Fund og Forskning i Det Kongelige Biblioteks Samlinger

Sommerlandets udvikling afspejlet i samlingen af arkitekturtegninger i Danmarks Kunstbibliotek

Nan Dahlkild — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

The history of leisure architecture in Denmark is older than the architectural archives. However, the first major leisure gardens and bathing facilities, Klampenborg Vandkuranstalt, from 1845, north of Copenhagen, designed by Gottlieb Bindesbøll, are very well documented in the collection of architectural drawings, which consists of c. 300,000 drawings by Danish architects. The article investigates how the expansion and growing importance of leisure architecture are reflected by the collection: from resorts and summer villas for the upper classes around 1900 to the growing number of holiday cottages of ordinary people, often designed in separated pieces and prefabricated. The collection contains unique drawings by famous Danish architects such as Martin Nyrop, Andreas Clemmensen, Hack Kampmann, P.V. Jensen Klint and Arne Jacobsen, who designed both individual summer houses and the Kubeflex modular system.

Opmålingen af Øresundskysten

Bjørn Westerbeek Dahl — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

By the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 the former Danish east coast of the Sound passed into the hands of Sweden. This was a serious development in the long-running conflict between the two countries. It meant that the Danish capital, Copenhagen, was at threat from a hastily organised attack from one of the harbours in Scania, especially Landskrona. In 1749 a huge enlargement of this harbour into a naval headquarters had begun. The Danish Admiralty tried to avert the danger by strengthening the fortifications of Copenhagen, but this did not completely eliminate the threat of an invasion of the west coast of the Sound. In 1752 it was decided to build a harbour on the coast for galleys, that is to say, small flat-bottomed warships, propelled by oars and operated by sailors from the fleet.

The lack of detailed maps prompted the Danish Admiralty to order a new survey of the coast from Elsinore in the north to Copenhagen in the south. Three naval officers, under the direction of the leader of the navigation school in Copenhagen, Frederik Wegersløff, were ordered to carry out this task with the help of twenty-four sailors. Within a few months in the summer of 1752 the whole 45-km coastline had been charted in a general overall map and seven detailed ones. The coastline was divided into separate stretches, parallel to the coast, each of which was precisely surveyed, and perpendicular from which the depths were sounded by over ten thousand casts of the lead. Objects in each stretch of the coast were in a distance of roughly half a kilometre placed on the maps by eye.

The coast had never before been surveyed with such precision, in terms of both the sea and the land. Earlier surveys (for example, by Bagge Vandel in 1647 and Jørgen Dinesen Oxendorff in 1689) had concentrated on ascertaining the depth of the water, but did not include many objects on the land.

The scale of the general map, of about 1:30,000, and of the detailed maps, of about 1:7,500, gives us a fine outline of the forms of the landscape and a lot of detail about the villages, buildings and gardens along the coast. When the maps were delivered to the Admiralty in October 1752, they were the basis for the decision, taken on 27 November 1752, to place a Danish harbour for galleys in the bay of Nivå. Before this happened, the maps were copied, so that the National Archives has one set and the Royal Library another.

"Jeg gemmer kun det, jeg ikke kan huske"

Anna Lawaetz — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

The digital turn has influenced art practices and forms of expression, and has created among artists an increased awareness of the archive. The digital turn changes how archives are created, and new strategies for collecting need to be established to ensure that the cultural heritage is preserved.

The study understands the performing arts archive as a living archive that is part of an artistic circuit. Through interviews with ten Danish-based performing artists who do not use the play text as a score for their work, the article examines what the artists themselves preserve and what kinds of record they need from the archive when re-staging or reinterpreting other artists’ work.

In order to get an overview of the nature of the artists’ archives, two axes are used: one that measures the volume and one that measures the nature of the content. Through an investigation of what the performing artists preserve, particular emphasis is ascribed to documentation of the work, documentation of the process and documentation of the experience. In addition, a new axis that deals with the time-sensitivity of archives is proposed.

It is not ideology that causes the performing arts not to be preserved by the individual artist in the study but a matter of chance, of economy in relation to recording and storage room. There is a tendency to save materials that make one’s own works appear as they were intended. Several of the artists have digital online archives, socalled ‘frontstage archives’, which differ from the digital archives they keep backstage, privately. A new trend can be seen among some of the artists, where the performance is documented by the audience at the performance, which calls into question the expressive potential of the material: is it part of the work itself or is it a perception of the work that can be equated with a review?

In the case of the need for archival materials for re-staging or reinterpretation, there is not necessarily a need for the same things that the artists themselves have preserved: here the raw video documentation, work notes, the intention on the part of the artist in his/her own words, in some cases recordings from rehearsals and contact with the bodies that performed the work are requested, in order to gain insight into the method. It is very clear that for the interviewees there is a need for an interaction between certain types of archive fragments.

Surprisingly enough, there was no correlation between artistic form of expression (durational, relational, wordless) and what was requested in relation to documentation.

Finally, the study maps the artists’ thoughts on different reporting formats, where both economics and transparency about purpose come into play as important motivational factors.

Det dansk-tyske ægyptologmøde i København 1941

Lars Schreiber Pedersen — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In August 1947 Copenhagen hosted the first international congress of Egyptologists since the end of the Second World War. About thirty leading Egyptologists from the United States, Africa and Europe (with the exception of Germany) made their way to the Congress, which had important issues on the agenda, including the creation of an International Union of Egyptologists and the re-establishment of the most important international journals whose activities had ceased during the war. The atmosphere among the participants was good, but there was a fly in the ointment. The Danish host of the Congress, Professor of Egyptology C.E. Sander-Hansen, had failed to invite the head of the Glyptotek’s Egyptian department, Otto Koefoed-Petersen. Koefoed-Petersen was far from happy with that decision, and he therefore launched attacks against Sander- Hansen in several Danish newspapers, in which he suggested that Sander-Hansen and other Danish members of the host committee had had links with representatives of the German occupying power during the war. Where Koefoed-Petersen got this information from is uncertain, but the information was true.

