. Cf. Bekendtgørelse, Lovtidende
1935A, p. 127
54 Lovtidende 1953A, p. 390.
55 Det nye Gymnasium. Betænkning afgivet …, 1960, p.5.
52
53
25
possible for individual teachers “to work seriously with the United States” (p.
66).
In 1961, the text of the new law for the gymnasium followed these
recommendations closely. However, if one can argue that this reform finally
acknowledged American literature (and culture) as a bona fide subject matter, it
is also clear that American culture was still seen very much as the junior
partner in that special relationship. This reflects the opinion of the committee
(and maybe even of the politicians who passed the law). It almost certainly
reflected that of the English teachers. As their colleagues in the other Fine Arts
discipline they saw it as their first duty to give the students a understanding of
the “best”, culturally speaking, and to English teachers that meant English
culture.
This is at least the very clear impression one gets the reading lists of the
English courses at St. Knuds Gymnasium in Odense from the years 1941-1971.
Here we find not only Shakespeare (the only author that was required reading
thorough this period) but also Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Hardy, and Blake.
Telling text books titles are 200 Years of English Poetry, British Essays, From
Beowolf to Kipling, An English Omnibus, and The British Spirit. The first
American prose to appear in the lists is Richard Wright’s Native Son, read by
one class in 1949. In 1951 a class read a piece by Sinclair Lewis, and in 1954 we
find John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. It is only from 1961 that American
literature is represented every year. Of Mice and Men was read regularly and
the same goes, from 1963, for The Death of a Salesman. Steinbeck seems to have
been the teachers’ favourite American writer, but Hemingway is also
represented with a couple of short stories. In 1970 we finally find The Catcher in
the Rye in a reading list, and two years earlier one class was introduced to both
the beat generation and Bob Dylan.56
56 The reading lists are printed in Meddelelser fra St. Knuds Gymnasium for the years 1941 to
1960, and in Sct. Knuds Gymnasium i Odense. Skoleåret 1960-61 and following years. We are
grateful to Svend Erik Larsen from Sct. Knuds Gymnasium for giving us access to this material.
We are naturally aware that reading lists from one single school offers slim evidence for general
patterns. However, the findings from Sct. Knuds are corroborated by informal interviews with a
number of people who attended other schools in the 1950s and 60s
26
The pattern is striking. Until 1970, at least at St. Knuds, British
literature dominated massively in the class room. From the early 60s, the
teachers followed the law and included some American prose, poetry and drama,
but only at the margins. It is equally telling that most of the chosen texts offered
critical comments on American mainstream culture and society. Thus, the
Enlish teachers fit nicely into our general picture of Danish intellectuals and
American culture. In the defence of the teachers, however, one might suggest
that they saw Steinbeck, Miller etc. as a necessary anti-dote to the sugary image
of America to be found the popular culture for the students who were destined to
take on prominent positions in Danish society.57
America for the masses - Americanization of popular culture in Denmark
In the decades after 1945 Denmark gradually became a modern industrial society. In
this process USA became the symbol as well as the role model whose ways of life were
imitated by Danish consumers and entrepreneurs. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed an
Americanization of production and consumption. The Danish adoption of such ideas
was promoted by official US programmes such as ECA. The production was heavily
influenced by American ideas on industrial relations, scientific management and
rationalization (piecework).58 The marketing of products was done with American tools
such PR-campaigns. Often products were filled with American contents, even though
the product in question was purely Danish. For instance a Danish grape soft drink
was titled Majami (cf. Miami) and the Danish cigarettes Holiday consisted – so an
advertisement informed consumers - of American blend tobacco produced on American
American and English culture were finally given equal status in a reform from 1971. Here the
normative goal of teaching in English in the modern language line is given as to give “the
students an understanding of characteristic elements of the culture of English-speaking
countries, especially England and the United States.” Whether this equal footing was realised in
the daily teaching practice is doubtful, however. It is telling, at least, that the law is utterly
silent as to the provenance of the texts to be used at the actual examaninations (Bekendtgørelse
om undervisningen I gymnasiet og om fordringerne ved og eksamensopgivelserne til
studentereksamen, par. 5: Engelsk, in Lovtidende A, 1971)
57
58 S. Toft Hansen, Rationaliseringsdebatten i Danmark 1918-1947. Industriledelse, Produktivitet og
Social Fred. Jern- og Metalsektoren som eksempel (Unpublished Ph.d.-Thesis, University of Aalborg
2001), 320-442.
27
machines under control of American experts claiming: “It’s OK it’s a Holiday”.59 The
distribution of goods on the retail side was changed dramatically when new concepts
such as self service, super markets, shopping malls and drive-in shops appeared in
most Danish cities.60 The first Danish super market opened in 1953 and the variety of
drive-ins included banks, book shops. This was openly inspired by the US example and
actively supported as part of the official American programmes in Denmark as stated
by USIS in 1953: “Encouraged by American consultants … both independent and
cooperative retail food outlets have started experimental changeovers to self-service
stores and there indications that this move may gain considerable momentum.”61
Finally Danish consumers also started to consume the American way.62 First
dedicated youth started drinking milkshakes and popcorn the 1950s. Later, during the
1960s juice, steaks, yoghurt and corn flakes came on Danish dining tables. In the
kitchen – American as well as more traditional – food was prepared less by hand as
canned and frozen food became more widespread and the electric gadgets entered the
kitchens. Refrigerators from the 1950s and freezers from the 1960s became standard
items. In the early 1950s the widely read journal “Samvirke” (published by the
cooperative movement) stated that “An American kitchen is the dream of most Danish
housewives”.63 In 1957, the first cooking book devoted to barbecue was published. The
blurb informed potential (and maybe sceptical) readers that “the strange word
barbecue (pronounced bar-be-kju) is borrowed from American.64 Barbecue only caught
on from the 1960s. By then a barbecue had become a “grill” (like in the rest of the
Nordic countries and Germany), and barbecue food consequently “grillmad” (grilled
Filmjournalen, January 1963, 2; P. Knoop Christensen, ed., USA og os: En antologi om det danske
samfunds påvirkning af impulser fra USA efter 1945 (Aalborg 1984), 99.
