From Auschwitz to the West Indies: The impact of Holocaust memory on Thorkild Hansen’s “slave trilogy”

Abstract

In 1971, the Danish author Thorkild Hansen was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his trilogy of books exploring Danish colonialism and slave trade. Hansen’s books were the first widely read and critically acclaimed accounts of Denmark’s history of slavery. Hansen started writing the books after a visit to Auschwitz in 1965. In this article, we explore the genesis of these books, and the impact of holocaust memory on Hansen’s narrative of slavery in the Danish West Indies. We argue that the trilogy’s portrayal of slavery can be understood by employing the framework of multidirectional memory, particularly the idea of anachronistic aesthetics.

In 1971, the Danish author Thorkild Hansen was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize for a trilogy of documentary fiction that dealt with the history of Danish colonialism and participation in the transatlantic slave trade. The “slave trilogy,” as it is often called, was a resounding commercial success that also brought Hansen much acclaim from contemporary critics (Frederiksen, 2012: 117–120, 123, 128–129).

In later years, the slave trilogy has been remembered as an early and crucial intervention in the public memory of Danish participation in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Henningsen, 2017: 420–422; Jensen, 2018: 43–44; Stecher-Hansen, 1997, 2008; Thisted, 2008: 12). As scholars have previously pointed out, Denmark’s possession of the West Indian colonies of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, and the transatlantic trade in sugar and African slaves between colonies and metropole, had never been completely forgotten nor suppressed in Denmark. The historiography and public remembrance of Denmark’s colonial empire had thus far, however, been marked by “colonial nostalgia” or a sense of national “exceptionalism,” suggesting that the nature of Danish colonial rule, and even the Danish slave trade, had been comparatively benevolent among European nations (Andersen, 2013; Brimnes, 2021: 22–24; Henningsen, 2017: 418–420; Jensen, 2018; Olwig, 2003; Thisted, 2008; Weiss, 2023). One of Hansen’s explicit goals with his trilogy was to debunk this myth of national exceptionalism and to expose the brutal realities of the slave trade on the West coast of Africa (in Slavernes Kyst from 1967), the transport of slaves across the Middle Passage (Slavernes Skib, 1969), and the plantation societies of the Danish West Indies (Slavernes Øer, 1970). Although he was not the first to write about these topics in Denmark, Hansen was the first to write a popular account that deliberately and forcefully undermined any collective sense of self-satisfaction with regard to the country’s colonial history.

The slave trilogy also had an impact in Norway, where the three volumes were well received among critics. The moral confrontation against national complacency inherent in Hansen’s project had potential force also there: Until 1814, the kingdoms of Norway and Denmark had been united in a dynastic union under the absolute monarchs of the Oldenburg dynasty. The shared history of the two countries in this early modern conglomerate state meant that many Norwegians had also been implicated in early modern colonialism and the slave trade under the Danish flag. Participation in the slave trade does not, however, seem to have figured at all in Norwegian cultural memory before Hansen’s trilogy was published. The fortresses in West Africa and plantation islands in the Danish West Indies had so far generally been perceived as parts of Danish history, in part because the kingdom of Norway had been the subordinate partner in the union since the sixteenth century (Weiss, 2023). While Hansen’s books might not have led to a comprehensive revision of the place of transatlantic slavery within Norwegian memory culture—Norwegian participation in the slave trade is, in fact, still a contested question in public debates in Norway—it was nonetheless an important, early attempt to open this aspect of history to scrutiny.

The impact of Hansen’s trilogy on the memory of slavery in Denmark and Norway is well established in the historiography. What has received less attention among scholars is the complex question of the genesis of the work. Stecher-Hansen (1997, 2008) places the trilogy in the context of the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s, specifically the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the anti-imperialism of Western European protest movements. Stecher-Hansen argues that Hansen’s original contribution was to substitute Denmark for the United States as the target of radical anti-imperialist and anti-racist critique:

In a decade when the United States was a favourite target for its treatment of African Americans and its imperialist role in Southeast Asia, Thorkild Hansen shifts the focus to his native land and, in doing so, touches a sensitive nerve in the Danish national consciousness. (Stecher-Hansen, 1997: 80)

We agree with Stecher-Hansen that a central conceit of Hansen’s trilogy was to employ Danish colonial history as means of harnessing a moral critique hitherto directed outward, toward an external “other,” and to re-direct this critique toward a stark interrogation of the Danish national self-image. We argue, however, that the external “other” was not so much the contemporary United States, but rather Nazi Germany as a perpetrator of the Holocaust. Hansen (1982: 147) himself claimed that the impulse to write the work came after visiting Auschwitz with a delegation of Danish authors in 1965 (NRK, 1971). This direct encounter with one of the major sites of mass murder in the Holocaust was not, however, merely the catalyst that led him to embark on his project. We argue that Hansen’s portrayal of Danish colonial history is also shaped in important ways by the memory of the Second World War.

While some commentators have noted Hansen’s statement about the importance of the visit to Auschwitz for the conception of the trilogy (Frederiksen, 2012: 110; Palsson, 2016: 213), few have so far explored the implications of this connection as we intend to do in this article. An important exception is Björn Lingner’s critical, postcolonial reading of the trilogy (2016), to which we shall return. Employing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg, 2009) as a theoretical point of departure, we here investigate the complex interplay between the memories of the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust as historical events, as they are negotiated in Hansen’s work.

