Bornholm Island

Bornholm Island is presented as a small, distinctive world at the edge of Denmark: a place of farmland, cliffs, rocks, and competing local attractions, served by a remarkably small police district. Its island setting initially invites Carl Mørck’s dismissive distance, but it becomes the ground on which Christian Habersaat’s long-running concern over Alberte Goldschmid’s death comes into focus.

Geography and Scale

Bornholm Island lies closer to Poland, Sweden, and Germany than to Denmark, a fact Carl uses to frame the assignment as an unwelcome journey to a remote place. His first response is colored by the island’s association with smoked herring; the novel’s account of the setting, however, makes clear that it is not merely an isolated backdrop. It is a micro-universe of almost six hundred square kilometers, with arable farmland, cliffs, rocks, and a profusion of attractions.

The island’s communities compete to claim distinctions that will draw visitors: the biggest, smallest, best-preserved, oldest, or tallest example of a local attraction. This playful rivalry sits alongside the island’s physical variety and helps establish Bornholm Island as a place with a strong, self-conscious local identity.

Policing and Island Life

The Bornholm Police district is described as Denmark’s smallest police district with its own commissioner, staffed by around sixty officers. It has only one police station left on the entire island. That station is manned around the clock and is responsible for police matters concerning not only about forty-five thousand residents but also the six hundred thousand tourists who visit each year.

This combination of limited policing capacity and a large seasonal influx gives the island a distinctive civic scale. When Carl and Assad arrive, they are asked to wait while officers deal with an excessively loaded vehicle on the ferry they travelled on. Carl responds with a mocking thought that the island’s supposedly atrocious crime should take priority, a moment that underscores how readily he underestimates the place and its local demands.

The School and Alberte’s Death

Bornholm Folk High School provides the setting for a sharply contrasting picture of ordinary island life. On November 20, 1997, its approximately fifty winter-term students, aged eighteen and older, were taking courses in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery. As John Birkedal explains, the day had seemed typical: the students were in good spirits, got along well, and had no sense of danger.

That normality is broken by Alberte Goldschmid’s death in a car accident that morning. She is remembered at the school as gentle, pretty, and probably its most popular student. More than a day passes before she is found, thrown so high into a roadside tree that she is almost impossible to see. The man who happens to look up as his car passes is Christian Habersaat, a uniformed police officer from Nexø. Bornholm Island thus joins the school’s everyday world to the case that will occupy Habersaat and eventually bring Carl and Assad there.