59
60
Dansk Sprognævn’s Collection: “Selvbetjening”.
61 Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, desp. 845, February 25 1953, ”USIS Semi-Annual Evaluation Report”,
511.59/2-2553, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
E.-M. Boyhus, ”Mad og drikke”, in Dagligliv i Danmark i vor tid, vol. 1, ed. G. Nelleman (Copenhagen
1988), 475-498.
62
63
Samvirke 1953 – quoted from Knoop-Christensen, USA og os, 38.
64
B. Poulsen, Grill-mad. Barbecue og El-grill (Copenhagen 1957).
28
food), one of the many neologisms in Denmark, based on a creative adaptation of
American words.
As working hours became fewer and vacation longer more time were left for
leisure and in this sphere American influence is also found. Besides the strong
influence in areas such as music and movies (this will be discussed below) one can
point towards the concept of hobbies. Having a hobby became very important, and in
1946 the first hobby handbook was published.65 The suggested hobbies were, besides
lasso throwing, not distinct American. Similar in the worlds of sport Danes were
reluctant to follow the Americans In 1946 the first basketball match was played in
Copenhagen between to teams from the American occupation forces in Germany.66
Shortly after a national basketball union was founded but it remained marginal in
comparison to European disciplines such as association football and the local invention
hand ball. American sports like baseball and football were and still are considered
exotic and odd. The more successful leisure activity was camping. Even though
camping was a known concept before 1945, the growth of the camping scene in
Denmark post 1945 clearly based itself on the American example, especially the use of
automobiles and caravans.67
This gradual movement towards an affluent society was, of course, not simply a
product of American economic and cultural imperialism. US programs for
modernisation of Europe, American business interest, Danish fascination with the
new superpower and a growing orientation towards material welfare worked together
in changing the way of life in Denmark. The interplay between these pushing and
pulling forces is complicated and influenced by factors such as economic performance
and national market interests. Compared to other European countries Denmark
witnessed a strong economic growth relatively late. What has generally been termed
65 Politikens Hobbybog (Copenhagen 1946). The book was extended during the 1950s (in 1955 it was a
three volume book) and published in several editions.
66
V. Bertram, Baskettball (Copenhagen 1955), 11.
67 Camping og friluftsliv (Copenhagen 1953). However, camping to a high degree became adapted to
established Danish habits. Many caravans were placed more or less permanently in established camps
that in many ways came to resemble the established tradition of allotments.
29
the Silver Fifties arrived in Denmark only in the last years of the decade. This relative
economic backwardness and the strong state regulation of trade limited the import of
American goods. In these conditions, the first 10-15 years after 1945, Americanization
of Danish consumer habits was characterized by cheap solutions such as camping or
by an Americanization by proxy. There are several examples of Danish companies
producing American “look a like” goods for the Danish and European markets.
DANDY (originally starting in 1939) produced chewing gum and in 1946 Toms started
producing a chocolate bar called the Yankie Bar [sic!] (which was also sold to US
troops in Germany).68
The most interesting of such copy products (or Ersatz Americana) is the
Danish cola drink, Jolly Cola.69 As in other European countries, breweries and soft
drink producers worried that the iconic Coca-Cola would be successful in crowding out
not only Danish soft drinks but also beer. Due to rationing of sugar the Coca Cola
Company did not find Danish bottlers willing to undertake a production but when the
end of sugar rationing was announced in 1952, local producers feared the worst.
However, breweries and soft drink producers successfully lobbied the government to
introduce a special tax on soft drinks containing cola-nut making cola drinks as
expensive as beer. The tax was very efficient limiting the sales of cola drinks in
Denmark to about 10,000 litres annually. Although the tax, effective from 1953, had
been carefully designed to cover all drinks containing cola nuts, it was evidently
directed against Coca-Cola, and the American company protested, supported by the
American government and Danish allies. As a result of this, in 1959 the tax was
abolished. In this situation, an alliance of 18 soft-drink producers (including the main
breweries of the country, headed by Carlsberg) joined forces to produce the local
brand, Jolly Cola. Jolly Cola was a clearcut copy of Coca-Cola, both in taste and in
business structure where the Danish company Dansk Coladrik A/S played the same
role as the mother company in Atlanta did in the Coca Cola construction. If Coca-Cola
A. de Waal, ed., Tæring eller Næring. 1950’erne i Danmark (Copenhagen 1987), 58-60; Jørgen O
Bjerregaard, ”Toms fylder 75 år”, Byhornet, no. 3 (1999): 30-36.
68
69 The following is based on our ongoing research in the history of Cola-drinks in Denmark, drawing on
the holdings of the Danish national archive, the archives of several Danish breweries and soft drink
producers as well as those of the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta.
30
had the advantage of the brand name, the Danish producers had the advantage of
local networks and the industry’s well developed distribution infrastructure, and when
the Danish “cola-war” broke out in July 1959, Jolly Cola managed to secure about half
of the market. Although Jolly Cola suffered from the competition of the globally
established American brands (Pepsi Cola was introduced in Denmark in 1970), it
managed to hang on to an impressive market share of some 40% until the late 1980s.
Import regulations, dollar gaps and slow economic growth hit entertainment
industry products much harder than most other items. For good reasons movies,
records and comics were not considered to be of any vital interest for the nation. Exact
figures for imports and restrictions are not available but a closer look at the import of
record reveals America played a very limited role. Until 1956 between 80 and 95% of
all imported records came from Britain and only in 1980 did US-imports exceed the
British?70 Of course the British export to Denmark may partly be of American music
but still Britain in this way remained an important filter and
American culture had
strong and even some times overwhelmingly competition from British popular culture
(especially pop and rock music in the 1960s), from home grown Danish culture as well
as European culture in general. It is clear that Danish marketing people did not
distinguish between British and American English but used both. This might owe to
lack of linguistic skills. However, other factors were probably at play as well. First the
strong and well established political and economical links to Britain, Denmark’s most
important trading partner. Second, Britain in many ways served as a cultural entrepot
where American popular culture was received, filtered and re-transmitted to Europe.