Multidirectional memory, colonialism, and the Holocaust

While the Holocaust and European colonialism are different in several fundamental ways, Michael Rothberg connects the commemoration of the two events in his book Multidirectional Memory (2009). Rothberg’s book critiques the idea of competitive memory, the notion that events in the past are competing over limited space in the collective memory. Often it is argued from this perspective that Holocaust memory has suppressed the commemoration of other traumatic events, such as slavery in the United States. Rothberg’s argument, however, is that rather than competing, these memories have often shaped each other, and their development must be understood together. Rothberg (2009) argues that while memory might be anachronistic in its essence, this is also what gives it a creative momentum (p. 5). Different memories can thus come together to create new narratives of the past, in what Rothberg calls anachronistic aesthetics. We understand Hansen’s book on the Danish slave trade to be an example of this.

In this article, we will deal with the question of how the memory of the Holocaust could stimulate and shape the remembrance of Danish slavery. The case explored here resembles Sarah de Mul’s analysis of Adam Hochschild’s bestselling 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost (De Mul, 2011). De Mul shows how Hochschild employed the “Holocaust paradigm” in his historical work both to underline the atrocities of Belgian colonialism in Congo by comparing them to those of the Holocaust and to highlight the unequal distribution of collective remembrance in the West by positing that the Congo had indeed become a “forgotten Holocaust” (De Mul, 2011). An important difference between the two cases, however, is their respective temporal proximity to the events of the Second World War and, thus, also their connection to different stages in the development of Holocaust memory. De Mul argues that Hochschild’s project should be understood in relation to “an ethical imperative to remember (‘never again’)” that had emerged in debates about the Holocaust sometime in the 1980s. In addition, Hochschild’s notion of the Belgian Congo as a “forgotten Holocaust” was premised on “the story and image of the Jewish Holocaust as the most unimaginable suffering” (De Mul, 2011: 590). Hansen’s trilogy, on the other hand, was written at a point in time where the collective memory in Scandinavia of the genocide of the European Jews was arguably much less fixed than it would later become, and where it had in fact not yet become known as the “Holocaust” (Lammers, 2011: 577–578). Understanding the multidirectional memory at work in Hansen’s trilogy thus requires not only identifying where and how the memory of the Holocaust and slavery intersect in the work, but also investigating what the idea of “Auschwitz” could have signified for Hansen.

Hansen’s Holocaust analogy plays an important part in Bjørn Lingner’s critique (2016) of the slave trilogy, since it has implications for his central thesis that the books were written from a position of “whiteness” in a post-Second World War context in which “white supremacy” had become delegitimized as “a coherently articulated ideology, while many, if not most of its basic assumptions stayed in place, reflecting a state of continued coloniality” (p. 6). Lingner suggests that Hansen’s conscious equation between the slave trade and the Holocaust performed multiple functions. It served to underline the brutality of the slave trade and “scandalise” Danish history by comparing it to Nazism, but it also connected “the German death camps to colonialist genocides outside of Europe” thus blurring “the white/non-white distinction with regard to the treatment of genocides in much (white) mainstream Western historiography [. . .]” (Lingner, 2016: 65–66). While Lingner (2016) thus suggests that Hansen disrupted the idea of the Holocaust as a unique event, what he describes as “its particular status as incomprehensible and beyond comparison by the fact that it was committed against a group that the victors of the war recognised as white,” he also criticizes the trilogy for a lack of awareness of the “racial aspect of colonialism” and a “shared ideology of white supremacy” between the colonialists and the Nazis (p. 65).

While we agree with his contention that Hansen seems largely uninterested in the history of European racism, Lingner’s argument that the Holocaust had become “incomprehensible and beyond comparison” by the time Hansen wrote his trilogy must be modified. Discourses of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust are historically and culturally contingent (Alexander, 2002; Stone, 2024: 271–272). An influential perspective among intellectuals in the 1960s was to focus on the Holocaust as a dark culmination of the forces of modernity, stemming from as far back as the Enlightenment (Catlin, 2022). While extreme in its scope and destruction, the Holocaust as viewed through this lens was symptomatic of certain troubling aspects of modern societies rather than necessarily unique. From this perspective, the Holocaust could easily be used as a foundation for a comprehensive critique of diverse modern phenomena such as instrumental rationality, bureaucratic regimes, and technological efficiency (Vetlesen, 2024). As we shall see, this interpretation of the Holocaust influenced Hansen’s portrayal of Danish slavery.

The first part of our analysis is primarily based on paratextual sources, namely an interview with the Norwegian state broadcaster NRK (1971) and an autobiographical text where Hansen (1982) discusses his discovery of a connection between Auschwitz and the Danish West Indies. These sources document the author’s reflections on the precise qualities of this encounter, also allowing us to discuss what the Holocaust signified for Hansen at the time. Another central concern is to investigate more closely the ways in which the Holocaust presented to Hansen a framework through which another traumatic event could be framed and explored. The second part of our analysis will therefore discuss Hansen’s emplotment of the slave trade narrative through figures, metaphors, and narrative structures derived from contemporary discourses on the Holocaust.

