The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (14 page)

 

At the turn of the millennium, Denmark, the first country in the world to legalize pornography and gay marriage, suffered the same wave of Bush-inspired conservatism that swept through much of Europe. (The Danes sent a submarine to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.) In 2001, the Folketing—Danish Parliament—landed in the hands of a conservative coalition for only the second time in eighty-five years. The coalition (headed by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen) and its austere policies on immigration were viewed by voters as necessary correctives to a lenient program that had led to an overburdened welfare system. On the heels of the controversial Muhammad cartoon incident, Rasmussen's government gained public support on its promise to put the Dane back in Danish.

The next item on the party's to-do list—an initiative that had frustrated conservatives for more than three decades—was to eradicate Christiania once and for all. It took just three years to pass parliamentary law L205 and begin what conservatives called the "normalization" of Free Town. L205 mandated that the Palaces and Properties Agency demolish fifty homes in Christiania, construct four hundred new condominiums, charge market rental rates, and turn management of the district over to a private leasing company. To Christianians, the scheme represented practically everything they'd stood against, and most residents refused to abide. Unlike previous governments, though, Rasmussen's didn't back down. It reinforced its efforts with heavy police intervention and a public relations smear campaign—including dramatic sting operations and petty drug busts that yielded few results but made the evening news—that turned many Danes against the once tolerated, even beloved commune.

During the police action in May 2007, the government's stated objective was to demolish a rundown squatters' shack known as the "Cigarkassen," or "Cigar Box"; by late afternoon, government workers had reduced it to rubble. But at Christiania's southwest entrance, the insurgency had begun. Pale, waifish Danes wearing hoodies and backpacks darted through Christiania's alleys and surrounding streets, hurling bottles and rocks at policemen. Near Christiania's infamous Pusher Street, a television camera caught an officer clubbing a young man in a yellow T-shirt to the ground.

More vans arrived and protesters set barricades of furniture, tires, and cars on fire. Police reinforcements were summoned from all over the city, and the sound of sirens filled the streets. Over the next few days, word spread throughout Europe that Christiania was under attack, and hundreds of supporters from inside and outside the country poured into Copenhagen. As officers dressed in bulky black riot gear flooded Christiania's gates, the government braced itself for what would be one of the most violent episodes in Copenhagen's recent history. And residents in Christiania dug in for what appeared to be Free Town's last stand.

 

The 1960s were fertile years for micro-nations—the liberalism of the time manifested itself in tiny islands of autonomy. Erwin Strauss's 1984 book,
How to Start Your Own Country
, attributes many of the era's breakaway provinces to the writings of Ayn Rand. In 1969, a group of Rand followers robbed a bar to fund the fictitious nation of Oceana. Oceanians didn't have an exact site for their country, but boot camps were established to train citizens to defend it. At one point the group even planned to steal a nuclear missile to stave off potential enemies.

Most "ephemeral states"—like American Michael J. Oliver's "Republic of Minerva," founded in 1972 on a pile of sand Oliver dumped on a pair of reefs north of Tonga—didn't fare as well as Christiania. (A Tongan chief ran Oliver off.) Neither did "Sealand," created in 1967 by Paddy Roy Bates on a six-thousand-square-foot World War II antiaircraft platform seven miles off the coast of Britain. Bates was ousted by his own "prime minister" in 1978 but won the platform back after a daring helicopter raid.

From its inception, however, Christiania was less the brainchild of a single person than a response to a collective yearning. In 1971, a group of locals broke down the wall to Copenhagen's abandoned, and increasingly derelict, Bådsmandsstrædes army base. One hundred and fifty squatters followed, making homes in whatever spaces they could find. Anarchy buzzed in the streets of Copenhagen. The May 1968 student uprisings in Paris and subsequent Danish student protests in the spring of 1970 had given young artists and students confidence and purpose. A squatter movement cropped up in Copenhagen in response to a growing housing crisis and displeasure with the Danish government. After the invaders took the Bådsmandsstrædes army base, the alternative Copenhagen weekly,
Hovedbladet
, ran the headline
IMMIGRATE WITH BUS NO. 8—THE DIRECT ROUTE TO CHRISTIANIA
, and hundreds more arrived at Christiania's gates.