This entrepot function was, in the 1960s, used very successfully by the British
entertainment and fashion industries in the 1960s when Britain became “cool” and
London “swinging”. In Danish youth magazines from the 1960s and 1970s British
fashion and music are much more prominent than their American counterparts. The
exception were movies that of movies. Music had become the main component in youth
culture.
70 Own calculations on the basis of National Trading Accounts 1945-1985. These also show a huge
import of records from Germany and Holland after 1958 – which might also consist partly of American
music.
31
The influx of American popular culture falls in two groupings: First what can be
described as conformist and entertaining popular culture for the general public, and
secondly popular culture as youth culture. In many ways the consumption of popular
American culture was a continuation of the patterns established in the inter-war
period when American movies, popular music and literature started to attract the
attention of the Danes. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the Danish edition of
“Readers Digest” published from 1946 under the title “Det Bedste” (The Best … from
Readers Digest).71 It was a direct copy of the American edition both in format and
content. Articles were translated from the American original with only minor
adjustments. With its mixture of political comments, family orientated features and
novels and short stories it was a huge success in the Danish market. The publisher
claimed sales of between 200,000 and 280,000 copies, an extremely high figure by
Danish standards, and a survey in 1951 showed that “Det Bedste” was the most read
magazine in Denmark with a national coverage of 23 %. “Readers Digest” clearly
propagandized for American political ideals and the American way of life and it was
important in creating a pro-American attitude in the Danish population.72
In the book market, the introduction of paperbacks and book clubs in the 1950s
was directly inspired by the book market in the United States. Furthermore the
number of American books published grew through the 1940s. 1950 saw the
publication of more American than British titles, and in 1958 translations of American
books even outnumbered Danish titles and made out 50% of all translated titles.73 No
figures for the number of books actually sold exist but surveys made in the 1950s show
that popular writers such as Frank G. Slaughter were among the best known in
Denmark and many trashy crime novels, e.g. the books of Mickey Spillane, were
published in large quantities. A similar trend can be found in popular magazines
71 P. Knoop Christensen e.a., Amerikaniseringen af det danske kulturliv i perioden 1945-1958 (Aalborg
1983), 100-136.
72
See a more detailed analysis ibid., 132-136.
73 Ibid., 154-178; H. Hertel, ”Kulturens kolde krig. Polarisering, antikommunisme og antiamerikanisme
i dansk kulturliv 1946-1960”, Kritik, vol. 35, no. 158 (August 2002), 9-23; Bruhn Jensen, Dansk
mediehistorie, vol. 2, 248-51.
32
where Hollywood gossip was an important ingredient and half the short stories
translations of American originals”.
In comics, we encounter the same picture. Even though American comics such
as “Popeye” were well known in Denmark before 1945 their circulation grew
dramatically in the post-war years.74 Comic classics such as “Donald Duck” (from
1946), “The Phantom” (1952), “Superman” (1953) were established with magazines of
their own and western comics such as “Black Mask” (1958), “Kit Carson” (1955) and
“Roy Rogers – King of prairie” (1955) were published on regularly basis. The moral
panic of the mid 1950s with its critique of violent comics (see below) caused publishers
to cancel the Danish publication of series as Superman and The Phantom for a period.
Less violent series remained immensely popular. Disney’s “Donald Duck”, established
as a weekly magazine from 1949, became the leading comic magazine for children,
reaching more than 170.000 copies in the late 1950s. In 2003 the weekly number of
copies is around 65.000.75
The American dominance in these markets was not unchallenged. Especially
British literature maintained a strong position in genres such as thrillers (e.g. James
Bond and Norman Conquest) and detective stories (from the adventures of Sexton
Blake to the more genteel heroes of Agatha Christie). Turning to war comics, Danish
readers showed a strong partiality for British sailors, Desert Rats and R.A.F.-aces.
Movies make a special case. In 1945, Danish cinema goers were longing for the
return of Hollywood movies to the Danish screens. American movie companies started
regaining their pre-war position. Out of 28 “remarkable” foreign films that premiered
in Denmark from May to October 1945 18 were American, and 14 out 16 “new movie
stars” presented in the Hvem Hvad Hvor-almanac were from Hollywood.76 This
success proved to the Danish authorities the potential trade deficit import of American
74 Knoop Christensen, Amerikaniseringen af det danske kulturliv, 137-151; Bruhn Jensen, Dansk
mediehistorie, vol. 2, 175-180, 253-255.
75
Figure of October 2003 from Dansk oplagskontrol [Danish Circulation Control]: www.do.dk
76
Hvem Hvad Hvor Politikens Aarbog 1946 (Copenhagen 1946), 414-418.
33
movies might result in. Consequently an unofficial import embargo was established to
limit the import of American movies and save dollars for other more important items.
A recent study shows how Hollywood engaged in an export strategy combining
monopolistic trading methods with a massive diplomatic support from State
Department and the local embassy in Copenhagen.77 The American Motion Picture
Association started to put pressure on Denmark to open its market as well as
accepting higher prices for so-called “super” (coloured, wide screen) movies. Danish
authorities were hesitant towards the first and cinema owners refused the second. As
a result Danish cinemas were on several occasions during the 1940s and 1950s
boycotted by the American film industry. The longest of these boycotts lasted from
1955 to 1958 and was solved only after prolonged negotiations between Motion Picture
Association and Danish cinema owners as well as interference from both American
and Danish state officials.
Because of this American movies were not always accessible for Danish
cinemagoers and Americanization through Hollywood productions was delayed.
Disney productions were not included in the boycott but otherwise Danes had to go a
long way to enter the world of Hollywood. And, in fact, many did. During the boycott
period people in Copenhagen could take the so-called Scarlet Ferries (named after
Scarlet O’ Hara) to Sweden to watch epics such as Moby Dick, Young Rebel and All
that Heaven Allows. After 1958 Danish markets were opened and American movies
soon established a strong position on the Danish market.
