The Unlost on Highways: Refugees and Altruistic Memory

I first saw them on the front page of the “Metroexpress” when I was having frokost (lunch) at an Iranian-run bar. It was Friday, September 11, 2015. One thought immediately crossed my mind—that the framing of the shot made it ideal for the purposes of a free morning daily that litters the cafés and sidewalks of every major city in Europe, like “Metro” in Poland. The picture features Lars Møller, a Danish police officer and an exemplar of Nordic looks, trying to cheer up a dark-skinned girl in the middle of one of the lanes of the E45, a pan-European highway stretching from Sicily through Denmark and up to the far north of Scandinavia. The policeman and the Iraqi girl are engaged in a friendly match of hvilken hånd vil du have leg, a Danish variation on “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” I considered the style, an emotional headline—Hope in the midst of misery—accompanied by the caption “Nowadays photos circle the globe at the speed of light,” a common tactic that the press employs to rhetorically allay the fact that in the early fall of 2015, Scandinavia was being flooded with a second wave of refugees, again fleeing Syria.¹

As I perused various news and social media sites, both Polish and international, I saw that the Drost-Hansen’s photograph had indeed taken the Internet by storm.² My Polish friends on Facebook were particularly keen on disseminating the photograph (by sharing it on social media) and valued it especially highly (by showering it with “likes”), often adding their own enthusiastic commentary to their shares. Their messages can more or less be distilled into one specific line of reasoning: in Denmark, law enforcement officers and average citizens often exhibit exemplary behavior towards refugees, whereas in Poland, still mostly unaffected by waves of migrants, we are witnessing the birth of incredible antipathy towards the amalgamated Other looking for asylum in Europe.

Here, I’d like to bring up two heuristic provisions. Firstly, it is hard to reconcile the representativeness of online phenomena with good research practices, including the requirement for appropriate documentation of the research process. Thus, in order to demonstrate that I have not conjured up this particular phenomenon for myself to later analyze, I will mention the citation for Drost-Hansen’s 2015 Årets Pressefoto Award in the “Best News Photo” category which he received in March of 2016.³ Allegedly, the decision of the jury was swayed mostly by the fact that the Danish photograph was circulated across social networks around the whole of Europe. Secondly, the presumption that admiration for Danish culture is equally high in Poland as it is in other European countries would be [-too informal]doubtful to say the least. In a recent issue of a journal published by Humboldt University, German Scandinavian studies scholars suggested that the migrant crisis effectively reduced the appeal of Northern Europe as a separate civilizational sphere—Der Lack ist ab, the magic is gone, and we should dig deeper to try and identify the causes of this particular disenchantment.⁴

Meanwhile, Scandinavia is still rather en vogue in Polish culture. Its popularity is evident in cultural tourism as well as in urban planning and architectural criticism, the latter seeing the cities of the far shore of the Baltic Sea as exemplary in terms of organizing urban spaces to foster a civic spirit, prioritize pedestrians and cyclists, and weave nature into the cityscape.⁵ Such intense emphasis on the glamour of Nordic culture complicates any critical approach to the subject, if not facilitating an outright deterioration of rational opinions and substantial observations into idealization. Furthermore, what’s striking is this tendency to split the narrative of the North into two contradictory visions of culture: one portrays Scandinavia as a leftist utopia realized within sensible limits, while the other emphasizes the gloomy “nests of wickedness” in the far north, teeming with social and psychosocial pathologies brought to light by authors of popular crime fiction.⁶ In Poland, these two visions remain parallel, without points of contact, the balance of literary fiction and social diagnosis still unclear. Poles wish for the “Norden route” to remain valid as a pretext for modernization: in our vicinity there are still countries implementing wide-ranging reforms rather than using them to foment public disagreement.⁷ But we could even go so far as to claim that in every train running through the Warsaw subway line there is at least one person reading a book from the incredibly broad selection of dark Scandinavian thrillers available in Polish.

