- (Read Danish version here.)
It all begins in a small cell at Vestre Prison. On the floor lies 25-year-old Moroccan Faycal Caaban. He is serving a sentence for armed robbery. Yesterday, he visited the prison doctor complaining of abdominal pain. Shortly after waking up, he collapsed onto the floor. In two minutes, the staff will enter the cell and find Faycal dead.
And this will set Copenhagen ablaze.
Riots in Copenhagen
This is roughly how I imagined starting my new novel, which I had planned to begin writing this summer. It might sound like a crime novel, but in reality, it was meant to explore the potential large-scale conflict that could erupt between certain immigrant groups frustrated with Danish society and the segments of Denmark’s population harboring intense xenophobia.
I wanted to write about what could happen in Denmark in the near future if everything spiraled out of control. My aim was to make it as realistic as possible. The young Moroccan’s death is inexplicable at first. Theories emerge that he was murdered by white inmates and that the Danish prison system didn’t intervene because he was “just” an immigrant. This sparks protests among segments of Copenhagen’s immigrant population, who set cars and buildings on fire.
The scenario wasn’t far-fetched; it was precisely what happened in Brussels in 2006. A 25-year-old Moroccan inmate died under unexplained circumstances in prison, leading to violent riots. Immigrants set cars and shops on fire, hurled Molotov cocktails, and clashed with the police. It only subsided after several days.
The Race War Begins
But in my novel, I wouldn’t let it end there. I wanted to depict how young, frustrated immigrants went on a rampage and then explore what would happen if radical far-right forces decided to fight back. I spent considerable time researching the race riots in Bradford, England, in 2001, the LA riots in 1992, and the Tulsa massacre in the U.S. in 1921. But I planned to push the narrative even further. I wanted to see what would happen if the chaos escalated: if left-wing extremists supported the immigrants in their fight against neo-Nazis and hooligans, if biker and immigrant gangs joined in with guns blazing, and if the police were forced to use live ammunition. I would put Copenhagen under martial law, set the city ablaze, and draw more and more Danes into the conflict.
The Man with the Weapons
The book’s narrator was to be a young history student who had never completed his thesis on the Holocaust historiography debate in Germany. He is a frustrated, megalomaniacal nationalist who once attempted to run for local office with a well-known, flag-waving political party. Living in a suburb of Copenhagen, he sees Faycal’s death and the ensuing riots as his big opportunity—something he has been waiting for.
For years, he has been preparing. He has bought weapons on the black market, taught himself to make bombs, and studied The Turner Diaries. He dreams of a Denmark purged of Muslims, “miscolored” people, and left-wingers. I envisioned him as a modern Raskolnikov—not content with killing a pawnbroker but instead executing his enemies summarily, hoping to incite the ultimate race war and make Danes realize that immigrants were destroying Denmark and its values.
The Massacre
The novel would follow him hour by hour. Amid the riots, he blows up a daycare center, planting evidence to frame immigrants. He enters apartment buildings and uses his semi-automatic rifle to kill any immigrants and leftists he can find. He breaks into a brothel on Peter Fabersgade, murders the sex workers, paints Quranic verses on the walls, and then calls TV2 from one of the dead women’s phones, ensuring the images spark more Danes to take to the streets against immigrants.
An Unrealistic Novel?
That was how the story would unfold. But then I hit a wall. I realized I had to abandon the project. I felt the book couldn’t be written. It would come across as a hollow premise, an implausible work of science fiction. This kind of extreme scenario, after all, couldn’t happen in our part of the world. Things don’t escalate that far—not here. Xenophobia in Denmark will never lead to race riots. People like this narrator, silently planning mass murders, don’t exist. Not here. I decided to write a completely different book about something more realistic.
Something Realistic: July 22, Oslo
A week or so later—on Friday, July 22—I watched the news. A bomb had exploded in Oslo, and a madman was shooting scores of young people on the island of Utøya. A few weeks later, London erupted into riots following the police shooting of Mark Duggan.
That’s Norway. That’s England. It hasn’t happened in Denmark. Not yet. But reality, it seems, has a way of catching up with even the wildest fictions.