The American boycott gave Danish film producers a chance to hang on to and
develop the market share won during the war. With a few exceptions, Danish film
makers did not try to out-Hollywood Hollywood but focused on light productions in the
genres of drama and comedy with a very high content of “Danishness”. The most
successful films were adaptations of the pastoral romances of Morten Korch, set in a
sunny Danish countryside without too many tractors and other reminders of the
reality of Danish agriculture in the 1950s. The pressures of modernisation were not
dominant either, in another successful series of the 1950s and 60s, the “Far til fire”
77J. Ulff-Møller, ”Hollywoods generobring af det danske marked efter 2. Verdenskrig”, Sekvens. Årbog
for Film og Medievidenskab (2000): 243-284.
34
comedies that gave a humorous but utterly sympathetic look at the daily life and core
values of a lower-middle class family. In a third series, “Soldaterkammerater”,
produced 1958-1968, the audience could follow the adventures of a group of young
conscripts in the army without ever being reminded of what armies are for – or that
Denmark was an American ally for that matter. Danish producers also had a try with
more traditional American genres such as thrillers and youth movies. The Danish
thrillers of the 1950s were by and large cheap copies of the originals and disappeared
once American films became available. The youth films – for instance Bundfald
(Dregs) - were of a better quality and significant in the way they at the same time both
copy American youth films and points towards the potential dangers connected to
United States as in the movie “Natlogi betalt” (1957) about the so-called American
girls, girls dating (or prostituting themselves to) American soldiers.78
For many Danes American culture was youth culture. The whole concept of
youth as specific life-span is captured in the concept teen-ager which became a
common word in Denmark in the 1950s. In 1958 the Copenhagen department store
Magasin opened a special teen-age department – “the meeting place of the young ones”
– and both in commercial and public debate on youth the idea of the teenager as a
modern young consumer became widespread.79 For young people, American popular
culture offered a medium to distance themselves from the parent generation and the
norms of the establishment. One can speak of rebellion in a series of phases: First the
rock’n’roll rebellion of the 1950s, then the beatnik rebellion of the 1960s and the
thirdly the flower power revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore the
interest in urban underground cultures such as rap, hip hop, and graffiti from the
1980s can be seen in the same light. In every one of these cases an American cultural
style was imported to Denmark and eventually integrated.
The first rock Danish rock’n’roll concert took place in October 1956, when Ib
“Rock” Hansen accompanied by a band of jazz musicians set off to rock. In the Danish
78
Bruhn Jensen, Dansk Mediehistorie, vol. 2, 238-40.
79
See add in Filmjournalen 1958.
35
press the arrival of rock’n’roll was expected with anxiety and fear.80 The newspapers
had reported on rebellious rock’n’roll youth and street fights in cities as London and
Oslo. But the fears proved groundless. Danish teenagers enjoyed the music and dance
but behaved within accepted norms. The only accident happened when a journalist –
working for an American news agency – paid of a couple of youngsters to throw fire
crackers into the crowd.
The history of Danish rock still has to written but the influence of American
rock’n’roll in the 1950s might easy be exaggerated. American music was not easy to
get hold of. It was, for instance, only from 1958 that Elvis Presley records were
officially released in Denmark. 81 This created ample space for Danish copies but also
for British ones. Thus in the late 1950s, Tommy Steele, presented as a nicer and less
rebellious version of the pelvis rotating Elvis Presley, became the key teenage icon in
Denmark.82 Later Steele’s position was taken over by the equally unthreatening Cliff
Richard, and by the early 60s Denmark had witnessed its first successful “British
invasion.” The charts in the youth magazine “Tempo” in 1963 showed a clear
dominance of Danish and German pop songs and only two Americans – Elvis Presley’s
“Good Luck Charm” and “Hawaii Tattoo” with The Waikikis. Up through the 1950s
and 1960s pop music – Danish, American, German and others alike – made out the
fair share of the charts.
Until the 1960s access to rock’n’roll and pop music was very limited on Danish
airwaves as well. The monopoly State Radio had a very high brow attitude towards
entertainment and pop in general and rock’n’roll was (unofficially) banned. In 1958
this was challenged from a commercial pirate-radio, Radio Mercur, broadcasting from
international waters.83 The success was staggering and contemporary surveys show
80P.
Bundgaard, Lykkens Pamfil (Copenhagen 1998); N. W. Jacobsen e.a., Dansk Rock’n’roll –
anderumper, ekstase og opposition (Aalborg 1980).
81
Filmjournalen 1958, No. 2.
82 C. Rønn Larsen, “Above all, its because he’s British. Tommy Steele and the Notion of ‘Englishness’ as
mediator of rock’n’roll”, in Britain and Denmark. Political, Economic and Cultural Relations in the 19th
and 20th Centuries, ed. Jørgen Sevaldsen e.a. (Copenhagen 2003), 493-510.
83 H. Nørgaard, Pirater i æteren. Radio Mercur og Danmarks kommercielle radio. Dansk Reklameradio
fra Øresund 1958-1962 (Odense 2003).
36
very high ratings. Danish authorities saw Radio Mercur as a direct challenge and
ordered the Danish navy to board the transmitting ship if it by accident entered
Danish territory. As directs attacks proved inefficient the State Radio in 1963 followed
a line of repressive tolerance and opened their own channel, Programme 3, for “young”
music. The decision raised some concern among music connoisseurs and also conflicts
within the State Radio. Young disc jockeys had to defend their musical choices against
an enraged music director, Vagn Kappel, who stated,
For me, pop is one of the most repulsing, stupid and filthy phenomena – and
here filthy is not in a pornographic sense, as pornography is not nearly as
cynical as the thoughts behind the manufacturing of pop-products, and I mean
to underline, that it would not in do any harm, on the contrary it would be
beneficial, to keep this disgusting industry outside the doors of the National
Danish Radio.84
But this was a voice of the past. During the 1960s pop, rock, beat was broadly accepted
and eventually in from the late 1960s even becoming partly intellectualized –
especially experimental rock in the style of Zappa and Captain Beefheart and the
political rock scene. In January 1972 the State Radio could set up a program called
“Beat- a musical balance sheet.”
