Denmark, tied to Victoria’s travels and the case, is both a physical setting in Victoria Bergman’s 1988 journey and a country through which she interprets personal trauma, inherited identity, and humiliation. The Copenhagen diary entry dated 23 May 1988 gathers those associations into a bitter account of violence and national entanglement; later references to Copenhagen and Aalborg link the place to the disclosure that Victoria had given birth to a child there. The country is therefore not merely a stop on a journey: it is where private experience and historical grievance become difficult to separate.

Setting and Routes

The 1988 strand places Victoria in Copenhagen and on the journey away from it. In Copenhagen she remembers the location of a hotel on Viktoriagade, close to a record shop. The route to that street passes through Istedgade, which she recalls for its shabby houses and concentration of hotels, bars, and sex shops, before turning onto the calmer side street. These details locate her return in a recognizable urban environment, while her awareness that she had been there less than a year earlier makes the visit part of a recurring, rather than wholly new, passage through the city.

The return journey carries her toward the ferry terminal at Helsingør. As the train approaches, Victoria considers whether her life might have taken a different course, then concludes that it probably would not have. The movement out of the country does not produce a sense of release: the reflection returns her to the childhood injury inflicted by her father and to the continuing force of hatred. The scene makes travel a frame for looking back, not evidence that the past has been left behind.

Afterward, her money lasts for the trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm. She gives away an eighteenth-century music box she had taken from a farmhouse in Struer to a drunk outside Stockholm Central Station. At a quarter past eight the next morning, she boards a bus from Gullmarsplan to Tyresö, sits at the back, and opens her diary. The sequence gives her departure concrete stages—train, return journey, station, bus, diary—and ends not with a summary of what happened but with the act of writing.

The 1988 Diary and Its Associations

The diary entry headed Copenhagen, 23 May 1988 makes the country’s meaning explicitly personal. Victoria connects Danish and German identities with experiences of abuse and humiliation, and describes Viggo Dürer as German-Danish. Her account also refers to German boys and to violence at the Roskilde Festival. These references are presented as part of her own charged recollection; the entry does not offer a detached history of Denmark or Germany. Instead, national labels become inseparable from the particular people and events through which she has experienced harm.

A separate exchange helps explain one of these associations. Victoria has heard several times about Danish women who entered relationships with German soldiers, and has concluded that a boy is himself a German child born to a Danish mother. The connection she draws is not a general statement about all such relationships: it is her interpretation of the story she has been told and of the boy’s identity. In the diary, that identity becomes part of her angry account of Danish-German entanglement, showing how personal judgment and the history of occupation overlap in her thinking.

Her reflections do not present hatred as a feeling she can simply set aside when she leaves. On the train near Helsingør, she describes her childhood as having been pierced by her father and treats the resulting hatred as bound to her, using paired images of thunder and lightning and of a clenched fist and a punch. Read beside the diary’s national accusations, the passage marks a distinction as well as a connection: Denmark provides the immediate setting for her recollections, but the wound she names reaches back to childhood and to her father.

Later References and Disclosure

Copenhagen and Aalborg reappear in a later conversation between Victoria and Sofia Zetterlund. Sofia indicates that she knows what happened in both cities. Victoria struggles to begin explaining, then says that she had a baby the previous summer in a hospital in Aalborg. The exchange makes Aalborg significant as the place of the birth and as part of a history Victoria has difficulty recounting. It also connects the Danish locations of the earlier strand with the disclosure of a consequential event in her life, without making the 1988 diary itself a complete account of that history.

Victoria’s language about Danish women returns in another passage in a form that expresses her contempt for them and her fixation on their relationships with German men. This recurrence reinforces how strongly the subject has become attached to her account of Denmark. It should be read as evidence of Victoria’s hostile perspective, not as an objective description of Danish women. Across these passages, the country’s significance lies partly in the difference between place and projection: streets, a hotel, a hospital, and a route home are specific settings, while Victoria’s diary overlays them with sweeping judgments shaped by her experiences.

Narrative Significance

The dated headings Denmark, 1988 and Denmark, 2002 establish the country as a recurring frame in the book, although the supplied scenes give the 1988 journey substantially more detail. In that earlier strand, the narrative moves between remembered harm, an immediate journey, and diary writing. The diary’s location and date anchor a forceful, subjective account, while the subsequent return to Stockholm shows Victoria carrying the material onward rather than resolving it through departure.

The locations also distribute the story across different kinds of knowledge. Viktoriagade and the route through Helsingør place Victoria in the landscape of her recollection; Aalborg is named later as the hospital where she gave birth; Struer is attached to the farmhouse from which she took the music box. Together these places give her history a geography, but not a simple explanation. Denmark is at once the setting for events she remembers and the subject onto which she directs anger, while the later conversation with Sofia begins to make one previously difficult part of that history speakable.