Danish-German Cultures (1773-1864): Conflict and Cohesion

The subprojects (WPs) are in-depth source-driven case studies of art, literature, biography, and language structured along the concepts of “contrastive pairs” or “generational clusters” between 1773-1864. The analyses will benefit from the interdisciplinary exchange and design of the output.

WP 1 Art (Sine Krogh)

Since the establishment of the Danish Royal Academy in 1754, up until the 1840s, German-speaking artists from Schleswig and Holstein and the neighbouring states travelled to Copenhagen to educate themselves (Monrad 1989), but the nationalization and wars of the 19th century changed the conditions of mobility and aesthetic exchange (Krogh 2021). The subproject will investigate the negotiations of the concept of nationality and identity models amongst artists, not only from the duchies but also from Hamburg, Dresden and Düsseldorf, updating research on Danish and German communities (Johansson 1997; Henningsen 1998; Gelius & Miss 2000).

WP 2 Literature (Anna Sandberg)

The case study of literature combines an analysis of cultural mobility as a practice and German-Danish imaginaries in the literary travelogues from late-Enlightenment to the Romantic and the late Golden Age. The authors can be described as border-crossing figures between German and Danish language and literature, which characterized their education, work and way of life. Several adressed two different audiences, translated their texts from Danish into German themselves or wrote in two languages. The aim is a diachronous account of the understandings (socially, culturally and politically) and imaginaries of: 1) the German states and cities as the nearest European abroad and 2) of the kingdom's relationship with the duchies as destinations and life stations for several authors (for instance at Kiel University). The travel literature documents how Danish culture and cultural identity are formed in exchange with the experience of the “other” (Harbsmeier 1997; Andersen 2007) – not only as negative demarcation and stereotyping but also as exchange in the journeys’ "contact zones" (Pratt 2008).

WP 3 Biographies (Steen Bo Frandsen)

Biographies offer one of the most promising fields for discussing the reality of entangled histories (Caine 2010; Renders et.al. 2017). A large number of protagonists in politics and public life spent part of – or their entire – life between different languages and cultures. Characterized by bilingual and bicultural competencies their biographies were formed before the culture would be organised in national categories. Through a selection of biographies of protagonists with different professions, the project sheds light on how the idea and existence of a multicultural composite state was retrospectively opposed and denied.

WP4 PhD project: Nations’ in Flux. A History of Identity and Language in the Danish-German Borderlands, 1814-1864 (Nikolaj Bjerggaard Olesen)

The project seeks to illuminate the entangled and multilinguistic border region between the Danish Kingdom and the German Federation in the nineteenth century, to address a forgotten story which in some regards runs counter to Danish national historiography. Traditionally, the history of the Danish-German borderlands has been one of a long period of peaceful coexistence which by the 1850s had become fractured and segmented into neat cultural categories of ‘Danish’ vis-á-vis ‘German’. Recent research has shown, on the other hand, that this was not always the case. However, these newer studies still struggle with freeing themselves of a language of binary oppositions, between ‘Danish’ and ‘German’. The project at hand seeks to deliver a different analytical framework with which we can highlight and better understand the persistent cultural and identity pluralism of the borderlands. It means to investigate habitual changes in the region – or the lack thereof – considering historical categories such as modernization and nationalization. With respect to the dynamisms of the Sattelzeit and Hobsbawm’s ‘long nineteenth century’, the question begs itself as to how quickly and for what reasons the people of the region subscribed to and identified with the emerging national identities and language ideologies of the period – if at all.

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