It was not only American records that were hard to get in Denmark of the
1950s. The same goes for the iconic garment of blue jeans or “cowboy bukser” (cowboy
trousers) as they were called in Denmark. The Copenhagen retailer Troelstrup was
the first to import jeans in 1948-49 and by the mid 1950s they were still very rare. A
prominent Danish historian has recalled how he as a young teenager in 1953-54
inherited a pair of Wrangler jeans from his female cousin and wore them with pride
even though they were a girl’s model buttoned in both sides.85 Thus the slow process of
Americanisation of youth culture must be explained in terms of supply rather than
84
Intet er, som det var – og dog. Feature in Jyllandsposten, 21 August 2003.
85
Dansk Sprognævn’s collection: “Cowboybukser”; Karl Christian Lammers to the authors.
37
demand. This changed when Denmark, economically speaking, entered it’s Golden
Sixties. From the mid-60s jeans became ubiquitous and a survey from the mid 1970s
showed Denmark was by then one of the most “jeansified” countries in Europe.86
An important part of the new teen age culture was the use of American words.
Pop, rock’n’roll and OK became part of everyday language between younger people. It
was important to be in, and in the 1960s Danish youths started petting (instead of
“kælen”, i.e. “fondling”). Later words from the American counter culture entered the
Danish vocabulary. In a feature article in the Danish newspaper “Politiken” from
January 1967 a female Danish exchange student reported from mind-blowing
American hippie culture presenting expressions such as psychedelic, grass, stuff, joint,
high, stoned, a flash, trip.87 In the following years these words became (directly or
translated) everyday slang in the Danish youth culture. In many cases the words came
from the music scene or the world of advertising. New Danish products produced for
the teen age market was given names like Dandy (chewing gum), Yankie Bar (sic) and
the Danish dairy works started a chain of milkshake bars under the name “Milk Pops”
(Mælkepops) referring to both the words pop and pubs. The milk pops was the
commercial incarnation of American teenage culture according to a newspaper
description from 1963: “Accompanied with the extreme noise from Elvis Presley
records (…) thousands of teenagers in the three existing milk pops sucks up tons of
milk made unrecognizable with juices, ice crème and other delicatessen.”88
“We do not want to become Americanised.”
In a speech given in London in 1949, the Danish prime minister, the SocialDemocrat Hans Hedtoft, commented on the post-war reconstruction in Western
Europe. Exactly one week after Denmark had signed the North Atlantic Treaty, he
stated,
86 Information, 12 June 1976. According to the survey less than 3% of young people between 12 and 24
years of age had not owned a pair of blue jeans.
87
Politiken, 23 January 1967.
88
Dansk Sprognævn’s collection: ”Mælkepop”.
38
Western Europe has its own way. We all know it at home. We want to keep it.
We do not want to be subject to the enforced collectivisation of the East but we
do not want to become Americanised either. We want something that is equally
far from both of these extremes. (…) If we use the Marshall Aid properly, we
here have an instrument to reconstruct Western Europe and to maintain our
independence.89
Critics might well point out that by joining the ERP and the Atlantic alliance
the Danish post-war governments had already accepted a high degree of political and
economic Americanization. However, these choices were not easily made. In 1947, the
Liberal government sought British advice before accepting the Marshall aid, and in
1949, the Social-Democratic government only opted for the Atlantic alliance after the
failed attempt to form a Scandinavian Defence Alliance. This was done with very little
enthusiasm and widespread criticism, not only from communists but also from social
liberals and social democrats.90 On this background, one might expect political
initiatives in the cultural sphere trying to safeguard Danish culture from the
American onslaught after 1945. However, there is very limited evidence for
government-sponsored Anti-Americanism.
In the press commentators regularly raised concern about the American
influence on the Danish language. One commentator in 1951 even claimed that Danes
were beginning to speak ameridansk (i.e. “Ameri-Danish”).91 However, none of these
Speech at the British Import Unions lunch, 11 April 1949. Quoted from Mariager, I tillid og varm
sympati, 255. The underlining is from the original speech manuscript.
89
Cf. L. Dalgas Jensen, ”Denmark and the Marshall Plan, 1947-48: The Decision to Participate”,
Scandinavian Journal of History, 14 (1989): 57-83; Nikolaj Petersen, ”Atlantpaten eller Norden? Den
danske alliancebeslutning 1949”, in Danmark, NATO og Norden, ed. C. Due-Nielsen (Copenhagen 1991)
17-41.
90
91 Cf. “Our Ameri-Danish Language” in Aalborg Stifttidende, 11 October 1951. The neologism is more
elegant in Danish where American is “amerikansk.” For more examples, see H. Galberg Jacobsen,
Dansk Sprogrøgtslitteratur 1900-1955, Dansk Sprognævns Skrifter 7 (Copenhagen 1974), and J. Lund,
”Danskerne og deres sprog 1945-1990. Kritik og tolerance”, in Dansk Identitetshistorie, vol. 4, ed. Ole
Feldbæk (Copenhagen 1992), 452-456.
39
laments persuaded Danish governments that a policy of linguistic purity was
necessary to save the nation from the Americans.
The government did act, however, in another ‘American scare’ in the early postwar period. From the early 1950s, concern about the cultural consumption of children
and adolescents became widespread. This was triggered by the expanding market for
trash novels and comics books that according to one commentator, Tørk Haxthausen,
were “educating [children] to terror.”92 The debate whose protagonists were mainly
teachers and librarians resulted in the appointment of a government committee “to
look into and reflect upon the problems concerning the substandard and destructive
literature”. When published in 1960, the report of committee proved tepid reading.
The committee opposed censorship and while accepting that trash literature was a
problem, this should be solved by producing more books of a better quality.93 The
report had no legal consequences, and even though one of the committees members
who had been in favour of censorship tried to argue his case in a book from 1961, it
was evident that the comics scare had died effectively down.94
If it is difficult to find strong evidence of Anti-Americanism in public policies, it
is evident that far from everyone were happy about the growing impact of American
culture in the broadest sense of the word. In a report from 195X from the American
embassy, we find the following assessment,
One must recognize that two different Danish groups exist so far as receptivity
to American culture is concerned. The youth generally, the working classes and
the lower middle classes like American popular culture, i.e. jazz, Hollywood,
automobiles, speed, informality, gadgets, best-seller novels, detective stories
and slick magazines. The older people in the more privileged classes, the
92 Thus one commentator sensationally claimed that the comis were ”educating [children] to terror. See
T. Haxthausen, Opdragelse til terror (Copenhagen 1955). For a more representative intervention that
also offers a good contemporary summary of the debate, see C. Winther, ”Børnene og den ”kulørte”
litteratur”, Folkeskolen (1954): 854-860, 886-891 and 922-924.