Cultural scholars often consider highways to be non-places or places proffering a specific non-interactivity.⁸ The persuasive power of the scene captured by Drost-Hansen stems from the fact that it touches upon the essence of change and thus explodes the interpretive frame. A square meter of Danish blacktop on an international highway, chosen by a policeman and a dark-skinned girl as their play spot, turns out to be a site of significance, a place in which the efficiency of European refugee camp technology (refugee camp as a generalizable technology of power) is exhausted.⁹ According to Finnish anthropologist Liisa Malkki, post-WW2 mass forced resettlement and migrant camps are a foundational excess that contemporary Europe is now consciously suppressing. The West has undoubtedly wholly internalized the logic of segregation.¹⁰ It often employed it in the course of humanitarian interventions in conflict zones on other continents; Liisa Malkki herself worked in a Tanzanian camp for Hutus fleeing Rwanda in fear of bloody retribution from Tutsis. Nowadays, the barely controllable flow of migrants into the EU subverts the old order founded upon economic position, keeping different cultures and ethnicities separate and embedded in their “appropriate” locations. Until fairly recently, however, Scandinavia seemed to be an exception to Europe’s strict migration policies, seeming to temper them with its altruism, its social democratic traditions and pacifist inclinations.¹¹ Previously we would have been hard pressed to imagine that it was in the interests of Nordic countries—nations famous for allocating a proportion of their GDP as development aid for Third World countries—to perpetuate any sort of economic or civilizational inequalities between specific areas of the world.¹²

In this essay, I will posit that the incredible career of Drost-Hansen’s photograph is directly related to the perception—present in Denmark, Poland, and basically everywhere else in the world—of Danes as an open, highly integrated society, whose history includes multiple instances of providing much needed succor to peoples in dire straits. The rampant popularity of one Danish photograph perpetuates and reinforces a perception which portrays the Danes as an unparalleled society of selfless rescuers. We still have trouble accepting arguments and topics that would exert a corrective influence on such pervasive memories. Although Poland has seen its share of widely acclaimed books (including reportages by Maciej Czarnecki and Ilona Wiśniewska, and Maciej Zaremba’s interventionist publications) and one provocative feature film (Dariusz Gajewski’s 2015 film Obce niebo) which encouraged a more critical look at the “Scandinavian paradise” and leveled numerous rather substantial and socially-charged accusations at it, the majority of these reservations pertaining to Sweden and Norway, with Denmark maintaining a more or less clean record.¹³ Moreover, disturbing or perplexing phenomena, including the zealous efforts of the Norwegian Barnevernet to transfer children to foster families, the progressive depopulation of the northern reaches of the Scandinavian Peninsula, and the short-sighted forestry policy of the Swedish authorities, are still fervently counterbalanced by positive arguments which often emphasize the developmental superiority of Scandinavia over the “Polish model.”

Revelations that could modify the perception of Danes as a good and well-meaning people don’t have to be sourced from research and academic treatises: news outlets, for one, have been covering the increasing severity of the Danish immigration policies over the past couple of years. European and international press agencies have been monitoring the attitudes of Danes towards refugees and immigrants much more closely in recent years, especially in comparison with the final years of the last century and particularly since the Muhammedskrisen (Muhammed-tegningerne)—the Muhammad cartoon controversy sparked in 2005 by the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in the liberal daily broadsheet “Jyllands-Posten.” Not coincidentally, artist and performer Uwe Max Jensen, a repeat offender of popular sensibilities and the perpetrator of many a provocation, immediately responded to Drost-Hansen’s photograph with an acrylic painting directly referencing the controversial publication. In a travesty of the highway scene, Jensen replaced the Iraqi refugee girl with the figure of the Prophet with explosives in his turban, the fuse lit, more or less copying Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon, the most recognizable of the twelve caricatures published by “Jyllands-Posten.” Accordingly, the unceremonious treatment of representatives of foreign cultures in Denmark, has been building up for over a decade now.

