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Never Ask for Help

Went to an opening at the Factory of Art and Design and finally met M. again with who I tried to get in touch since November. He brought along M., this young Russianjewish politologist and artist who is an intense and beautiful person. She just came out of a desastrous living situation. When she came home from Switzerland in December it had been broken into her appartment and her belongings utterly destroyed. So I said she could live at my flat for at least until after her exams. Don’t know why but I seem to always get along great with Russianjewish people, love their kind of sensitive musical-exuberant sarcasm. Maybe... it has to do with that I play the violin and they say the violin expresses the soul of the Ashkenazy Jews best?

Meanwhile we make dinner parties and spent time showing each other our favourite music. Turns out – surprise - that M. is a big Chopin and Rachmaninoff connaisseuse. She laughed at me when I danced baroque style to my favourite Rameau piece. After one dinner party I. suggested we should talk in our mother tongue for 5 minutes. So we talked: Flamish, Russian, Rumanian, Hebrew, German. It was quite beautiful.

I asked M. how she survives in Denmark with her temper and she said she is going insane.

In her opinion many Danes have a problem to be asked for help. If someone shows that he/she needs help or feels isolated they would quite easily panic, or withdraw and close off. She says it seems hard for many Danes to deal with this kind of emotions because that would remind them of their own fear of being isolated.

M. wrote a paper about jantelaw and the Danish society and I look forward to reading it. She wrote to me: „ Regarding help: People would offer help, surely and I'm sure you've noticed this too. You will never be let down on the street. But the help is offered through an extreme degree of humiliation and Samaritan sense of obligation as oppose to 'listen, let's just deal with it". The kind of assistance that would destroy your self-worth and integrity in a whirl. What i mean by this and the image is: emotionally, it is cheaper to help yourself or let yourself go un-assistented than ask for help from a Dane. Danes have a problem when offered help just as well as when they're asked for it. Or when offered a compliment or a high phrase for achievement. And having lived here for so long, as intensely as it frustrates me I am beginning to feel the type of national guilt many Danes are proned to on their behalf, simultaneously with the feeling of the isolation from "their group".

I do not know if what M. says is true for the general Danish character but it does match my experience being here over Xmas, the celebration of .. charity and love. Without wanting to go more into details. This whole issue is somehow for me connected to what almost all foreigners here tell me: they do not have really close Danish friends. Please tell me somebody this is not true!

image: Marianna Bastashevski

14.01.2008, 17:34