Cf. Betænkning afgivet af det af Undervisningsministeriet under 27 januar 1955 nedsatte udvalg
vedrørende børns og unges læsning. Betænkning nr. 260 (Copenhagen 1960).
93
94
V. Jensen, Stene for brød: de kulørte hefters problem (Copenhagen 1961).
40
communist intelligentsia, and many intellectuals reject American popular
culture, but are receptive to good American aesthetic and academic
accomplishments.95
From what we wrote in the sections on high brow and popular culture this seems to be
a quite precise assessment. However, it must be acknowledged that the rejection of
America for many intellectuals went well beyond popular culture. To communists
Anti-Americanism seems to have been almost a Pavlovian reflex. USA was often
compared to Nazi-Germany. Prominent politicians were seen as American versions of
Göring, Goebbels, etc., and to the well-known communist lawyer Carl Madsen, the US
was simply “the new power of occupation.”96 The Danish Communist Party stayed
loyal to the Kremlin to the bitter end and need not concern us further here.
One of the political consequences of the defeat of Nazism was that the criticism
of democracy that had been widespread among conservative politicians and
intellectuals in the 1930s disappeared97. This also meant that conservative AntiAmericanism was watered substantially down. In 1953, the new cultural journal Det
danske Magasin dedicated its first issue to “Anti-Americanism and the Culture of
Europe”. In his contribution, the editor wrote of the growing Anti-Americanism in
Western Europe that was being ”nurtured by caring if not always clean hands”,
stressed that much of it originated in Moscow and concluded, “in many cases, criticism
of America is well founded and therefore useful. (…) However, the glossolatian
movement called Anti-Americanism that is currently spreading across Europe is an
intellectual fraud and a political luxury we cannot afford.”98
Embassy Chp. to Dep. State, May 2 1950, “Revised draft of USIE Country Paper for Denmark”,
511.59/5-250, Record Group 59 (State Department), National Archives.
95
96 See T. Hansen, ”Den danske presse og McCarthy”, in Den kolde krig på hjemmefronten, eds. K.
Petersen & N.A. Sørensen (Odense forthcoming) and C. Madsen, Vi skrev loven, (Copenhagen 1968), 193
et passim.
97 See N.A. Sørensen, ”Danmarkshistoriens vigtigste parentes”, in Partier under pres, ed. J. Lund
(Copenhagen 2003), 352-354.
98 T. M. Terkelsen, ”Ami go home –” En studie i Anti-Amerikanisme, Det danske Magasin, no. 1 (1953):
12-18.
41
It is easy see why the conservative editors and contributors to Det danske
Magasin came to the defence of America. By 1953, McCarthyism had been making
headlines in Denmark as elsewhere for several years. What worried the conservative
intellectuals (as well as staff members at the American embassy) was the harsh
criticism of the United States that McCarthyism triggered.99 Looking at the reception
of McCarthyism in the Danish press, we encounter an explicit rejection of the methods
of McCarthy but normally set within a strongly Anti-Communist discourse. One of the
fiercest critiques of McCarthyist America published in the small, but influential
liberal newspaper Information, was written by the literary critic Elsa Gress who,
thanks to an American grant, followed the phenomenon at first hand in 1952. In a
scathing criticism, she argued that the general notion of America as the land of the
future was utterly wrong. America was dominated by medieval institutions and
values, and “descendants of the Jeffersonian democracy, grandchildren of the
Enlightenment and the French revolution ironically become the victims of authorities
that Europe is growing away from.”The medieval institutions” that undermined
American democracy were ”Big Business” and the churches. Two years later, she went
even further and characterised McCarthtyism as an expression of “the American form
of Neofascism” and warned that “the plague over America” might be worse that “the
plague whose repercussions we still suffer from in Europe.”100 The editor of
Information, Erik Seidenfaden gave an utterly unflattering presentation of
McCarthy’s career and concluded by expressing the pious hope that somebody would
shoot the senator.101 In early 1953, the grand old man of the liberal left, Poul
Henningsen, compared “the purifications” in the United States with those taking place
in the Soviet Union, stating that the American ones were “no less effective (…) even if
the means might seem more humane.”102
99
For the assessment of embassy officials, see Mariager, I tillid og varm sympati, 340.
E. Gress, ”Det Middelalderlige Amerika”, Information, 12 February 1952, and id., ”Massehysteri
1692 og nu”, Dialog (April 1954): 1-4.
100
101
E. Seidenfaden, ”McCarthyismen, Amerika og os”, Fremtiden, issue 10 (1953): 14-15, 18-24.
102
P. Henningsen, ”Rejs dig menneske”, Social-Demokraten, 2 January 1953.
42
It is, however, crucial for our understanding of these criticisms, that Gress,
Seidenfaden and Henningsen did not consider themselves Anti-American. Quite the
opposite, Seidenfaden stressed that his Pro-American credentials were impeccable and
that his criticism was rooted in a strong admiration of American political culture.
Likewise, Gress characterised herself as a “Pro-American Anti-American.” With his
usual acumen, Poul Henningsen, pinpointed the dilemma of the Danish observers,
The United States is two things that exist side by side – one thing we like and that
enrich us and one thing we justly fear. Every time we talk about McCarthy it is
probably necessary to add that there is another America, a land of culture from where
we get modern literature, jazz, drama and film. Let us stress as strongly as possible
that Hemingway, Chaplin, Armstrong, Arthur Miller – to mention just four names –
constitute a decisive part of the image of America for us Europeans.103
To this Seidenfaden and Gress would probably have added the American liberal
tradition. The central point here is that outside the Communist camp it is very hard to
find die-hard Anti-Americans in Denmark. Critics to the left instead, like Poul
Henningsen, saw “two Americas”. In politics, the “good America” was the liberal
Democrats; the “bad America” the Republican right. In culture, “bad America” was the
dominant middle class conformism and materialism and the commercialised popular
culture whereas “good America” was the authentic, anti-establishment voices hailed
by Henningsen.
