12
“Just Like Coming to a Foreign Country”

Historic Background—Foundation Narrative

The specific details about exactly when, why, and even how many Dutch immigrants came to Denmark in the early sixteenth century are not certain, though local historians have done their best to establish some semblance of a foundation narrative from the sources available. In these stories, King Christian II invited Dutch farmers to Denmark and gave them rights to the island of Amager, either because of their ability to provide superior vegetables to the court or so that they could teach their superior agricultural techniques to the Danish peasants (Frandsen 2002, 7). A royal charter from 1521 outlines the rights of the Dutch peasants, including the specific guarantees that the immigrants would be allowed to maintain Dutch traditions and customs and even to be exempt from the corvée work required of Danish peasant tenant farmers (Hjorth 1986, 9–10). The Danish peasants of Amager were forcibly removed to Zealand, though they began to return under King Frederik I.⁴ In 1547 King Christian III granted the Dutch rights to Store Magleby in exchange for promising to keep their farms tidy, maintain their Protestant faith, pay 300 marks in annual rent, and provide the court with root vegetables and onions (10).

The privilege of landownership granted the Dutch immigrants meant that they could distinguish themselves agriculturally from Danish farmers, who were forced to operate under tenant and open-field systems that focused on grain production, with vegetables and other crops being produced only for their own use. In contrast, the Dutch farmers could rotate crops and focus on raising vegetables, which they were able to sell at a good profit in the nearby capital (Abrahamsen 1964, 6), and Amager became known as Copenhagen’s Kitchen Garden (Thurah and Kaae 1968, n.p.). It is in direct relation to the Dutch success with agriculture that their dress also became well known. Though it is impossible to know exactly what sort of clothes the original Dutch immigrants wore and how they differed from those the Danish peasants were wearing, it is clear that, with time, the Dutch intentionally developed distinctive clothing as part of the literal marketing of their products in Copenhagen (Frandsen 2002, 7). The women’s dress was regarded as particularly interesting, with its “splendid colors and rich decoration” (Hjorth 1986, 10). However, these clothes were not necessarily of value to people outside the Amager Dutch community; Birte Hjorth describes how the clothes of an Amager Dutch woman who married a Danish man from the town of Sundbyøster (also on Amager) were taken back to Store Magleby to be sold after her death, as they would fetch a better price there (19).

This background information makes clear how the Dutch immigrants were not only truly privileged, particularly compared to their Danish neighbors, but also clearly recognized as a distinct group. Eighteenth-century scholar Laurids de Thurah reports that the Amager Dutch referred to themselves as “the King’s Amagers,” and indeed, the place-name became so bound to the Dutch peasants that many writers are careful to refer to the island’s Danish residents as Amager Danes.⁵ From the earliest texts to those from the early twenty-first century, the persistence of Dutch language and customs is remarked upon. For example, the Dutch were allowed to maintain their own judicial system until 1821, and a kind of Low German-Dutch creole was used in the Store Magleby church and schools until around the same time. Several texts attest that aspects of the language continued to be used through the nineteenth century, and that Dutch lexical influences could be found in the local Danish dialect until the mid-twentieth century (Thurah and Kaae 1968, n.p.).

The Island of Amager

As discussed above, Amager has low prestige within the region, is the brunt of jokes as Shit Island, and is generally coded as a place very foreign and/or distinct from the capital. Geographical street names also add to the sense of distance from Denmark. On the island’s north end, for example, street names include Swedish provinces and German cities and states, other European countries, and North American locales, while streets in the south end refer to African countries. Dutch cities are, however, reserved for the area directly west of Store Magleby and south of the airport.

One of the world’s oldest civil airports, Copenhagen’s deserves some special attention here. Today, Denmark’s only land border is with Germany, which, as a fellow member of the Schengen Area, has very minimal border controls. Given the relatively low number of travelers who enter the country at one of its 130 harbors, Copenhagen Airport is in effect the most important gateway to the country from so-called third countries, that is, those not part of the European Union or the Nordic Passport Union (Ministeriet for Flygtninge, Indvandrere og Integration 2008, 3). In 2012, 23.3 million passengers used Copenhagen airport, over eight times more than Denmark’s second international airport (Copenhagen Airports n.d.a; Billund Airport 2013). At the time of its construction in 1925, the airport was named after the nearby village of Kastrup, but it was also close to the village of Maglebylille, which was slowly eaten up by the ever-expanding runways and taxiways until most of the village was razed in 1969 (Jansen 2002, 201).

