The International Migration of German Great War Veterans by Erika Kuhlman

Author:Erika Kuhlman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Boy Jessen

When the city of Paris hosted the World’s Fair in 1900, nations from around the world exhibited their cultural attractions, their presumed “national characteristics,” and their national achievements at the event. At the Danish exhibit, Hans Olrick and C.N. Starcke offered a summary of Danish national culture in a book they had prepared for the fair, including a chapter titled “National Characteristics.” Danes, according to the authors, were a homogeneous people living in harmony with their natural world. They embodied self-restraint, were lighthearted but melancholic at times, were often shy, and typically turned their backs on confrontation. Risk-taking, claimed Olrick and Starcke, was not part of the Danish nature. The authors detected these qualities in Danish music, art, and literature. 48 Boy Jessen confirmed these traits, and added that Danes were habitually “clean in words and deeds…highly educated, hard working [sic], efficient in all their doings, and [they] live a clean home life.” 49

After their victory over the Danes in 1864, Germans ran roughshod over that stereotypically quiescent Danish character. The Danish defeat in the Prussian–Danish War of 1864 left a “terrible scar on the Danish psyche,” since the latter was now entirely dependent on the goodwill of Germany for its existence. The Danish government in Copenhagen took excessive care not to offend its powerful neighbor. German nobility and clergy regarded Danish-speaking peasants as lacking morality because they did not speak the German language. One could presume that they thought the opposite to be true; that German was the language of morality. 50 As if to put a finer point on it, clerics doubted that non-German speakers were “true Christians.” Christopf Heinrich Fischer, minister to a congregation in the Schleswig village of Hyrup, indicated as much in a sermon when he proclaimed that the devil ruled the souls of people in homes where no German was spoken. This animosity regarding language could be detected in social class, since upper-class elites spoke German and in some areas only the poorest farmers and urban working class spoke Danish. Danish philosopher N.F.S. Grundtvig feminized the nation when he proclaimed Denmark to be a womanly, pacifistic, and antiheroic nation. A pro-Danish poster circulated in the 1920 plebiscite depicted Schleswig returning to Mother Denmark as a reunion between a mother and daughter. So distinctive were Danish character traits and the Danish language that Boy Jessen, as well as historian Norman Berdichevsky, adopted the phrase “Danish-mindedness” to convey that uniqueness. 51

Boy Jessen embodied the harmonious living in the natural world that Olrick and Starcke admired, but not the pacifism or self-effacing character. Jessen’s military experience led to an expanded sense of “Danish-mindedness” as he left Schleswig to serve his duty in Berlin. There, he found and clung to a group of Danish men who were also German nationals because of the Danish loss in the 1864 war. This experience led to Jessen’s realization of the transnational Danish Diaspora, or the ways in which Danes were understood to be distinctive, no matter where they lived. Jessen’s

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