After the fall of McCarthy, political criticism of America tended to die down
(although the race issue at regular intervals was discussed as an example of the
severe shortcomings of American politics and society). The cultural criticism
continued, however. In the writings of Poul Henningsen from the 1920s to the 1960s, a
constant theme is that commercial interest and “real art” are like fire and fire.
Whenever commercial interests are dominant “art” becomes conformist, bland and
socially conservative, and when commercial values dominate people are reduced from
democratic citizens to mere consumers. In the 1950s and 60s, America served as the
103
P. Henningsen, ”Amerikas for- og bagside”, Social-Demokraten, 22 December 1954.
43
main illustration of this and in this sense of the word, Poul Henningsen frequently
warned against the “Americanisation” of Danish culture and society. It is however also
clear, that Henningsen got a lot of the inspiration for his criticism from American
intellectuals, and at one point he lamented that “we are turning into a caricature of
the American industrial state, but without its eminent critics.” 104
It was quite typical that some of the strongest criticism of American popular
culture was rooted in – American culture. Thus Haxthausen’s tirades against the
dangers of comics found most of its ammunition in the writings of the American
psychiatrist Frederick Wertham (whose work, almost ironically from an AntiAmerican perspective, was first introduced to Danish readers in Readers Digest).105 In
1962, Ernst Bruun Olsen’s musical, “Teenagerlove”, was the talk of the town among
polite society in Copenhagen. It was a vicious satire of the Americanised commercial
popular culture. The score, however, was written by Finn Savery who listed Parker,
Powell and Gillespie as his main sources of inspiration.106
Anti-Americanism was clearly very selective. However, this selective AntiAmericanism was retreating from the beginning of the 1960s. John F. Kennedy also
became an icon in Denmark.107 His administration included some of the liberal left’s
favourite Americans such as John K. Galbraith and the civil rights legislation was
seen as a sign of an America mending its ills. Even the hard line against communism
was hailed as demonstrations of strong political leadership. A prominent example is
the Social-Democratic daily Aktuelt’s comment on the Tonkin Bay incident, “He [LBJ]
took his decision with an admirable mixture of resource, diligence and mental
P. Henningsen, “Hvad er det” (1965), reprinted in id., Kulturkritik. Vol. 4: 1956-1967 (Copenhagen
1973), 165-172.
104
105
See Fr. Wertham, ”Atompigen & Co”, Det Bedste (1948): 45-48.
E. Bruun Olsen, Teenagerlove (Copenhagen 1962). For Finn Savery, se the interview in
Filmjournalen, issue 20 (1963): 10-11.
106
A telling example is John F. Kennedy. 22. November 1965, a collection of commemorative prose and
poetry published by the Danmark Amerika Fonden on the second anniversary of his assassination.
Among contributors was Klaus Rifbjerg, the arch typical left-leaning radical. All the contributions had
previously been printed in Danish newspapers spanning the whole of the political landscape – with the
exception of the Communists.
107
44
strength. (…) It took both personal courage, sense of responsibility and self-confidence
to reach such a decision in so little time.”108
This changed dramatically over the next few years. Criticism of the Vietnam
War grew rapidly and was the dominant tenor in the press coverage from at least
1968. When Danes celebrated the 25th anniversary of the liberation from German
occupation, several commentators paralleled the situation of Europe under the yoke of
Nazism with the present plight of the Vietnamese people109. By 1972, even the
conservative Berlingske Tidende called on their readers to join the Anti-American
demonstrations. The same year the Social-Democratic prime minister, Anker
Jørgensen, made a major diplomatic faux pas when he commented that personally he
had preferred George McGovern as the winner of the presidential elections.110
By stating his preference for McGovern Jørgensen reproduced the notion of ’the
two Americas’ we saw earlier. The vast majority of the criticism of the American
conduct in East Asia was a criticism not of the United States as such but of a United
States gone wrong.
This also is true of the key protagonists of the anti-war movement among
college students. They were also very selective in their Anti-Americanism. Many of the
participants in the anti-war demonstrations wore blue jeans and t-shirts. They
watched such films a “Dr. Strangelove”, “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Soldier Blue”, and from
the middle of the 1970s, the growing number of American films dealing with the
Vietnam War. American counter-culture symbols were taken in together with classical
revolutionaries. Thus, in 1967, an advertisement in the underground magazine “Love”
offered posters of Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Jean Harlow and Allan Ginsburg
side by side with Mao Zedong and Karl Marx.111 In the concert halls in Copenhagen,
radicals enjoyed Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Mothers of Invention, Jimi Hendrix,
Country Joe MacDonald and CSN&Y, to mention some of the main rock attractions of
108
Aktuelt, 15 August 1964.
109
Cf. N. A. Sørensen, ”En traditions etablering og forfald”, Den jyske Historiker, no. 71 (1995): 120-121.
110
Jørgensen’s comment is quoted in Avisårbogen 1972 (Copenhagen 1973), 160.
111
Advertisement in Love (1967-68), no. 1-3.
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1969-1970. If the main icon, Bob Dylan, was not readily available after 1966, the
inspiration form Dylan is almost painfully clear on the first original Danish rock
album recorded by the Steppeulvene in 1967. That the album was called “Hip” was no
coincidence. By 1970, the “hip” and “politically engaged” part of Danish youth culture
was to a high degree simply a copy of the American counter-culture. A crucial part of
the import was, of course, the strong criticism of “official America” and the
“materialism” and “conformity” of main-stream American culture.112 American visitors
rooted in the counter culture might have preferred Budweiser to Tuborg or Carlsberg
and pot to the Middle Eastern hashish that was be dominant “soft” drug in Denmark.
Except for that, they would have felt very much at home.