The somewhat old-fashioned verb “galvanize” would be a good fit here; “galvanize” meaning “to shock or excite (someone) into taking action.” The sight of the little refugee girl standing in the middle of the Danish highway galvanizes the memory of the Danes’ exemplary humanitarian past. Like nationalism, xenophobia, national immigration policies, and religiosity (and so forth), memory is a key operator in the extensive “constellation of socio-political processes and cultural practices,” that serves as the foundation for contemporary voluntary and compulsory population transfers.¹⁴ After studying a wide range of biographical testimonies, including truly harrowing ones, given by children, Liisa Malkki declared that there was no such thing as a universal, transhistoric refugee experience. Experiences of that sort are primarily determined by the cultural context of the areas that migrants are fleeing, as well as the characteristics of the sites they're relocated to and their historicity. Memory and time collaborate to establish the anthropological dimension of human migration. In the case of the Kingdom of Denmark, almost universally considered a potential safe haven, a particular role is played by the Kingdom’s reputation, which is founded upon its prior efforts to protect the dignity and human rights of other peoples, including the transfer of a couple of thousand Jews to Sweden in the fall of 1943 (known as Jødeaktionen, Oktober 43 or Aktionen 43in Denmark), the diplomatic and humanitarian efforts known under the umbrella term “the white buses” (De hvide busser), as well as the efforts of the Red Cross and Count Folke Bernadotte. The lexicon employed in the preservation of the regional memory of Southern Jutland—Danes call it Sønderjylland to avoid having to use the German name “Schleswig” is a clear reminder of the fact that the Swedish aristocrat could have never started negotiating with Heinrich Himmler the release of concentration camp inmates to neutral Sweden in February 1945 (primarily using white buses painted with the red cross) if it were not for the Danes’ efforts launched at the end of 1944.¹⁵ Of the 17,000 released inmates, only half were of Scandinavian descent; over time, the release efforts were broadened to include women and children from a variety of European countries.

The road to Sweden led through Jutland and the Danish islands; near the former German-Danish border crossing in Kruså, a monument to Bernadotte was erected soon after the war. After leaving the Reich and crossing into Denmark, the white bus passengers were washed, fed, and taken care of by Danish volunteers at the Padborg aid station, located right near where the E45 runs today (the idea of pan-European highways was put forward by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the late 1940s). A recently published non-fiction book exploring the part that Danes played in these humanitarian efforts is suggestively titled Redningsmænd (The Rescuers).¹⁶ The author of the book, who served as the editor-in-chief of “Politiken,” a popular daily dating back to the late 19th century with a pronounced social liberal stance, commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Aktionen with another volume—Landsmænd. De danske jøders flugt i oktober, published in English under the title Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denmark's Jews Escaped the Nazis, of the Courage of Their Fellow Danes – and of the Extraordinary Role of the SS.¹⁷ The release of The Rescuers was accompanied by a special exhibition at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, opened in the middle of 2015 and very popular with visitors in the summer months, during which Scandinavia finally felt the impact of the migrant crisis sweeping the rest of Europe. The events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the white buses nearly coincided with a new sort of exodus at the German-Danish border. Poles themselves can also attest to the veracity of the Danes’ reputation as prone to helping others. The victims of the anti-Semitic witch hunt of 1968 found safe haven and empathy in Denmark, while those whom the Polish authorities issued with “travel documents” (an exit passport that didn’t allow the holder to return to Poland) could expect some material support from the Danish government if they decided to settle in Denmark. Danish authorities were very liberal with asylum seekers and immediately decided to forgo thorough verification of the applications. “The asylum granting process was reduced basically to registration of the applicants, with the exception of the obvious intelligence service plants and war criminals. No Polish Jew was refused asylum,” emphasizes Søren Kolstrup.¹⁸

The success of Drost-Hansen’s photograph stems from its ethnographicness and the well-preserved memory of the Danes’ past humanitarian efforts.¹⁹ Thus, the notions postulated by Elizabeth Edwards are validated. For cultural scholars, room for interpretation of photographic content exists in the cracks between the intentions of the photographer, the intended use of their work, and the absorption of its impact by specific discourses, its social existence in a variety of circulations (this discrepancy is obviously subject to gradation, situations in which the aforementioned cracks are sealed are at least as interesting). Stepping onto the highway with his camera in hand, Drost-Hansen was supposed to do what a stringerdoes: take press pictures that will later be sold to news desks, and report from the scene. He wasn’t there to provoke anything: on the contrary, he confirmed the hospitality of the host society and its (auto)stereotypical quality defined by the verb at hygge.²⁰ The term implies a proclivity towards imbuing interactions and physical spaces that shape the interpersonal with a cozy, intimate character; the authors of books that have recently made hygge quite the buzzword in Poland have not crafted a novel sociological or cultural category, they merely instrumentalized a positive stereotype about the Danish people.²¹ Rather than proffer an attribute of the power vested in him by the state, Officer Møller extends his hands in friendship to play with the small Iraqi girl. In Drost-Hansen’s lens, the sprawl of the highway itself becomes quite “cozy.”

