Copenhagen: Pleasure Principle

Rohini Mohan goes to Copenhagen looking for darkness, but is forced to give in to sweetness and light.

- Rohini Mohan

Who was I to argue with a man’s determination to grin? This guide in Denmark was neither fatalistic nor stoic. He described the big lakes in the centre of Copenhagen not as “a mirror to the city’s secrets, like the bodies that lay beneath,” like a Danish protagonist in my head would have, but as “a wonderful spot to hang out with friends.” Giuseppe’s excitement buoyed his feet several inches above the ground. He had left his hometown in Italy to fall in love with Copenhagen, and he had fallen hard. “It’s a happy city,” he said several times, glowing from within. “The happiest in the world, you know?” His words were not a prism to the brutality of society and the complexity of humans, as Stieg Larsson or Hakan Nesser had led me to expect. He was, and wanted to be, simply the avatar of Copenhagen joy.

If told something or somebody was the happiest ever, most people I know would want to challenge it. There must be a dark underbelly, they would insist, a grief behind the sunny disposition. Perhaps I need less crabby friends, but I understand the impulse. It is a rejection of labels, a knowledge that a range of emotions is what makes life worth living.

But tourism works in the opposite way: it needs labels to lure and sell, it needs to smile while opening the door. Smiling back, but wise to the ploy, I walked around Copenhagen trying to square the happiest-city label with the other notion I nursed due to the region’s inspiring many outrageously dark noir mystery novels. Until I went to Denmark, I held in my mind cold images of serial killers, troubled alcoholic detectives and witnesses found buried in the snow. But I like to be liked, so I didn’t challenge any resident about a crime wave, especially not the meringue that was Giuseppe.