Today (May 5th) is Denmark’s Liberation Day, where we celebrate the end of Nazi Germany’s occupation from 1940 to 1945.

We were forced to have blackout curtains in front of the windows to prevent English bombings, and on Liberation Day all the blackout curtains were burned in large bonfires in the streets.
Now we celebrate by putting lit candles in all the windows on May 4th and 5th.

On this day, we also remember the designer, poet, lyricist and rebel Poul Henningsen, affectionately referred to as “P.H.”

With unparalleled diplomatic skill, he managed to trick the Germans again and again. One way was to get permission to extend Tivoli’s opening hours later at night by designing a lamp that could not be seen from the air, and which can still be seen in Tivoli.

With its soft, focused “hygge” (cozy) light, it can also be seen in countless Danish homes, shops and hotels, often as a pendant, and it’s sold all over the world as a treassured Danish design classic.

But P.H. did much more than that, always in defiance. He even managed to write a song that was on top of the charts for several years.

The reason it became so popular, and escaped German censorship, is that it’s a song about marriage; how marriage turns safety and affection into boredom and duty.

But if you understand how to read a metaphor, it actually deals with how German “protection” was in reality coercion and lack of freedom.

In Danish, the lyrics naturally rhyme, and the lines connect beautifully with the melody, but here you get the English translation of the song “Man binder os på mund og hånd”:

Grasping for shiny things
Is done by every greedy little child
Tie others up with a ring
Is what you do as an adult
Think how often you’ve stood
And shared a window paradise
“All of this is mine”
And life goes on the same way
You tie us hand and mouth
With the thousand fine ties of habit
And it’s difficult
To flutter free
We play hide and seek with someone who knows
To shield us from loneliness
With sweet contracts
We lull ourselves into
Could we ban the three words “I promise you”
Would we have been in love on a more honest path
The words we swore with hand and mouth
They only apply for a short time
Until the joy is gone
And everything is over
Meet what awaits us
And no one knows how it goes
Bear fate without defiance
What lies ahead
Joy at every kindness
But without faith that it will continue
Seek peace knowing
That we have no claim to peace
You tie us up mouth and hand
But you can’t bind the spirit
And no one is captive
When the thought is free
We have an inner fortress here
Which is strengthened in its own worth
When we just fight
For what we treassure
He who keeps his soul upright can never become a slave
No one can rule what we decide for ourselves
We promise with hand and mouth
In the darkness before a morning hour
That the dream of freedom
Will never pass

Poul Henningsen 1894 – 1967

– Hasse “Hassan” Sørensen