‘There humans had done something against humans that was not very different from what had happened here’: the slave trilogy and the Holocaust narrative

In the autobiographical book Søforhør (1982), Hansen claimed that the idea behind the work had come to him in April 1965, when he traveled with a delegation of Danish writers to Poland, a trip that included a visit to Auschwitz. Hansen (1982) described this experience as life-changing: “there is in one’s own life a time before one has seen Auschwitz and a time after, which can never be the same. Down there something is broken in you, which can never be healed again” (p. 144, our translation). As the delegation left the concentration camp for Krakow on a bus, they sat there in stunned silence. Back at their hotel, an unsettled Hansen asked author Hilmar Wulff how he could “rid himself of these horrors,” upon which Wulff replied that he “should of course write about it.” Hansen (1982) claims that this answer strongly contributed to his decision to write about the Danish slave trade (p. 147). In an earlier radio interview from 1971 with the journalist Birgit Gjernes from the Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, Hansen provided a similar version, only here he added that it would have been impossible for him to write about the Holocaust itself, that “faced with such materials one would stand completely powerless as a writer.” This led Hansen to search for something “in our own history that could demonstrate examples of a comparable human cruelty towards humans” (NRK, 1971, our translation).

Hansen’s choice to write about the Danish slave trade was thus in part caused by the impossibility of writing about Auschwitz itself. On the surface, this explanation seems to summon the Freudian concept of “screen memory,” in which the memory of an event takes the place of a more traumatic event, which it would be more difficult or problematic for the individual to remember. However, a central point of Hansen’s project was to substitute a very recent historic event where Germans had been the primary perpetrators, for a more historically remote event where Danes had been the perpetrators, making the question of comfort or disturbance much more complicated. Such complex displacements are central to Rothberg’s (2009: 14) concept of multidirectional memory, which “frequently juxtaposes two or more disturbing memories and disrupts everyday settings.” According to Rothberg (2009), all remembrances are inevitably marked by “displacements and contingencies” and the “affective charge” of memories is difficult to predict: “one cannot know in advance how the articulation of a memory will function; nor can one even be sure that it will function only in one way” (p. 16). The link between Hansen’s experience of Auschwitz in 1965 and the slave trilogy seems to confirm the unpredictability of multidirectional memory. The parallels Hansen drew between two different, disturbing memories created a space for him to investigate the historical guilt of his own nation.

In Søforhør, Hansen goes on to describe in some detail the parallels he perceived between the two historical phenomena:

There [in the eighteenth century] humans had done something against humans that was not very different from what had happened here, separated parents from their children and allowed the latter to die, and later separated the parents from each other and sent them to different plantations to let them work themselves to death, but the humans that had done this had not been members of the SS, Nazis, Germans, they had mostly been quite ordinary Danes such as myself. I should therefore have an opportunity to understand how something like this could come about, and therefore perhaps also to, if not rid myself of the horrors, then to at least somehow control them. (Hansen, 1982: 147, our translation)

In this key passage, Hansen states some of the major points of connection that he identified between the Holocaust and the Danish slave trade. It is apparent that he does not posit any historical causality between the two: Hansen does not, for instance, claim that the racism of eighteenth-century Europeans was a direct precursor to the racist and antisemitic ideology of Nazism, or that the institutions and practices of West Indian plantation societies prefigured the concentration camps and ghettos of occupied Europe in the 1940s. Hansen’s explicit comparison rather produces timeless, ahistorical similarities that reduce the historical specificities of the two phenomena, instead suggesting that they are symptoms of a perennial human nature. On the one hand, Hansen points out the similarity of the ruthless and inhuman violence against the victims in the two cases, symbolized here by the unnatural separation and wilful destruction of families, and on the other, the very “ordinariness” of the perpetrators. The phrase “humans had done something against humans” is central here: It implies that the capacity for brutal violence is always inherent in humanity. Hansen seems to have believed in the fundamental continuity of human morality across human history. Hansen’s project bears some resemblance to Hochschild’s mode of comparison, some 30 years later, between the Holocaust and atrocities in Belgian Congo, which was similarly based on a perceived similarity between the “degree of violence, torture, and suffering [. . .] while at the same time these notions of violence, torture and suffering are stripped of their historical particularities” (De Mul, 2011: 591). It is interesting to note, in this regard, that Hansen’s phrase “humans had done something against humans” all but extinguishes the identity of both the victims and the perpetrators. In order to make the cruelties comparable, they must first become decontextualized.

If Hansen’s anthropology was based on an ahistorical notion of the sameness of human morality, the rhetorical purpose to which this insight was employed was to remind his fellow countrymen that Danes had in fact manifested the “evil in man” in previous centuries. Part of Hansen’s project was to direct the blame inward and unsettle the complacency of a small nation used to seeing itself as a force for good and, in the context of the Second World War, as a victim rather than a perpetrator of aggression. As Lingner (2016: 66) puts it, it can be read as “Hansen’s ultimate stab at Danish self-contentedness by confronting the Danish reader with a direct historical comparison of Denmark with its historical foe and former occupational power Germany.” Astrid Nonbo Andersen has shown that Danes in the immediate post-war period had failed to investigate any possible links between Nazi atrocities and colonial violence: during the 100th year anniversary of Emancipation Day (July 3, 1848) in Denmark in 1948, merely 3 years after the end of the war, none of the newspaper articles she has investigated “draw any parallels between the recent Nazi atrocities and the history of slavery and Danish colonialism” (Andersen, 2013: 63). One reason, she argues, could be that anti-German sentiment caused by the war “blocked any parallels between the two.” In addition, the relative success of the effort to save the Danish Jews strengthened the notion that “there were no affinities between colonial Denmark and Nazi Germany” (Andersen, 2013: 63).

