"Forstod hun hvor frustrerede og ulykkelige de var?": Demanding Happiness in Nikolaj Zeuthen's Verdensmestre: En historie fra oo'erne

The Danes, in general, seem extremely averse to innovation, and if happiness only consist in opinion, they are the happiest people in the world; for I never saw any so well satisfied with their own situation. Yet the climate appears to be very disagreeable, the weather being dry and sultry, or moist and cold; the atmosphere never having that sharp, bracing purity, which in Norway prepares you to brave its rigours.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark & Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman'¹

Happiness and the Welfare State

The question I use as title for this article, "Forstod hun hvor frustrerede og ulykkelige de var?" (Zeuthen 2010, 101) [Did she understand how frustrated and unhappy they were?], is posed by Rune, the male part of the couple that constitutes the collective protagonist ("they," the female part is Anna) of Danish author Nikolaj Zeuthen's debut novel from 2010, Verdensmestre (World Champions). Rune articulates this question during a heated, highly emotional phone conversation with an anonymous pedagogical consultant for the local municipal authorities responsible for administering the day care institution attended by the couple's 3-year-old daughter, Emma. They believe Emma's well-being suffers in the institution—she doesn't thrive—and that she needs to be put into another, better institution. And they cannot understand that the municipal authorities simply can't fix this, that is, remove the cause of their individual, unique unhappiness. Don't they understand?

When Rune's wish is denied, he experiences the bureaucratic rage, in Kathleen Woodward's sense (Woodward 2009, 165–94), articulated in the question where he, by implication, holds the welfare state responsible for his family's happiness. Because this couple—from the wealthy creative class of Copenhageners—cannot accept not being happy all the time, someone must be held responsible. As the objectively detached and mocking—yet also intimately knowing and sympathetic—narrator puts it (when, in the middle of the novel, their initial youthful and euphoric state of happiness has evaporated under the impact of two small kids, two jobs, a PhD dissertation that has to be finished [on Prozac], and all the rest):

At Rune og Anna var mennesker der kunne stille sig selv spørgsmålet 'er jeg glad?', og som var parate til at reagere på et negativt svar ved eksempelvis at gå til læge og i en periode sygemelde sig, var et sundhedstegn. De accepterede ikke lykkens fravær, men tog den tid og anvendte de midler der skulle til 'for at få ny energi.'

(Zeuthen 2010, 85)

(That Rune and Anna were people who could ask themselves the question 'Am I happy?,' and who were ready to react to a negative answer by, for instance, going to a doctor and calling in sick for a period of time, was a sign of health. They did not accept the absence of happiness but took the time required and used the necessary means to 'get new energy.')

Happiness today is a personal project, especially in the West, where we increasingly believe we can and must shape our own lives as if they were works of art (Bauman 2008). To an unprecedented degree, we feel responsible for our own happiness—for planning our own lives in such a way that we can say we are always happy (Bruckner 2010). And as said, for many Danes, this includes expecting, even demanding, happiness from the welfare state, which is held responsible for securing our personal state of happiness.

However, the modern Danish welfare state never promised to make its citizens happy the way "they" seem to expect in Zeuthen's novel—at least "they" feel free to hold the state responsible for (not recognizing and thus not doing something actively about) their individual unhappiness. Reading the novel at the remove of the narrative voice telling the story, the reader is shown—as in an experimental micro-sociological laboratory—that happiness can hardly be planned and socially engineered...