Scandinavia: And a Nurse to Tuck You In

(See Cover)

Like Norsemen of old toasting Balder, the god of light, Scandinavians celebrate summer with feasting and fireworks, music festivals and folk dancing until dawn. At lunch hour, heliotropic beauties stand on every sidewalk with closed eyes and hiked skirts, “mooning at the sun,” as the Swedes say. Restaurant tables are laden with summer delicacies: crayfish, trout in sour cream, fresh eels, wild strawberries. In the milky gloaming that passes for night, Copenhagen cabarets work double shifts, and the nightlong sounds of revelry prompt a tourist official’s tip: “Have fun in Denmark. Sleep in the next country.”

It is the season when northerners finally shuck “winter sickness” and speak soulfully of the Good Life. Above all, the good life of summer is for the young. Graduating high school students, wearing old-fashioned visored caps, swarm through the cities celebrating their freedom. Stockholm’s pimply raggare, teenage rowdies who drive battered U.S. cars, roar up the Kungs-gatan, stop to pick up a nymphet, then roar off again. Mothers and children troop off to cottages beside gleaming lakes and fjords to sail, swim and hike until fall. Except that they usually adjourn to summer palaces, Scandinavia’s royal princes and princesses follow much the same routine. This summer has been different—but then, it’s not every year that royal families get to marry off three daughters.

Red-ringed Date. First to be married in June was Princess Desiree, 26, third oldest granddaughter of Sweden’s Gustaf VI Adolf. A beautiful, gifted textile designer, she married Baron Niclas Silfverschiold, a rich, landowning aristocrat, and will live in a 40room, 400-year-old castle. Desiree’s elder sister Margaretha, 29, also will be in the headlines this week when she mar ries British Businessman John Ambler, 40. She will do the cooking in their Knightsbridge flat, but decided against promising to “obey” him in her marriage vow.

Red-ringed on every royal and near-royal engagement book in Europe is Sept. 18, date of the 21-cannon wedding that will reunite the ruling families of Greece and Denmark. In a Greek Or thodox ceremony in Athens, King Constantine of the Hellenes, 24, will take as his Queen Anne-Marie Dagmar Ingrid. Prettiest, youngest and liveliest of three royal sisters, leggy (5 ft. 8 in.), slim (120 Ibs., 22-in. waist) Anne-Marie will also be the first at the altar—as well as the first Danish princess to marry a reigning monarch since 1680, when Sweden’s King Karl XI took Ulrika Leonora as his Queen.

Grabbing the Oars. In the midst of the scramble to get Sweden’s Margaretha to the church on time this week, Scandinavia’s royals had to act relaxed and be nice to Nikita Khrushchev, who descended with his family for an 18-day goodwill tour of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. There were moments of levity, such as the time when Khrushchev startled Swedish Premier Tage Erlander by grabbing the oars of a boat and rowing him nonstop across a 300-yd. lake. But all in all, Nikita was no great hit anywhere. He miffed the Danes right off by sneering that their prized, highly productive farms are too small. In Sweden, he again rankled his hosts at a dinner by declaring that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been better off since Russia grabbed them in 1940.

Khrushchev’s gibes at Scandinavian capitalism particularly galled the Swedes, who have remained neutral in the cold war and are doubly furious at having to spend $57 million to revise their defense planning as a result of Colonel Stig Wennerstrom’s espionage for Moscow (TIME, May 8). Sweden is intensely proud of the humane, egalitarian society it calls “industrial democracy”—and with reason. From poverty so desperate that hundreds of thousands of its people fled to the U.S. in the 19th century, hardworking, ingenious Swedes have not only turned their predominantly capitalist economy into the world’s second most prosperous (after the U.S.); they have also managed to distribute affluence more equitably than any other people on earth.

Denmark, Norway and Finland have prospered similarly, and in decades of unbroken Socialist rule they have also developed egalitarian, secure societies, virtually unscarred by slums, unemployment, curable disease and illiteracy. To Danes, their aim is to ensure “the greatest possible happiness for the greatest number of people”; to Norwegians, to guarantee “security regardless of personal success.”

