'NORWAY ABLAZE - DENMARK SHAKEN'

Norway's neighbours, meanwhile, had been following events there closely. The interest of the Danes had been heightened, in January 1935, by a visit from Fredrik Ramm, well known to them for his passionate antagonism to their country. Ramm had fought bitterly through his newspaper to protect Norwegian fishing rights around Greenland, and when, after a prolonged dispute, the International Court at The Hague pronounced in Denmark's favour, that had only increased his animosity. But at Høsbjør, as he wrote, 'the ice melted in my heart and a new, unknown feeling began to grow, a love of people unfettered by what they could give me'.36 Now he said on Danish radio, 'The main thing I am here to tell you is that my greatest fault has been my hatred of the Danes. My mind was poisoned with that hatred ... Now I am here to put things straight.'37 The Copenhagen daily, Dagens Nyheder, headlined its story, 'The Oxford Group effaces Norwegian-Danish hatred'.38

Where Norway's intellectual atmosphere had been coloured by Marxism, Denmark's comfortable way of life - 'well-buttered', Buchman called it - was flavoured by the sceptical and free-thinking liberalism of Georg Brandes, the Professor of Aesthetics at Hamburg and Copenhagen Universities successively. He had died only eight years earlier, having published his final book, The Jesus Myth, in 1925 at the age of eighty-three. Denmark's deep Christian foundations had been strengthened by a revival in the mid-nineteenth century, but the Church now freely admitted that it had lost the confidence of the intellectuals and the workers. What was happening in Norway was a fruitful topic of discussion and witticism, but it was widely assumed that it could not happen in Denmark.

Buchman visited Denmark in January 1935, at the same time as Ramm. He found the interest intense, and there were strong demands that he bring a team there. But he was aware that the Norwegian pattern could not be repeated. For one thing, there was no Danish figure comparable to Hambro willing to initiate a move from within. 'The local forces are not clever enough to handle the situation,' Buchman wrote to Kenaston Twitchell. 'So I have asked them for the moment to refrain from anything that would catch public attention. Everything had been wonderfully prepared, the Bishop favourable, when some old-fashioned Christians started a house-party on old lines and did not know how to handle the press. They had a prayer meeting for reporters and so gave them a splendid chance to get a scoop. We will not be able to start with a house-party, because of the wrong sort they have been having.'

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