World War II

World War II is a historical time recalled through personal experience rather than treated as distant backdrop: its aftermath is visible in a young Danish woman’s work in Hamburg, while later scenes connect wartime memory to archives, language, and changing relations between Denmark and Greenland. The war’s presence is measured both in ruins and in the long institutional histories that follow it.

Wartime Service and the Postwar Ruins

In March 1946, a young bilingual woman joined the Royal Air Force at Dagmar House on Town Hall Square in Copenhagen. The British forces had taken over the building from the Germans, and she learned that they were recruiting young Danish men and women who spoke German and English. With a Swiss mother and schooling in Grindelwald, she could speak both languages; because she had been too young to join the Resistance, the RAF opportunity seemed a way to serve Denmark. She was eighteen, though women had to turn twenty-one within their first three months of service, so she lied about her age by three years. Her decision was also personal: her boyfriend, a second lieutenant, had gone there six months earlier.

Her memory of Hamburg is organized around the brutal division between comfort and devastation. Traveling from Rahlstedt to the city center took about twenty minutes by a kind of subway. On weekends, the women’s sergeants’ uniforms gave them access to officers’ mess halls, where they could obtain champagne, caviar, Chateaubriand, and ice cream. Yet near Wandsbek, only fifteen minutes from the center, the rubble began: heaps extending to the horizon. The contrast was sharpened by the sight of German civilians walking past, pale and hollow-cheeked from hunger. She recalls that in the six months she was there, she never once saw a German hurry. Recalling the scene, she grips her listener’s arm and exclaims, “War is horrible!”

Memory and the Historical Record

The wartime recollection is not an abstract account of military history. Its emotional force lies in a witness’s specific circumstances: a young woman entering service under a false age, following a boyfriend, and encountering hunger and destruction at close range. When the account comes back to her, she momentarily forgets the setting of the conversation; the past is carried in voice and gesture as well as in factual chronology.

Elsewhere, the novel shows how official records can preserve institutional decisions while withholding the materials needed to verify them. The Cryolite Corporation’s documents are being transferred to the National Archives of Denmark, but some are classified as general resolutions and subject to fifty years of confidentiality, while personal files are protected for eighty years. A former chief accountant recalls that the partly state-supported company made photostat copies of its accounts and that government ownership amounted to 33.33 percent of its shares. Yet even she did not have access to every section of the books, and she suspects that a separate confidential ledger existed. This later bureaucracy is not itself a record of wartime events; it echoes the larger problem the novel poses about how institutions shape what can be known of the past.

War, Language, and Historical Inheritance

The consequences of the war-era political order also appear in the novel’s account of Greenlandic language loss. In Qaanaaq, Greenlandic-speaking children encountered teachers who did not speak Greenlandic and had no plans to learn it. Advancement was presented as a passage to Denmark, education, and escape from Arctic hardship, but the passage was to be made in Danish. The policy’s stated promise of equal rights accompanied Greenland’s official designation as Denmark’s northernmost county and the naming of Inuit as “Northern Danes.” The recollection links the educational promise to a pressure that could erode the language through which children thought and remembered their past.

The novel sets this institutional history against intimate acts of courtesy and cultural practice. As a child newly arrived in Denmark, Smilla was addressed by a schoolmate with a courteous helpfulness that followed his discovery that she was a girl. Isaiah, too, sometimes switched into formal Danish to address her with respect, and in the final months of Juliane’s worsening self-destruction he asked whether he could sleep at Smilla’s home. Such encounters make language more than an instrument of administration: a change in register can express regard, while the loss of a mother tongue marks an alteration in memory and belonging.

The Past as a Living Presence

The novel repeatedly places official history beside personal testimony and material traces. A missing report from the 1966 expedition is discovered to have been removed; company papers remain subject to layered access restrictions; and the wartime witness’s recollection survives through an embodied telling rather than a neutral record. These are different histories and different kinds of evidence, but together they make the past something actively mediated—by memory, language, institutions, and the gaps between what a witness experienced and what an archive permits others to establish.

World War II therefore matters not only as the setting for the Hamburg testimony but as part of the novel’s wider attention to inherited power. The recollection of postwar hunger and ruins remains sharply particular, while later scenes examine how states and companies classify people, control documents, and define the languages through which history can be told. The war is recalled as a lived rupture whose aftermath persists in both personal memory and institutional arrangements.