Police attempted to rout the settlers but were overwhelmed by their numbers. Looking to avoid violent confrontation, Danish officials gave Christianians three years to try their "experiment." But the following year the officials went back on their word and ordered the area cleared. Supporters swarmed the grounds and the police were outnumbered once again. This time the government decided to let Christiania "stay until further notice."

All the while, Christianians expanded the infrastructure of their budding micro-nation. A housing office was established in the Rosenhuset building to process prospective tenants and manage maintenance for the area's 170 structures. Residents began weekly common meetings to decide community issues like garbage disposal, large-scale construction projects, tenant applications, water, electricity, and government relations. The community's first rules: no buying, selling, or trading of homes; no violence; no gang affiliations; no guns; no cars. A law prohibiting hard drugs (but not
all
drugs) was added after a run-in with heroin addicts in the late 1970s.

I'd heard about Christiania while researching "temporary autonomous zones" (or TAZs, as named by anarchist writer Hakim Bey), and flew to Copenhagen in early 2006 to see the community before the bulldozers arrived. Beneath the orange glow of a new condo complex across the street and Denmark's first snowfall of the year, Christiania appeared more like a village from a Hans Christian Andersen tale than a self-ruling suburb. Small cottages balanced on top of one-room guardhouses; hobbit-esque shacks sported dragon-shaped chimneys. I could see meadows and giant maples and rock-lined pathways.

The area was so expansive it took my Ghanaian taxi driver nine repetitions of the word "Christiania"—accentuated by jabbings of his index finger—to demark the borders of the neighborhood's northwestern wall. He was excited to be here. He did the things in Free Town that people do in anarchist communes—talk politics, buy hash, and hang with his buddies in the pub long after the bars of Copenhagen had closed. It's a "good place," he quipped as we approached the northwest gate. Then he glanced across the street at the condo complex and said, "It will soon look like that."

 

A foot of snow had piled up—a surprise storm for a city surrounded by water—by the time I rendezvoused with my host for the next ten days, an excitable fifty-three-year-old named Emmerik Warburg, who'd discovered Christiania thirty-two years before, as a young artist. He brushed the snow from his jacket and loaded my bag onto his bike, a local Christiania design with two wheels and a cargo box on the front.

Emmerik led me down Christiania's main drag, the Long Road, past an old officers' barracks that had been transformed into modish, bohemian apartments. He pointed out the "Raisin House," an afterschool children's center that used solar power and composting toilets. Beyond that was a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant and, to the right, the terminus of Pusher Street, where dealers once sold hash from elaborately designed stands before the police shut them down in 2004.

We turned right at a carousel-size Buddhist stupa with a string of prayer flags circling it and two burning candles inside, then passed through a brick archway that opened into a clutch of interconnected homes. The complex was called Mælkebøtten (Dandelion) for the flowers that covered its common meadow in the summer. The whole enclosure, including the apartment I was to stay in for the next week, used to be a grenade factory, Emmerik explained. "Don't worry," he said. "They've all been taken away."

The apartment's interior was surprisingly clean, with touches of classic Danish design. Almost all the building material in Christiania is recycled. The front hall light was fashioned from a paper cylinder wrapped around a low-wattage fluorescent bulb, with a circular CD case fit into the bottom as a dimmer. Another low-wattage bulb over the bed was entombed in a coffee can. The woodstove was also a local design—half a fifty-gallon drum laid on its side with the vent on top. But the gas heater worked best, Emmerik said, as he leapt out the window to turn on the tank.

Things had been a bit tense around the neighborhood, he went on as he scrambled back through the window. There was lots going on. Lots to do. New Year's Day had marked the first L205 deadline—meaning that on January 1, the government was supposed to start demolishing houses. A few days before the holiday, though, residents received a letter saying the deadline had been extended. Still, he said, they were divided as to what to do. Some wanted to cut a deal; others refused to acknowledge the government's claims. The division ran so deep, Emmerik said, that half the town had skipped the last general meeting.

