It
isn’t easy being the Little Mermaid, who on Friday turned 100 years
old. In fact, since the early 1960s, she’s had an exhausting life as the
target of countless, often violent, vandalisms and other “happenings.”
Thanks in no small part to her authority as a symbol of Denmark, the
mermaid has over the years become the go-to spokeswoman for the agendas
of different groups who use the statue as an ironic mouthpiece to talk
about affairs both domestic and global, lighthearted and grave.
It
started in 1961, when students painted a white bikini on the statue.
Shockingly, in 1964, the statue was beheaded in what should be
interpreted as a political assassination. “She had to die,” Cecelia
Zwick Nash, daughter of the late Situationist artist Jørgen Nash, who
confessed to “killing” the mermaid, says. “She was too naïve.” The
statue’s demise made headlines on the front-page of newspapers as far as
Tokyo and Moscow; a Madrid editorial called the headless mermaid “a
symbol of a world that has lost its head.” In the next decades, the
statue has sported everything from Islamic chador to KKK robes, masks of
the faces of Danish politicians, to Pussy Riot-style balaclava. Dozens
of times she has been sloshed with paint, was beheaded a second time in
1998, and was dynamited off her rocky roost on the 2003 anniversary of
9/11. Every injury is necessarily repaired by her “doctors” at the Royal
Bronzery. “But she has strong muscles,” Jesper Vind Jensen, a critic
for the Danish paper Weekendadvisen, says, adding that he and many of
his fellow citizens “are grateful for the statue.”
The
bronze statue by sculptor Edvard Eriksen was originally, and quietly,
erected on a pile of boulders at the lip of Copenhagen Harbor in 1913,
in honor of a prima ballerina named Ellen Price de Plane who had danced
the title role in an adaptation of native son Hans Christian Andersen’s
fairytale “The Little Mermaid,” about the sea princess who traded her
voice for legs because she loved an earthling prince, but mostly, and
most importantly, because she wanted a human soul.
And
while 1 million tourists come to visit her every year, arguably no one
loves her more than the Chinese. Their love of the Little Mermaid began
with Mandarin translations in 1918 of the H.C. Andersen story;
generations of Chinese have grown up with his tales, and Andersen
resonates with them as a real proletariat: a poverty-stricken,
hard-working man from the slums who persevered to achieve ultimate
success. So popular is Andersen in China that next year a $13-million
theme park based on his fairytales will open in Shanghai.
So popular is Andersen in China that next year a $13-million theme park based on his fairytales will open in Shanghai.
In
recent years, the piscine darling has helped secure the Scandinavian
country favorable trade and tourism agreements with China. When former
Chinese president Hu Jintao embarked on a state visit to Denmark last
year, he wanted to meet the Little Mermaid in person. In response, the
Danish Foreign Office constructed a wooden observation deck on the
esplanade specifically for Juntao’s brief visit, complete with a red
carpet. In 2010, in an historic and unprecedented move, the Danish
Ministry of Culture decided to loan the mermaid for the World EXPO in
Shanghai. Called “a business trip” by Danes, the act had the symbolism
of a small, aspiring country marrying their beautiful daughter to a
superpower.
And
the statue continues to serve in a diplomatic capacity to the People’s
Republic of China. Denmark has long had a relationship with China,
having established diplomatic ties in 1950—the first European nation to
do so. The Chinese government, however, broke that relationship off in
early 2009, after Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen received
the Dalai Lama in Copenhagen. Already opposed to the statue’s trip,
which they called “grotesque,” the right-wing Danish People’s Party
threatened to block the Little Mermaid trip to the EXPO as punishment.
Nevertheless, she went and was received in China as a VIP. The Danish
pavilion, where the mermaid was housed in a blue lagoon, was second in
popularity only to that of the Chinese pavilion, and during the course
of her March-to-November stay, some 5.5 million people visited the
little fish-girl there.
“She
did such a good job,” former Danish Ambassador to China Christopher Bo
Bramsen told me at the time. Indeed, since then, Chinese tourists have
been flocking to Copenhagen. Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
reports that an unprecedented 80,000 Chinese traveled to the country in
2011, the year after Shanghai’s “year of the mermaid,” and the numbers
have been ever record-breaking. In 2012, Scandinavian Airlines
inaugurated two daily, direct routes: from Beijing and Shanghai to
Copenhagen.
On
Friday, the little lady’s big birthday, Wonderful Copenhagen
live-blogged reports of the celebration in Mandarin. Additionally, a new
informational sign was revealed, telling just a little of the Little
Mermaid’s life story in Danish, English, and Mandarin. And, all day long
Copenhagen buses that run routes to Carlsberg brewery and the mermaid
at Langelinie Quay flew celebratory Danish flags. “Usually that is
reserved for royalty,” says Signe Hedemann Mikkelsen, Wonderful
Copenhagen’s Project Leader for the statue’s centennial. “But she is
royalty.”
source: thedailybeast
source: thedailybeast
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