Formidable physical barriers, most notably the great north-south mountain wall dividing Norway from Sweden, and old enmities have long separated the nations. Their different environments and histories have molded distinctive national characteristics. From their proximity to Western Europe and to each other in the north’s most densely populated country, the Danes are the merriest, laziest, most sophisticated and animated (their compulsive small talk is known as snak). The non-Aryan Finns are of nomadic Magyar stock and are caricatured as somnolent, introverted and dour. The isolated Norwegians have a reputation for being tough, brave and simple. The Swedes, who were greatly influenced in the 19th century by Germany, are thought of as stiff, shrewd and neurotic. If a Norwegian invents something, according to one theory, a Swede will patent it, and a Dane will be in charge of promotion.

In another parable, possibly told by a Finn, two Danes, two Norwegians and two Swedes are wrecked together on a desert island. By the time they are rescued, the Danes have formed a cooperative, the Norwegians are fighting, and the Swedes are waiting to be introduced.

Nonetheless, an agreement permits citizens of the Nordic bloc to live, work, pay taxes and draw welfare benefits anywhere in Scandinavia (including Iceland, which won its independence from Denmark in 1944, Danish-ruled Greenland and the semiautonomous Faroe Islands), and today they virtually have common citizenship. They are linked by similar parliamentary systems, laws, education, a Lutheran background, their hunger for books and food, the absence of class, race or religious frictions or of governmental corruption. A passion for exercise explains the firm figures, clear eyes and radiant complexions of their beautiful women.

Hard, Wild World. All save the Finns can understand the others’ variant dialects of the same basic lan guage. Most of all, they are united by centuries of wresting sustenance from rocky, grudging soil and hostile seas, in latitudes far north of any other ancient civilized society.* Norway, whose fjord-slashed, mountainous land is only 3% arable, has thrived largely on cheap, limitless hydroelectric power and its 14 million-ton merchant fleet, the world’s most modern. Even in summer, most of Scandinavia is a hard, wild world of trees and water, the elements that drew the first settlers northward 10,000 years ago. Finland’s 60,000 lakes take up more territory than all its farms. Since forests cover 71% of Finland—highest proportion in Europe—it has had to build a strong, well-rounded industrial base, helped, paradoxically, by Russia’s ruthless insistence on huge postwar reparations. Denmark, fearful that it may lose markets for its bacon and dairy products, is also vigorously pressing industrialization.

Reindeer Tongue. The whole vast region, laced with glaciers and rushing rivers, reaches from Russia west to the Atlantic, from the bustling Baltic coast to snow-capped mountains high in the Arctic Circle, where the sun does not sink below the horizon for many summer weeks. The area, including 160,000 islands, is five times the size of Great Britain (pop. 52 million), but it has only 20 million inhabitants.

Nearly half that many Americans have Scandinavian blood. Yet, surprisingly, it has only been in the past few years that the U.S. tourist has discovered these rugged, lonely lands. As accessible as any of southern Europe’s overpriced, overcrowded resorts, the Nordic nations have some of the Continent’s newest and best-designed hotels. Many Scandinavian restaurants are world-famed, and even out-of-the-way farming and fishing villages often boast good inns specializing in robust local dishes, such as gravlaks, Norway’s salted, spiced salmon; fresh cloudberries, a Finnish favorite; or Lapland reindeer tongue. Department stores bulge with elegant objects that would cost twice as much in the U.S. Almost any city boasts a tax-supported opera house and theater; at Tampere in Finland, one theater jutting across a lake has dispensed with a revolving stage, has a revolving auditorium instead.

No Sauna Aloft. Express trains, which kill 2,000 reindeer annually, are fast and comfortable. SAS, jointly owned by Sweden, Denmark and Norway, is one of the world’s best-run airlines, introduced direct Chicago-Scandinavia jet service this spring. (On SAS flights to Finland, a leaflet apologizes for the fact that there is no room for a sauna.) Scandinavians are honest, hospitable, and most of them understand English. One of their most useful tourist services is the summer camp that specializes in taking children for a few days while parents gad about on their own.

Nowhere else in Europe does good design make itself so universally felt. The north has produced few great artists of the stature of Edvard Munch; but architects such as Finland’s Alvar Aalto and Denmark’s Arne Jacobsen are among the world’s most admired. Dozens of northern artisans—ceramists, glass blowers, weavers, cabinetmakers and silversmiths—have made Scandinavia an international synonym for elegant functionalism. Whether in a car or a carpet, Scandinavian artisans at their best blend traditionally solid craftsmanship with a daring use of form or clever technique.

