Jes Fabricius Møller

Being Danish: Paradoxes of identity in everyday life

Over twelve months spent on an anthropological field trip to central Jutland form the empirical basis of this study of national identity in Denmark from the mid 1990s to the present day. Jenkins gives both a very personal account of how a foreigner experiences everyday life in Skive, an average Danish town, and a systematic qualitative rather than quantitative anthropological and sociological study. According to the author, the question of identity is basically an

Domesticating a German Heir to the Danish Throne

‘May the good Lord give the king a Danish heart — if it is possible.’1 These words were spoken from the pulpit by the parish priest Vilhelm Birkedal in a small church on the island of Funen on Sunday 4 September 1864. Priests were meant to say a traditional prayer for the monarch, Christian IX, who had ascended the throne the year before, and for the royal house, but Birkedal’s intentions were obviously quite different. He was questioning the legitimacy of the new king. The whole of Funen was then crowded with soldiers and officers. They had been evacuated from the Jutland peninsula and the island of Als, where, two months earlier, the Danish army had suffered a crushing defeat against the Prussians, which had brought the Second Schleswig War to a close. An officer reported Birkedal’s breach of protocol and the priest was reprimanded. His comments, however, indicated an underlying sentiment present among the Danish population at the time. The new king was a stranger to his people and — to make matters worse — a German. Like Birkedal many saw in him a representative of the enemy. Over time, however, the relationship between the monarch and his people would evolve into something more settled and stable and, one might say, mutually appreciative: a process of domestication, involving the reshaping of the public image and the political functions of the royal family in general and of Christian IX in particular.

LUTHERAN ORTHODOXY AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN DENMARK – 1536-2011

This article shows how anti-Catholicism has influenced Danish society and the politics of the Oldenburg Monarchy1 since the Reformation. Scandinavian historians have typically had a materialist approach to history but it is argued that religious convictions played a crucial role. Legislation was dominated by a very explicit anti-Catholicism, also in the written absolutist constitution (Lex Regia, 1665). No persecutions took place and there are several examples of how Catholics were allowed to stay, work and worship, especially in the periphery of the Oldenburg conglomerate state. Absolutism was abolished in 1848-49 but the new constitution still gave a privileged position to the Lutheran state church, which is upheld until today. Although religious tolerance gained ground already in the beginning of the 19th century Lutheranism remained an integral part of Danish national identity.

Review: Knud J.V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark, Palgrave Essential Histories, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York; 2004; 256 pp.; 033365918X, £15.99 (pbk)

during the Great War the Russian military systematically violated those laws, violently deporting entire ethnic populations under their control. At the same time, Hull’s terminology is somewhat puzzling. On the one hand, she refrains from describing the war in Southwest Africa as a ‘genocide’ (which it certainly was) because she argues that the term ‘genocide’ is not necessarily helpful in an historical context. But then, Hull freely describes the Turkish mass-murder of Armenians as a ‘genocide’ (which again it certainly was). Furthermore, it is debatable whether such a loaded term as ‘final solution’ is necessarily useful in reference to the military campaigns of imperial Germany. Linked to this, it is surprising for a study which squarely locates colonial practices within a broader European context of violence that Hull’s book does not give more attention to Hannah Arendt’s ideas. While Hull describes some of Arendt’s theories on violence, she hardly discusses Arendt’s perhaps most famous thesis: the colonial origins of ‘totalitarian’ violence within Europe. Hull purposefully refrains from drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between colonial rule and later (German) violence within Europe. Nonetheless, some of the language used in the German colonies was chilling. In Southwest Africa, the German military freely discussed the ‘destruction’ of entire populations; one observer even talked of ‘non-humans’ (Unmenschen). Overall, Hull’s book is a scholarly, thought-provoking study of Germany’s wars between victory in 1870 and defeat in 1918, remarkable in its breadth and full of resonance for today’s world. It should be read by anyone interested in the history of imperial Germany, as well as by those keen to learn how an empire can disastrously govern territories under its control.