I was sitting in Tirana when former Danish Minister of Culture Uffe Elbæk praised Annisette on the radio programme P1 Debat for her political engagement.
For the second time in a year, I was in Albania, and once again I had spent part of my stay confronting the country’s communist past: visiting Hoxha’s bunker complex, the House of Leaves – the former surveillance headquarters – and encountering account after account of the Sigurimi secret police and of the Albania Enver Hoxha created: a closed, repressive Stalinist dictatorship in which political opponents were persecuted, tortured and killed, the population was subjected to surveillance, religion was banned, and ordinary people were deprived of the civil liberties we take for granted in Denmark.
The history is so recent that you quickly begin to look differently at the people around you. A 65-year-old man was around 30 when the regime collapsed. A 55-year-old woman spent her entire childhood and youth under it. The people you pass in the streets of Tirana have not necessarily read about Hoxha’s Albania in history books.
They lived it.
Against this Albanian reality, Uffe Elbæk’s words about Annisette landed like a blow.
The occasion was the controversy over politics from the stage at Ed Sheeran’s concerts, and the participants in P1 Debat had been asked to bring along political music they personally appreciated. Elbæk chose Annisette precisely because, in his view, she had always been so politically outspoken:
“She has always stood up for the oppressed, the marginalised. She has always stood up and said that we must defend democratic rights and our ability to live the lives we want to live.”
That is a remarkable “always”, because there are some oppressed people missing from Uffe Elbæk’s account.
The Albanians.
The Oppressed Who Were Forgotten
Annisette and Thomas Koppel were members of DKP/ML, the Communist Party of Denmark/Marxist-Leninists, and politics was not a private inclination existing separately from their music. It was an integral part of their art and public activity, becoming increasingly dominant during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 they travelled to Albania, and in 1987 The Savage Rose returned there on tour.
And they were enthusiastic.
In an interview with the Danish news agency Dagbladenes Bureau on 11 July 1990, as the communist system was beginning to collapse, Thomas Koppel maintained his admiration:
“Yes, there certainly is democracy in Albania,” he said, even claiming that the ordinary Albanian had “greater influence on the development of society than the ordinary Dane” and that one could not “fail to notice the social security and happiness.”
Five months after that interview, in December 1990, both Thomas Koppel and Annisette stood as parliamentary candidates for the Red-Green Alliance.
They were not mistaken from a safe distance. They had seen the country for themselves, and they maintained their enthusiasm for Hoxha’s Albania. In Koppel’s view, the revolt against the system was not a popular uprising at all, but something organised by forces intent on undermining the country.
That amounts to a defence of an inhumane totalitarian system and cannot be dismissed as idealistic naïveté.
And here lies the real scandal in the story of The Savage Rose.
Totalitarianism Becomes Idealism
Thomas Koppel and Annisette should long ago have been made to answer for their political choices – but in the Danish narrative about The Savage Rose, that has never really happened.
On the contrary, the dominant account has remained remarkably close to Uffe Elbæk’s version on P1 Debat: their support for totalitarian communist regimes has been reduced to idealism, while their own self-image as champions of freedom, solidarity and the oppressed has largely been accepted at face value.
So eager have people been to reconcile their undeniable artistic stature with their political engagement in one grand moral whole that the people actually oppressed by the regimes they defended have simply been written out of the story.
It is an astonishing moral operation.
There is no need to ask Thomas Koppel and Annisette what they believed they stood for. We can simply compare their own words with their political choices.
They spoke of democracy, but defended a dictatorship.
They spoke of freedom, but defended a system that denied its own population fundamental liberties.
They spoke of the oppressed, but when confronted with a real regime and its real victims, their solidarity did not lie with the oppressed.
It lay with the regime.
This is not a minor blemish on an otherwise unambiguous record of political activism. It is a fundamental contradiction between The Savage Rose’s own moral self-image and some of the political choices they actually made.
Yet it is the self-image that has survived. It was that same self-image that former Culture Minister Uffe Elbæk repeated on P1 the other day.
And he is not alone.
When Politics Gets in the Way of Honouring the Artist
In 2007, Copenhagen City Council decided to rename Pumpehusvej after Thomas Koppel. The stated purpose was to “honour” him for his contribution to Danish musical life.
Nor can the decision be excused on the grounds that nobody had considered his political past. Lars Dueholm of Denmark’s Liberal Party, Venstre, explicitly raised Koppel’s political engagement as an objection to the honour, pointing to his support for communist dictatorships. Social Democrat Anne Vang replied that she did not share Koppel’s political views either, but that to the Social Democrats he was “first and foremost” a composer who had contributed to Denmark through his music.
And so he got his avenue.
As a general principle, separating the artist from the art is perfectly reasonable. Knut Hamsun’s novels can easily be read independently of his Nazi sympathies; Michael Jackson’s music can be separated from the allegations of paedophilia; and Harald Bergstedt’s Solen er så rød, mor can be sung to children without importing Bergstedt’s Nazi associations into the nursery.
In that sense, I have no difficulty recognising Thomas Koppel as an outstanding composer and Annisette as one of the greatest singers Denmark has produced.
But naming a street is not an exercise in art criticism.
It is a public honour.
And The Savage Rose themselves insisted on making politics an integral part of their art and artistic identity.
Nevertheless, a broad political majority in Copenhagen – not merely the left – chose to honour Thomas Koppel by naming an avenue after him. It says something about how normalised the excusing of this part of Danish cultural history has become.
When Albania gets in the way of officially honouring Thomas Koppel, the politician is separated from the composer. When Uffe Elbæk, almost twenty years later, wants to praise Annisette, the politics is attached again. Now it is no longer an embarrassing liability but the very basis of the tribute: she stood up for the oppressed and marginalised – and she defended democracy.
No, she did not.
In Albania, she and Thomas Koppel unequivocally stood on the side of the regime.
It is remarkable how long words have been accepted as evidence of deeds. You do not become a democrat by saying “democracy”. You do not become a freedom fighter by saying “freedom”. And you do not stand with the oppressed when you defend the regime that oppresses them.
It is elementary.
Yet when it comes to The Savage Rose, Danish politicians, cultural figures and opinion-makers have been willing to accept the band’s own moral narrative while cutting away the part of the history that makes that narrative impossible.
That is why Albania is not a footnote to the history of The Savage Rose’s political engagement.
Albania is the litmus test of their own narrative of freedom, democracy and solidarity with the oppressed. It is a test they have never passed, and it matters that Thomas Koppel and Annisette do not enter cultural history simply as idealistic champions of democracy and freedom.
Thomas Koppel had barely been laid to rest before he was officially honoured. We should not also risk ending up with an Annisette Street.
And one thing is certain: Uffe Elbæk and company would have an exceedingly difficult time finding an Albanian willing to endorse the fulsome praise they continue to lavish on The Savage Rose.