More recently, the airport worked with the local community in preservation projects. In 2002 Copenhagen Airports A/S sold a historic farmstead to Museum Amager, contributing a deed of gift that made the purchase possible (Københavns Lufthavne 2003). The farmstead, known as Fadersminde (Father’s Memory), had previously been used for training at the airport, but these activities were being moved to another historic building—the Vilhelm Lauritzen terminal from 1939, a major example of Nordic functionalist architecture that is now a listed building (Copenhagen Airports n.d.b). In a single night in 1999, the entire 2,600-ton, 110-meter-long building was moved across the runways on “50 steel reinforcing structures supported by connected flatbed trucks (744 wheels) with reciprocal height adjustment” to an area next to what remains of Maglebylille, just north of Store Magleby, where it was restored and now functions “as a terminal for special VIP arrivals” (Iversen n.d.). But these preservation efforts are not the only examples of refunctioning and reuse at the airport; the airport is also well known for refurbishing its runways and taxiways with materials recycled from the old runways (COWI 2010).

With so much going on in this contained environment, it is not surprising that the island today has a kind of identity crisis. Airport recycling initiatives and the Shit Island nickname are also tied to the fact that most of Copenhagen’s waste management is still based on the island (see R98 2010). Similarly, a debate has emerged recently about renaming the old Dump Road to something less unsavory. While some commentators argue against this as a whitewashing of the island’s history, proponents of the change feel that such names are an embarrassment for the island and do not reflect the significance of its current role in Denmark (see Levinsen 2010 and Dueholm 2010). For example, Amager has played host to significant international events, such as the 2009 International Olympic Committee session and the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, both of which took place at Bella Center on the island’s western side.

Figure 12.1 Amagerbanken’s 2009 ad campaign shows the island of Amager as detached from the rest of Denmark, but also highlights how it is a microcosm for the country. The Amager Dutch figure is most visible on the airplane’s tail fin.

A fall 2009 ad campaign by Amagerbanken, founded as a local bank in 1903, seems to flout the island’s negative connotations by projecting it as completely independent (Politiken 2011b).⁶ Campaign posters depict a stylized map of the island, floating independently, with no sign of the rest of Copenhagen, any of Sjælland, or the bridge, built in 2000, that crosses the sound to connect Amager to Malmö, Sweden (see figure 12.1). The absence of references to the rest of Copenhagen or Denmark, moreover, highlights Amager’s and the bank’s status as distinct from Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank (literally Danish Bank), whose headquarters are—of course—in central Copenhagen.

Matching Amagerbanken’s usual logo colors, the illustrated island is overwhelmingly green, as though it were heavily wooded, with illustrations of island landmarks and institutions popping out from between cartoonish trees, while other sites and major streets are marked in light gray. The sites included emphasize the noteworthy cultural activities and institutions, including the distinctive spiral tower of Our Savior’s Church, the humanities campus of Copenhagen University, the Copenhagen Opera House, the headquarters of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Field’s Shopping Center, and the airport. On the now-defunct website portion of the campaign, aimed at clients aged eighteen to twenty-eight, a video featured a young woman who speaks at length about Amager’s attractions, but who also somewhat defensively adds in a fashionable mix of Danish and English, “Amager will never be totally trendy, I know, and thank you very much, but Amager is my island” (Amagerbanken 2010). Just as the campaign’s spokeswoman claims Amager as her own, so too is the map colonized by silhouette images of the bank’s logo—a man in characteristic historic Amager Dutch clothing, holding a basket of vegetables in one hand and a measuring cup in the other (Amagerbanken 2011). The figures on the island correspond approximately to the locations of Amager Bank branches, while other figures can be seen in the space around the island engaging in “travel”: riding in a hot-air balloon, windsurfing, and emblazoned on the tail fin of an airplane making its landing approach to Copenhagen Airport.

According to the website, the logo is based on the old seal of the Store Magleby schout (a local administrator) first developed in the late 1600s and used until the system was abolished in 1821. It was adapted by the bank for its emblem in 1906 to symbolize its “good business sense and local knowledge as well as the island’s historic background as the royal pantry” (Amagerbanken 2011). While the seal and the original version of the logo showed an Amager man in everyday work clothes, the 1973 and 1978 restylizations (as well as the 1930s sculptural relief on the bank’s main building at the north end of Amager on which they are based) put him in the festival clothes reserved for married men’s use at major religious holidays and special occasions such as weddings (Møller 1996, 56). The costume features very wide, knee-length pants, a black jacket, a red scarf, and an unusual, almost disc-shaped, large, fuzzy blue hat called a floshat (Hjorth 1996, 48–51).

