The City as an Uncanny Stage

The 1836 painting Langebro, Copenhagen, in the Moonlight with Running Figures by C.W. Eckersberg provides a rare glimpse of Golden Age Copenhagen by night – a strangely compelling nocturnal scene, at once mysterious and commonplace. The bridge – an important topographical feature of Copenhagen – is depicted in the painting as both connecting and disconnecting places and people in the city. This article considers Langebro as an unsettling place in early nineteenth-century Copenhagen as well as today, one that is simultaneously central and peripheral to the city, a place and non-place that evokes sentiments of the uncanny. As an ambiguous topos, Langebro sparked the imaginations not only of Golden Age painters such as Eckersberg but also of writers such as Søren Kierkegaard and H.C. Andersen, whose representations of Copenhagen will be interpreted in this light.