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Of Mind and Matter: The Duality of National Identity in the German-Danish Borderlands (Central European Studies)
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About Of Mind And Matter: The Duality Of National
Product Description Of Mind and Matter analyzes identity formation in the multicultural border region of Sleswig. It highlights the changeability of national sentiments and explores what has motivated local inhabitants to define themselves as Germans or Danes. The analysis focuses especially on the respective national minorities, among whom the transitional and flexible aspects of Sleswig identity surface most clearly. The study investigates national sentiments in a border region from a theoretical and comparative perspective. It relies on diverse forms of historical evidence, including quantitative sources such as language statistics and election results, but also more subjective sources such as personal life stories and interviews. The study pays equal attention to German and Danish source material. Of Mind and Matter adds important new angles to the literature on national identity in border areas and fills a conspicuous gap in English-language historiography, which completely lacks modern analyses of Sleswig history. Review Of Mind and Matter is an ambitious work that seeks not only to capture the experience of Schleswig as a region with a composite identity, but to query many of the theories of nationalism, while also placing the Schleswig experience in a comparative framework. This sweeping macrohistorical design, the author hopes, will help inspire more microhistorical studies of the region. The results of Peter Thaler s approach are mixed: he demonstrates a keen awareness of the complexities and at times fluidity of border identities; his case studies, though, done in rapid brush strokes, are far more suggestive than definitive. Thaler s opening chapter quickly lays out the changing historiography on Schleswig before turning to an overview of the literature of nationalism. While Thaler sees positive elements in differing theories of nationalism, he argues that too much of the field remains mired in the dichotomy of Staatsnation versus Kulturnation. Moreover, many of the established approaches, whether the instrumentalist approach of scholars such as Benedict Anderson or Eric Hobsbawn, or ethno-national approach of Connor Walker or Anthony Smith, fail to take into account the subjective choices about national belonging. Here, Thaler harkens back to Ernst Renan s notion of the nation as a daily plebiscite. This subjectivity, as Thaler terms it, also points us back to the mind of the title; the matter are objective circumstances, such as language or religion that can shape, but do not necessarily determine, national identity, especially in a border region. Thaler then offers a brief synopsis of the broad sweep of Schleswig s history, including linguistic and cultural developments, before moving to his narrow case studies. Chapter four examines three minority groups, the Danes in the German Kaiserreich, Germans in interwar northern Schleswig, and the Danish minority of post-1945 German Schleswig. Thaler sees the first group as a rather classic minority (i.e., Danish nationalists left on the wrong side of a border shift), while the other two are more unusual. For the German interwar minority, this claim seems less substantiated or at least poorly explained; why wouldn t some in the northern part of Schleswig continue to adhere to Germany? One wishes Thaler had detailed this group s post-1945 fate a bit more clearly as well. In contrast, the post-1945 Danes certainly were unusual as their numbers were swelled in the war s aftermath by Germans who for a variety of reasons economics, disgust with Germany, etc. chose to identify with the Danish minority, particularly in the decade after World War II. It is also interesting that, as Thaler notes, some German parents have continued to send their children to Danish schools. Here, Thaler might have pondered at greater length what composite border identities in an integrating Europe mean. The ensuing chapter explores the subjective nature of composite identities primarily by analyzin