This change codes the figure more clearly as “Dutch,” as this hat was the most distinctive aspect of the Amager Dutch costume. Books on the subject take pains to explain the hat’s origins in the headgear of sixteenth-century Dutch sailors, and its use among the Amager Dutch is presented as evidence of their continued ties to the Netherlands, since a proper blue floshat had to have been produced there. Hjorth, for example, writes that contact with the Netherlands was maintained via trade and sailing, made possible by the close proximity of the important fishing and shipping town of Dragør, only a couple of kilometers from Store Magleby (1996, 26).

But this change also amounts to a dressing up, as the combination of festival clothes with the props of work—vegetables and the measuring cup—is incongruous. Moreover, the male figure is misleading, since it was primarily women who sold the goods at market. The choice can be attributed to a reliance on traditional gender roles in which men are connected with finances. The logo draws upon two of the best-known aspects of the Amager Dutch—their farming and their unusual clothing—and combines them in a single image meant to demonstrate the bank’s attachment to Amager. Yet however tied to the island’s history the image is meant to be, it still required explanation for the bank’s modern clients; the logo is explained at length in both Danish and English on the website, suggesting that the origins of the figure and his hat are not common knowledge. Ironically, Store Magleby is obscured on the Amagerbanken map by the ad’s text; the Amager Dutch figure is present everywhere on the island, but his home is rendered invisible and inconsequential.

Amager Museum

While the Amager Dutch man in Amagerbanken’s logo references a distant, imagined past, the south end manifests the present-day use of Amager Dutch costumes in Store Magleby. An analysis of selections from the February 2010 members’ newsletter of the Museum Amager gives a picture of contemporary costume use as well as of traditional activities, particularly carnival (Museum Amager 2010b). As noted above, the large blue floshat was the standout element of Amager Dutch men’s clothing traditions. Illustrations of the Amager Dutch carnival depict the practitioners of the games wearing clothes not unlike those on the Amagerbanken logo, including the hat. This costume is also represented, along with a woman’s festival costume, in the logo for the Amager Museum. But according to Lisbeth Møller, when it became impossible to get new blue floshat from the Netherlands in the 1840s, the Amager Dutch began switching over to black cylinder top hats (1996, 132). This substitution is typical of the many incremental changes over the centuries to the traditions that are still labeled Dutch, even as they are both separated from the Netherlands and clearly integrated into the Danish setting. The newsletter’s cover features a color photograph of two men on horseback, wearing black pants, vests, top hats, and broad-sleeved white shirts: the Amager Dutch men’s costume as it was known in the nineteenth century, minus the jacket, which would have been cumbersome while riding or performing the carnival games (140–141).

Each man is also carrying a large Danish national flag, known as Dannebrog, which according to legend fell from heaven to support the Danish king in battle in 1219, though its earthly existence is first documented from the late fourteenth century. Inge Adriansen describes how in the nineteenth century the flag underwent a transformation from symbol of the monarchy and of state authority to a popular symbol of unity in the face of national challenges, particularly in relation to the country’s German neighbors (2003, in particular 127–172). An 1807 illustration of Dannebrog’s use by the “Dutch peasants on Amager” at carnival is one of the earliest known examples of private use (133). Today, the flag is used in a variety of private contexts—such as on birthday cakes and Christmas trees—that may be surprising to non-Danes (or non-Scandinavians) (171). At the time when the Amager Dutch began using Dannebrog, Denmark was an absolute monarchy, yet the peasants used this royal symbol as a festival decoration. The Danish flag’s adoption by people who were identified and who self-identified as Dutch is also remarkable because even today it is understood to indicate the group’s self-image as “a legitimate part of Danish society” (127). The situation reveals the extent to which the allegedly Dutch festival has become a Danish one.

