In comparison to other European regions, the German-Danish borderlands, with their respective Danish and German minorities, have received relatively scant attention in English-language scholarship. Despite two short but intense wars in the nineteenth century that redrew the regional boundaries, a dramatic plebiscite in 1920 that once again fractured the region, and a painful period of Nazi occupation that pitted neighbors against one another, the lands comprising the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein and the former Danish County of South Jutland (known to its German minority as North Schleswig) have not generated the same level of interest evident in the literature addressing other contested European borderlands. When they are featured, the German-Danish borderlands typically appear, on the one hand, as the site of an exceedingly complex dispute amounting to a significant alteration for Danish history, a preamble in the emergence of the German nation-state, and an otherwise modest footnote in the history of modern Europe. On the other hand, they sometimes draw interest within the context of more recent events as an exemplary frontier, where the stability of the border and the absence of outright conflict may offer clues for other regions still struggling to achieve peace. In this second iteration, the minorities on either side, and especially the tiny German minority in Danish North Schleswig, stand as so-called model minorities to be studied in the hopes of emulation elsewhere. If the former view warns away prospective researchers, the latter tends to obscure some of the intrinsic significance and sophistication of the region's history. Fortunately, Peter Thaler and the contributors to Like Snow in the Sun? have brought to a wider audience a thoroughly researched and properly nuanced account of the German minority in Denmark.
Thaler distinguishes himself as an editor, assembling eight highly qualified specialists and uniting their voices in an exceptionally well-crafted volume that offers a compelling narrative of the German minority from its emergence in the nineteenth century through its most recent transitions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thaler sets the stage by eschewing the usual inquiries about the secrets of the minority's success and instead frames the book as an inquiry into the minority's longevity. He begins with a prediction from the Danish historian H.V. Clausen (1861-1937), who claimed the German minority was destined to “melt away like snow in the sun” (2). The contributors follow with chapters that explain both the historical development of the German minority and its surprising resilience over time.
In the second chapter, Hans Schultz Hansen shows how the German community in North Schleswig emerged from a patchwork of attitudes and self-conceptions, where specific localities––even within this small geographic space––harbored different viewpoints, and where rural and urban differences, class divides, political affiliations, and diverse language preferences yielded shifting and often ambivalent views of belonging. If the policies of the German Empire offered a firmer institutional footing for German-minded Schleswigers in schools and civil administration, the plebiscite of 1920 swiftly brought latent ambiguities back to the fore. Ryan J. Gesme gives readers an in-depth look at the attempts on both sides to mobilize votes for the plebiscite, revealing the ways in which Germans fell back on regional identities to resist outside pressures towards national consolidation. Henrik Becker-Christensen's chapter on the interwar period depicts a resolute yet flexible minority leadership holding fast to ambitions of autonomy while maintaining their cultural unity through a strategy of compromise, even when beset by periods of weak mobilization. The rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the occupation of Denmark in the 1940s created new pressures and, as Annika Seemann shows, led to a painful and protracted process of reconciliation. The border may have remained unchanged and the detention of minority collaborators may have lasted less than a decade, but the scars of the occupation lingered in regional memory well into the twenty-first century. At the same time, the postwar years were a critical period of transition, and Frank Lubowitz, Michael Byram, and Jørgen Kühl trace the ways in which the internal strategies of the German community's leaders, the rapprochement between Germany and Denmark, and the salience of minority rights in the European integration process created an opportunity for the community's resurgence. As Kühl explains, by the late 1990s, “It had fully arrived in South Jutland society: it was asking for the right to live according to its own culture and to share responsibility for the future of its homeland” (157).
Such descriptions of successful incoporation into Danish society at the end of the twentieth century mirror earlier, more sanguine assessments of the model minority, but the contributors are keen to stress the community's lingering fragility. Jørgen Kühl points to controversies over bilingual signage in North Schleswig towns as indicators of both a more assertive German minority and of ongoing tensions with the Danish majority. In the penultimate chapter, Ruairidh Tarvet explores anxieties about the decline of the German language in the region, arguing that a “more liberal approach to language policy . . . invites questions about the authenticity of German North Schleswigers as a linguistic community” (191). Clearly, the contributors are not ready to put to rest H.V. Clausen's prediction, yet in a concluding chapter, which is a welcome summary and reflection on the volume, Thaler suggests that the German minority “was not rooted primarily in language but in a distinct sense of self” (206).
One of the challenges with crafting a new history of the German minority is adopting a suitable perspective. As the contributors make clear, this community was shaped within a small regional space, but it was also influenced by its relationship with the Danish minority across the border, by the two nation-states in which it resided at different times, and by broader events on the European stage. By zooming in on the region, the contributors cannot always keep these larger frameworks in view. For this reason, readers unfamiliar with the history of the border dispute or German-Danish relations may wish to begin with some preliminary reading, such as Peter Thaler's 2009 work, Of Mind and Matter: The Duality of National Identity in the German-Danish Borderlands. In a similar way, this volume remains focused primarily on a political and institutional history of the minority community, with an emphasis on its aspirations as an identity group. Readers will learn much about the ways in which it asserted itself in political institutions, party structures, schools, churches, and the press. The contributors devote less space to discussing the development of economic and cultural affairs, aspects of daily life, the wider region in which the community resides, or the particulars of the Danish minority just across the border. Thus, this book serves best as a critical intermediate source, certainly accessible to all readers, but especially indispensable to those who have already summoned the courage to thwart scholarly inertia and explore the rich history of this fascinating region.