Conclusion
American-Danish cultural encounters can be divided into successive phases. In the
interwar years, Denmark witnesses the first invasion of American popular culture
while intellectuals generally spoke critically of America and Americanization. In the
next phase, ca. 1945-60, Denmark entered the American sphere in politics and
economics, and as a consequence the position of the intellectuals vis-à-vis the United
States became much more complex. To most Danes, however, America was seen, in
life-style, as the home of the good material life. Dollars shortages meant that it was
also a quite distant utopia and the Americanization of the first post-war decades was
to a high degree one of the imagination when Danish firms and cultural workers
successfully catered for this by a wide array of Ersatz-American products – from
refrigerators to candy bars and pop stars. In this period the impact of America was
also dampened by the high prestige of the United Kingdom. Until the mid-50s, Danish
politicians tried to use Britain as a buffer against American influence, and in the
cultural sphere, British writers and artists unwittingly performed the same role. In
the sphere of high-culture, the American avant-garde impacted on the young
The anti-war movement in Denmark has been analysed from a narrow political perspective by S. H.
Rasmussen in his book Sære Alliancer. Politiske bevægelser i efterkrigstidens Danmark (Odense 1997).
We still have no substantial works on the Danish counter culture as such. So far, the best book
available is B. Hansen, ed., Dengang i tresserne (Copenhagen 1976).
112
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generation of Danish writers and contemporary jazz was worshipped as the fitting
music for urban modernity. At the same time, many intellectuals were highly critical
of the American commercial “popular” culture, and McCarthyism was criticised by
influential liberal and left-wing commentators. The third phase of American-Danish
encounters started in the early 1960s. By then, Denmark was finally reaching the era
of affluence which made American goods affordable for consumers from both the
middle and working classes. If Elvis Presley gained a following in Denmark, the early
and middle 60s were clearly dominated by imports from Swinging London in the
Danish youth culture. Only from the late 1960s did American influence become strong,
not least through the import of the American counter culture, almost lock, stock and
barrel. This included an outspoken criticism of “official America”, and from the late
1960s, Anti-Americanism was in vogue, both in popular and elite culture.
The fourth, and current, phase started in the late 1970s. If the earlier periods
had witnessed a progressive Americanisation of life-styles and popular culture, it is
also important to stress the limits of the process. First, “Americanisation” was part of
a broader process of internationalisation, and, to mention just one example, in the
1970s Danish pop music still owed much more to German schlagers than to American
popular music. Secondly, one should not overestimate the penetration of American life
style. If the favourite Danish fast food was the hot dog, the Danish version (including
mustard, ketchup, pickles, gurkins, roasted and raw onions) was a far cry from the
American original. If most families had a barbecue (or rather a grill) they seldom used
it. The favourite food of most Danes continued to be the traditional heavy dishes
stemming from the peasant culture that was only slowly dying in the 1950s and 1960s
and when the pizza arrived in Denmark around 1970, it was the Italian version.
Although many American series were shown by the single Danish television channel,
local productions were by far the most popular – while British series like “The Forsyth
Saga,” “A Family at War” or “Upstairs, Downstairs” attracted far more viewers than
the American ones. According to the American immigrant Ellen Bick Meier the
Denmark she encountered in the late 1960s was very far from New York.
However, to Bick Meier Denmark in the late 1980s was much less of a foreign
country. In an article, published in the widely read Samvirke she lamented the
47
onslaught of American commercial culture and begged her Danish readers to fight
it.113 However, her appeal fell on deaf ears. By the late 1980s, the Danes no longed
“said “Jolly” to their Cola”, to quote a popular advertisement slogan from the 1960s.
They had switched to Pepsi and Coke. The hot-dog stands were pressured by the
growing number of McDonald’s and Burger Kings (established in Denmark from
1979), and even Conservative Young Turks were using Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in
the USA” as an anthem.114 The trend continued at ever increasing speed in the 1990s.
If the Danes over the last 10-15 years have become more and more reluctant
Europeans, we have over the same period almost turned into enthusiastic Americans.
In this, Denmark just follows the global trend of economic and cultural
globalisation. Two local developments were, however, also important. First, in the
early 1980s the left-wing hegemony in the politicised youth culture came to an end.
Danish youth turned right with a vengeance, and in the youth organisations of the
Liberal and Conservative parties, official America with its Reaganite rhetoric of AntiCommunism and the Free Market gospel was idolised. Second, the broadcasting
monopoly of Danmarks Radio came to an end. In 1988 commercial radio was
introduced and a second public service television channel was launched. Cable TV –
and thus foreign television channels - became available to more and more Danish
households from 1985, and from the early 1990s commercial television channels were
established. This liberalisation of the airwaves has, in Denmark as elsewhere, lead to
a massive influx of American programmes from soap operas to talk shows, and even
local productions resembles mere copies of American originals. If the old radical Poul
Henningsen who criticised the Americanisation of the state radio in the 1950s had still
been around, he would have gone ballistic.
In this process Anti-Americanism has also withered. Of course, criticism of the
aggressive American foreign policy under the Bush administration has been raised,
113
E. Bick Meier, ”Made in the U.S.A.”, Samvirke, vol. 60, no. 9 (1987), 15-17.
In an interview - in “Søndagsmagasinet”, DR1, broadcast August 24, 2003 - Brian Mikkelsen,
Denmark’s Conservative Minister for Culture, admitted that he only much later found out that
Springsteen’s vision of the United States differed dramatically from his own. To his credit should be
added, though, that he still considers “Born in the USA” his favourite song.
114
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often echoing the notion of the ‘two Americas’ we discussed above. But criticism of the
war in Iraq from 2003 has focused much more on the decision of the Danish
government to join the “coalition of the willing” – and has, in a comparative European
perspective, been quite timid. At a much more innocent level, some sort of AntiAmericanism still pops up once in a while. When McDonald’s sued a hot dog-stand
owner for naming his stand McAllan, we were jubilant when the High Court ruled
against the Americans in 1996. And when Disney, who owns the name Tarzan,
decreed that the beloved hero of children’s book Gummi-Tarzan in the future must be
known only as “Gummi-T,” we were appalled.115
Cf. ”McAllan flygter fra Danmark”, Ekstra Bladet, 8 October 1998, and ”Disney tvinger Gummi
Tarzan i knæ”, B.T., 29 August 2003.
115