Ebba Strange (born Henriksen) 15 April 1929 to 3 December 2012

I had decided not to speak at my mother’s funeral. How could I? What would I possibly say? Lena provided an excellent and fitting eulogy inside the chapel, before we proceeded to the cemetery. There was nothing for me to add. But then I changed my mind. At the reception at Viby Centret - where we gathered after lowering my mother to her final resting place - I felt I had to say something. The other speeches were all about how wonderful and successful Ebba had been. Sure, that was so, but in my view it wasn’t the whole picture. Something was missing: The things that didn’t quite go my mother’s way. As you saw from the photographs above, I spent some time with her in her later years, after she retired from the parliament and while she gradually disengaged herself from her many other assignments. I felt a duty to convey to the congregation some of the matters my mother was not quite happy with towards the end of her life. 

Although she had a lot of influence, my mother never became a minister, somewhat to her disappointment. But during her time in office, her party – People’s Socialist Party, abbreviated ‘SF’ from the Danish spelling – was just a bit too far to the left to go into government. However, by 2012, when my mother died, her party had entered into a coalition government with the larger, more mainstream Social Democratic Party. In fact, two full ministers attended the reception; one – the Minister for Finance – was also one of the pall-bearers (together with me, one of my cousins, another one of Ebba’s close political allies as well as two of her grandsons = six). I just couldn’t pass up on an opportunity like this: A chance to set a few things straight on behalf of my late mother. 

So I got up and mentioned some of the things that went right for Ebba during her career and lifetime: The progressive pedagogy she practiced, taught and campaigned for as a politician eventually became mainstream practice in Danish society; cruel and senseless corporal punishment of children has long been outlawed in schools and throughout society, including the home. Women in Europe are no longer confined to the home, they are active and equal participants at all levels of society. The production and testing of ever more powerful nuclear weapons that were glorified by both USA and the Soviets in the 1950s is today rightly seen as wasteful, dangerous and outright crazy by most sane people in the world. The cold war is long over; the world is more peaceful and prosperous today than it has ever been. When my mother entered politics, we had fascist dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal; western colonial imperialism, oppression and racism were institutionalized throughout much of the world. Not so much today, now we are all humanitarians, right? Those were some of Ebba’s successes, she and her progressive friends were on the right side of history early on. . 

Now for the failures, the matters that have not been resolved, that still need to be addressed and fixed. I learned from our good friend Professor Tommy Koh to try to limit your message to three points. According to him, that is the optimal number for most listeners to appreciate and take in:  

1) The environment has not been fixed. We cannot have the nice world my mother dreamed of if the earth is withering. All over the globe, nature is under attack. It always bothered my mother that in Denmark a powerful farming lobby – now aided by the European Union - is state-subsidized to poison and degrade the land through industrial farming practices. The soil and waterways are being ruined, the landscape scarred and wild animals are dying off. Today more so than ever. 

2) NATO goes on destabilizing Europe and the wider region. In my mother’s view, NATO should have been dissolved together with the Warsaw Pact in 1991 at the end of the cold war. I said to the congregation: “If you people really value my mother’s legacy, you should use your influence in government and in society, and next week you should go and file an application for Denmark to leave NATO. How hard can it be … the Secretary General even speaks Danish!!!!!!” Soft chuckles from the audience … the former Danish PM Fogh Rasmussen was the American-guided marionette puppet at the time pretending to be in charge of the alliance. 

3) Social fraud. To my knowledge, my mother never spoke about this in public; she was afraid that her political opponents on the right of the isle would seize on it and portrait it as a failure of socialist policies. But she commented to me quietly that when she sat out in the 1950s to support poor and destitute families, she didn’t mean this to turn into a governmental juggernaut supporting half of Denmark’s population.”By golly, we have a legal duty in this country to support ourselves and our families, and a moral one as well”, I heard my mother say, when she learned of people calculatingly taking advantage of generous welfare schemes. With that, I felt my mother married well the old-fashioned conservative views of her childhood home with her newly found compassion for the underprivileged in society.