Tellingly, there is no caption for the image of the riders with Dannebrog on the newsletter’s cover; unlike the users of Amagerbanken, the periodical’s readership is privy to the costume’s pedigree. In fact, in the entire section “Carnival,” the word Dutch is never mentioned. Instead, the text focuses on the tradition’s longevity, claiming its practice “since the 1600s” and “for generations.” The very names Store Magleby and Amager are sufficient for the in-group readers to make the connection to the Dutch community (Museum Amager 2010a). As is common in “display events”⁷ of ethnic heritage in North America, carnival is presented as pleasurable not only to take part in but also to observe. In an entry on a carnival “preparation” day, performers and their activities are described in the present tense: “The barrel painter decorates the carnival barrel according to local, historical tradition. The saddle-maker inspects and repairs the horse’s ‘snekketøj’ [shell-decorated tack]. The horse’s mane and tail are braided and decorated with ribbon. The boys decorate their bicycles for their own ‘carnival-ride.’” Potential spectators are exhorted to “also experience two small girls being dressed as carnival brides” (13–14).

Not only is the Dutch background of the activities not mentioned, neither are the activities explained. The uncommon term snekketøj is marked by quotation marks as being unusual, but it is not defined. What exactly is the boys’ “own ‘carnival-ride’”? Why are the girls dressed up as brides, and what does it have to do with carnival? Pictures show the children in costumes that seem to be miniature versions of the nineteenth-century festival costume, suggesting the common carnival motif of role inversion (young-old), but the lack of exposition underscores the exclusivity of the arrangement. To find out about it, it is implied, your presence at the event is required. In this way, the tourist spectators who venture to Store Magleby are enlisted in the preservation of its heritage. As much as the museum strives to educate potential visitors from outside the immediate vicinity about local history, the event is also in many ways a small-town phenomenon that requires insider knowledge.

The main event of carnival in Store Magleby, however, is known nationwide in Denmark, if in different variations. “Knocking the cat from the barrel” was one of the attractions of the historic Amager Dutch carnival. A living cat was put in a barrel suspended between two poles, and mounted riders would take turns striking the barrel with a special bat until it broke and the cat fell out. Opinions are divided as to the origins of this fastelavnsridning (carnival-riding) ritual, with some claiming that it originated with the Amager Dutch, and others saying that it was known elsewhere in Denmark and southern Sweden before their arrival, but it was in any case practiced in many areas through the nineteenth century (Bregenhøj and Larsen 2007, 256–274). With time, the cat was removed from the equation, replaced in some instances with candy. Today this tradition is still called “knocking the cat from the barrel” but is mostly performed by children on foot in motley costumes who take turns striking the barrel, almost like a piñata. The Store Magleby organization Friendship Circle, however, today claims to carry out the most historically authentic performance. There, the men—and only men—still ride horses in a full gallop toward the (empty) barrel, with honors going to the one who knocks the final bit of the barrel from the rope it is attached to. They all wear the same clothes as the men on the newsletter cover described above, giving the event a visual uniformity and emphasizing the historical, traditional nature of the event.

Whether the ritual has Dutch or Danish origins, the self-identified Amager Dutch at the Amager Museum are now the most visible guardians of this heritage, though there are other sites at which it is performed. In nearby Dragør, pre-Lenten festivities began in 1890 as masked parades and carnival riding, sometimes on water, with costumes and decorations that were “fantastic and comic.” In 1970 a Dragør carnival organization was formed to arrange carnival riding in Dragør as a “true copy” of the practice in Store Magleby, “but with a single exception—in Dragør the riders are of both genders” (Dragør Kommune n.d.). Images from the Dragør municipality website and from local newspapers show that the women who participate in the ritual strive to emulate the visual uniformity of the male Store Magleby riders, dressing in the same costumes, pulling long hair back and covering it with the top hat. In 2010 the winner of the Dragør carnival riding was a woman named Ane Mette Wieder, who had also been crowned “barrel king” twice previously (Bjørton 2010). A list of competition winners from 1970 to 2014 on the organization’s website shows that women have won the “barrel king” title fourteen times (Dragør Fastelavnsforening n.d.). Both the male-gendered costumes and the use of the term barrel king underscore the ritual’s reliance on traditional gender roles, despite this organization’s explicit desire to allow women to participate. These contestants are thus performing a double drag: as “Dutch” and as men.⁸

Other articles in the Museum Amager newsletter give additional insights into the gendered aspects of the community’s heritage performance. Such a clear traditional division of male and female performance and work is unusual in Denmark, a country that generally prides itself on a gender equality, which is (as indicated above) often presented as a contrast to immigrant populations. One article focuses on four members from the “core” of the Amager Museum’s volunteer corps—“four spry gals” (Jansen and Jansen 2010, 16–18). The word translated as “gal” is usually used affectionately to refer to girls or young women, but can also carry an implication of unmarried women who “behave immorally, despicably or loosely” (Den Danske Ordbog n.d.). This use to describe mature women is clearly not intended to be insulting but rather to be jovial; yet to some degree it also reinforces a traditional perception of women and women’s contributions to the performances as less serious and more childlike, especially in contrast to the role of the mighty barrel king.”

