The City as an Uncanny Stage

1 Introduction

If we think of the city of Copenhagen with its characteristic harbour, its lakes and islands, and its location beside the sea, a distinctive theme that springs to mind is the relationship between land and water. We may therefore hypothesise that in Copenhagen the bridge as an architectural structure is particularly significant for the way the city works, both on the infrastructural level and in terms of cultural perception. In general, the twentieth century was a moment when the dominant cultural narrative shifted Denmark’s self-understanding, from its perception as a country of islands connected by slow-moving ferries to its construction as a country whose different parts were joined by bridges. This culminated in a narrative of transnational “connectedness” with the constructions of the Great Belt Bridge (Storebæltforbindelsen) connecting the islands of Zealand and Funen in the late 1990s and Øresund Bridge, which established a physical connection between Copenhagen and Sweden when it opened in 2000.

Figure 1:

C.W. Eckersberg, Langebro, Copenhagen, in the Moonlight with Running Figures (1836).

Further, in terms of the architectural development of Copenhagen itself, inner-city bridges have played an increasingly important role. Several smaller bridges in particular for pedestrians and cyclists have been built in recent years including examples such as the architecturally stunning, winding orange cycle bridge known as the Bicycle Snake opened in the southern part of the harbour as part of a larger strategy to ease daily cycle commutes in the city, thereby promoting and constructing Copenhagen as a particularly “liveable” city.^[1] However, anyone who takes a walk along the quays of inner Copenhagen will witness a rather less successful architectural project as part of this effort: the Inner Harbour Bridge. Located at the end of the celebrated seventeenth-century Nyhavn canal, this was a barren, empty building site for several years as the developer went bankrupt, leaving behind a half-built pedestrian bridge which for several years during the 5-year-long construction period was rather helplessly blocked off with metal fencing as the project was facing an uncertain future until the bridge was finally ready for the citizens to use in 2016 (Habermann 2016). This example reminds us that the bridge as architectural metaphor has ambiguous symbolic qualities that tell against naive narratives of urban development as progress. While such progress narratives present bridges as points of contact between previously separated territories, the half-built pedestrian bridge points instead to a narrative of lack of contact, of connections gone dead, and it emphasises that in Copenhagen’s inner city, water has a separating function, almost like a wall or impenetrable boundary.

Not so far from today’s Inner Harbour Bridge, another bridge, Langebro, connects those same parts of Copenhagen, and Langebro has a much longer history as a bridge giving rise to ambiguous narratives of Copenhagen. Indeed, a famous image of Langebro is from the early 19th century, given in one of the so-called Golden Age Danish painters, C.W. Eckersberg, whose painting Langebro, Copenhagen, in the Moonlight with Running Figures provides a rare glimpse of early nineteenth-century Copenhagen by night. Eckersberg was a pioneer in taking painting outside the artist’s studio and into the field to depict both natural and urban motifs, and this small painting shows a strangely compelling nocturnal scene, one which is at once mysterious and commonplace. While Langebro is an important topographical feature in Copenhagen, it is depicted here as a bridge that both connects and disconnects places and people in the city, an indeed forms an ambiguous cultural narrative of the city. In this article, I will consider Langebro as an unsettling place in Golden Age Copenhagen as well as today: a place that is at once central and peripheral to the city, a place and non-place that evokes sentiments of the uncanny. As an ambiguous topos, Langebro sparked the imaginations not only of Golden Age painters such as Eckersberg but also of writers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, whose representations of Copenhagen will be interpreted in this light (Steiner 2014).^[2]

2 The Bridge as a Thing and the City as a Stage

Let us first consider a well-known philosophical source on bridges as cultural symbols or topoi. In his 1951 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking”, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously indicates the duality or ambiguity of a monumental and picturesque old bridge in Heidelberg. A structure that dates from Roman times, this bridge is a piece of architecture and infrastructure that connects – or in Heidegger’s terms, “gathers” – the riverbanks on either side while equally acting as a constant reminder that the two banks are forever separated. As Heidegger writes, the bridge is a “thing”, but it also has the particular quality of creating a “location”, “site” or “space”:

Dinge, die in solcher Art Orte sind, verstatten jeweils erst Räume. Was dieses Wort „Raum“ nennt, sagt seine alte Bedeutung. Raum, Rum heißt freigemachter Platz für Siedlung und Lager. Ein Raum ist etwas eingeräumtes, Freigegebenes, nämlich in eine Grenze, griechisch péras. Diese Grenze ist nicht das wo etwas aufhört, sondern wie die Griechen erkannten, von woher etwas sein Wesen beginnt. Darum ist der Begriff horismos, d. h. Grenze. Raum ist wesenhaft das Eingeräumte, in seine Grenze Eingelassene. Das Eingeräumte wird jeweils gestattet und so gefügt, d. h. versammelt durch einen Ort, d. h. durch ein Ding von der Art der Brücke (Heidegger [1936–1953] 2000, 156)

A picturesque, watercolour quality often dominates the architectural references in Heidegger’s descriptions of concrete settings, such as the bridge in Heidelberg or the rural farmhouse in the Black Forest. But if we look past the rosy glow that tends to envelop Heidegger’s architectural interpretations, we may instead emphasise the aforementioned ambiguity between gathering and separating – the duality Heidegger uses to characterise the bridge as a symbolic form. Moreover, Heidegger introduces a useful conceptual link between the bridge and the phenomenological concept of the horizon as a boundary (from the Greek ὁρί ζων meaning to divide, mark out, settle or define).

Following Heidegger, we may therefore say that as a ‘thing’ in the city that both connects and separates distinct localities, the bridge has potential to create a sense of place: it makes us aware of the boundaries, differences and connections in the city, and in this way, as if by proxy, it grants us insight into what the city’s ‘horizon’ may be said to be and how it can be experienced as bestowing meaning.^[3] If we wish to think of the city as a bounded space insofar as it can be understood through the figure of the horizon, we will also have to consider the city as a horizon for practical life: while the city may be architectural in its material expression and ordering, it serves primarily as a framework for people’s lives, that is, for praxis. It is therefore a horizon that is both architectural and cultural in character. In the vocabulary of phenomenology, as a boundary or imaginary line of delimitation, a horizon is never concretely ‘within reach’, but rather provides a general drift or orientation towards a larger idea, place or setting.^[4] As Heidegger outlines in the passage quoted above, we can gain knowledge about the character and constitution of this drift by subjecting the ‘things’ of the city – material objects that have the potential to provide orientation just like the example of a bridge – to interpretation, here a bridge. This means considering how they may facilitate practical life, albeit without moralising about what those praxes might be or about what goes on in the city. Now, let us keep this in mind as we turn back to Golden Age Copenhagen and Langebro.

As we know, urban life is rarely without conflict, difference, ambiguity and contradiction, and indeed, many of the city’s institutions and architectural arrangements serve precisely to structure these differences, disparate requirements and needs (Carl 2011, 38–45). The lives lived in the city as much as the city’s public life, contains a performative element, which makes the urban spaces of the city a kind of stage. Although it may seem obvious, we also should remind ourselves that part of what it means to live in a city is to be surrounded by people one does not know personally, people whose particular visual characteristics, such as their age, clothing or work uniforms, offer specific information about them (Lofland 1973, 56–65). What goes on in the city is conditioned by anonymity and visuality (Steiner 2014, 150–158), and precisely this combination opens up opportunities for ambiguous forms of participation through for example disguise, performativity and even cunning (Barac 2015, 213–224).

Around the time when C.W. Eckersberg painted Langebro, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard lived in Copenhagen. Kierekgaard wrote about precisely the above-mentioned duality of anonymity and visuality as characteristic of life in the city also in relation to his own life in Copenhagen and the city’s concrete spaces, including Langebro. As is well known, Kierkegaard took daily walks around Copenhagen, the city where he lived for most of his life, and his habit of talking to the people he met enabled a very particular urban praxis that took on performative characteristics with highly ambiguous connotations (Pattison 1999, 8–10). We may say that Kierkegaard vacillated between both “taking part” and “playing a part” in the life of the city’s open spaces. His constant vacillation between different behaviours and degrees of participation in urban life can also be seen as a vacillation between participation in an ever-changing role play and full immersion in the practical life of the city that borders on forgetfulness of self (Steiner 2011, 85–102). Neither of these positions constitute a straight-forward or positive interpretation, and just as much as Kierkegaard consciously changed between different ways of behaving in the streets of Copenhagen, so did his judgements of the city vary. As Kierkegaard writes of an occasion marked by an unusually positive evaluation of the city’s performative quality, he sometimes even engages in a speculative form of role play:

Især deler min Forlystelse sig i at variere. Her to Hoved-Variationer. Jeg betragter hele Kiøbenh. som et stort Selskab. Men den ene Dag betragter jeg mig selv som Verten der gaaer og samtaler med alle de mange indbudne mig kjære Gjester; den anden Dag antager jeg, at det er en stor Mand der har gjort Selskabet, og jeg er Gjest. I Forhold dertil er jeg forskjelligt paaklædt, hilser forskjelligt o: s: v: […] Ogsaa paa en anden Maade varierer jeg: ved snart at betragte Kiøbh. Som en stor By, snart som en lille (Kierkegaard in Heiberg and Kuhr 1919, 284).

We see here how the concrete context of the city seems to morph between a tragic and a comic stage set (Kruft 1994, 77). Certainly, Kierkegaard was not unwilling to see himself as the social gadfly of Copenhagen, a title often bestowed on him at the time. Moreover, since he was a philosopher, an analogy between Kierkegaard and Socrates was often made, not least by Kierkegaard himself, suggesting a Socratic alignment and aspiration of Kierkegaard’s self-perception and approach to the city and urban life (Hadot 1995, 147–178). While we must beware the risk of historical conflation and historicism that this analogy entails, we thus find an imagined analogy between the ancient Athenian agora and the open spaces of early nineteenth-century Copenhagen. This, of course, may not be completely accidental, as the period in which Kierkegaard lived is known as the Golden Age – one where architects, writers, painters and others look back to antiquity as a Golden Age and believing to be standing on the threshold of a new such Golden Age (Kondrup 1996, 159–226, 204–206). But we may speculate whether it makes Kierkegaard’s reflections on and ambiguous participation in the cacophonous character of the conversations that take place in the city and in the texts Kierkegaard write about the city contribute to the very sentiments of ambiguity that often characterise his writings about the city. This includes the passage quoted above where he is vacillating between appreciating his own participation in Copenhagen’s urban and public life as a source of philosophical reflection and one where the limitations of the historical condition of Copenhagen also become apparent (Steiner 2014, chapter two).

Yet, crucially, Kierkegaard’s writing and thinking depend on the city’s architectural structures, its ‘things’ that act as concrete frameworks. Turning back to Heidegger, if a bridge has the potential to define, mark out and even ‘gather’ a place, as Heidegger emphasises, it always also simultaneously divides, separates and institutes difference between diverse elements of the city. This is the kind of ambiguity to which I will now call attention in my discussion of Langebro. The question I will consider in the rest of this article is whether we can think of Langebro as a site and a ‘thing’ or symbolic architectural figure in the city, one with particularly rich and ambiguous cultural value. If we can do so, this makes it a topical point of entry for investigating cultural narratives surrounding Copenhagen, revealing the discourses we use to describe that city’s life and history from a new perspective.

3 Golden Days and Dark Nights: Langebro, an Unsettling Place in Copenhagen

Langebro – whose name literally translates as “Long Bridge” – is a large bridge in Copenhagen that connect the inner city with Amager in the south, and which can be used by many forms of traffic. The current iteration of the bridge was esigned by the influential post-war Danish architect Kaj Gottlob in 1954, Langebro is a central infrastructural node, encompassing a dual carriageway for motor traffic, a cycle lane, and a pavement for pedestrians. With its characteristic watchtower, and it has capacity to open and close to let large ships pass beneath it, Langebro is a well-known architectural landmark in Copenhagen. I am surely not the only person to have been bitterly reminded of the city’s windy location beside the sea as I cycle over Langebro. Nor do I imagine I am alone in having experienced Langebro as an uncannily deserted urban space while walking down the massive stone steps on one side of the bridge. Many drivers must also have felt a thrill on the steep ramp next to the bridge near the Islands Brygge quay. Yet, as a thing, Langebro has been in place here many years previously to this particular physical constrcution.