To U.S. eyes, Scandinavia, like its handicrafts, is a happy union of past and present, of comfortable conformity and bold innovation. Skyscrapers live in harmony with magnificent 8th century castles; sleek new streetcars glide silently over cobbled streets. In Sweden, the visitor may be whisked from a new nuclear power plant outside Stockholm to 500-year-old Uppsala University, where the founder of modern botany, Carolus Linnaeus, studied in the 18th century. (“God created,” say the tidy Swedes. “Linnaeus put things in order.”) Stockholm cops, though issued guns during Khrushchev’s visit, normally cling grimly to their accustomed sabers. Proud Viking longboats are lovingly preserved in an Oslo museum. At Drottningholm, a summer palace across Malaren Lake from Stockholm, 18th century operas are staged for the public with their original sets in the only surviving court theater of the period.

Chest of Tattoos. The three royal families are themselves a pleasantly nostalgic reminder of Scandinavia’s great conqueror-kings. Long since shorn of all power, the democratic monarchs are universally liked by their subjects and show none of the condescension that surrounds the British throne. Danes seem happy enough that King Frederik lives in a wing of the Amalienborg Palace in downtown Copenhagen rather than in the gloomy, inconvenient Christiansborg Castle where the royal family lived in the past. And they did not revolt when a too-candid picture revealed that the towering (6 ft. 4 in.), rugged King had a chestful of tattoos. Norwegians felt genuinely sorry for King Olaf, a dedicated yachtsman and onetime Olympics champion, when Khrushchev’s visit forced him to forgo a regatta at Hanko Island last week.

Princess Margrethe, Denmark’s heiress apparent, was the hit of the evening on TV recently when she gave a lively, informal account of an exports-building trip she had made through the Far East. Danes have had a warm spot for Margrethe’s kid sister ever since the King allowed in public years ago that the little girl was “strong-minded” and had “bad habits.” They worry that the princess may be in for political unpleasantness as Greece’s Queen. Many Danish parents sided with their Queen when she tried to make Anne-Marie wait another year before getting engaged. As it was, the wedding was originally set for next January, and was only moved forward when Constantine mounted the throne after his father’s death last March.

Victoria’s Relations. In preparation for the marriage, which will be held 19 days after Anne-Marie’s 18th birthday, she is taking a recorded Linguaphone course in conversational Greek, a present from a Copenhagen record distributor. Meanwhile, since Constantine speaks little French (hers is fluent) and no Danish, they chat in English, which both speak well.

Anne-Marie, who belongs to Europe’s oldest dynasty, is a distant cousin of her husband-to-be*,-and is also a descendant of Queen Victoria, Constantine’s great-great-grandmother. They first met in July 1957, when she was not quite eleven and he was a naval cadet on a Greek training ship. The rumors started four years later. Anne-Marie, who was not overly bright as a student, attended two Swiss schools to learn French but got most of her education at the private coed Zahle School in Copenhagen. One day, startled by a piercing wolf whistle from outside, a Zahle teacher snapped in Danish: “Some kind of punk!” The whistler was Constantine, come to carry Anne-Marie’s books back to Amalienborg Palace.

Two at the U.N. Scandinavia’s royal families have played an influential part in the north’s emergence from the traditional isolationism that ended with World War II. Since then, Norway and Denmark have bound themselves to Europe as charter members of NATO and EFTA, the Outer Seven trading bloc. Finland, Russia’s only European neighbor that has not been plucked behind the Iron Curtain, has meticulously observed the neutrality agreement imposed on its government by Moscow after its valiant defense against the Red army. Nonetheless, the Finns are also associated with EFTA and have strong economic and emotional ties to the rest of Scandinavia.

Even Sweden, which last fought a war 150 years ago, is now determined to defend its neutrality, if necessary. Swedish troops performed ably as members of the U.N. peace-keeping mission in the Congo. Two Scandinavians, Norway’s Trygve Lie and Sweden’s Dag Hammarskjold, ran the U.N. creditably for 15 years. When Hammarskjold died in a 1961 plane crash, he had extended U.N. influence and broadened his countrymen’s horizons. Younger Swedes, who previously showed little interest in world affairs, now generally support Western proposals for an ambitious Swedish foreign aid program in keeping with its affluence. “They used to turn instinctively inward,” says Premier Tage Erlander. “I sense a great change.”

