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109 CHAPTER FivE Identity on a Personal Level Sleswig Biographies during the Age of Nationalism 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 attachment. In earlier periods, many of these affiliations were predetermined. Modern societies with their focus on individualism have expanded autonomous self-definition. This chapter explores the response of individual Sleswigers to the challenge of nationalism during the last two centuries. 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 differing national allegiances. Yet although the chapter examines intellectual life histories, it strives to provide more than abstract biographies. Instead, it uses concrete life experiences to empiricize the concept of subjective nationality in border regions. In Sleswig, too, the most common path of identity formation followed the gradual politicization of cultural attributes, especially language. For a SleswigHolstein activist in the Danish composite monarchy such as Wilhelm Beseler and a Danish-minded deputy to the German Reichstag such as H. P. Hanssen, identification with their linguistic community proved powerful enough to withstand the ideological influence of the political center.1 Following the division of Sleswig in 1920, in turn, a clear majority on both sides of the new border was socialized fairly unproblematically into its respective nation-state. Yet a substantial number of people chose a different course. As a consequence , the chapter explores biographies at the national crossroads. The individuals examined were linked to more than one cultural community. They made choices that were influenced by their public and private socialization and their emancipation from it. Although the life stories 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 110 ◆ CHAPTeR FIVe increasing questioning of national concepts in the period following World War II, this progression is not linear and leaves room for alternative self-definitions. The analysis reveals the different types of self-identification available to the inhabitants of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sleswig. Sober Rationalist in an Age of Passion: Nicolaus Falck (Niels) Nicolaus Falck was born in 1784 in Emmerlev in western Sleswig, slightly to the north of the current German-Danish border.2 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 Nicolaus Falck away from his social origins, although he always retained an appreciation of Sleswig peasant culture. Following training at the Haderslev grammar school, Falck began the study of theology and philosophy in Kiel, which he completed with a doctoral dissertation titled “De historiae inter Graecos origine et natura” in 1808.3 He subsequently undertook graduate study in law, passed his exams in Gottorf, and began his juridical career in the civil service. Falck found employment at the SleswigHolstein chancellery in Copenhagen, where he 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 its academic institution 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...

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