In a 1971 song about Langebro, the Danish folk singer Kim Larsen describes an experience of walking across the bridge on an early Monday morning.^[5] The bridge features in the song as what might best be described as a tragicomic stage setting, and the singer describes a series of disturbing episodes that take place as he makes his way across it. He sees, as he says, a woman crying, a bunch of drunkards drinking themselves to death, and Christian missionaries yelling that doomsday is near. “So if you dare to, come walk with me”, Larsen repeatedly shouts in his characteristically coarse voice. It is the act of walking across the bridge that facilitates his experience of these people, figures and episodes. The song is actually a Danish version of another folk song, “Geordie”, the best-known rendition of which is probably American folk singer Joan Baez’s 1962 recording, in which she sings about walking across London Bridge one misty early morning. “Geordie” refers to an old Scottish story about a woman’s pleas on behalf of her husband, who is about to be executed. In the more modern Danish version, the fundamental relationship between men and women is even more fraught and fragmented: in Larsen’s song we meet a woman “with pretty eyes” who runs after her husband shouting that he has stolen her life. In the Danish popular imagination, Langebro seems to be a place that provokes ambiguous and even uncanny sentiments.

Of course, Langebro is much older than Larsen’s song. It dates back to at least the seventeenth century, and Eckersberg painted it in 1836. During the rough period 1800–1850, which is celebrated in Danish culture as the Golden Age, Copenhagen was still tucked away behind seventeenth-century ramparts. The city’s four entrance gates were locked at night, and – so the story goes – the absolute monarch personally kept the keys to the city under his pillow. Entering and leaving the city was thus a significant issue, making spaces of transition such as gates and bridges places of particular cultural importance. Langebro connected two parts of the city that lay within the extensive ramparts: the mainland area of Copenhagen, and the small island of Christianshavn, situated in the city’s large harbour. In fact, the bridge was one of two connecting points between the inner city and the southern gate, joining the city centre not only to Christianshavn but also to the hinterland of the island of Amager, an area characterised by a combination of stinking sewage deposits from the city and the fertile farmland that resulted. This emphasises Langebro’s status as an important place of transit in the city, both then and now, but it highlights all the problematic cultural associations connected with Copenhagen in the nineteenth century. The city at that time defined itself by means a strict boundary, one whose utility finally collapsed in the 1860s, when the ramparts’ military functionality was more than called into question: when the crowded city within was swept by a cholera epidemic, it sounded the death knell for Copenhagen’s bounded urban structure.^[6] In what follows, I will juxtapose three representations of Langebro from the Golden Age: Eckersberg’s painting and two texts, one by the writer H.C. Andersen and the other by Kierkegaard.

4 Langebro as an Uncanny Site in Golden Age Culture

Let us now take a closer look at Eckersberg’s painting (Please see Figure 1). Ever since he painted Langebro, there has been controversy about the motif. Why are people running across the bridge in the middle of the night? What is the woman on the right-hand side of the picture pointing at, and why do the people appear to be upset? Is there anything strange about the pink horizon, and why are the shadows cast by the figures at a slant? Should we imagine that Amager has been stricken by fire? Or is there a fire in Copenhagen itself, reflected in the windows of the house on the quayside? (Jensen 1998, 23–60)

Eckersberg was a famously precise artist, and the peculiarities of the motif are unlikely to be down to sloppiness on his part. We might see them instead as features of a paranoiac-melancholic dream vision, and thus as a manifestation of the interest in the hidden, the disturbing and the Gothic that were part of the Romantic and Victorian imagination. But if we allow our minds to wander before the painting, we can see how its very openness to interpretation enables it to convey an understanding of Langebro as an in-between place – a place of transit between different realities and yet, at the same time, a stable and well-known location in Copenhagen. The moonlit scene causes the viewer to vacillate between quietly contemplating the bridge as an urban motif and seeing it as a vehicle of locomotion. Yet the painter’s real point of interest – or topic – has been left outside the frame: we as spectators will never see what the people in the painting are seeing. We are thus left with the bridge as something that teases our imagination.

