Like Snow in the Sun? The German Minority in Denmark in Historical Perspective

Abstract

As Peter Thaler points out in his preface to the edited volume Like Snow in the Sun? The German Minority in Denmark in Historical Perspective, the EU border region of Sønderjylland (Southern Jutland/Schleswig-Holstein) is often held up today as a model for the harmonious co-existence of different linguistic and ethnic groups, but it is important to remember that this positive state of affairs did not come about easily or quickly. The Danish- and German-oriented groups that form the majority of the region's population (alongside Frisian and plattdüütsch speakers) spent the better part of two centuries jockeying for political and military dominance of the area, with varying degrees of support or pressure from the Danish and German governments and their allies. The overarching story of nationalistic tensions in the border region has been skillfully and evocatively told in several recent publications, including seminal works by Peter Thaler, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Denmark whose 2009 book Of Mind and Matter: The Duality of National Identity in the German-Danish Borderlands (Purdue University Press) has been foundational for the field. While much of the scholarly focus in such works has been on the challenges faced by the Danish minority living in the duchies occupied or annexed by Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Thaler's new book looks instead at the German-oriented communities that existed within the Danish unified state (helstat) prior to the Second Schleswig War in 1864 and after the 1920 plebiscites that integrated northern Slesvig into the Danish kingdom, offering a much-needed and thoughtful correlative to the better-known stories about the Danish minority.Like Snow in the Sun, which grew out of an international conference held in the UK in 2019, brings together a welcome array of established and emerging scholars’ complementary perspectives on this complex topic, ranging from Thaler's framing narratives about the underlying issues of nationalist activism to PhD candidate Ryan J. Gesme's careful case study of how the plebiscites engaged with Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination. The chapter authors include Danes, Germans, Brits, Schleswigians, and an American, exemplifying the transnational reach of the topic and its relevance to contemporary political discourses. Eight of the ten chapters focus exclusively on the twentieth century and beyond, from the Great War through the present, in order to explore how the question of cultural identity in this disputed region has continued to be entangled with transnational geopolitical trends and currents. Although the period-specific case studies are primarily historiographic, some of them also contain helpful discussions of intersecting linguistic, propagandistic, ethnographic, and pedagogical aspects of the politically charged situation in the border region.Thaler's introduction both provides a useful chronological framework for the later chapters and contextualizes the situation of the German minority in northern Schleswig with regard to the larger issue of small ethno-linguistic minorities in European border regions, which he also invoked at the end of his 2009 book. The volume's title echoes and challenges the prediction of Danish-oriented activist H. V. Clausen that the numerically insignificant and culturally divided German-oriented minority would “melt away like snow in the sun” (p. 2), informing the volume's analyses of how the German-oriented community in northern Schleswig managed instead to develop and maintain a unique group identity.As the only chapter dedicated to the German-oriented community in the region prior to and during the Prussian annexation of the region, Hans Schultz Hansen's description of the development of an increasingly German-affiliated (rather than regional) movement covers the most well-established historical terrain. In addition to laying important groundwork for the subsequent chapters, it also contains valuable new insights into how the various ideological camps within that population interacted, competed, and ultimately coalesced. Hansen's study spans from the 1840s to 1914, rehearsing both the best-known and several lesser-known incidents of conflict between the two groups in response to the intensification of nationalistic ideologies and political pressures that led to the two Schleswig wars, the annexation of the duchies, the formation of the second German empire in 1871, and, eventually, the outbreak of World War I. In chapter 3, Gesme, drawing on a wide range of governmental documents, campaign posters, and media reports, builds on Hansen's historical foundation to show how the area's German minority reacted to the border plebiscites that the outcome of Great War made possible, not just through the defeat of the Wilhelmine Empire, but also due to the international community's acceptance of Wilsonian ideals of self-determination.From chapter 4 onward, each chapter provides another piece of the puzzle of how the German-oriented community navigated the explosive changes that came about in Germany over the course of the twentieth century. Henrik Becker-Christensen in chapter 4 examines the interplay of nationalist dynamics and political ambitions within the community's associational structure in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly after the rise of the National Socialist party in Germany and its promise of revising the Danish-German border once more, but ends his account on somewhat of a cliffhanger just prior to the Nazi invasion of Denmark in April 1940. Fortunately, Annika Seemann's contribution in chapter 5 seamlessly picks up the narrative thread and carries it through World War II, with its attendant effects on the community's relationship to Denmark and the occupying German army, as well as considering the immediate postwar attempts to achieve political resolution for fractured trust and strained community bonds. Chapter 6 contains Frank Lubowitz's account of reorganizational efforts within the German minority community in the postwar decades, as it came to terms with the reality of living permanently as a linguistic minority within a Danish-majority state. He divides the gradual process of integration into three phases—reconstruction, consolidation, and equality—that track with generational shifts among the community members.One of the volume's greatest strengths, particularly in the latter half of the book, is the immediacy of its access to the existing German minority community today. Drawing on research conducted several decades ago, Michael Byram's examination in chapter 7 of the role of educational institutions in the formation of national identity and socialization of community members in the region in the 1980s makes important points about the centrality of schools to minority identity, but feels somewhat dated in its narrow chronological perspective; it would have been helpful to provide current data for comparison and evaluation of how his conclusions have been borne out since. By contrast, the next two chapters are much more focused on closing the circle to the present: the former principal of the A. P. Møller Danish high school in Schleswig, Jørgen Kühl, presents an expert eyewitness account in chapter 8 as he sketches out the evolution of the German minority over the past quarter-century, due to both external and internal factors, into a “recognized, self-confident, integrated, and active part of Danish society” (p. 9), while, in chapter 9, Scottish Scandinavianist Ruairidh Tarvet assesses the minority community's current hybrid linguistic identity, drawing on recent survey data about code-switching and bilingualism, and explores “how it challenges preconceptions of national minorities as displaced nationals” (p. 9). Thaler's conclusion in chapter 10 not only summarizes the historical arc traced by the preceding chapters, but also reprises many of the points he has made in earlier publications, notably about the region's paradoxical relationship to the historical concept of Schleswig and the cultural specificity of how nationalistic movements developed in different European border regions.This compact but information-rich volume succeeds admirably in accomplishing its editor's goal of filling a gaping hole in the scholarship about the complicated history of the Danish-German border region. Both the Danish- and German-oriented minority communities need to have their stories told if the two hundred years of tensions between them are ever to be fully resolved, and it will require a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, as this volume models, to do those stories justice. The volume is tightly organized and intellectually coherent, while the articles are uniformly well-written and accessible to a broad audience, making them well-suited to classroom use and offering a solid foundation for future research into other, more humanistic and sociological inquiries into the repercussions of political division and cultural hybridity as residents of the border region have experienced and expressed them.