The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (15 page)

We ended the tour near an afterschool center. There was a small beach and a canoe on the shore. Emmerik said the community built the center to keep kids out of trouble after school. Then he pointed to a mock real estate sign posted on the side of a hill that read,
THE FREE STATE CHRISTIANIA IS NOT AND WILL NEVER BE FOR SALE.

The edict echoed a well-known quote from Ahnfeldt-Mollerup regarding the government's desire to shut Christiania down. It was not so much anarchy the government wanted to control, she wrote, as it was proprietorship of a successful venture:

Each and every little village in every corner of [Denmark] now has a small shop where one can purchase the style that already can be found at Christiania. So one can wonder about the anger and aversion many of the conservatives feel about this quarter's culture, one can wonder why Christiania should be replaced by conventional housing at just this point when the quarter's maladjusted style has become so mainstream. Perhaps the point is actually that it should not be torn down, but instead that bourgeois Denmark wants to buy Christiania and is displeased about it not being for sale.

By 9
A.M.
on May 16, 2007, the fires around Christiania had died out. Workers cleared barricades while commuters pedaled along Prinsessegade Road to the Knippelsbro bridge. The air still smelled like burning rubber, but on Pusher Street, hash dealers were already out, covertly peddling sticks of Afghan crème.

The Copenhagen daily newspaper,
Politiken
, condemned the police raid as needless provocation. The Palaces and Properties Agency asserted that the Cigar Box had to be demolished under the auspices of L205. By midday, Christianians had rebuilt the structure. That afternoon, they held a housewarming party hosted by one of Denmark's best-known DJs.

The standoff continued through the summer, and Christiania's lawyer, Knud Foldschack, threatened to file seven hundred property rights lawsuits if the government continued to pursue L205.

Deadlock had long been Christiania's best defense. By the time lawsuits were decided, often a new government—looking to avoid controversy—had taken over the Folketing and buried the case. Foldschack estimated that his seven hundred cases would take a year to settle once filed, at which point the political landscape could change dramatically. The wait, he said, would be worth it. "You can only destroy a situation, a possibility, like Christiania, once," he said. "You can never restore it."

But Rasmussen called for and won—albeit by a slimmer margin—a surprise early election in the fall of 2007 and secured a second term. In Christiania, optimism dimmed. Ten to twenty police patrols a week randomly searched homes and hassled residents. (A year before, Amnesty International had called for an "independent mechanism for the investigation of human rights violations by the police" in Christiania.) Half the community wanted to fight the government; the other half wanted to take the government's offer to lease their homes at below-market rates. In the summer of 2008, Foldschack registered the lawsuits, and the fate of Christiania returned to the courts.

Many demonized Rasmussen's government for wanting to gain access to one of the last, and most valuable, undeveloped building sites in the city. But residents like Richardt Lionheart said that even before government intervention Christiania was evolving into the sort of free-market community it had been founded in opposition to.

During my visit in 2006, Lionheart spoke of the darker currents beneath Christiania's bohemian surface, and we continued the conversation via e-mail until last winter. He first came to the neighborhood in January 1972, to put certain sociological and political beliefs into practice. A week after arriving, he moved into the "Blue House" with two women. The threesome took over the second floor, which had been a changing room for soldiers. They removed rows of steel lockers and set up a telephone and hot water heater. They laid hardwood floors, decorated the place, and hosted meetings and parties. His greatest hardship in those days proved to be his relationships; eventually he moved out. When he returned two years later, he fixed up his own place and has lived there ever since.

Lionheart's first skepticism about Free Town came in 1984, when he was living in Colombia on a psychology research grant. That winter he received a letter from his brother, Eric, who'd been diagnosed with cancer and had fallen behind on his rent in Christiania. The district Eric lived in threatened to kick him out if he didn't pay. Richardt flew home and settled the debt, but, he said, things haven't been the same since.