While the women’s drag implicates ethnicity, they also perform a kind of time-travel drag that returns them to traditional gender roles of past centuries. Each of the four women profiled has special tasks at the museum that, as the title demonstrates, are heavily gendered domestic activities: baking, sewing, flower arranging, and weaving. The women are described as having these interests outside of their connection to the museum—the seamstress and weaver are educated in these professions. Each profile makes explicit the woman’s connection not only to the museum but also to Store Magleby and Amager. Only one is identified as being from somewhere else; she is immediately noted as coming from the island of Bornholm, and it is by virtue of her expertise as a weaver that she has joined the community. The other profiles make references to family members and to childhood memories that signify the women’s deeper roots in the community. The Amager costume features prominently in many of the reminiscences; for example, one woman was inspired to refurbish her aunt’s old costume. Each woman makes a statement about the museum’s presence in her thoughts or her efforts to be there at every opportunity, reflecting its role in her daily life and her strong identification with it.

Amager Dutch and Other Immigrants

Though the museum also features changing exhibitions and is particularly well known for its summer enactment of a working farm circa 1900, the permanent exhibitions focus on “the history of the Dutch immigration to Denmark in the 16th century and their descendants’ life and culture” (Museum Amager 2012a). This emphasis on the Amager Dutch as immigrants is carried over in a variety of texts, and when the website refers to “being ‘Dutch’ on Amager” as “something special,” it shows that there is still a claim that the group has an identity distinct from being just Danish. The Amager Dutch are of course also—or even principally—Danish, but their self-identification with the “Dutch” supplements the Danishness rather than excluding or being precluded by it.

The many references to the history of the “immigrants” and “immigration” to Amager make that group unusual in that it is closely identified both with the Danish island and with a separate point of origin—not autochthonous, despite centuries of residence. The justification for the claims to the island, and more specifically the village of Store Magleby, comes not only from the royal invitation and charters but also from the group’s solidarity and fidelity to its origins. The museum website maintains that a sense of “fellowship” is “still here,” not only via the festivals and organizations “but through an ingrained consciousness that the Dutch have stood together through centuries” (Museum Amager 2012b.).

The desire to compare the Dutch to contemporary immigration is likewise present in the museum’s texts and projects. One of its stated themes is “cultural encounters,” related in the newsletter’s summary of the 2009 annual report to the development of a project called “Welcome?” (Bager 2010, 5). The project’s website calls it an ongoing collaboration being developed by Amager Museum with the Danish Immigration Museum, Museum Lolland-Falster, and the Dragør Local Archive. The results—a Web exhibition, traveling exhibition, and educational materials—will examine “integration across time as seen through three historical examples of invited immigration—the Dutch immigration to Amager in the 1500s, the Polish labour migration around the year 1900 and the immigration of Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and 70s.” The goal is “to learn more about integration as a social process—not least in light of contemporary debate” (Danish Immigration Museum 2012). A somewhat similar miniseries and Web project from the educational branch of the public television station DR in 2003 used the Dutch as the starting point on its timeline of Danish immigration history. The website stressed that “Denmark has always been a destination for immigration” and sought to emphasize that debates about “foreign cultures, foreign languages, foreign clothing—foreign people” are not a recent source of controversy (DR 2004).

Though the “Welcome?” project’s results were unavailable when this chapter was written, it is worth noting that its point of departure quite literally questions how “welcome” immigrants can be. The title’s question mark casts doubt on the sincerity of the invitation and the welcoming reception for the immigrants, in both the short and long terms. The historical distance and dearth of primary sources on the 1521 Dutch immigration make comparison to the more recent groups difficult at best. But the project website suggests an attempt to emphasize the ongoing presence of Dutch identity while the community is also held up as an example of successful integration. Pictures on the website refer to each of the three groups under consideration; the Poles and Turks are represented by pictures of adults at work, but the Dutch by a recent color photograph showing two young girls in folk costume, shot from behind. This gesture softens the historical gap with an inversion, representing the oldest immigrant group with the youngest “immigrants”—and arguably also by its association with girls, not boys or men—but also suggests a model whereby traditions can be maintained and passed on to future generations. Ultimately, in the case of the Amager Dutch, these traditions become local, Danish traditions.