In Denmark, we have been taught to see the Golden Age as a period when Danish art and culture flourished. But we also know that the Golden Age developed against the backdrop of a series of political and economic catastrophes: it was a time when war, defeat, fire and bankruptcy were on everybody’s mind. In other words, it was a period of change and disruption. According to Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, the Golden Age generation had lost its moorings but carried on without complaint, as if all those changes and transitions could be overlooked or forgotten. True to the Biedermeier ideology, people of the period stuck prudently to what was closest to them: family, king and country (Nørregård-Nielsen 1987, 35). So when we are using cultural products such as Eckersberg’s painting to gain insight into Golden Age urban culture, we should remain aware that the harmonious, peaceful world these products often depict may be only a surface phenomenon. Just outside the picture frame, a very different and uncanny urban reality was to be found. This was an urban culture that was more alive and more variegated than it was golden, more agitated than harmonious, a culture undergoing overwhelming transformation. The uncanny sentiments surrounding Langebro in Eckersberg’s picture may reflect this.

Langebro was important to other cultural figures of the Golden Age too. It is a potent symbol in an early book by one of the period’s most celebrated writers, Andersen’s A Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of Amager in the Years 1828 and 1829 ([1829] 2005). The title reveals the book’s topic – a journey – but not the genre of fantastic realism to which it belongs. In fact, Andersen’s protagonist has barely set out on his journey before he is confronted with Langebro. The confrontation entails an almost existential choice with consequences for the development of the story, both literally and literarily. In a sequence at the beginning of the book, Langebro and Knippelsbro, the second bridge connecting central Copenhagen and Christianshavn, are manifested allegorically as a pair of sylphlike women. The Knippelsbro woman is described in terms worthy of a heroine in a romance novel: she has beautiful eyes, a sweet strawberry mouth and a slim waist. The other woman – that is, Langebro – is described as a dying Heloise in whose eyes one can clearly read the last act of a tragedy. Both women want Andersen to follow them across their respective bridges. As he writes:

jeg var Hercules paa Skilleveien. – Amagerkonen var saare veltalende; ≫følg mig, ≪ sagde hun… Følger Du derimod Jomfruen her, flagrer i Phantasiens lystige Flugt og bygger brogede Trylleslotte, da vil disse snart styrte, thi Grundvolden, den classiske Dannelse, det dybe, philosophiske Blik mangler Dig. Hun er en Datter af Manden, som gjemmer Nøglerne til Druknehuset, hvilke jeg seer hun har listet fra den Gamle i Aften. Din hele Reise vil hun gjøre til en Spøgelsehistorie … Den Blege sagde Intet, men i dette Intet laae der langt mere end i hele den Andens lange Tale; bleg, men venlig stod hun for mig, og vinkede – som Aanden i Hamlet. Underlige brogede Phantasiebilleder svævede rundt om hende, og syntes, halv i Spøg, halv i Alvor, at opføre luftige Dandse (Andersen [1829] 2005, 9–12).

Andersen chooses to walk with the pale woman across Langebro, and the story follows suit, leaving behind classical references and structuring principles, and opening instead onto a world of Gothic mystery and darkness, of allegory rather than symbol. Again, as in Eckersberg’s painting, Langebro is a place with the potential to transform reality, a stage on which to experience brief episodes. But in Andersen’s case we leave both the tragic and comic stage sets behind and enter a scene that looks more pastoral, or even satirical. The choice of Langebro here is a journey into a magical parallel universe, where the otherwise well-known area between inner Copenhagen and the eastern tip of Amager teems with ghosts and mysterious creatures. From the outset, Langebro embodies all these features while simultaneously providing concrete passage into this enchanting land. If these features qualify Langebro as a spatial figure insofar as it embodies cultural significations that surpass its functionality as a bridge, the question is what this unsettling but alluring imagery can tell us about Golden Age Copenhagen.

Langebro also appears in the work of Kierkegaard, for whom it represents a zone of transition between the busy capital and the quiet, abandoned island of Christianshavn. Established for the city’s merchants during the seventeenth century – a time of economic crisis – Christianshavn in Kierkegaard’s day was dominated by the large, empty warehouses of companies that had not survived the hard times (Munck 1867, 12–13). It was a poor, rundown area. Kierkegaard writes:

Langebro har sit Navn af Længden, som Bro er den nemlig lang, men Broens Længde som Vei er ikke betydelig, hvad man let overbeviser sig om ved at tilbagelægge den. Naar man saa staar paa den anden Side: paa Christianshavn, saa synes det igjen, at Broen dog maa være lang, thi man er som langt, meget langt borte fra Kjøbenhavn. Man mærker strax, at man ikke er i en Hoved- og Residentsstad; man savner i en vis Forstand Støien og Færdselen paa Gaderne. […] Paa Christianshavn derimod hersker der en stille Rolighed. Man synes der ikke at kjende de Formaal og Hensigter, som sætte Hovedstadens Borgere i saa støiende og saa travl Virksomhed, ikke at kjende de Forskjelligheder, som ligge til Grund for Hovedstadens larmende Bevægelse. Det er ikke her som bevægedes, ja som rystedes jorden under een, man staaer saa sikkert som nogen Stjerne- eller Vandkiger for Iagttagelsens Skyld kunde ønske det. Man seer sig forgjeves om efter hiint Hovedstadens sociale Poscimur, hvor det gaaer saa let til at gaae med, hvor man hvert Øieblik kan blive af med sig selv, hver Time finde Plads i en Omnibus, overalt omgiven af Afledere; her føler man sig forladt og fangen i den Stilhed, der isolerer een, hvor man ikke kan blive af med sig selv, hvor man overalt omgives af Ikke-Ledere (Kierkegaard [1846] 1962, 291).

In this passage, the striking difference between Christianshavn and inner Copenhagen causes the latter to appear both nearby and far away at the same time. This prompts Kierkegaard to regard the island of Christianshavn as a mirror image of the city of Copenhagen, even though the island is located at the city’s heart: Christianshavn is a dead city-within-the-city whose silence produces an experience of emptiness and alienation. For Kierkegaard, this in turn becomes a striking measure of what characterises urban life in all its complexity, behind the scenes of the bustling capital (Steiner 2014, chapter three).

Kierkegaard is often cited for his negative take on the modern aspects of urban culture, a modernity being witnessed for the first time, albeit on a small scale, in Golden Age Copenhagen. In a book from 1846, he presents the busyness of the metropolitan environment from a more negative perspective than in the passage quoted above (Kierkegaard 1846). Here, he describes the overflow of superficial “diverters” in the city, where modern urban life bombards the senses of the individual, a theme that became familiar in later theories of the modern city, including the work of Simmel (1903, 185–206). In Kierkegaard’s optics, this situation of overload diverts modern humanity from real issues of existential and religious significance.

However, in the anecdote about Langebro, the dialectical tension that Kierkegaard finds in the opposition between the busyness of inner Copenhagen and the emptiness of Christianshavn builds a different kind of analysis, indicating a more positive vision of the overwhelming character of urban life. Indeed, the text can be seen as attempting to mark out how the modern city provides a lifeworld and a setting that conditions and even invigorates human existence. Rather than seeing the city as facilitating modern humanity’s descent into meaninglessness, Kierkegaard points to a potentially positive structure of references, thereby portraying the city as a potential source of orientation – echoing its discussion by means of the phenomenological vocabulary that I introduced at the beginning of this article.

The concept of “diverters”, which Kierkegaard invents in this text, represents a kind of tension that in his view creates a healthy frame for the modern urban dweller. The emptiness of Christianshavn alerts Kierkegaard to the importance of the messiness and richness of city life, and Langebro itself incarnates this dialectical tension. In this messiness, we find the surplus of signification that came across in the other two representations of Langebro as uncanny or unsettling. In this case, it is the emptiness that is unsettling. But if we consider all these representations together, the experience of walking across Langebro with Kierkegaard points again to the same understanding: there is something else to be found beneath the golden lustre of the Golden Age. When Langebro takes us to the far too tranquil stetting of Christianshavn, we leave behind the city and urbanity in their Golden Age form. Quietness is not synonymous with harmony; it has unsettling qualities. A quiet city is a dead city, deeply uncanny in its non-urbanness.

Ultimately, as in Eckersberg’s painting and Andersen’s tale, Kierkegaard’s representation of the experience of walking across Langebro reveals the existence of a richer, more complex urbanity than the tranquil settings that are often found in representations of Golden Age culture. It is an urbanity that covers the entire spectrum, ranging from a dense, lively urban environment that places strain on our sensory apparatus, to an abandoned nothingness indicative of the period’s difficult political and economic circumstances. Again, Langebro is a vehicle that both separates and brings together these different realities, oscillating between tragic, comic and even satirical frames. It reveals that a horizon it is not stable and unified for everyone; rather, its function depends on one’s own background and situated interpretation.