A few years later, Richardt's neighbor died and his widow—a Swede who was new to Christiania—moved into her husband's house. But residents of the district told her she was not welcome. Richardt stepped in and, in keeping with Christiania rules, called a meeting to resolve the matter. Three days before the meeting, a posse broke into the woman's house, piled her belongings in the street, and reclaimed the home for someone of their choosing.

"Anarchy is a beautiful thing if people have very fucking high morals," he said. "If they don't, then it's lynch mobs. This was a lynch mob, I'd say. And the same with consensus democracy. You have to have very high morals to make it function. You have to have a very high level of energy as well."

There were other stories of arbitrary law and violence in Free Town. Since the beginning, the community used thugs to enforce rules and chase unwanted residents out of the neighborhood. In the housing pool, preferential treatment was sometimes given to applicants who had friends on the inside. In 2005, residents offered a troop of gay actors a home, then kicked them out after determining that they didn't comply with the "Christiania lifestyle." In 2004, a television journalist was violently threatened when he tried to erect a small house in Christiania, against neighborhood rules. The following spring, the drug scene on Pusher Street made headlines when six masked men fired automatic weapons into a crowd to avenge one of their members who'd been thrown out of Christiania. Several people were injured, and a twenty-six-year-old man was killed. In April of 2009, a twenty-two-year-old man's jaw was blown off and four others were injured when an unknown perpetrator lobbed a grenade into a crowd outside Café Nemoland.

The government blew many of the stories out of proportion in its campaign to close Christiania, but some of its base assertions were grounded in disquieting facts. While Christianians refused to recognize the government's authority, two thirds of the community received welfare and used city and state services like hospitals, schools, and roads. More than one hundred residents owned cars, and, because they couldn't park in Free Town, they clogged the streets of Christianshavn with them.

One point almost everyone, including most Christianians, agreed on was the fact that Free Town's drug trade had become its Achilles' heel. On one hand, the $174-million-a-year business filled area shops, cafés, and restaurants and made the neighborhood the second-most-popular tourist stop in Denmark, after Tivoli. On the other, it brought violence and a power imbalance that diminished Christiania's community mentality.

One night during my stay, I visited a former hash dealer some friends had introduced me to. "Andy" unlocked six deadbolts on two doors to let me into his apartment. He lived in Frederick's Arc, the largest timber-frame structure in Denmark and site of the 1979 heroin blockade. He'd put on weight since he stopped dealing and now went to the gym every day and played with the Christiania soccer club. His biceps and neck were well defined. He had a buzz cut and shifty blue eyes, seemingly aware of every movement in the room at all times.

Andy's apartment was outfitted with nearly everything a twenty-something bachelor could want—and, seemingly, everything Christiania historically opposed. The living room was appointed with a leather wraparound couch and a pool-table-size wide-screen TV. The kitchen was equipped with a multitude of fancy stainless-steel appliances and granite counters. The hardwood floors were sparkling new.

After starting as a runner on Pusher Street in the late nineties, when he was fifteen, Andy eventually set up his own stand in 2001. Individual busts were frequent leading up to the 2004 raid, he said, but the risk was worth it. When he was twenty years old, he was clearing $1,000 to $2,000 a day. He took extravagant snowboarding trips to Switzerland and spent $12,000 once on a two-week bender in Miami. He didn't work on Christiania's public projects or attend meetings. In a socialist country where income tax ranges from 43 to 63 percent, Andy was an instant member of Copenhagen's nouveau riche.

Since he quit pushing, Andy had been trying to reinvent himself. He pointed out a painting he'd been working on that seemed like an interesting abstract until he explained that it was a depiction of an enraged dragon breathing fire. I asked about an assortment of electronic equipment in the corner, and he said he was also learning how to DJ. When I inquired what he thought of L205, he answered that he hoped it would pass over, that things would stay the way they were. "I do what the lawyers tell me," he said. "I just give them money and trust they will do the right thing."