A newsletter article entitled “Let the Food Speak” shows an attempt to put the Amager Dutch story into a constellation with a different type of contemporary immigration to Denmark. A museum project sponsored by the Danish Cultural Heritage Board called Stove-side Conversations—The Meal across Cultures had four cooks from the museum’s volunteer corps meeting with asylum seekers housed at the Red Cross Center in nearby Kongelunden. The project focused on the cross-cultural phenomena of food and food preparation rather than on “the immediate barriers like language, culture and religion.” According to the article, the asylum seekers learned something about both Danish history and, “not least,” Amager’s history, as well as being able to share some of their own culture with the museum volunteers (Ravn 2010, 12).

Claus Ravn writes that the story of the Dutch immigration to Amager has parallels to contemporary immigration, “especially when it comes to influence on food culture” (2010, 12). But he does not elaborate on what these parallels are or on what food was prepared. The only nationality mentioned other than Danish is Dutch; we do not know what the asylum seekers eat or where they come from. In fact, the Red Cross Center at Kongelunden is a special location; 150 of its 250 spots are for those “who need care beyond the care provided for all asylum seekers.” A large number have psychiatric illnesses and physical disabilities, including some who are “seriously disabled survivors of torture” (Roure 2009, 8; see also Frivilig i Dansk Røde Kors n.d.). Even if the participants in these “stove-side conversations” did not come from among the most special cases, the contrast between them and the invited, successful immigrants from 500 years ago could hardly be greater.

Though the museum’s volunteers appear to be making a sincere effort to promote cross-cultural understanding and to welcome the asylum seekers, the cheerful focus on trite, superficial similarities—that the Dutch and the asylum seekers both came to Denmark from other countries and both have cultural food traditions—offers little in the way of reflective or critical examination of the challenges that immigrants currently experience. As described by Sieg, “The sharing of food evokes the multicultural food fair, that arch cliché of capitalist pluralism” (2002, 138) and simultaneously again displays the tendency of Dutch drag to rely on traditional gender roles; most of those in the photographs accompanying the article are women. There is no mention of the extraordinary privileges enjoyed by the Dutch over their Danish neighbors, nor of the fact that the Dutch were linguistically, religiously, and physiologically more similar to the Danes than are the majority of contemporary immigrants, 67 percent of whom are of non-Western backgrounds (Ministeriet for Flygtninge, Indvandrere og Integration 2009, 7). While the article and the museum’s projects seem optimistic about the benefits of “cultural encounters,” contemporary Danish integration policy debate, as in many European countries, has shifted “towards an increasingly assimilationist rhetoric” in which immigrants are expected to absorb quickly into Danish society (Klausen 2005, 69). Denmark’s former minister of integration Søren Pind repeatedly stated that he does not like to use the term integration, preferring assimilation (Information 2011). The activities that work to preserve the nearly 500-year-old Amager Dutch heritage, while emphasizing the group’s immigration history, stand in stark contrast to the demands on newcomers.

Nonetheless, Amager Dutch remains an identity that can be assumed and performed on special occasions, and one that is regarded as worth preserving, along with old Amager farms like Fadersminde, Vilhelm Lauritzen’s 1939 airport terminal, and even, when occasion calls for it, traditional gender roles. Yet as much as participation in Amager Dutch activities is voluntary, it seems unlikely that someone with “other ethnic background than Danish” could join them as anything except an outside observer. The proximity of Sudanvej (Sudan Way) to Doorn Allé (Doorn Avenue), and Tunisvej (Tunis Way) to Tilburg Allé (Tilburg Avenue—Doorn and Tilburg are Dutch cities) at the island’s south end offers a vision of immigrant coexistence that belies how far it really is from Christiansborg or even Store Magleby to Kongelunden. The busy flight patterns overhead and the steady drone of airplane engines are a constant reminder of the comings and goings of would-be immigrants, but the “welcome?” that awaits them is, at best, ambivalent.