Scandinavians are reaching out in other media. Ingmar Bergman’s tortured film canon, topped by The Silence, has built a worldwide movie cult unequaled by any Scandinavian since Garbo’s girlhood. Half a dozen Swedish singers, from Kerstin Thorborg to Birgit Nilsson, commute between Stockholm’s Royal Opera and Manhattan’s Metropolitan. Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal, author of a classic study of the U.S. Negro and his problems, who went on to become executive sec retary of the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Europe, is currently writing what promises to be the definitive work on solutions for the underdeveloped world.

For all their geographical proximity, there is only a partial pattern in the customs, the people, the cultures of Scandinavia.

Norway has been called the Scotland of Scandinavia, and its people share the Highlander’s hardihood, serenity and national pride. After 91 years of enforced “union” with Sweden, Norwegians won their independence in 1905 and actually elected their King, the late Haakon VI, who led its valiant wartime resistance movement. Ruled for 29 years by the Labor Party, Norway has an economy-model welfare state known as the Golden Mean that costs 5.5% of national income, v. 8.2% in Sweden.

Scandinavia’s smallest, most thinly settled population (3,600,000) is in Norway, a beautiful land that is 75% lakes, mountains and glaciers. To sustain its people, Norway exports lumber products, aluminum and 90% of the catch from rich fishing grounds such as the Lofoten Islands. But the nation’s most vital resource is its merchant fleet. With 2,833 freighters in operation, Norway has more tonnage afloat than the U.S. One man who controls much of Norway’s shipping is Niels Onstad, who lives in a spacious white mansion outside Oslo with his wife, onetime Skating Star Sonja Henie. Many of Norway’s ships are local inventions such as “parcel” tankers, which can carry up to 40 different liquids simultaneously.

Norwegians are the most democratic and bourgeois of northerners, regard ostentation as a cardinal sin. They are also Scandinavia’s most proficient athletes; everyone from five to 90 skis, swims and hikes. And many of them have summer cottages on the shores of the endless fjords; often businessmen commute to work by hydrofoil. Though 96% of the population is nominally Lutheran, the church plays little part in the nation’s life. Says one churchman: “We are suffused with a pale benevolence instead of the antagonism we used to know.”

Next to drunkenness, the national vice, Norway’s biggest problem is that it has too many languages. Riksmal, of Danish origin, is spoken by educated townsfolk; nationalists have promoted an invented “Norwegian” tongue called Landsmal, based on rural speech. Both Riksmal and Landsmal are now official languages and taught in school. “If a man knows eight languages,” they say, “seven of them are Norwegian.”

Finland, a Swedish colony for 650 years, became a grand duchy of Russia in 1809, prompting the ringing plea: “Swedes we are no longer. Russians we can never be. Therefore we must be come Finns.” Finland finally proclaimed its independence in 1917, has been Finnish ever since. An earthy, engaging, moody people who have fought war after war, and always started again from the ruins, they regard sisu, plain guts, as the highest virtue. For, say Finns, “Whatever happens, we will be on the wrong side.”

On the losing side against the Red army in World War II, the Finns in 1944 were forced to pay an exorbitant reparations bill: 17,680 square miles of territory and $300 million worth of goods, including industrial products that they had no means of producing. It took know-how as well as sisu, but they did it. The Russians, who had also occupied the naval stronghold of Porkkala just west of Helsinki, finally withdrew in 1956.

In the shadow of Soviet guns, Finns must be discreet. Even so, many outspokenly deplore President Kekkonen’s servile attitude to Moscow. Kekkonen’s attempt to sell Scandinavia Moscow’s plan for an atom-free zone in northern Europe was roundly snubbed by the other Nordic countries.

The vast (118,000 sq. mi.), rugged land is becoming industrialized. However, wood products still account for three-quarters of its exports, and the government has only recently awakened to the fact that the forests have been badly overexploited. Finland’s wage-price spiral rises unchecked, largely because of welfare state benefits that are beyond its means. The Finns are such heavy topers that the government wraps every bottle of liquor in a temperance tract. More worrisome for a nation of only 4,500,000 is the legal abortion rate, which has doubled in ten years, and at 71.6 per 1,000 is one of Europe’s highest. There are an estimated 20,000 illegal abortions yearly as well.

As they have rebuilt and restocked their own country, Finnish architects and designers have stamped it with a clean, distinctively Finnish elegance that makes Leningrad, less than an hour’s flight away, look drab. To the delight of sauna-worshiping Finns, the sauna vogue has become international, providing Finland with a new export.

