Great Danes in Exile: Part 1 - Piet Hein
by Norman Berdichevsky (Dec. 2008)
Shakespeare characterized a famous Danish Prince, Hamlet, and indeed all of us as the victims of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.“ The same might be said to apply to the entire Danish nation. Its endurance and many achievements in the arts, sciences and democratic institutions were in the last century and a half twice jeopardized by invasion and occupation (1864 and 1940-45) by an aggressive Germany. Many foreign observers and even Danes such as Hans Christian Andersen questioned whether a nation that had so long placed its trust in good will and mutual respect rather than armed resistance to aggression could long endure.
How ironic indeed when Denmark suddenly was catapulted into world headlines by the publication of a few satirical cartoons by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten aimed at the campaign of terror by Islamic extremists and the political misuse of Islam. Gentle and ironic satire has long been a Danish art form dating back at least to the many short stories (“Fairy Tales“) by Andersen and used with great success against the Nazis when armed force to resist seemed suicidal and hopeless.
How much more remarkable is it then, that in the face of antagonistic Muslim extremism today, before which the “vaunted” (cowardly would be the better more accurate term) New York Times abjectly surrendered and refused to reproduce any of the infamous Muhammad cartoons, the entire Danish press reprinted all of them in February 2008 to protest the planned assassination of Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists!
From 1940 to 1945, four prominent Danes - Physics Professor and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1922, Niels Bohr, entertainer Victor Borge, engineer and poet, Piet Hein and architect and interior designer, Arne Jacobsen all took a stand against the Nazis and the occupation of their country. The last three were wholly unknown outside the borders of their small homeland while Bohr was a distinguished world figure and Noble prize winner in physics. Each went into exile but they did so not to abandon the fight but to help promote the cause of their homeland and the plight of their fellow citizens trapped at home and refute the great Nazi lie that Denmark had wisely sought “German protection”.
The German occupation of Denmark was initially in the form of a special lenient administration allowing life to go on normally without any interference except “necessary security measures”, until the Fall of 1943 when an attempt to deprive Jewish citizens of their rights and deport them, provoked mass resentment. The four men who left before then, not only helped give reliable information about their country under occupation, but gained publicity that furthered their own illustrious careers and made them world famous. We can take heart from their example at a time when the lack of will to openly confront militant Islam characterizes much of Western Europe and elsewhere.
A few months ago one of the leading publishers in the United States, Random House pulled a book, “The Jewel of Medina” by first time author Sherry Jones just prior to its publication date on August 12th. The reason was clear - a “politically correct” American academic believed it was inflammatory against Muslims. The publishers say they had received “cautionary advice" not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it "could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment." How stark the contrast between such publishing giants (and cowards) as the New York Times and Random House, long considered to be among the leaders in the world of letters and freedom of expression with the heroic stand of the Danish press.
Each the four Danes had a Jewish connection - either a Jewish wife (Piet Hein), one Jewish parent (Niels Bohr) or were wholly of Jewish origin (Victor Börge, born Borge Rosenbaum and Arne Jacobsen). Each was an innovative and respected person in Danish public life at the time of the German invasion and occupation of their country in April 1940. For “practical reasons”, they were all advised by colleagues not to “provoke” Denmark’s strict policy of neutrality and to refrain from making anti-Nazi statements. To their credit and the credit of all Danes, they refused to be cowed and when no other practical alternative was possible, chose exile.
1 - Piet Hein
Like other Danes with Dutch names, Piet Hein was a descendent of Dutch
colonists invited to Denmark by King Christian IV in the 17th century for their skills in constructing dikes and drainage works as well as shipbuilding. He was named for an "illustrious" ancestor, a 17th century Dutch naval hero (or pirate) who preyed upon Spanish fleets in the Caribbean and is considered to be Holland's equivalent of Sir Francis Drake. His decision to study both physics and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen was considered "eccentric." After all, people told him, it had never been done before.
