regardless of our exam results. And the idea that anyone could be fired for incompetence or laziness was beyond the bounds of our imaginations.
There were only a couple of people at the Institute when I got there. I stopped for a quick chat with them, but not about the one thing on all our minds: they knew that I knew that Janne had left me.
The woman, Signe, was – like most of us – in her fifties, an acerbic-looking character who always behaved as if no one realised how brilliant she was. Her one concession to a world that hadmoved on was a touch of mascara on her eyelashes. Her specialist area was women’s writing in a male-dominated society, a subject which had filled classes in the seventies and early eighties, but like mine her course was not particularly popular today. That was not why she was so bitter, though. There were two other reasons for her hatred of the world. One was that another old Marxist had landed the job of editing a major history of literature for Gyldendal , the country’s biggest publishing house. They were both dyed-in-the-wool hard-line leftists, so the injustice lay more in the fact that she had lost out to someone from such a provincial institution as South Jutland University. The other was that Signe had dreamt of becoming a literary critic with Politiken, the leading left-wing daily, even though she always described it as a crypto-conservative paper, but since the demise of the communist Land og Folk along with that of the Berlin Wall and my own narrow field of academic expertise, they had no use for her. In these post-Wall times her ability to assess a work of literature in the light of the slogan ‘No feminist struggle without class struggle. No class struggle without feminist struggle’ was not what Politiken was looking for. So she had wound up working for Information, which was fine as far as it went, but not what she wanted – so few people read the little left-wing rag. She was, therefore, pretty bitter. She had been in the same consciousness-raising group as Irma, and tended therefore to give me a bit more slack than she allowed other men, although if the truth be told she had always viewed me as a shallow womaniser with no concept of the singularly repressed state of the female sex. Her current lover, Jeppe, who stood there nodding throughout our conversation, was nothing but a moron. We carried on as though our teaching and our research work were of the utmost importance, but were wise enough not to actually talk shop.
Instead we discussed the news that a Yugoslav anti-aircraft unit had managed to shoot down one of the Americans’ top-secret Stealth bombers. Like the majority of left-wing academics Signe and Jeppe were against the NATO bombing campaign. They felt itwas immoral, possibly because NATO was intent on avoiding any losses on its own side, possibly because the bombings had swelled the stream of refugees pouring into Albania. Or possibly because the Chilean coup and the war in Vietnam had left them with an instinctive abhorrence of NATO and the United States. They were considering the one move to which Danish intellectuals always resort when they really want to feel involved: that of collecting signatures for a petition denouncing the war and calling for peace, a document which they fully expected Politiken to print. They had given no thought, however, to what this ‘peace’ might entail. Nowadays most of us were too set in our ways to go taking part in demonstrations. I got round her request to support such a declaration by saying that I was too busy. They accused me of shirking a difficult confrontation. But deep down I was of the opinion that enough was enough, that Milosevic deserved a good hiding and that we could not permit the perpetration of ethnic cleansing in modern-day Europe. Petitions could not do much to stop it. But a few missiles might. Signe said I was naive and that war only made matters worse. That the possibilties for negotiation were not yet
There were only a couple of people at the Institute when I got there. I stopped for a quick chat with them, but not about the one thing on all our minds: they knew that I knew that Janne had left me.
The woman, Signe, was – like most of us – in her fifties, an acerbic-looking character who always behaved as if no one realised how brilliant she was. Her one concession to a world that hadmoved on was a touch of mascara on her eyelashes. Her specialist area was women’s writing in a male-dominated society, a subject which had filled classes in the seventies and early eighties, but like mine her course was not particularly popular today. That was not why she was so bitter, though. There were two other reasons for her hatred of the world. One was that another old Marxist had landed the job of editing a major history of literature for Gyldendal , the country’s biggest publishing house. They were both dyed-in-the-wool hard-line leftists, so the injustice lay more in the fact that she had lost out to someone from such a provincial institution as South Jutland University. The other was that Signe had dreamt of becoming a literary critic with Politiken, the leading left-wing daily, even though she always described it as a crypto-conservative paper, but since the demise of the communist Land og Folk along with that of the Berlin Wall and my own narrow field of academic expertise, they had no use for her. In these post-Wall times her ability to assess a work of literature in the light of the slogan ‘No feminist struggle without class struggle. No class struggle without feminist struggle’ was not what Politiken was looking for. So she had wound up working for Information, which was fine as far as it went, but not what she wanted – so few people read the little left-wing rag. She was, therefore, pretty bitter. She had been in the same consciousness-raising group as Irma, and tended therefore to give me a bit more slack than she allowed other men, although if the truth be told she had always viewed me as a shallow womaniser with no concept of the singularly repressed state of the female sex. Her current lover, Jeppe, who stood there nodding throughout our conversation, was nothing but a moron. We carried on as though our teaching and our research work were of the utmost importance, but were wise enough not to actually talk shop.
Instead we discussed the news that a Yugoslav anti-aircraft unit had managed to shoot down one of the Americans’ top-secret Stealth bombers. Like the majority of left-wing academics Signe and Jeppe were against the NATO bombing campaign. They felt itwas immoral, possibly because NATO was intent on avoiding any losses on its own side, possibly because the bombings had swelled the stream of refugees pouring into Albania. Or possibly because the Chilean coup and the war in Vietnam had left them with an instinctive abhorrence of NATO and the United States. They were considering the one move to which Danish intellectuals always resort when they really want to feel involved: that of collecting signatures for a petition denouncing the war and calling for peace, a document which they fully expected Politiken to print. They had given no thought, however, to what this ‘peace’ might entail. Nowadays most of us were too set in our ways to go taking part in demonstrations. I got round her request to support such a declaration by saying that I was too busy. They accused me of shirking a difficult confrontation. But deep down I was of the opinion that enough was enough, that Milosevic deserved a good hiding and that we could not permit the perpetration of ethnic cleansing in modern-day Europe. Petitions could not do much to stop it. But a few missiles might. Signe said I was naive and that war only made matters worse. That the possibilties for negotiation were not yet
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