“Andersen Forever”: Denmark celebrates its writer who died 150 years ago

“Celebrating the anniversary of a death is not that common,” observes Eik Moeller, the president of the foundation in charge of the festivities, which will last until autumn 2025. “Denmark has few great literary and cultural 'brands', and Andersen's is a genuine one. He therefore deserves special treatment,” he explains to the Danish news agency Ritzau, in a dispatch reported in particular by the daily Kristeligt Dagblad .

According to Claus Elholm Andersen, professor of Nordic literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), the author of The Little Mermaid, born into poverty before becoming a 19th ^- century European celebrity, still has much to say to the world.

“Reading him today, it is clear that he was a particularly insightful observer of the inequalities, power relations and social differences of his time. This is precisely what makes his writing so timely and relevant today, for both children and adults,” he says in Jyllands-Posten .

HC Andersen, as he is most often called in Denmark, “taught us so much about sadness, gossip, the Law of Jante [a fictional code of conduct meant to encapsulate Scandinavian egalitarianism], snobbery, love, illusion and seduction,” the same newspaper recalled last spring, on the occasion of the publication of yet another biography devoted to the most famous Dane abroad.

In his homeland, “everyone knows the poor boy from Odense, the ugly duckling [named after the story he wrote in 1842 based on his own life] who grew up to become the most famous storyteller of all time, a swan without equal,” the newspaper added.

But the Danes clearly haven't had enough, as a series of events will take place until the autumn to mark the ^150th anniversary of his death in Copenhagen at the age of 70, probably from cancer.

Theatre performances, workshops, lectures, and art projects will take place in and around Odense, on the island of Funen, with the aim of presenting the poet and storyteller in both his “dark and light” aspects. This initiative is supported by the HC Andersen Foundation and his hometown, located about 160 km west of Copenhagen.

Why call it “Andersen Forever” ? asks Politiken . “But, after all, why not,” the daily continues, noting that the author “had a great sense of adventure and a thirst for travel” abroad. “If you add up his thirty trips, he spent nine years of his life outside Denmark,” in Morocco, Constantinople, and the United Kingdom, for example, where he stayed with the Dickens couple. His work, which includes 156 tales and short stories, has been translated into more than 160 languages.

One of the highlights of the festivities will take place at the HC Andersens Hus, the storyteller's birthplace, in Odense, which Japanese architect Kengo Kuma transformed into an interactive museum in 2021. “Flowers of Remembrance,” a temporary exhibition on “life, death and remembrance,” opened there on August 4: it explores the plants and flowers present in the writer's life and work.

The museum has also been offering, since April 2, a permanent exhibition that reviews half a dozen people for whom Andersen “had warm feelings,” even romantic ones, and with whom he exchanged correspondence, excerpts of which are presented. This exhibition will not “interfere in the debate on [his] sexual preferences,” even though these people are of both sexes, reports Politiken. The Dane, who never married, had no children.

In Jyllands-Posten, Professor Claus Elholm Andersen prefers to highlight the work: the countless paper cut-outs, the travel sketches, the thousand poems and, of course, the stories which, “with humor and irony, […] put their finger on where it hurts most.”

More information about the “Andersen Forever” programat this address .