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Article Excerpt
SOCIAL IDENTITIES REPRESENT a group phenomenon, but they are also lived and experienced on a personal level. This makes the dividing line between individual and collective identities less rigid. The line is further blurred in environments that permit a personal choice of group affiliation. In earlier periods, many of these memberships were predetermined. Modern societies with their focus on individualism have expanded autonomous self-definition.
This essay explores individual responses to the challenge of national identification in the German-Danish border region of Sleswig during the last two centuries. (1) Together, they cover a broad selection of Sleswig society. They include people born in the late 1700s as well as people alive today, people from different walks of life, and people with diverse national identifications. Yet although the essay examines intellectual life histories, it strives to provide more than abstract biographies. Instead, the article uses concrete life experiences to empiricize the concept of subjective nationality in border regions.
As a consequence, the article focuses especially on individuals at the national crossroads. Although their life experiences also display a process, which ranges from the gradual transformation of prenational conceptions under the influence of social and economic modernization in the early 1800s all the way to the increasing questioning of national concepts in the period following World War II, their presentation is thematic rather than chronological. The progression is not linear and leaves room for alternative self-definitions. As a group, the cases selected illustrate the diverse responses of the Sleswig populace to modern group formation. (2)
The theoretical debate of nationalism and nationhood has been passionate and complex. Although analyzing these concepts has been an important scholarly enterprise since the nineteenth century, it has not led to convincing, generally applicable models. The divergent historical experiences of different populations resulted in divergent perceptions of nationhood, even if experiences as well as perceptions have become increasingly similar over time. Originally, concepts of nationhood tended to differ along political and geographical lines, but the analytical threads can be more easily pulled together now. The growing importance of non-Western experiences has blurred the once prevalent juxtaposition of western and eastern European models and can serve as a starting point for more universal viewpoints.
If one carefully analyzes the various concepts of nationhood, their demarcations frequently prove to be fluid, and their rigid juxtaposition becomes less persuasive. Most nations display characteristics found in a variety of theoretical models, and conceptual variances among national self-images tend to be based on the particular historical circumstances more than on irreconcilable ideological differences.
French nationalism, which is generally seen as the archetype of a state-centered conception, was not content with mere political loyalty; on the contrary, ethnic minorities enjoyed fewer cultural rights in France than in most other European countries. For the Corsicans and Bretons, French political nationalism essentially entailed an adaptation to French language and customs that left little room for autochthonous cultural traditions. (3) At the same time, the process that Renan had defined as a daily plebiscite was not simply left to popular initiative, but relied on a thorough policy of national mobilization, as Eugen Weber demonstrated in his magisterial Peasants into Frenchmen. (4)
Civic participation, in turn, does not inherently conflict with cultural definitions of nationhood. Civic life frequently functions more smoothly in culturally homogenous societies, and it was hardly coincidental that the egalitarian social policies of the welfare state had their earliest and most comprehensive expressions in the countries of the Scandinavian north, in which a high degree of cultural coherence strengthened the sense of responsibility toward society's less fortunate. (5)
Conscious policies of nation-building and long-term cultural processes form a theoretical dichotomy that can be reflected in political reality. These factors can reinforce each other or compete with each other. A stress upon ethno-cultural continuities dating back centuries that overlooks the fundamental change in societal interconnectedness that began in late eighteenth century Europe is just as incomplete as the exclusive reference to the recentness and inventedness of national concepts and symbols that ignores genuine cultural continuities.
But there is another aspect to consider. While representing the leading interpretations, ethno-culturalism and instrumentalism are not the only ones. In addition to these most visible schools that focus on the civic and cultural aspects of nationhood, and in a variable and ambiguous relationship to them, one can also find a voluntaristic conception. This conception is traced back to Ernest Renan's classic dictum that the nation is a daily plebiscite. (6) Often, it is seen as a subcategory of the Staatsnation, because the nation-creating will of this concept has commonly been tied to the population of a preexisting territorial unit. Its basic premise, however, is compatible with other theoretical models as well. An abstract understanding of the voluntaristic nation would even provide for individuals spread across the globe to merge into a nation through a common will; such broader approaches have not been given serious consideration, though.
