Europe > Denmark > Zealand > Copenhagen > Articles > Hans Christian Andersen's Copenhagen

He was grumpy, self-absorbed and belligerent. A hypochondriac and a neurotic, he was prone to violent mood swings and sobbing over bad reviews. After visiting his admired fellow writer Charles Dickens in London, Dickens put up a notice outside his home: “Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family AGES.”

To Danes, however, Andersen is a venerated, if slightly unlikely, national hero. Indeed, the city held a mammoth cultural festival to celebrate his bicentenary in 2005, an event so large it made the staging of the 2001 Eurovision Song Contest in the Danish capital look like a primary school play. What’s more, a red carpet of celebrities from Pele (Brazil) and Susan Sarandon (USA) to Liz Hurley and – wait for it - Roger Moore (UK) were appointed as HCA ambassadors to lend some A-list gravitas to the proceedings. The organisers are spent a cool 230m DKK (£21.7m) on proceedings.

But just what’s all the fuss about? Why all that brouhaha, not to mention bucks, for a man who was, by all accounts, a bit of an oddball. Well, according to the critic, Jackie Wullschlager, whose biography of HCA, The Life of a Storyteller, was published last year, Andersen was the founding father of children’s literature. By authoring fairy tales such as The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, he blazed a literary trail for the likes of JK Rowling and Madonna to follow.

“We had no children’s literature, when he began to write,” says Wullschlager. “The nineteenth century was a sentimental century. Andersen focused on the child as a child. For him, the child is not just a would-be adult.”

There was nothing else for it. Before Wullschlager started researching her weighty tome, little had even been written in English about the complex psyche of this particular great Dane. To get to know the reclusive Andersen, therefore, we had to get to know the city that shaped him. And that meant one thing: a weekend in Copenhagen.

Take the lift to the third floor of the Magasin du Nord and roam the kitchenware department for a while. There, between a display of commemorative tea towels (69.95 DKK / £6.50 each) and a range of official HCA dinnerware designed by Lin Utzon, the daughter of the Danish designer of the Sydney Opera House (coffee cups go for 129.95 DKK / £12), a doorway leads to a certain Vingårdsstræde attic room (now part of the department store). Andersen lived here in his early twenties and his study has been recently opened as a small museum shrine to its erstwhile resident. Yet the room itself remains eerily sparse, betraying little about the man with the distinctive Cyrano de Bergerac nose and Prince Charles ears that we’ve come to uncover.

Next door, over coffee at the Café a Porta, an elaborately decorated coffee house dating from 1857 and a favourite hang-out of Andersen, the avuncular trumpeter and composer Palle Mikkelborg can shed little light on the personality of the establishment’s most famous former patron.

“When I think of the music I love – Ravel, Miles Davis – there’s more to it than just music. While so many of us go about life without ever playing in tune, these people play the symphony of life in tune,” says Mikkelborg, who has been appointed a HCA ambassador and composed a festival theme around the notes hca (‘h’ being the Danish version of a ‘b’).

“I don’t care about his personal life. I care about what he tells me,” he adds, draining his latte. “There are lots of rumours about him, but very little has ever been proven.”

Here are the facts. Andersen first arrived in Copenhagen on the morning of September 6, 1819, the poor, uneducated 14-year-old son of a shoemaker. It was, for the young Andersen, dreaming of fame and fortune, a momentous occasion. “The whole city was in commotion, everybody was in the streets, and the noise and tumult of Copenhagen far exceeded any idea which my imagination had formed of this, to me at that time, great city,” he wrote in his diary.

Today, Copenhagen looks much as it did in Andersen’s day. Many of the houses he lived in remain, with canal-side apartments at Nyhavn 20 and 67 now marked with commemorative plaques. The Royal Theatre on Kongens Nytorv, still home to Denmark’s leading opera, theatre and ballet companies, was the centre of Andersen’s world and the focus of his adolescent dreams to be an actor. Today, a marble bust of Andersen, modelled on an original from 1864, welcomes theatregoers. The Tivoli Gardens amusement park, meanwhile, served as constant inspiration to Andersen from its 1843 opening and today houses Den Flyvende Kuffert (The Fyling Trunk), a ride in Andersen’s memory, which depicts 32 scenes from his most popular fairy tales.