5 An Ambiguous Act of Bridging

If the city is a stage, a status embodied in particular places, figures or things, the question that now arises is this: how can we capture the evocative power of an example such as Langebro, not only theoretically but also in a way that builds a bridge between representational material and the actual experience of the city? In his work on modern Berlin, literary and cultural scholar Andrew Webber suggests one possible interpretive strategy or methodology by considering particular cultural representations of the urban realm, its figures and places, which he calls “topological”. He suggests that we look for:

A succession of what might be called epistemic topoi, spatial figures that also stand as models of how the city is thought or known. The topological or topographical knowledge of the city is cast between the actual shape of things on the ground and forms of figuration. Structures of knowledge are sustained by cultural topographical images. That is, the epistemological understanding of the city is always bound up with […] the way the city appears in cultural imagination, from both within and without. (Webber 2008, 16)

He argues that in any city at a given point in time, one can find particular spatial figures – places, settings or architectures – that carry and convey deeply seated cultural significations concerning that city. These spatial figures are concretely located in the city, and at the same time they can repeatedly be found in representations, where (according to Webber) they convey specific knowledge about how the city was perceived and imagined at that time. We may say that bridges in general, and Langebro in particular, constitute such a spatial figure for early nineteenth-century Copenhagen. This, I would like to suggest, can help us to articulate the ambiguities and darker elements that lie behind the apparent lustre of the Golden Age.

On the methodological level, Webber suggests that we first look for clusters of representations of a particular place, object or topographic structure in a city, for example in painting, film or literature. Then, by making interpretations of these representations, we should draw out the common cultural themes or obsessions that characterise them. Finally, we should reflect on how these themes might indicate wider sentiments or structures that characterise the city in question at a particular point in time. The assumption is that how we imagine architecture, a city or an urban landscape in art and culture is related to how we use and perceive that city or landscape, but in a way that is rarely foregrounded in our attention. By interpreting visual or textual representations of a city, we may thus uncover hidden knowledge about it – its order, character, ethos and people, and the stories or myths we have become used to telling about them.

Thus, by treating Langebro as a spatial figure, we can develop an alternative interpretive strategy for considering representations of Copenhagen’s Golden Age, uncovering the very different reality that lies beneath the shiny surface of so many representations of the city from the period. Bearing in mind the tangled cultural significations surrounding Langebro, we can bring this discussion up to date by considering the epistemological potential of other bridges in and around Copenhagen – for example, the central place accorded to the Øresund Bridge in the internationally acclaimed Danish/Swedish TV series Bron/Broen (2011–2013). But we can also return to the Langebro of today to see if it still possesses the potential to bring out ambiguities in contemporary discourses about urbanity and the city, and to ask whether it still allows one to see oneself in the city – that is, whether it can still be regarded as an uncanny stage. In other words, we can think about the extent to which Langebro has a performative aspect, and if so, what that aspect entails.

When it comes to Langebro, as mentioned, the bridge today constitutes a nodal traffic point in the city – as one becomes acutely aware when the traffic stops because the bridge is being pulled up to allow a ship to pass. It thus provides the urban traveller with a break while journeying through the city, a break that is often unwelcome but can also stimulate reflection on the rhythms, states, and moods of urban life. Langebro constantly draws attention to the tension between being on the move and standing still in the city. Even nowadays, when Langebro stops traffic by letting ships sail between its raised ‘arms’ allows us to think about urban culture in a way that goes against the grain of one of the key underlying myths about the ideal or “golden” city – the myth that traffic movement is smooth and never stops, which Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells famously coined as a “space of flow” (Castells 1989, 126–171). But this should be regarded as one of today’s chief fictions when it comes to understandings of urban life (Carl and Parry 2000, 6). The bridge thus remains a spatial figure that we can use to point to the different, more complex realities of urban life, behind the smooth surface also of contemporary discourse. Langebro provides access to narratives about the city’s horizon as something that still provides a foundation for citizens today, but it does so in a way that counterposes such overarching and overpowering discourses.