In Denmark at the time, the hegemonic narrative of the country’s experience of the Second World War figured it as a “light in the darkness of the holocaust” due to Denmark being an occupied country where a large majority of the Jews were rescued by fellow countrymen and had survived (Bak, 2021: 100; Lammers, 2011: 571–573). Hansen’s comparison between Auschwitz and the Danish West Indies, eliding as it did notions of Danish and German national guilt, was thus deliberately provocative. When promoting the books, Hansen clearly embraced the shock value of bringing Danish (and Norwegian) history in close proximity to the brutality of Nazism. During a meeting with the Norwegian press in 1969, for instance, Hansen mentioned that he had begun research for the third volume and had there discovered a “Norwegian that has pronounced sentences the likes of which one cannot find in Nazi Germany” (Lode, 1969: 34). He also claimed that “the worst Nazi torture during the Second World War cannot compare to the inhuman sufferings these Africans had to endure” (Granum, 1969: 13).

Deconstructing Danish innocence: allusions to the Second World War and the Holocaust in the slave trilogy

Considering the central role played by Hansen’s personal experience of visiting Auschwitz in his accounts of the genesis of the slave trilogy, and his willingness to compare Nazism with Danish slavery in interviews, one would perhaps expect this analogy to be centrally figured and easily visible in the books themselves. This is, in fact, not the case: Searching the books for direct comparisons yields few substantial results. There are nonetheless more subtle manifestations of this comparison throughout the books that showcases how the Holocaust paradigm deeply influences Hansen’s narrative.

In his reading of the trilogy, Bjørn Lingner argues that there are in fact representations of “the German death camps” in the books. He points out that Hansen at two separate instances quotes verbatim the same sentence from the historian Jens Vibæk, one of the contributors to the major historical work Vore gamle tropekolonier (1952–1953). In a discussion of the terrible demographic realities of the Danish slave plantations, Vibæk had compared them to crematoria: “The West Indian islands were crematoria, that not only swallowed the rate of birth but that so far as St. Croix was concerned yearly burnt up an addition of 575 slaves” (Hansen, 1968: 143, 1970: 254, 2004: 271; Lingner, 2016: 63; Vibæk, 1953: 254). According to Lingner (2016: 63), this sentence is “clearly a reference to the German extermination camps,” and Hansen “seems to want to make sure that the parallel to the more recent genocide invoked by Vibæk is clear to the reader.” He also finds that Hansen’s nightmarish description of a night shift at a sugar mill “can also be read as a reference to the death camps in Europe,” and that the sequence reads as a “picture of the industrialized, mindless destruction of people in vast numbers, thus connecting the early horrors of modernity with the most recent ones” (Lingner, 2016: 65).

While it appears that Hansen hesitated to make overt references to the Holocaust in his trilogy, the quote from Jens Vibæk is one of the few instances where he did make this connection, although somewhat indirectly. It is interesting to note, moreover, that this intertextual reference pointed the reader to a historical work where such a comparison was more explicitly made: In Vibæk’s section of Vore gamle tropekolonier, he compared eighteenth-century Danes’ and twentieth-century Germans’ respective justifications of the brutal treatment of the slaves and the Jews. Reflecting on the Danish writer Hans West’s (1758–1811) comparison of the treatment of the slaves with that of other groups such as sailors, soldiers, and peasants, in which West argued that slaves were in fact in many ways treated better, Vibæk pointed out that this argument had no merit and that “similar arguments were made in Germany about the concentration camps, that were perceived by the population as pleasant sanatoriums.” Vibæk (1953: 257) further claimed that the conditions for the slaves were so varied that they could not be generalized, but that they could be placed on a continuum between “inherited and well-treated servants and the horrors of the concentration camps” (our translation). Hansen was very much indebted to this historical work when writing his trilogy, and particularly the part written by Vibæk (Stecher-Hansen, 1997: 89). Vibæk’s text, which was written not a decade after the end of the Second World War, is therefore an important precursor and possible inspiration for Hansen’s emplotting his slavery trilogy with tropes echoing the memory of the Holocaust.

Another way in which Hansen connects his project of unsettling Danish complacency with the memory of the Second World War in the trilogy is his construction of dichotomies between German innocence and Danish guilt. In some points of the narrative, Hansen subtly suggests that eighteenth-century Danes were far more morally compromised than their German contemporaries. Considering Denmark’s fairly recent experience as a country occupied by Germans, this reads as a deliberate strategy to deconstruct notions of Danish innocence. In the chapter on the role of slave ship physicians in Slavenes skip, for instance, Hansen uses the German doctor Gottfried Wichmann as the paradigmatic example. While Wichmann is treated as emblematic of all such physicians in much of the chapter, his nationality is highlighted in the narrative when Hansen makes a remark on the language in Wichmann’s physicians’ journal, where he registered all treatments, recoveries, and casualties of both crew and slaves. While the reports are in German and the names and medicines are written in Latin, the few Danish words in the text become revealing:

Some Danish words such as “Qvindeslave” [female slave] and “Drengeslave” [boy slave] have glided into the text. The Germans did not have any slave trade, and the German language is therefore behind the Danish when it comes to trade terminology. (Hansen, 1969: 174)

While the Danish language had become morally compromised by the practices of the slave trade, the German language had remained uncorrupted. Hansen’s notion of German innocence with regard to the transatlantic slave trade was not entirely correct: Germans from principalities and imperial cities in the Holy Roman Empire were in fact “entangled” in this trade in various ways, both directly and indirectly, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This would not have been known to Hansen when he wrote his trilogy, since it has only in recent years become a topic in academic research and public debate in Germany (Bärwald and Lentz, 2023; Mallinckrodt et al., 2021). The idea of German innocence and Danish guilt served, however, to underline that brutality and dehumanization was a part of human nature, not a specifically German quality.