Less familiar to Andersen, however, would be the newly opened Hans Christian Andersen Museum, located just off HC Andersens Boulevard. The sign outside promises “an exciting experience for all the family”, but what Andersen - who reportedly took himself very seriously - would make of a Disneyfied version of his rather tragic life story, particularly a welcome statue whose head rotates like something from The Exorcist and whose lips move as if lip-synching a bad Scandinavian porno film, you’d dread to think.

Marianne Stagetorn Kolos, owner of Café La Glace, founded just a few years before Andersen’s death, has an idea. “He was a man who never felt at ease with himself,” she says as we sip piping-hot chocolate served with fresh cream in the homely interior, located just off the main pedestrian street, Strøget.

Throughout the festival Marianne is designing a new cake each month to reflect the 12 most popular of Andersen’s 156 fairy tales. April’s cake will be based around the theme of the Princess and the Pea. “He’s very important to Denmark as we are a little fairytale country and he managed to capture our Danish soul. From the Round Tower to the Little Mermaid, we feel lucky as Danes to see landmarks of our city in his stories,” she says.

The next day, we find ourselves pondering what we have learnt about Andersen over dinner at Restaurant Els, another favoured HCA hang-out, dating from 1853. Andersen’s stories may still resonate for Danes both young and old, and the city he loved has grown to become a cosmopolitan, stylish capital, but what of Andersen’s legacy for contemporary Danes?

OK, we now know that Chairman Mao was a huge Andersen fan and declared Andersen’s birthday a public holiday. We have learnt that people sing his words at Danish football matches without even realising they originate from his pen. And we also know the old grouch was totally paranoid about being buried alive and would go to bed at night with a sign round his neck saying, “I’m not dead, I’m just sleeping.”

“He wasn’t a sweet old man, he was sharp as a razor,” says the Danish actress Susse Wold, another HCA ambassador, who travels the world reading Andersen’s work to new audiences. “I only really fell in love with the stories in later life, when the true depth of what he was trying to tell us became apparent to me,” she adds. “He reaches out to adults through the ears of children but the stories are quite dark – they have most meaning for people who have lived.”

But with the festivities about to kick off, is all this fuss, perhaps, a case of Emperor’s New Clothes? A festival that celebrates a man many of us would cross the road to avoid should he be strolling down Strøget today. And for all the popularity of his stories, has his body of work actually inspired any young Danes to pick up a pen and start scribbling?

The answer, it transpires, lies just a few minutes from the front door of my hotel at a cosy café bar on now-fashionable Nyhavn. Here, on my last night in town, I strike up conversation with a young Danish barman by the name of Carsten Rasch.

Carsten, I learn, is a big fan of Andersen’s work, deeply influenced by his writing and fascinated by Andersen’s intense rivalry with the philosopher Kierkegaard. What’s more, when not pulling pints of Tuborg, he posts his fledgling writing to Noodlewasser (www.digte.dk), a web forum for young writers and regularly attends Poetry Slam nights (http://poetryslam.dk) at the Vega Bar in Vesterport.

“My poems are kind of postmodern, just my personal thoughts,” he blushes like a young, Danish Hugh Grant. “Poetry Slam has open mic slots for people to get up and perform. The crowd can’t applaud as the atmosphere is too hushed, so they just click their fingers to show their appreciation.”

“I dream,” he adds bashfully, “of being the person with the most clicks.”

Andersen’s tales are not known for their Hollywood endings – from the mermaid that plunges herself to a watery grave, to the fir tree that ends up stoking a log fire. But, maybe, just maybe, the story of the barman who dreams of being a famous writer is one contemporary Danish fairy tale that could just come true.

• More from David Atkinson

Recommended hotels in Copenhagen

Front

Denmark, Zealand, Copenhagen

"Copenhagen's hippest address, minutes from the Nyhaven Canal, the sleek modern-Scandinivian decor is much loved by guests."

• Front Overview and Reviews

From EUR 260.00
per room per night