As the culture of modernity took shape, it generated a number of characteristic tensions and oppositions that have become familiar across the whole range of cultural life and analysis. Driving many of these was a deep anxiety about cultural identity itself, expressed in the recurrent complaint about the fragmentation of life, the rupture of ancient traditions, and the loss of a vanished age of individual and social harmony and cohesion. Such anxiety is expressed not only in Kierkegaard's account of levelling, the public and the press, but in the less pessimistic critique of ‘the Age’ offered by Heiberg. Naturally there were also those for whom this was not so much a problem as an opportunity – the opportunity, in this instance, to escape from what was perceived as Denmark's narrow provincial past and to transform it into a modern, open, democratic and urban society. What this actually meant could, of course, vary enormously – from Heiberg's programme of cultural reformation through to Carstensen's inauguration of Tivoli as a thoroughly modern, stylish and urbane alternative to the traditional ‘country-fair’ entertainments on offer at the Deer Park. For those who felt the advent of ‘the new Age’ or the unsettling conditions of what Heiberg called an ‘age of transition’ as threatening, it was appealing to contrast the old sense of national, communitarian identity with the loss of identity in the internationalized culture of novelty, a culture that invited the label ‘cosmopolitan’, often with derogatory connotations.