In August-September 1941 a meeting of Danish and German Egyptologists took place in Copenhagen. The main reason for the meeting was to address the challenges faced by the long-standing collaboration between the scientific academies in Berlin and Copenhagen regarding the publication of the Dictionary of the Egyptian Language, Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. The outbreak of war in September 1939 had made this work difficult, as the dictionary’s extensive amount of source texts (Zetteln) and archive in Berlin had been taken to safety, while several of the dictionary’s younger employees had been called up for military service.

The meeting in Copenhagen was attended on the German side by the professor of Egyptology at the University of Berlin, Hermann Grapow, who came to Denmark on 29 August 1941 in the company of the director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the Orientalist Helmuth Scheel and the Berlin-based Danish Egyptologist Wolja Erichsen. During the first days in Copenhagen, Grapow and Scheel met with, among others, the president of the German Scientific Institute in Copenhagen (the Deutsche Wissenschaftliche Institut), which had opened in May 1941, the Kiel professor Otto Scheel, and with representatives from the German embassy.

On 1 September the University of Copenhagen’s Egyptological laboratory in the heart of Copenhagen hosted the first meeting between the Danish Egyptologists and Hermann Grapow. The Danish side was represented by the Nestor of Danish Egyptology, H.O. Lange, and the younger Egyptologists C.E. Sander-Hansen, Aksel Volten and Wolja Erichsen. Three topics were on the agenda: continued collaboration on the Egyptian dictionary in Berlin, C.E. Sander-Hansen’s future work on the late Berlin professor Kurt Sethe’s comments on the oldest known religious texts from Egypt – the Pyramid Texts – and the plan to publish a demotic dictionary.

Two days later Grapow gave a lecture at the German Scientific Institute, where Sander-Hansen and Volten were among the many prominent members of the audience, which also included several representatives from the German embassy, led by the plenipotentiary Cecil von Renthe-Fink. H.O. Lange had originally agreed to participate but later changed his mind, citing poor health and challenges navigating safely in the dark as reasons for his cancellation.

On 6 September C.E. Sander-Hansen, Erik Iversen and Wolja Erichsen met with Scheel and Grapow at the German Scientific Institute. The meeting, which had come about at the initiative of the Danes, had a more informative nature and revolved around Lange’s impending eightieth birthday in October 1943 and the opportunity to publish a Festschrift in his honour.

Grapow and Scheel also had a number of other tasks in Copenhagen. In addition to several meetings with the various representatives of the German occupying power in Denmark, Grapow held, among other things, a meeting about another ongoing German project regarding the registration and inventory of German medieval manuscripts in Denmark with the head of the Prussian Academy’s Deutsche Kommission manuscript archive, Hans Werner Pyritz, who had come to Copenhagen on 2 September, and with a German lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, Günther Jungbluth. Pyritz also had the opportunity to give a well-attended lecture at the German Scientific Institute before the small German delegation left Denmark again on 7 September 1941.

Several German government institutions in both Copenhagen and Berlin subsequently considered the Danish-German Egyptologists’ meeting in Copenhagen a success. However, it was not, as had been hoped from the German side, the starting point for a more in-depth collaboration between the German Scientific Institute and Danish intellectuals.

After the Danish-German meeting in Copenhagen, difficulties continued for the Egyptian dictionary’s remaining employees in Berlin, Grapow and Erichsen. Because of the war, otherwise completed works could not be printed, and in 1943 conditions in Berlin had become so uncertain for Wolja Erichsen and his family that they left the German capital and settled in Denmark. Erichsen never returned to the dictionary work in Berlin. The plans to publish a Festschrift to H.O. Lange came to nothing when, after a short illness, Lange passed away in January 1943. The German lecturer Günther Jungbluth had hardly got much further with his work of inventorying the German medieval manuscripts at the Royal Library and the University Library when he was called up for military service in January 1942 and had to leave Denmark.

The Danish-German gathering in Copenhagen in 1941 had no consequences for the participating Danish Egyptologists after the liberation in May 1945. This was primarily due to the fact that the Danish public never found out about it – or rather, only did so very late. In 1941 the Danish newspapers wrote neither about the meeting of the Danish and German Egyptologists nor about Grapow’s and Pyritz’s lectures at the German Scientific Institute, with a number of German and Danish notables among the audience. The Danish-German meeting was therefore forgotten until Koefoed-Petersen brought it up in connection with the public dispute with Sander-Hansen in the late summer of 1947.

Otto Koefoed-Petersen undoubtedly found the visit of his Danish Egyptologist colleagues to the German Scientific Institute during the occupation inappropriate. By bringing the subject up in connection with the Egyptologists’ conference in 1947, he probably hoped to be able to bring the Danish participants, and not least C.E. Sander-Hansen, into disrepute. However, that did not happen. Many newspapers were critical of Sander-Hansen’s actions regarding Koefoed-Petersen’s lack of invitation to the Egyptology conference, but none of them was apparently prompted to investigate the otherwise precarious subject of the comings and goings of Sander-Hansen and his colleagues at the German Scientific Institute during the occupation.

Om forfatterne

- Redaktionen — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200