Home > Ungdomshuset and the Copenhagen Youth Rebellion

Ungdomshuset and the Copenhagen Youth Rebellion

by Open-Publishing - Sunday 11 March 2007

Movement Europe

From workers stronghold to social center, placed in the neighbourhood of Nrrebro historic, Ungdomshuset has been the epicentre of political contestation and social protest in Copenhagen. Today the Youth House is no longer. It was first evicted the torn down. The kids and their supporters hit the streets.

History crashing down

The house from 1897 which stood in the centre of the conflict, originally named Folkets Hus (the People’s House), was the result of the early workers movements. In 1910, The Second International and the German Socialist Clara Zetkin declared March 8 an International Women’s Day of Struggle from the house. Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg spoke there and in 1918 the great demonstration against unemployment when workers stormed the Danish Stock Exchange started in the house. After the war, the house gave shelter to German refuges for a while, but as the Socialist movement’s social texture in Copenhagen changed, the house was abandoned in the 60’s and stayed that way until a group of young squatters from Nrrebro decided to squat the empty building as a part of their year long campaign for a self managed youth house in Copenhagen. In 1982, the mayor of Copenhagen Egon Weidekamp gave the house for the young use and the house was named Ungdomshuset (the youth house). "They get a house, and we get some peace", the mayor said before handing over the keys. Those words were to become very significant 25 years later.

For more than two decades Ungdomshuset served as the main temple of the Danish underground scene and a safe haven for all those kids who just did not fit in anywhere. Lenin and Luxemburg were replaced by punk rock and libertarian political attitudes opting out on the nuclear threat and the old left en bloc. Ungdomshuset above all was young. Generations of very young people have learned things the "do it yourself way" in Ungdomshuset, played their first set of broken drums or had some of their first indignant political experiences. The writer of this article is one of them.

The list of "now superstars" who have played in Ungdomshuset is long. They came there before anybody else in Copenhagen knew who either Bjork or Nick Cave was and in 1991 an American teenage punk band called Green Day played in the house before shooting off to world fame. The house however, always remained a thorn in the side on many local right politicians; the young were uncontrollable and many a political action and demonstration has started in Ungdomshuset during the years. Conservatives had wanted to close the house for years, but as the municipality of Copenhagen has been Social Democratic for 106 years, it would take a Social Democrat to achieve that goal.

"Our price is low, but we are selling a problem"

In 1999 the Social Democrats decided to sell the house and vote with the right. The official reasons for selling the house changed constantly. The building was set for sale for a remarkably low price in 1999. As a conservative city board member put it: "Our price is low, but we are selling a problem".

Very few people wished to buy the house though, a right turned Christian sect called Faderhuset (casa del padre) was turned down as buyers because a majority found them to be an "unserious buyer". But then an unknown joint-stock company called Human A/S made a bid on the house. The front person, a rather eccentric lawyer called Inger Loft, claimed to want to help the young. Her mysterious company was accepted as a buyer and Ungdomshuset and the young users were sold against their will. The lawyer became object for many speculations in the years to come. It was soon discovered that she had possessed an administrative position in the municipality until recently before her bid and people started talking about a Social Democratic manoeuvre. After a year of silence Lawyer decided to sell the stocks in Human A/S to Faderhuset lead by their pastor Ruth Evensen. One day before the sale, further mystery was added to the matter. A loan was taken in the value of the house through another mysterious company called "Sarah Lee Jones Corporation" based in Panama. Every search for the investors behind this company ends in a dead end. The house ended in the hands of the same right wing Christian sect which had just been labelled an "unserious buyer". It seems likely that the lawyer’s role was to act as a middleman somehow. But who knew what? Did forces at the municipality look for a way not to sell the house directly to a right wing Christian sect? We’ll probably never know.

The sect’s interest in the house was simpler it seems. In their conception of Christian awakening, sin has to be battled offensively. They participated in a crusade against "Muslims taking over Copenhagen", they fight homosexuality openly and their pastor Ruth Evensen had a vision from God telling her to buy Ungdomshuset and get rid of the young. Years of protests, court cases, a change of mayor and some serious initiatives from a foundation of lawyers, cultural entrepreneurs, etc. trying to save the house did not prevent the eviction. The commune had left the most vivid cultural activity house in the hands of crusaders and the new Social Democratic Mayor would not go as far as to pay the young people a new house =96 which the commune had originally promised. She gave them the offer of letting their supporters buy a house to replace Ungdomshuset. Price: 1,9 million Euros. In this way the scene was set for this weekend’s riots. The intensity, the diffusion and at some points irrationality of those riots came as a surprise even to the activists in and around the house.

"Don’t worry; today they are not looking for Arabs"

What happened in Copenhagen last weekend went beyond the classic clash between political activists and police. As described correctly in last Saturday’s Il Manifesto, the struggle for Ungdomshuset has assumed far more widespread significance than that of a relatively isolated underground fighting for their house. A threatening eviction of parts of the historical free town of Christiania within the coming year most certainly has raised the level of tension a brought more young people to the streets. The riots however unveiled a more general level of social unrest among young people in Copenhagen than what can be referred struggles for the town’s "free spaces", as could be seen when a school on the other side of town was destroyed. For sure, it was not pretty or politically rational. Moving through the streets of N=F8rrebro and around Christiania one could not notice how heterogeneous those crowds were. Thursday night hundreds of Arab kids joined the clashes letting out a little something of their own. Years of marginalisation has brought those kids out too, along with all the others to numerous to mention. As I heard one Palestinian kid say to his friends in my own street Thursday night (notte) before He joined the crowds down the street: "Don’t worry, today they are not looking for Arabs, they only arrest the white kids tonight"

That densely significant remark points directly at the more general level of cultural political contestation in Denmark today. Since its first election in 2001 the Danish right wing government in line with other western governments has launched that which they define as "the battle for the culture". It is a rather diffuse political program which aggressively targets everything from a presumed 1968 left wing dominance of universities and state television to Muslims who are labelled more or less en bloc in the defence of that which is defined as "common values". There has been a shift which, apart from placing Denmark strictly on the atlanticist axis globally, has implemented neo-conservatism in depth in the Danish Cultural Political debate. From the cartoon crises last year, to the recent welfare reforms, to Christiania and Ungdomshuset you find this generalized sense of truly escalated aggressive policies of cultural uniformity. The refusal of this generalized political cultural state of emergency is what I find to be recognizable across Europe and beyond these days, when young people take it to the streets in solidarity with Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, from Venice to Hamburg, from Istanbul to Bologna, from Oslo to New York and as far as New Zealand.

Yesterday the users of Ungdomshuset were crying on the street as masked construction workers broke down their house. Today they invite people to party and play music, the Ungdomshuset way, in central Copenhagen demanding a new self managed space. Saturday, young people from all over Europe are invited to join that party at a large peaceful demonstration.