A similar contrast between culpable Danes and innocent Germans is found in the final volume of the trilogy, where Hansen creates a deliberate contrast between two “sensitive” and enlightened men, the German-born Paul Erdmann Isert and the Dane Hans West: While both were well educated and familiar with Enlightenment thought, the former criticized the institution of slavery, and the latter defended it. Their nationalities are again highlighted in Hansen’s (2004: 275) text: “Their backgrounds were nearly identical, but in character and motive they were different, in their opinions and their fates they became opposites. The German fought against slavery and gave his life. The Dane wanted to make a career.”

The banality of evil? Dehumanized slaves and dangerous bureaucrats in Island of Slaves

Highlighting Hansen’s employment of Holocaust analogies in the trilogy allows us to re-evaluate a central characteristic of the slave trilogy that has also been commented upon by previous scholars, namely Hansen’s preoccupation with investigating eighteenth-century Danish historical figures as perpetrators (Andersen, 2013: 67; Stecher-Hansen, 1997: 94–95). The three books are populated by scores of Danes and Norwegians implicated in various facets of the slave trade or plantation economy: as captains, helmsmen, or sailors on slave ships, plantation owners and overseers, governors and other colonial administrators, soldiers, and missionaries. In some notable cases, he dwells at the seemingly paradoxical qualities of men who in their professional lives mistreated, transported, punished, tortured, or killed enslaved Africans, while at the same time displaying unmistakable traits of mundane ordinariness in their everyday life.

Astrid Nonbo Andersen has previously demonstrated how the rise of critical reappraisals of the Nazi past in West Germany in the mid-1960s influenced the public commemoration of slavery and colonialism in Denmark in the same period. While earlier public discussions of the history of the Danish colonies in the West Indies had been largely nostalgic and self-congratulatory, the 50th anniversary of Transfer Day in 1967 occasioned an explicit and severe criticism from the political Left, of Denmark’s involvement in slavery. Nonbo Andersen (2013: 67) argues that this critique “seems to have some affinities with [. . .] the growing awareness among the German youth movement of Germany as a perpetrator nation and capitalism as part of the problem.” Nonbo Andersen suggests a connection between Thorkild Hansen’s critical examination of Danish history in the slave trilogy and the novel notion of a “perpetrator nation” being developed in contemporary West Germany, thus acknowledging an indirect influence of Holocaust memory on the work. While we agree with this argument, our contention is that Holocaust memory also shaped the slave trilogy in more direct ways, and that Hansen’s portrayals of Danish perpetrators are markedly influenced by certain key aspects of the collective memory of the Holocaust as it had begun to evolve in the early 1960s, most notably following the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. An influential strain of historical and philosophical reflection on the Holocaust in this period was concerned with the Holocaust as a bureaucratic genocide, how the modern state apparatus in the hands of the Nazi regime had facilitated mass murder by anonymous bureaucrats. This interpretation tended to universalize the Holocaust in such a way that the lessons drawn from it seemed applicable to contemporary debates (Simonsen, 2022: 54–55).

The overarching plot of Island of Slaves is the development of a state-driven dehumanizing slave–master system and the abrupt demolishment of this system, a system that makes the murderous bureaucrats possible through a process of rationalization without morality. Hansen plots this process as an enlightened response to the problem of slave rebellions, that is to the problem of slaves not behaving like slaves. There are several key events in this narrative that underscore the influence of the Holocaust in Hansen’s writing.

Early in the book, we are told about a large-scale slave uprising at St. John in 1733 (Hansen, 2004: 108–157). The uprising is led by a slave known as King June, who has been captured in Africa and sold into slavery. He is robbed of his name, but not of his past: Hansen tells us that he is called “King June” because he was captured in June, and because he used to be a tribal leader in Africa. For Hansen (2004: 71), it is precisely the fact that King June lived most of his life outside slavery that gives him a motive for planning the uprising, “He had soul” Hansen tells us. Hansen describes how the rebellion spreads all over the island among slaves who used to be free, until they are eventually defeated by French forces.

While the rebels are being chased by enemy forces, Hansen narrates the strange story of how the rebels met their end. King June and his rebels managed to slip away from the French and make it to the eastern coast of the island, “they had travelled to St. John’s easternmost point [. . .] because it was closest to Africa” as Hansen (2004: 153) phrases it. He clearly connects the uprising to the identity of the rebels as non-slaves. Here the rebels drink, dance, and one after the other commit suicide.

The story of King June is clearly romanticized, and Hansen transcribes motives and agency to the actors in this story that could not imaginably be found in any sources. In Hansen’s narrative, the function of the rebellion is to contrast the conditions of natural freedom and industralized slavery. For both the readers and the Danish slavers, the story highlights the problem of what it takes for men to endure enslavement under conditions where the risk of dying is not enough to stop rebellions. The solution to this problem, Hansen shows us, is a process of dehumanization and violence.

