Herman Bang's Grave

Herman Bang was Denmark's most modern writer at the turn of the century — and its most hounded. Openly effeminate in an era that punished it, mocked and smeared in the press, he wrote novels of quiet, devastating restraint; his Mikaël (1902) became source material for landmark early queer cinema. He died in 1912 on a lecture tour, in Ogden, Utah, about as far from home as a Dane could get. His grave in Vestre Kirkegård is exactly as he wished: no gravestone at all. The plot is marked only by a large copper beech tree — an absence that reads, a century later, like his prose: everything said by what is withheld. (The burial itself had a dark-comic coda — the coffin was initially lowered into the wrong grave and quietly moved after the mourners left.) Visiting: Vestre Kirkegård is Denmark's largest cemetery, free and open daylight hours, a short ride from the centre. Ask at the entrance map for the Bang plot, find the beech, and stand a moment with the writer who survived his tormentors by simply being better than them.