Christiania had changed, he said. Back in the day, residents acted as one. There was no obstacle too large for them to tackle. They managed massive construction projects, like laying sewer lines by hand, and renovated thousands of square feet of rundown buildings, without a penny from the government. Now, he said, the government refused to acknowledge the collective and dealt with Christianians individually. And infighting was crippling Free Town's efforts to fight back.

 

It's somewhere between ironic and ordained that Christiania was established on the former site of much historic Danish military action. The city ramparts on the eastern border of the neighborhood, first built in 1617, were reinforced later that century after Sweden's siege of Copenhagen. The Bâdsmandsstrœdes base, while active, housed the Royal Artillery Regiment as well as ammunitions laboratories and depots.

The following day, Emmerik walked me through the base to show what Christiania's settlers had done with the place. Poison-gas-testing chambers in Mœlkebøtten had been transformed into airy pieds-à-terre with flower boxes, pastel-trimmed dormers, and wind chimes. Nearby in the Fabriksområdet district, blacksmith Charlotte Steen had renovated a bomb factory—designed to have the roof blow off in an explosion—into a Usonian town house, complete with a ship's bow and oak rafters collected from old boathouses in Holmen. One of the most stunning homes in Christiania was occupied by machinist Helge Pyramide. Over nine years, he constructed his twelve-sided house, "The Twelve-Edge," using roofing tiles from a sugar factory and volcanic ash for insulation.

"The government can't seem to figure out how to solve this Christiania problem," Emmerik exclaimed as we strolled past a girl brushing a pony in one of Christiania's eighteen stables. "We keep telling them, we already
have!
We've been doing it for almost forty years!"

The defining characteristic of Christiania's homes, Emmerik explained, comes from the fact that it's against the rules to sell or trade them. Real estate speculators—and the excessive appreciation of property values—ritually kill art communities in the world's greatest cities, he continued. In Christiania, when residents move, they simply pack up their belongings and leave. So house design is based solely on the owner's needs, not resale value or even building codes. The result is some of the most innovative and acclaimed architecture in Europe. Several books have been published on Christiania's eclectic aesthetic. Well-known architects, like Merete Ahnfeldt-Mollerup from Denmark's Royal Academy, regard the district as a kind of "adaptive reuse" laboratory.

Christiania has come up with several social innovations as well, Emmerik said. After the ban on hard drugs in 1979, the community initiated a drug rehabilitation program that cured 80 percent of participants. (Five percent was considered successful in Copenhagen at the time.) Collective property management gave the poor and handicapped a higher standard of living while simultaneously creating a nurturing environment for artists. Every year the community feeds thousands of homeless and poor people on Christmas Eve at a massive banquet thrown in the Gray Hall. Businesses like Christiania Bikes (the maker of Emmerik's ride) have received government awards for entrepreneurialism and ship their products all over the world.

Emmerik explained the financial workings of Free Town as we strolled past the community kindergarten, designed to integrate children into society by using neighbors' yards as a playground. (In the 1970s, students were fed macrobiotic food, toy weapons were banned, and children held their own meetings.) All of Christiania's tenants pay a $380-a-month "use fee," regardless of the size of their home, and businesses pay according to their potential for profit. The cash is then put in a pot and divided between public programs like the building office (for structural repairs), children's facilities, the post office, a weekly newspaper, recycling, public toilets, water, and electricity. Christiania then pays the government a group value-added tax and additional funds for public services like water and electricity. (Since the 1990s, the government has commended Christianians as "model citizens" for never missing a payment.)

Leftover New Year's Eve fireworks boomed overhead as we walked along the ramparts in Free Town's eastern quarter. A spotted mutt the size of a greyhound trotted by, and Emmerik boasted that because Christiania's dogs go leashless, they are more docile. Gingerbread shacks with rainbows and Shivas painted on their walls practically abutted the water. The front window on one was broken, and the owner had left a note that read, "If you are going to steal, then at least do it from people who can afford insurance." Across a small bridge leading to the other side of the moat, Emmerik pointed to another sign. This one announced a meeting to refuse the municipal government's demand that everyone declare an individual address. (Christiania still uses a common mailbox: DK-1440, Copenhagen.)