This process is laid out in two related but separate institutional developments. The first is the act of conversion. As Stecher-Hansen (1997: 102) has pointed out, Hansen’s (2004: 203) view of the role-played by Christianity is inspired by Nietzsche, as he describes how baptized slaves are becoming grateful for their position as slaves: “It ended with the Negros saying the same as their owners: they were the worst people on earth. They were better off as slaves in the West Indies than as free people in Africa.” While conversion is central to the ideological aspect of dehumanizing the slaves for Hansen, the development of a judicial code for punishing is the main material prerequisite for slavery without uprisings. It is in his description of this development that we most clearly see the impact of multidirectional memory on Hansen’s work.

The process of industrializing the plantation system and dehumanizing slaves reaches its peak in the late 1790s, right at the coming of abolitionism. Hansen (2004: 284–287) tells us of plans for a full-blown breeding program for the slaves on the island, as an enlightened response to the end of slavery: As it becomes obvious that the transatlantic slave trade is nearing its end, the Danish Finance Minister Ernst Schimmelmann is among those who argue for one last great import of slaves, in order for slavery to maintain itself for all eternity through breeding on the islands. In his argument, he also compares slaves to cattle and emphasizes that slaves just like farm animals would be most productive when treated well. To make possible this last great import of slaves, Schimmelmann suggests that the Danish state should give state loans to the plantation owners. The plan would eventually fail, Hansen tells us, because people who live in slavery are not in a condition to have multiple children (if any at all), not because of Danish resistance to the idea. Hansen clearly plots this development as a process of bureaucratic dehumanization, a logical response to the problem of uprisings and rebellion.

One individual involved in the development of slavery that is treated at length by Hansen is Phillip Gardelin, who was appointed governor of the Danish West Indies in 1733. Hansen’s main interest in Gardelin is his drafting of new slave regulations that detailed draconian punishments for a variety of offenses such as theft, escape, or plotting or participating in slave rebellions. The Danish colonies did not have any formalized slave code, unlike most colonial possessions on the Caribbean (Rugemer, 2013; Sebro and Gøbel, 2017: 102). Instead, Christian Vs Danish law (1683) was supposed to apply in the West Indies as well. Although not an actual, comprehensive slave code, Gardelin’s slave regulations were thus a radical step toward institutionalized violence, a step not imposed on him by his superiors. According to Hansen (2004: 68), the rationale behind this law code was Gardelin’s acute awareness that the slaves now vastly outnumbered the Europeans on the islands so that, consequently, it would take more than sporadic and random measures to deal with the constant threat of slave rebellions: “[. . .] you could not keep slaves without judicial process. It was a question of jurisprudence, terror had to be put in a system, put down in clear, simple rules that both white and black could understand.”

Even more than the exposure of Gardelin’s systematic and rational approach to the brutal punishment of slaves, however, it is Hansen’s extended portrait of his career and personality that most clearly reveals an influence of Holocaust memory on the text. In Hansen’s (2004: 66) account, Gardelin was a quite unimpressive man with an unremarkable background that had slowly worked his way up the career ladder in the Danish colonial administration, before unexpectedly being appointed governor due to unforeseen circumstances. Hansen’s portrayal of Gardelin is interspersed with short sentences and adjectives that underscores the image of a correct and capable, but colorless bureaucrat: Gardelin, writes Hansen (2004: 66), “had been something in an office. He knew French. He had a sense of order.” Elsewhere he is described as a “meticulous, thin-lipped man,” and as “slightly insignificant and colorless [. . .]” (Hansen, 2004: 66–67). The portrait culminates in an aphoristic juxtaposition of the separated realities of Copenhagen and the West Indies, occasioned by the fact that Gardelin ended his days peacefully as a brewer back in Copenhagen:

He could tap beer as he could tap blood, and the other way around. He was not of a dangerous, far less of a vicious nature. He was an civil servant. He was a good permanent undersecretary. He combined in his unblemished person the clerks feel for numbers with the civil servants’ respect for rules and regulations. (Hansen, 2004: 67)

Another important character in the third book of the trilogy is the Norwegian jurist Engebret Hesselberg, who brutally repressed the alleged plotters of a slave rebellion on St. Croix in 1759. Hesselberg, we are told, was something of a prodigy in the field of law back in Copenhagen (Hansen, 2004: 227). He is given the task of meting out proper punishments to slaves who were planning to take part in an uprising in 1759. Hansen takes us through Hesselberg’s reasoning, and how he lays out a juridical framework that violently quells rebellion in a way that is economically viable for the state. Of the 83 men arrested, Hesselberg sent 59 “home” to their plantations. The 12 men who were convicted were publicly tortured, beaten, or burned to death as a deterrence. While the torturous punishments are being handed out, Hansen shows us Hesselberg’s note keeping where he carefully noted the misery of the condemned, apparently without affect. The three main figures planning the uprising were set in iron cages at public places, where they lived for 42 hours, 91 hours, and 9 days, respectively. With these punishments, Hansen (2004: 227–238) tells us that slave uprisings were dealt with for good in the Danish colonies.