The keys to reading a photograph are buried not only inside of pictures themselves, but also in the contexts of the memory of human communities, as well as in the ways we store and publicly display the photographs.²² Because of memory, Drost-Hansen's photograph is no longer just a record of a brief encounter between two people on the E45, it becomes a reminder of a particular historic invariant. Facebook users reacted to the photograph as if it were an online update of the moral and multicultural bona fides of the Danes. Once again, they have risen to the challenge. The relative ubiquity of this particular reaction stems—aside from the obvious reasons, like the global reach of the Internet—from the fact that the atmosphere surrounding this special sort of memory of the Danes’ past behaviors, altruistic memory so to speak, generally unites Danes, Poles, and others—the memory itself transcends national borders. Within the workings of memory, bona fides corroborating a society’s humanitarianism and its commendable approach to refugees are issued without much restraint because the memories of the displays of hard altruism and human charity, elevated to function as descriptors of entire societies, are based primarily on synecdoches. The number of Jewish transports to Sweden from the fall of 1943 is estimated to have been somewhere between 600 and 700, however, the transports were allegedly facilitated by a “countless” mass of selflessly helpful Danes.²³ Similarly, clad in his police uniform, Lars Møller represents “all” Danish policemen and their benevolent attitudes towards refugees as well as all government representatives responsible for handling refugee matters. We need to remember, however, that synecdoches are metonymic operations, and the latter can simply produce metaphorical effects.

An in-depth exploration of the subject of “the October of 1943,” Sofie Lene Bak’s book provides a convincing explanation for the way in which what we’ve previously called altruistic memory was shaped. In the latter half of the 20th century, the hermetic Danish culture and the external world went through a sort of homology in terms of the state of knowledge. This can be distilled down to a single sentence: the Danes (totum pro parts) have created a society of helpers and rescuers. This notion spread far and wide and quickly morphed into a stanchion of the aforementioned memory because there was no lively intellectual exchange between Denmark, Europe, and the rest of the world.²⁴ Despite the lack of formal barriers, or rather against the paradoxical backdrop of the establishment of English as the new lingua franca and the progressing cosmopolitization of local cultural patterns, Denmark has neglected to open itself up to new ideas and critical reexaminations that have been spreading across a number of fields, including Holocaust research and war studies. The unrestrained transfer and exchange of knowledge was stalled by the Danes’ awareness of their own anti-anti-Semitism, displayed with full force during the course of World War II and later confirmed and reinforced by numerous postwar episodes, including that when Poles fled Gomułka’s repressions. Danish public opinion contented itself with the belief—not unfounded—that in contrast to other Western societies, including their Swedish neighbors, the Danes were highly literate in terms of history: they never mix up the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust, nor do they say “Polish death camps” rather than “Nazi death camps in Poland.”

One has to wonder, however, what led non-Danes to internalize, for entire decades no less, the apologetic outlook on Danish altruism and to later consider it a perpetual distinctive characteristic of Nordic societies. Bak considers the information provided on the official Yad Vashem website a clear example of this—the Jerusalem-based institute responsible for the maintenance and preservation of the memory of the victims and heroes of the Holocaust promotes the same “popular tradition” that Denmark finds itself stuck in: “the entire” society helped and the Danes are distinguished by their altruistic “national character.”²⁵ Admittedly, Hannah Arendt’s international bestseller (first published in 1963) may have cemented that particular view. However, the passage in Eichmann in Jerusalem dealing directly with the events in Denmark is quite short—covering barely few pages.²⁶ Moreover, we are dealing with the work of a pre-eminent thinker, a highly discursive text which invites criticism and strictly academic dialog.

It seems that the resolution of these doubts may linger in the linkage between memory and popular culture. With all the media and tricks at its disposal, including the cinematic poetics of melodrama and the mechanisms of repetition described by Marek Krajewski, the “culture of repetition” amidst other “popular culture cultures.”²⁷ Back in 1965, a group of Americans went on a special trip along the “rescue route” in Denmark; under the cover of night, they crossed the Øresund and reached Swedish shores in one of the same boats that took part in the operation in October 1943.²⁸ Fred Small, singer, songwriter, and Unitarian, author of the famous song Cranes Over Hiroshima, recorded the song Denmark 1943 for his 1988 album I Will Stand Fast; the song, over six and a half minutes in length, is a methodical account of the events, opens with a rhetorical question: “How can it be Denmark