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Vest, a ruddy-faced man in his sixties, earns his living making historical documentaries for schools and Danish television. He is soft-spoken, thoughtful, and wary; he says Christiania is frequently burned by the mainstream press. Lillesøe is theatrical and maternal, a night owl tending to the needs of her chicks in the wee hours. Both are veteran players in the theater group Solvognen (Chariot of the Sun), a national treasure that has mounted spectacular staged events in the city, such as a faux occupation by NATO troops in 1973, captured in Vest’s brilliant satirical film Five Days for Peace.
Over Lillesøe’s beef stroganoff and several bottles of French wine, we discuss their work as cultural ambassadors, in which capacity they organize massive, enclave-wide open houses, seminars featuring distinguished Danish citizens, and meet-the-folks events in their home attended by decision makers of every major political party. Vest snorts at the widely held notion that Christianites need to follow the law like every other Dane. “It’s bullshit that the state doesn’t make special arrangements and allowances for certain people,” he argues. After all, he says, there are “different legislations”—subsidies, permissions—governing farmers, industrialists, and owners of historic houses in need of repair.
With charges of usurping government property constantly hanging over their heads, you would think the Christianites might not risk expulsion by openly distributing illegal drugs. But marijuana is the very DNA of Christiania, the gold standard of its value system. The first coin of its realm was the 35-kroner silver fed (“fat,” slang for a toke); it reflected the price of a gram of hash at the time. Fri hash (the freedom to consume and trade cannabis) might be the Freetowners’ defining choice, the stand they took that really sent them up the nose of the authorities while also giving them the defiance to fight.
Christiania’s solidarity embraces even the often intimidating pushers. “It takes some of all kinds to make the world, and so it is,” the militant old-timer Dorte La Cour explains. “We are gangsters and holy men and women and hippies and straight people, hard-working people, artists, and people who drink and smoke too much.” (Vest is somewhat more fatalistic. “We found out here that market forces are stronger than our hippie ideals,” he says.)
Since the 2004 crackdown, cannabis sales have spread “off campus,” away from Pusherstreet. Outside Christiania, those who seek a nugget of hashish might now be offered a bag of heroin, cocaine, or meth. Drug-related gang violence has risen across Copenhagen. In 2005 a Christianite was murdered by a gang member, a byproduct of the battle to re-establish Christianite control in the vacuum created by the government’s anti-drug crackdown.
Michael Kragh is police commissioner for Station Amager, the precinct with jurisdiction over Christiania. A friendly young officer with a spry build, blue eyes, and a quietly steely demeanor, Kragh confirms that “it’s impossible to stop very much of the drug sales” in Christiania, estimated in The Financial Times at more than $70 million annually. “We’d have to be there 24 hours with a large force, and that’s not possible,” he says. “We make some small operations to show the inhabitants that we can come in anytime and take some dealers and some buyers. In a way yes, it’s symbolic.” (An average of about 161 grams a day were confiscated in 2007, according to his statistics.)
The gang wars, Kragh concedes, were “not happening before the closing of the stalls in 2004. The gangs have gotten stronger since then, because they sell harder drugs and there’s more money than there was before.” Still, he maintains, “we never find hard drugs in Christiania.” The commissioner is proud to combat what he believes is a harmful threat to Danish society, particularly to children, but he has no illusions about solving the “drug problem,” in Christiania or elsewhere, until “the politicians decide” how to resolve the issue, either by sending in enough force to squelch the trade once and for all or finding some limited legal accommodation for it.
An intense man in his 50s with movie-star looks, shades, and a suede jacket, Per Smidl is the author of The Sacrificial Blood of Welfare, a controversial 1995 book that is, by Danish standards, a shockingly deviant indictment of a machine-like state that bulldozes individual rights. The book chronicles his Kafkaesque wrangling with the Denmark tax authority, an altercation that led to a 12-year self-imposed exile in Prague. A former Christianite who participated in the Junk Blockade, risking death at the hands of gun-toting heroin dealers, Smidl has just returned to Denmark. He credits the Freetown with saving his sanity. “I’ve heard many people say that Christiania saved them when they were at their wit’s end and didn’t know where to go,” he says. “I’m one of them. When I was a young man of 25, Christiania was the place where I could set a new direction for myself.”
When he learns I am researching this story, Smidl contacts me to say he has an urgent message: The enclave must survive the normalization campaign. “If Christiania is gone,” he says, “we lose the last foothold of freedom in Danish society. Christianites represent a way of old Nordic society, almost tribal. There’s something characteristic about all [its] people, as much as they vary. They stand on their own two feet, they know who they are, they’re able to build their own house, they walk with their heads up, they’re undaunted by political power, they’re anti-authoritarian, they will meet and speak their case, they are examples of people who have retained freedom of expression. This is the only area in Denmark where you’ll find this almost extinct species of Dane.”
“I can’t see myself living in a country that doesn’t have room for a place like Christiania,” KAB’s Nygård agrees, echoing a sentiment I heard from young and old.
“They do not dare to close Christiania forever,” predicts Ludvigsen. “That would cause a civil war in Copenhagen…and be a shame for the image of Denmark.”
The colorful Dorte La Cour, a grizzled veteran of Christiania’s wars for survival, is the queen of the truculent naysayers, a successful visual artist who left her husband to move here three decades ago. I have trouble finding her house on an unmarked path called Bjørnekloen (Bear’s Claw), where it seems every house is numbered 69. (There are no official house numbers in Christiania.) I catch up with her as she is returning from a waterfront cleanup she organized in her imperious manner. (She asked me to join the crew. I declined, being short on time and overdressed for the occasion.)
La Cour tells me she was determined to quash the aftalen, showing me a T-shirt she designed that said “Nej” (“No”) in quaint 18th-century calligraphy. It was a nej to normalizing, to social housing and its bureaucracy, to politi—to everything imposed on Christiania by the corrupt, envious society outside. La Cour brought in new lawyers to help with the lawsuit, because Foldschack, nice as he is, just doesn’t get it.
Christiania has the broad support of the “media elite,” the movie stars, the glamorous big-name architects and academics, the intelligentsia at large. T-shirts reading “Forsvar Christiania” (“Defend Christiania”) are worn throughout Denmark. Even the Copenhagen city council has said it won’t approve anything that the Freetown doesn’t. If the Freetown’s cause is lost in the courts, the city could see hundreds of thousands of civil libertarians marching to save Christiania.
“Fuck Realdania,” says La Cour. “We don’t need their money. We’ll take the case to the people.”
Charles Hayes is the author of Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures (Penguin). His website is psychedelicadventures.com.
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