Piet Hein was born in Copenhagen and was an only child. His father was a civil engineer and it must have been a remarkable example of being "a chip off the old block," a sure sign of things to come, that his father designed the roller coaster at Tivoli Gardens (a perfect blend of science and art). His mother, Estrid Hein, was a noted eye doctor and active in Dansk Kvindessamfund (Danish Women‘s Society), the feminist organization that helped secure the right to vote for Danish women. She was the daughter of Octavius Hansen, a leading jurist and politician whose home was the scene of frequent social gatherings attended by the leading figures of art, science and politics throughout Scandinavia.
It was his mother's influence and his interest in her work that led Piet Hein to design several innovative optical devices that earned him his first source of income from successful patents. These included lampshades that reduced glare and spread light much more evenly than was possible earlier and were at the same time strikingly attractive.
As a doctor, his mother was involved in much of the humanitarian and social work of the League of Nations in Geneva. It was due in great measure to her influence that Piet Hein felt so "international." There was also a bit of the "pixie" about her. She designed what people called an "individual national costume" that incorporated elements from diverse regions of Denmark.
An ardent Danish patriot yet a passionate advocate of world brotherhood, Piet Hein combined the attributes of a true Renaissance Man-inventive scientific genius and artistic sensitivity. Piet Hein harmonized a vision of one humanity and one world with an immense love of his Danish homeland and language. If this seems like an impossible task, it is no more than the equivalent ideal compromise he found by merging the rectangle and the circle into the super-ellipse, a brilliant design element in urban, furniture and tableware design as well as in dozens of other applications, He was a genius in such diverse fields as mathematics, physics, engineering, poetry, painting, furniture design and philosophy.
His elf-like persona made him an ideal "pixie" but he was an intellectual giant and a friend, collaborator and correspondent with Nobel Prize-winning physicists Niels Bohr (whose ideas on nuclear physics he popularized for ordinary Danes) and Albert Einstein as well as with film legend Charlie Chaplin (a fellow "pixie"). He was often referred to as the Hans Christian Andersen of modern Denmark and compared to Plato and Goethe as a philosopher or the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. He never tired of admonishing the world to free itself from "conventional wisdom," insisting that the "trick is not to let yourself be hypnotized by traditional solutions."
Piet Hein studied art at the Swedish Academy in 1925-26 and then physics in the 1930s. While at the University of Copenhagen, he attended lectures by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, famous for his Uncertainty Principle. Piet Hein immortalized his life and knowledge in short, aphoristic poetry, accompanied by simple drawings, thereby creating more than 7,000 of what he called grooks. If any more proof of his versatility is called for, he was able to draw the illustrations to the grooks with his left hand while writing the text with his right!
A few sample grooks among the many hundreds that he himself translated into English will give the reader an immediate idea of their poignancy, humor and relevance. The drawings are equally important and the potentially interested reader can acquire several volumes published in the United States during the 1950s and 60s.
PRAYER
Sun that givest all things birth
Shine on everything on earth!
If that's to much to demand
shine at least on this our land.
If even that’s too much for thee
Shine at least on me.
A Toast
The soul may be a mere pretense
The mind makes very little sense.
So let us value the appeal
Of that which we can taste and feel.
He began what appeared to be a whimsical hobby under the pen-name of Kumble in 1940 following the German invasion of Denmark. At the time, he was president of the anti-Nazi Union and had to go underground. The first grooks reflected his views but managed to be circulated freely for a time because their imaginative and subtle use of irony was often lost on the Germans. In spite of his deeply felt love for Denmark, he could poke fun at himself and fellow Danes who he felt tended to over-dramatize their conception of their own country. In an introduction to a film he collaborated on for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Industrial Council, he designed a globe on which Denmark filled up one hemisphere and the rest of the world had to be content with the other half. This globe became a popular novelty item for many Danes who shared his ironic sense of humor.
Piet Hein had another motive for his Denmark globe. He wanted to show how a small country, "poor in natural resources," could still make a major impact on the world due to its human resources. Piet Hein (he is always referred to by both names) was a master of the art of coining aphorisms that speak to us from the heart, the mind and the gut all at once. They often contain a subtle irony that makes us reflect on the few lines long after we have read them. He was able to achieve this in the languages he spoke fluently-English, German, French, Italian and Swedish as well as his native Danish.