Denmark has a special charm, a blend of Baltic wit and North Sea sauce. And the pride of Danes stems from more than possession of Tuborg and Carlsberg beer, or of Europe’s oldest royal house. “The Danes are superb salesmen of themselves,” sniffs a Swede. “They play their little-mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen image to the hilt.” Some 4,500,000 people live in the tidy land north of Schleswig-Holstein, and they wallow in hygge (pronounced HUG-ga), which simply means coziness. It is an indispensable word in Danish that reaches everyone, everywhere. People plan a hyggelig evening with friends; an old farmhouse can be hyggelig; one has a hyggelig time curled up in a chair with a book—free from worry and the trouble of thinking about annoying things.

Copenhagen is a swinging town with the gayest nightclubs in Scandinavia and an easy tolerance that leads Danish girls to say, “I’d rather have a Negro boy friend than a Swede any day.” It also boasts the Berlingske Tidende, one of the great newspapers of Europe, and a Premier, Jens Otto Krag, who has not only outstanding skill but also one of Denmark’s favorite actresses as a wife. Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens may be the world’s finest pleasure park; there, most summer nights the fireworks splash the city with light, and a cannon booms the midnight signal.

In Denmark, the social services began at the end of the 19th century, but were pulled together in the Social Reform Act of 1933. Denmark’s efficient farmers, who own 90% of their land, have largely financed refinements in the system that have left virtually nothing undone, short of nurses to tuck the pampered citizenry into bed at night. Fact is, even that service is available—from members of the Home Help Service, a new wrinkle which provides domestic help for sick housewives.

Sweden is either miracle or mirage. In summer, all 173,423 sq. mi. of it seem to be filled with dimpled, unattached blondes. In fact, only 40% of Sweden’s 3,700,000 women are blondes. The country also lacks such other vital resources as coal, oil and fertile farmland. Like the other Scandinavian countries, Sweden must export to survive. In desolate Arctic wilderness lies Sweden’s treasure, the greatest reserve of high-grade iron ore in all Europe. In this wasteland of rock and ice lies Kiruna, which claims to be the world’s biggest city (11,000 sq. mi.) and exists to exploit the lode. Under floodlights in winter and the midnight sun in summer, its hardy miners and technicians work night and day to bring the treasure to the surface.

In area, population and affluence, Sweden is the envied, energetic giant of the north. It has the highest wage scales, highest living standards and highest productivity in all Europe. In the past 25 years, its industrial output has trebled and has crossed the world. The auto industry’s big success story is the Volvo, sparked by dynamic Gunnar Engellau, the first European automaker to build a North American assembly plant. Behind Swedish industry’s plans to spend a billion dollars for new plant and equipment this year stand such powerful banking and business dynasties as that of the entrepreneurial House of Wallenberg.

Sweden’s quiet miracle has been wrought by a potent triumvirate of employers, unions and government that has virtually eliminated strikes in Swedish industry, boosted productivity and assured its workers the best pay rates and fringe benefits in Europe. By milking the capitalist cow instead of nationalizing it, Sweden’s labor government sustains the comprehensive social-welfare program that is creating “a home for its people.”

What is the lesson of the north today? Much has been made of the sexual and suicidal pattern of the Nordic countries. Some argue that it is all the fault of the welfare state. The statistics are murky and conflicting. True, mating habits in rural Scandinavia may differ from accepted norms in Syracuse or Sacramento. This probably has more to do with rural isolation and the long winter months than with such newfangled ideas as pensions for Grandpa or socialized playpens. In any case, from Oslo to Stockholm to Copenhagen, no one seems to mind all that much. Busily building prosperity for all, Scandinavia has in large part become a place, as Denmark’s Poet-Bishop N. F. S. Grundtvig foresaw a century ago, “Where few have too much, and still fewer too little.”

*One-seventh of Sweden, one-third of Norway, and a quarter of Finland lie above the Arctic Circle. -They had the same great-great-grandfather, Denmark’s King Christian IX (1818-1906), whose skill at bagging the better thrones for his children earned him the sobriquet “Father-in-law of Europe.” One of his daughters was Queen Alexandra, wife of Britain’s King Edward VII; another, Princess Dagmar, married Russia’s Czar Alexander III.