Nation Topics - Copenhagen | The Nation

The new play "Copenhagen," arrived on Broadway this spring wreathed in garlands of awards from a two-year run in London, is a play about science, quantum mechanics, in fact, and the relationship between Nobel-laureate physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. An evening with Michael Frayn's dazzling new drama will be among the most exhilarating, challenging and involving two and a half hours viewers ever spend in a theater. In London, the remarkable Tháâtre de Complicité has just staged a thrilling new play called "Mnemonic," also about memory, connection and human evolution.

The article focuses on two motion pictures titled, "The Idiots," and "The Sorrow and the pity." "The Idiots," which is a 1998 film that is now being released in the United States takes as its subject one group which is a disorganization of youngish people living as squatters in an affluent suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark, who devote themselves to upsetting bourgeois propriety by "spassing;" pretending to be mentally retarded. "The Sorrow and the Pity," is a portrait of present-day France, as much as it was an investigation of historic events.

The article presents information on the book "The History of Danish Dreams," by Peter Hoeg and translated by Barbara Haveland. Hoeg's wonderful first novel, "The History of Danish Dreams," was first published in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1988, it's a young man's all-or-nothing book. The book is contemptuous of feudalism and the aristocracy, journalism and organized religion, the bourgeoisie and the welfare state, the army, the police, the civil service and the legal profession.

The article focuses on the investigation of the crashed U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs and reporting a fire aboard attempted an emergency landing at Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland. Toxic and radioactive ingredients mixed with the jet fuel in the pyrotechnic display. The plane broke into thousands of small pieces on the three-foot-thick ice. Other aircraft and weapons fragments were suspended in new ice as the bay refroze, leaving a long black gash to mark the site. Into this frozen desert were sent representatives of some seventy U.S. agencies, mainly military, to deal with the "broken arrow," the code name for accidents involving nuclear weapons. Because Greenland belongs to Denmark, teams of officials from Copenhagen also were called in.