Scholars have previously suggested that Hansen’s portrayal of Danish perpetrators of violence might have been influenced by the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s reports from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In their discussion of Hansen’s treatment of the cold and rational brutality of Gardelin and Hesselberg, Jakob Ladegaard and Sine Jensen Smed (2017) argue that these figures are, in Hansen’s portrayal, “emblematic expressions” of Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” (p. 126). Gardelin and Hesselberg are both described as conscientious bureaucrats, as cogs in the machinery that helped the system of slavery to operate smoothly. This leads Ladegaard and Smed (2017) to conclude that “Thorkild Hansen might possibly have read Arendt’s reportage, as it was published as a book in 1963, at least it is the same form of banal, bureaucratic evil he describes in his slave trilogy” (p. 126, our translation; see also Palsson, 2016: 213).

There are indeed some striking parallels between Hansen’s Gardelin and Hesselberg and Arendt’s Eichmann. Gardelin and Hesselberg contributed to acts of extreme violence, albeit in their somewhat distanced roles as legislators or judges. Hansen does not portray them as vicious sadists enjoying their bloody work, but as rational bureaucrats whose primary motivation was to impose order in the colonies. This bears a striking resemblance to Arendt’s (2022: 275) central contention, later criticized by several scholars and commentators, that Eichmann was not a “perverted sadist” (as the prosecution had argued in Jerusalem) but in fact “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” a “new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, [that] commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong.” The circumstances being, in Arendt’s optics, a totalitarian state that employed modern technologies and organizational methods to commit mass murder, in a way that allowed a bureaucrat like Eichmann to remain largely divorced both from the physical act of destruction and any sense of personal responsibility. It is of course quite conceivable that Hansen had in fact read Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial. It is clear, however, that Hansen would not have had to be intimately familiar with Arendt’s work to envision the genocide of Europe’s Jews as an act of bureaucratic mass murder in which faceless officials had played a central role. The novel concept of the “desk murderer” (“skrivebordsmorder”), for instance, entered the lexicon of Scandinavian languages in 1961 as part of the coverage of the Eichmann trial.

In the 1971 interview with NRK, reporter Birgit Gjernes mentioned that it had struck her that several of the characters in Hansen’s trilogy were “correct functionaries, just as in the concentration camps, those who sent people to death in their thousands maybe, they were correct and proper.” Hansen replied that Gjernes had here made a “very central observation,” and went on to ruminate on what he called the “office person” (“kontormennesket”):

It is quite clear that seen from a certain perspective, the apparently quite innocent office person is an extraordinarily dangerous person. The German author that I hold very dear, Ernst Jünger, he says about these people that, yes, the one day they may function as ticket inspectors in the trains, and the next day they may function as members of a firing squad. The one day they strike a whole in your ticket, the next day they strike a hole in your head. (NRK, 1971, our translation)

As the quote attests, Hansen was an avid reader of Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), the controversial German author and radical nationalist intellectual. Hansen was enamored by Jünger’s works, especially the war diaries that detailed Jünger’s experiences during the Second World War. In these texts, Jünger portrayed the brutality of this war in a manner described by Matthias Schöning (2014) as “die Ästhetik der mitleidsloser Beobachtung bei umso metaphorischerer Darstellungssprache.” In 1964, Hansen edited Krigsdagbog (Jünger, 1964) a Danish translation of a selection from the diaries that had originally been published in German as Gärten und Strassen (1942), Strahlungen (1949), and Jahre der Okkupation (1958). It is in the latter work, an account of the almost apocalyptic conditions in Germany from the last month of the war to 1948, that we find the specific passage that Hansen quoted in the interview with Gjernes. In his diary entry for May 23, 1945, Jünger related that he heard on the radio that a disguised Heinrich Himmler had been captured and had committed suicide with a cyanide pill concealed in his mouth. This led Jünger to reflect on the character of Himmler, whose most characteristic trait he described as his “distinctly bourgeois” character. One would think, wrote Jünger, that a man who caused the death of thousands would be visibly distinct from others, would have a “terrible luster, a luciferian splendor,” but instead one merely found the ordinary faces of anonymous functionaries:

From this one can [. . .] clearly see the degree to which the evil has penetrated our institutions, the progress of abstraction. Our executioner can appear behind the first and best store counter. Today he hands us a recommended letter, tomorrow our death penalty. Today he strikes a hole in your ticket, tomorrow in the back of the head. Both he performs with the same pedantry, the same sense of duty. (Jünger, 1964: 106, our translation)

Although they came to it from different vantage points, Jünger’s sharp portrayal of the anonymity and “bürgerlichkeit” of Nazi perpetrators prefigures aspects of Hannah Arendt’s later concept of “the banality of evil” (Neaman, 2014: 213). While the influence of Arendt is less certain, it is quite clear that Hansen’s portrayal of the colonial official Gardelin must have been directly influenced by Jünger: even Hansen’s terse style and epigrammatic formulations in his description of Gardelin (“He could tap beer as he could tap blood, and vice versa”) clearly echo Jünger.