I went the following night to see Pusher Street for myself. The alley was empty, apart from three eidolic shapes crowded around a fire smoldering in a fifty-gallon drum. I approached a middle-aged woman reclining on a pile of wood chips and asked if she was selling. She nodded and asked how much I wanted. I told her I had one hundred kroner. She pulled a black stick the size of a small pencil from her pocket, and I handed her the money.

I went into Woodstock—Christiania's first bar, which opened in April 1974—and was hit by a wall of blue smoke and blaring country music. The bartender was either very drunk or very strange and laughed every time I counted out on my fingers how many beers I wanted, which was one. I found a seat at a long pine picnic table in the back and rolled a joint. As I tapped the butt on the table, a woman at the other end spilled her hash on the floor and yelled at me. She circled the table, alternately pointing and screaming for the next five minutes. When I finished rolling, she slammed her fist on the table and yelled, "Remember that?!"

I smoked the joint quickly and left. The clouds had receded for the first time since I arrived and there were a few stars overhead. I walked down Long Road, past the Raisin House and the stupa. The candles under the Buddha had been replaced and were burning, and a few lights were on in the surrounding homes. Less than a half mile from downtown Copenhagen, I couldn't hear any traffic or any noise at all. I thought of Emmerik and the original vision of Christiania and knew for certain that it was long gone. But walking into Mælkebøtten with blue moonlight reflecting off the courtyard, I still had to wonder whether that meant this place shouldn't exist.

 

French philosopher Michel Foucault said that there are no such things as utopias. A true utopia, he said in his 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces," is a figment of our imagination. It is merely a concept of society in its perfected state. What people refer to as utopias, he said, are in fact heterotopias, "simultaneously mythic and real contestation[s] of the space in which we live."

"There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization," he said,

real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted Utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.

Heterotopias come in many forms. From sacred grounds of ancient cultures to military schools in the twentieth century to cemeteries today, they reflect a certain aspect of the society they reside in. They also typically occupy a certain era, Foucault said, when "men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time."

In May 2009, it seemed Christiania's era was drawing to a close. The Eastern High Court ruled in favor of the Palaces and Properties Agency in the cases Foldschack had filed. Christianians decided to appeal to the supreme court. The court said it would announce a decision in January 2011, and the waiting game was back on.

Four months later, Christiania celebrated its thirty-eighth birthday with a day of parades, free food, and DJs. Supporters showed up in Native American garb and tie-dyed T-shirts. The mood was upbeat, but in photos and videos of the scene it looked more like a historical reenactment of the 1970s—complete with dozens of tourists watching from a safe distance—than a celebration of a thriving community. "As time goes by, I guess people are getting more realistic and are less positive to the communistic ideas," Lionheart wrote. "There's nobody today who defends communism. There's nobody who talks in the local paper at all. It's like everybody here just wants to have the right opinion instead of having their own opinion."

The comment reminded me of an experience I had just before I left Free Town in 2006 that seemed to speak to both the neighborhood's resilient spirit and its conflicted identity. I'd spent the evening alone in the Moonfisher Café, contemplating the many faces of Christiania. Two ceiling fans pushed thick tobacco and hash smoke around the coffee shop. I bought an espresso and set it on a homemade steel table. A few drunks laughed loudly in the corner. Pool balls clicked in the back room. A lookout announced that a police patrol was approaching, and smokers quickly shuffled hash and rolling papers into their pockets. The cops arrived, young-looking Danes with blue eyes, blond hair, and padded riot gear. When they left ten minutes later, a woman at the bar yelled, "We got you!" and bowed in mock reverence. A few seconds after that, a massive bottle rocket exploded beside the patrol.

In the bar, joints came out again and conversations continued with hardly a pause. I left and ran into a young girl and boy outside the entrance, cherub-faced Danes no more than six or seven years old. They'd rebuilt a snow barricade meant to slow police patrols. I smiled and waved. After ten days in Christiania, I was starting to feel like a local myself. They stared back, and the girl told me it would cost one hundred kroner to pass.