Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908–1914: Claiming the Homeland

Abstract

minating in the Bonn-Copenhagen Declarations (1955). The following chapter by Michael Byram (Durham University) analyzes school, language, and identity in North Schleswig in the 1980s. It is widely accepted that education has a key function in promoting the use of minority language and identity, but in cases of cross-border minorities, the curricula taught must accommodate the narrative and demands of both, the kinand the state of residence. Additionally, German schools in a Danish state faced a challenge that most minority members spoke the regional dialect Sønderjysk (Southern Jutian), neither standard Danish, nor standard German of the states to which they could be linked via ethnopolitical identities. The former principal of one of the Danish high schools in South Schleswig, Jørgen K€ uhl, offers an overview of minority history until 2020, the centenary of border redrawal and reconstitution of German minority in Denmark. He points out that relationships have normalized since 1995 when the chairman of the German minority spoke for the first time at the central lieu-de-memoire in Danish national history, the battle of Dybbøl memorial day. To this effect, K€ uhl argues, the younger generation from the community see no contradiction in pursuing schooling at first in Danish Duborgskolen in South Schleswig and then enrolling in Deutsches Gymnasium Nordschleswig. He concludes that the previously dominant reference of the region’s citizens to either of the nation-states as homelands, has yielded place to a non-state, Schleswig regional identity. The final chapter by Ruairidh Tarvet (Edinburgh University) confirms this observation in the analysis of linguistic identity in the German minority. He demonstrates both the flexibility of code switching in different circumstances and navigation between standard German, standard Danish and the Sønderjysk dialect. This book opens existing historical research on the region in the region’s languages to an international public; it adds to understanding of hitherto unknown aspects of minority identity formation and community consolidation. Yet, much more critical reflection could have been offered in this volume on the dominant presentation of minority history during and its relationship to NS German rule. If anything this reflects on challenges that minority members themselves face in their Vergangenheitsbew€altigung and are increasingly perceived as such by the minority itself.