Without a doubt, his most remembered and honored achievement was the mathematical formula that enabled him to design what he called the super-ellipse, the perfect compromise between the rectangle and the circle. The problem was originally presented by Swedish designers' difficulty in planning a traffic loop in the roughly rectangular city center of Stockholm.
The spatial advantages of using his mathematical formula in buildings as well as tables, chairs, lampshades, placemats and tableware has been estimated at 15 percent. The super-ellipse was the basic form used in the design of Mexico City's Olympic Stadium, Stockholm's Sergel Torg (at the city center) and many other similar projects throughout the world. The technical brilliance of Piet Hein's super-ellipse solution and its applications as an important element of what became known as "Danish design" or "Scandinavian Modern." This, coupled with his flamboyant personal life and attractive whimsy, made him the choice for Life magazine's cover story (the first Dane to be so honored) in October, 1966 with his portrait encased in a super-ellipse and the captions "Piet Hein, Denmark's pixie poet with his slide rule," and "Piet Hein peers from his super-ellipse."
In his university days in Copenhagen in the 1920s, the young Piet Hein hit on the idea for the Soma Cube. This is a 3 x 3 x 3 cube (i.e., made of 27 unit cubes) that can be built out of seven different pieces, each composed of three or four small cubes; it became the ultimate three-dimensional puzzle. Psychologists have also used the cube to test spatial skills. An article on the Soma Cube in Scientific American stimulated thousands of readers to make their own models and build imaginative shapes. Parker Brothers brought out a game based on the cube in 1969. If you know a child who is a budding engineer, there is no better gift than the Soma Cube. It carries a label warning against "addiction."
All of Piet Hein's achievements stem from the fusion of art and science. His super-ellipse was the most beautiful blend of the two. Many of his grooks also make the same point. He believed we must avoid narrow specialization and instead strive to build bridges between the "hard" technical and natural sciences and the "soft" humanistic ones. His artistic talents go beyond his poetry. He was an accomplished painter, defining art as a way of thinking about all subjects. He asserted in the grooks and in serious essays that the great cultural divide was not between the haves and the have-nots, but between the knows and the know-nots. He said: "After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein's theory of relativity, now that is a work of art. Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin. Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved."
When he was 10 years old, Piet Hein was sent to Metropolitan Skolen, a traditional school for well-to-do boys, where he had difficulties because of his iconoclastic views on everything, including patriotism. His suggestion that one should leave the room when the national anthem was played did not receive approval from his teachers or fellow pupils.
This is all the more ironic in hindsight, for it was Piet Hein who wrote what is certainly one of the most beautiful expressions of love for Denmark, Når den lyse lærker synger over Danmark, written in 1947 just after the World War II. It is among the most beautiful tributes to his homeland in song and devoid of any arrogance. The poem has been set to music and tells of skylarks flying over waving fields of wheat and the crashing of waves on the shore. The last two stanzas reveal that the mature Piet Hein was anything but the young cynic of his schooldays.
Piet Hein was an admirer of women and was married four times and had five sons. One of his wives was a Jewish woman from Argentina and Piet Hein spent several of the war years there and attracted the attention of the anti-Nazi cause. He had quite definite ideas about women and even wrote on the subject, as we would expect from a true Renaissance Man. He believed that a woman's "soul" or what we might call personality was the more dynamic factor in attractiveness than physical appearance, and that "lady" was often the term applied to a woman who for propriety's sake refused to have a sense of humor, an essential ingredient in any human relationship.
He maintained an apartment in the center of Copenhagen but was emotionally tied to the two estates, Damsbo and Egeskov on the Danish island of Funen. His son, Hugo, continues to direct production of the many Piet Hein art objects and devices that have earned international acclaim. The cities of Rungsted and Næstved recently inaugurated Piet Hein streets and Piet Hein was recently included in a popular write-in vote as one of the 100 most famous Danes. He was indeed a “Renaissance man” of multiple talents typifying the best in Western Civilization uniting the arts and science and a Great Dane.
To comment on this article, please click here.
To help New English Review continue to publish interesting and informative articles such as this one, please click here.
If you enjoyed this article and want to read more by Norman Berdichevsky, click here.
|
