HC Andersen House in Odense: The Emperor’s New Walls – Culture

A park in the middle of the crouched houses of the old city center, not big. Pavilions made of wood and glass that rise gently from the earth. Here a hill, there a break, a sunken garden. In the new HC Andersen house in Odense, Denmark, the worlds, the above and the below, intertwine. Inside a ramp, a meandering ribbon that leads you down from the light into the dark. From the tape the voice of the poet who argues with the narrator: “I was not born in a hole like this!” He was. In the middle of the room the poet as a silhouette, as a guest in the city palaces and country estates of his wealthy patrons; He liked that better.

Hans Christian Andersen, who mostly drew as a HC himself, also told his own life, which lasted from 1805 to 1875, over and over again, over and over again in a different way. Who would I most like to be if I weren’t myself? A questionnaire that Hans Christian Andersen once filled out. His answer: “Hans Christian Andersen”. What am I most afraid of? “Myself”.

He wanted to be kissed – and not be forgotten as a poet; one wish came true, the other was more difficult

On small boards along the ramp, Andersen shouts: “I too want to be kissed.” And this one: “In happy days, don’t forget the poet”. At least his wish came true when he was painfully denied others – the kiss.

The new house in Odense was built by Kengo Kuma, the Japanese star architect who also designed the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo. Kuma says he grew up with Andersen’s fairy tales, like all Japanese, all Danes, all Germans. It looks like it has been carefully planted in the center of the small town with its narrow streets and low houses. An organic building, without any corners, edges or sharp angles, in which the landscape set by Kuma’s colleague Yuki Ikeguchi, the hedges, the bamboo and the bushes are an integral part of the architecture. This house is still growing, and it will grow in ten, fifty, and a hundred years.

HC Andersen has never lacked fame. Not out there in the world, where his stories are being reinvented again and again to this day, most profitably and momentous in the Disney universe. And not at home in Denmark, where they always celebrated it, even if perhaps not always appreciated it in all its complexity and size. Andersen reinvented the fairy tale in his time, he showed universal aspects of human existence so artistically that the titles of many of his stories – “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Princess and the Pea” – to this day are proverbial.

As an actor miserable, but at least quickly failed, as a poet admired by princes and princesses

Copenhageners like to make fun of Odense’s obsession with HC Andersen: Yes, Andersen was born here, but didn’t he run away from the small provincial town when he was 14 and didn’t even look back, you ask? A poor shoemaker’s son, eager for the fresh air, freedom and the generous patrons of the capital. As an actor he was miserable there, but at least quickly failed, as a poet he then made admirers of princes and princesses all over Europe, associated with Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo – and possibly posthumously overtaken his writing contemporaries in terms of worldwide popularity.

The Copenhageners like to hide the fact that HC Andersen also fled their city, which often made him feel the upstart, time and again. That he exchanged their Biedermeier narrowness and intrigues with the vastness of extensive journeys to Italy, Germany, England and France. And after his death in 1875, in which coin did you commemorate him in Copenhagen? They gave him a grave in the Assistens cemetery, the most beautiful in town, yes. In 1913 they gave his Little Mermaid a statue, initially hardly noticed, soon a tourist attraction: With their bronze – and really very small – mermaid, the Copenhageners succeeded in putting the sad story of an unrequited love at the service of a world-wide experience economy and she At the same time, with a pragmatic business sense, to transform it into a trademark for what is essentially a robust, unromantic Danish culture. After all, in 1955 they named a six-lane “boulevard” after the poet, today the loudest and most polluted street sin in Copenhagen.

The Odenseans also had a street monster that cut their old town in two in the 1960s. But Odense decided a few years ago to go to the monster’s collar, to shut down the road. And so here now, in the summer of 2021, all of a sudden there is space for a new tram, for strollers and for a lot of green, but also space for the new HC Andersen house, which cost the equivalent of 54 million euros – a new beginning for them City that also creates space for a new look at HC Andersen.

You mucked out, rethought everything. “We didn’t want to talk about HC Andersen anymore,” says Henrik Lübke, the creative director of the Andersen House. “We wanted the exhibition to speak like HC Andersen.” Where a lot of artifacts await you in the old museum, lots of facts, lots of answers, the new house primarily asks questions. How does one find his place? What makes you human? And how was that with love? Was it the women who spurned him, as Andersen would have us believe during his lifetime, or was it not in reality the cool, distant friend Edvard Collin, to whom all his longings were for, to whom he wrote heartfelt letters (“You do not return it! It torments me “). An impossible love, like that of the mermaid for her earthly prince. Many of HC Andersen’s fairy tales don’t end well.

When it comes to the question of what is more captivating, the man or his work, the house remains most fruitfully undecided

You can already find one or the other piece of the author: his suitcase, his wallet, the scissors with which he created the playful silhouette, his inkwell and his pen. But things are talking, whispering their own version of events over the headset. They brag, argue, and contradict their owner, but their version of things is not necessarily more reliable than HC Andersen’s. The rosary, acquired in Switzerland, pretends to be from Spain, the inkwell prides itself on being the real source of Andersen’s words. Andersen himself would have liked that, he had a sense of humor. He was also vain, one of the most photographed personalities of his day.

When it comes to the question of who is more captivating, the man or his work, the house remains most fruitfully undecided. At the end of the ramp, the belly of the house opens up, the underworld, a cave entirely dedicated to the fairy tales that come to life there, but only if the visitor plays along, stimulated by the installations, the animations, and the voices from the headset . When the viewer throws his shadow on a canvas, for example, and then suddenly begins his own life, as in Andersen’s dark story “The Shadow” (in which at the end the shadow reverses roles and makes the writer his shadow) .

Open detailed view

In one room you can lie back on the floor and listen to the voices of the mermaids diving around you. You lie directly under the planned garden pond, once the construction work has been completed – at the moment it’s “soft opening” – then the reflections of the water will play with you through the glass ceiling. In another corner, a bitchy princess invites potential suitors to a casting show. “Generously donated” by the Danish royal family is a bed with a mountain of magnificent mattresses, next to it, also a “loan from the royal court”: a dried pea on velvet pillows. On the wall there are long expert reports from leading “mattress experts”, which verbally prove the authenticity of the pea and the scientific correctness of Andersen’s story.

Last of all, there is a room in which the work and the man come together again, dedicated to the fairy tale that HC Andersen himself once described in a letter as a “playout” of his own life: the ugly duckling. “What kind of a guy are you?” The others ask mockingly when the duckling has finally pierced its shell. HC Andersen was not only the eternal outsider, he also knew about his unfavorable looks. Friedrich Hebbel talked about his “dodgy, lemur-like, buckled figure”, an American globetrotter described Andersen’s mouth after a meeting in 1862 as “a wide crack across his face that could have been mistaken for the throat of a child-swallowing troll if it weren’t for the rays of the sun of goodness of his heart that played around the lips “.

It took a long, cold winter before the feathers of the supposed duckling roared, its slender neck lifted and it became “the most beautiful of all beautiful birds”. At least HC Andersen has given the story a happy ending, and visitors can slowly climb up the ramp from here.