Thus, voluntarism remained within distinct boundaries. Renan developed his argument to a large degree in order to demonstrate that it was inappropriate of Germany to reannex Alsace in 1871, even if the local population might have had German cultural roots. He claimed the Alsatians for the French nation, because they did not identify with the German. The decision was seen as personal and subjective, but the choices were predetermined. It had to be the existing nation-states of Germany or France; there was no third option, although later developments, particularly in the interwar period, indicated that the most natural point of reference for many Alsatians might have been Alsace itself. (7)
The subjectivity of identity can also express itself in a more fundamental manner, however. The recent movement toward globalism and transnationalism, whereby the former is defined as largely detached from specific national territories and the latter as rooted in but transcending them, has added new facets to this phenomenon. Ever larger numbers of people live outside of the state of their birth but retain social and emotional ties to it. Their identities tend to be influenced by both their native and their host cultures, from which they pick and receive in varying and eclectic forms. Diasporan communities try to preserve a sense of uniqueness in their new country and an active interest in their old. (8) Tourism both highlights and levels cultural differences. The youth culture of MTV reaches almost every corner of the world. Culture becomes deterritorialized, because people living next to each other are no longer necessarily participating in one and the same. (9)
Subjectivity and fluidity need not be connected with migratory processes. In more than a few border regions, too, a clear-cut determination of national identity proved to be challenging. (10) In such cases, local identities did not conform to the national paradigm, be it based on political or linguistic standards. It is this specific border environment with its ambiguities and interdependencies that forms a focal point of this study.
SOBER RATIONALIST IN AN AGE OF PASSION: NIKOLAUS FALCK
(Niels) Nikolaus Falck was born in 1784 in Emmerlev in western Sleswig, slightly north of the current German-Danish border. (11) The district has always been predominantly Danish-speaking. Falck's father was a fairly typical representative of the local farming tradition, albeit with a sojourn as a sea captain, which might explain his decision to afford his son a higher education. This education led Nikolaus Falck away from his social origins, although he always retained an appreciation of Sleswig peasant culture.
Following training at the Haderslev grammar school, Falck took up the study of theology and philosophy in Kiel, which he completed with a doctoral dissertation titled "De historiae inter Graecos origine et natura" in 1808. (12) He subsequently undertook graduate study in law, passed his exams in Gottorp, and began his juridical career in the civil service. Falck found employment at the Sleswig-Holstein chancellery in Copenhagen, where be was thoroughly integrated into local society and established numerous contacts with the Danish intellectual and political elite. He preserved these connections all his life, even when the tone of German-Danish exchanges within the composite monarchy had become strident.
In 1814, Falck was called to the University of Kiel, which was to be the center of his professional career for the remainder of his life. As a professor of law in Kiel, he identified so strongly with the land of his birth and his alma mater that he rejected more lucrative offers from universities all over Germany. He was held in high esteem among his colleagues and honored with membership in the Danish academy of sciences as well as the presidency of the Society for the History of Sleswig and Holstein. In addition to his scholarly endeavors, he also pursued politics, serving in the assemblies of both duchies. He reached the height of his public career between 1838 and 1844, when he was called to preside over the Sleswig estates. Falck died in 1850, in the midst of a war that pitted liberal revolution against royal government and at the same time marked a struggle for the national future of the duchies.
Falck's personal and philosophical development was strongly influenced by the bonds he established early in life. He developed a long-time friendship with the Holstein aristocrat Adam von Moltke, at whose house he served as a private tutor in 1808. In the short-lived intellectual bloom that followed the Napoleonic Wars, he joined the proponents of the Kieler Blatter, highly spirited young men, many of whom would shape the political debate in the turbulent decades to follow. These few years may have been the most political period of Falck's life, notwithstanding his greater public visibility in later decades.
Falck did not truly share his friends' passion for practical politics, however. After the Karlsbad Decrees had curtailed the liberal movement, especially at the universities, Falck withdrew from the public activism that had surrounded the Kieler Blatter and focused on his academic career. Falck saw himself primarily as a scholar, not a politician. Moreover, he remained more closely bound to the existing social order than many of his colleagues. Although widely associated with the liberal movement, Falck never fully ascribed to many of its tenets, and the new brand of radical liberalism that arose in the 1830s remained alien to him.
Moderation also characterized Falck's position on the emerging national conflict. Whereas men like Friedrich Dahlmann and Adam von Moltke placed the duchies' autonomy in a yet ill-defined context of German nationhood, Falck remained tied to the Danish realm. Sleswig and Holstein enjoyed historical rights as the united German duchies, but as such they formed a part of the composite monarchy personified by the king in Copenhagen.
Falck's attachment to the Danish realm was especially pronounced in his younger years. He underscored in 1819 that the duchies of Sleswig and Holstein were his most immediate fatherland. Yet he also clarified that this left room for a broader definition that included the entire monarchy. (13) Later in life, Falck would have described his relationship to Denmark more soberly, but he never advocated a German nation-state. His ultimate allegiance belonged to the dynastic polity, compared to which the autonomy of cultural groups remained secondary.
Falck was raised as a Danish speaker and always retained a thorough knowledge of this language. German dominated higher education in the duchies, however, and became Falck's primary language. He also used it in his correspondence with Danes, even if he matter-of-factly accepted Danish replies. Although this preference could not elude politicization in...
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