Hansen’s concept of the dangerous “office person,” inspired by Jünger, is an abstracted image of a perpetrator as a figure that has been created by the negative forces of modernity: the anonymous and undistinguished product of mass society who is as efficient and emotionless in his mundane tasks as he is when he commits mass murder. While Jünger does occasionally deal directly with aspects of the Holocaust itself in his war diaries, condemning the murder of the European Jews and expressing disgust when confronted with news about the concentration camps or mass killings on the eastern front, he tended to place the responsibility for these atrocities on abstract phenomena that he associated with the catastrophic culmination of a rampant and destructive modernity (Schöning, 2014: 23). Jeffrey Herf (1994: 120) sees Jünger as a notable example of a more general turn among conservative intellectuals in Germany after the Second World War, from a reactionary modernism that had embraced technology in the interwar years to a technological pessimism that saw technology as a threat to society. Not technology in the form of specific technological devices, that is, but more broadly and abstractly conceived as “the entire project of the domination of nature and the vision of a good society resting on the growth of scientific and technological theory” (Herf, 1994: 115). As Herf (1994) notes, the technological pessimism of the German right could serve apologetic purposes, since the condemnation of technology as the primary cause of “the German catastrophe” both lessened the agency and moral responsibility of individuals and abstracted the particularity of German history (p. 120). Jünger tended to reify technology and ascribe to it, rather than to actual political actors, responsibility for the many atrocities committed by the Nazi regime: “[. . .] events appear without subjects who bring them about. They simply happen. Victims are murdered, but beyond reference to ‘murderous technics’ there appear no perpetrators or actors” (Herf, 1994: 122).

As Herf also points out, however, technological pessimism and a critique of “instrumental rationality” had largely become an important phenomenon on the political Left in the 1960s (1994: 119). While Hansen might have found direct inspiration for his critique of the perpetrators of the slave trade in Jünger’s war diaries, the notion that the structure of modern, capitalist societies somehow had contributed to the horrors of Auschwitz had thus become both widespread and culturally resonant by the time Hansen wrote his trilogy.

The implications of Holocaust memory in Hansen’s slave trilogy

Interpretations of the Holocaust prevalent in the 1960s—notably the idea of a bureaucratic and efficient genocide produced by the forces of modernity—presented Thorkild Hansen with a framework for developing some of his central characters and explaining how slavery could be maintained in the Danish West Indies. The narrative in Island of Slaves, the third and final book of the trilogy, is plotted as the development of a dehumanizing system figured as the enlightened response to violent slave rebellions, a system in which otherwise normal men act violently toward slaves, much in the same way as contemporary intellectuals imagined ordinary Germans became perpetrators of genocide.

Scholars have previously seen some of the characters in the trilogy as possibly influenced by Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil.” We have argued that, rather than Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the central influence on Hansen’s thinking on the Holocaust and the Second World War was the German author Ernst Jünger, whose war diaries Hansen had translated into Danish only a few years previous. What Hansen specifically found in Jünger’s work was the image of the lethal “office person” whose calculating rationality enabled him to perform brutal acts with cold dispassion while compartmentalizing the extreme violence and everyday normality in the different spheres of his life.

If the retrospective projection of the notion of the modern “office person” onto a more remote past led Hansen to create an anachronistic and perhaps unlikely image of Gardelin as an eighteenth-century Eichmann, it did also facilitate his project of shattering the hypocrisy of the myth of Danish innocence. The anachronism inherent in this comparison was productive insofar as the eighteenth-century perpetrators were drawn according to a template that would be both instantly recognizable and repulsive to a post-Second World War Scandinavian audience. The “power of anachronism” is underscored by Michael Rothberg in his analysis of “anachronistic aesthetics” in the works of the novelist André Schwarz-Bart. Discussing an instance near the end of the novel A Woman Named Solitude where Schwarz-Bart juxtaposes the material remnants of a Caribbean slave revolt with the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, Rothberg (2009: 147) points out that by committing one certain form of anachronism, connecting two places and periods that were not usually viewed together, the author was able to expose a different form of anachronism, namely the error that “regards as uneventful periods which were actually full of events,” thus correcting the notion of “the Caribbean as an ‘uneventful’ site outside of the dominant narrative of world history.”

In a similar fashion, Hansen’s remodeling of aspects of the plantation society of the Danish West Indies in the image of Nazi Germany brought Danish colonial history in uncomfortable proximity to what would have constituted the definite “perpetrator nation” to the Danes and Norwegians of Hansen’s generation, thus exploding the exceptionalist discourse of benign colonialism and opening the door to self-critical comparisons. Although it was somewhat understated in the books themselves, some contemporaries did in fact pick up on the Holocaust paradigm in Hansen’s trilogy: in his own time, several critics observed the similarities between Hansen’s description of slavery and the Holocaust. One critic described the ships carrying slaves from Africa to the West Indies as “Floating KZ-camps,” and another described a slave ship captain portrayed by Hansen as a “good Danish Eichmann” (Frederiksen, 2012: 123).

At the same time, however, Hansen’s employment of the Holocaust paradigm in his portrayal of Danish slavery tended to de-historicize both the Holocaust and the specific historical events about which he wrote. When Hansen was first moved by his visit to Auschwitz to begin investigating the darkness in his own country’s history, the common denominator that he claimed to have identified between Auschwitz and the Danish West Indies was the realization that ordinary humans like himself had committed unspeakable evils to other humans in both places. Lars Jensen (2018: 48) argues that the impression made by Hansen’s perpetrators, navigating between their idyllic domestic lives and the horrendous violence at work, is “the chilling realization of the inhumanity hiding behind ordinary family life”. The basis of the comparison could hardly have been more minimal than this, the essential message simply being that humans have always had an inherent capability for brutality, ordinary Danes not excepted. Hansen’s interest was thus primarily the dehumanizing and violent system of slavery, and in exploring the figure of the perpetrator in Danish history.