Insights into Schleswig-Holstein Politics Economy History

Transcription

1 Volksinitiative Religionen landeszentrale für politische bildung Wirtschaft Religionen Wirtschaft Politik Direkte Demokratie Regierungen Geschichte Geschichte Wirtschaft Politik Regierungen Landtage Minderheiten Gesellschaft Regierungen Volksinitiative Landtage Minderheiten Volksinitiative Gesellschaft Direkte Demokratie Landtage Parteien Landtage Parteien Minderheiten Regierungen Volksinitiative Minderheiten Parteien Volksinitiative Direkte Demokratie Wirtschaft Religionen Gesellschaft Geschichte Direkte Demokratie Klaus Kellmann Insights into Schleswig-Holstein Politics Economy History Politik Wirtschaft Parteien Religionen Geschichte Politik Politik hintergrund

2 Klaus Kellmann Insights into Schleswig-Holstein Politics Economy History HINTERGRUND Eine Schriftenreihe der Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Schleswig-Holstein About the Author Klaus Kellmann, born in 1951 in Langenhorn (North Friesland), studied German, History, Philosophy and Pedagogy at the University of Kiel and was awarded a doctorate by the University of Kiel. Since 1985 he has been Department Head at the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel.

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS theme 1 The Land, its Economy and its Administration 5 theme 2 History 21 theme 3 Politics and Parties 41 theme 4 Local Government Politics 60 theme 5 Direct Democracy 74 Acknowledgements 86 The Land, its Economy and its Administration 1. A Land Bridge between the Continent and Scandinavia Schleswig-Holstein is the land bridge between Central and Northern Europe, between the Continent and its Scandinavian Peninsula. In this geographic situation and function it is a natural link that connects Northern European with Central European cultures, languages and nations. Schleswig-Holstein, embraced by the seas, as its anthem of 1844 has it, has natural sea borders in the East and the West, as well as a natural border in the South formed by the River Elbe. The interstate border running from Lauenburg to Lübeck and separating Schleswig-Holstein from Mecklenburg- Western Pomerania resulted from historical political developments. This is also true, especially so in fact, for the German-Danish national border running from an area north of Flensburg to an area south of Tønder, which following an often war-like and bloody confrontation lasting over one thousand years was fixed permanently only by the 1920 referendum mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. Since then, there has been living a German minority north of that border and a Danish one south of it. theme 1 Schleswig-Holstein is bisected between Kiel, the regional state capital, and Brunsbüttel by Kiel Canal, which continues to be the world s busiest manmade waterway. Kiel Canal was opened in 1895 under the German Empire not primarily for commercial purposes, but to make possible the rapid deployment of navy ships in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. 2. The marshland, the Geestland and the Eastern Hilly Land Typical of the land is its geomorphologic division into three parts: the marshlands (Marsch), the geestland (Geest) and the eastern hilly land (östliches Hügelland). In terms of settlement geography these types of landscape are associated with three dissimilar, even contrasting styles of farm and village arrangements as well as of agriculture. On the broad coastal strip of the marshlands bordered by the North Sea generally diked land wrestled from the sea there live Dithmarschers and Frisians. The latter also inhabit the unique and therefore largely protected offshore island groups including the holms (Hallig islands). The marshlands, the poor soils of the Schleswig-Holstein Geest including the sparsely populated, slightly raised central spine of Schleswig- Holstein (mittelholsteinischer Landrücken), and the gently rolling eastern land 5

4 succeed one another from West to East. The eastern land, characterized by young moraines, was initially cultivated by Slavic groups of people. Over time, manorial social structures developed here. As a matter of fact, it is the cradle of the nobility of Schleswig-Holstein. Die Kreise Schleswig-Holsteins Stand: The Rural Districts of Schleswig-Holstein Nordsee Helgoland zum Kreis Pinneberg Nordfriesland Nordfriesland FLENSBURG Heide Dänemark Husum Heide Dithmarschen Niedersachsen k 50 km FLENSBURG Schleswig-Flensburg Schleswig Rendsburg-Eckernförde Itzehoe Steinburg Rendsburg Pinneberg Pinneberg Kreisgrenze (letzte Änderung: 24. März 1974) Kreis Kreisfreie Stadt Sitz der Kreisverwaltung KIEL NEUMÜNSTER Hamburg Segeberg Ostsee Plön Bad Segeberg Plön Bad Oldesloe Stormarn Eutin LÜBECK Ratzeburg Herzogtum Lauenburg Ostholstein Mecklenburg- Vorpommern Figure 1: Map of Schleswig-Holstein showing, among other things, the state s organization into districts and administratively independent cities (courtesy of the Statistikamt Nord) [Figure legend: Kreis = District; Kreisfreie Stadt = Urban District; Sitz der Kreisverwaltung = Seat of District Authority] Schleswig-Holstein has eleven rural districts and four administratively independent cities (Figure 1). With an area of approx. 15,770 square kilometers 268 Statistisches Jahrbuch Schleswig-Holstein 2010/2011 Statistikamt Nord (approx. 6,091 square miles), Schleswig-Holstein is Germany s second smallest territorial state. As of 31 December 2010, it had a population of 2.83 million. 4. Bone of Contention between Denmark and Germany The land bridge between the seas must have been of no small interest at a very early time in history. From the eighth century AD onwards, Saxons, Franks, Danes and Slavs fought for possession of it. Charlemagne took the risk of crossing the River Elbe and ultimately incorporated Holstein, Stormarn and Dithmarschen as Gaue [historical administrative and judicial districts] into Francia. At his instigation a fortress named the Hammaburg was built near the River Alster. The Danes protected themselves against the Franks with an earthen wall, the Danevirke, which ran south of Schleswig. In AD 811, an open confrontation erupted between Roman-Christian Francia and the pagan-nordic world of the Vikings. As a result and a compromise, the Eider River was declared a dividing line, which then marked the German- Danish frontier until 1864, i. e., for more than a thousand years. Over time and this is what makes the history of the land so very special to the north and to the south of this demarcation line the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein came into being, gradually developing a sense of common identity and pride. Although the Estates of both Duchies elected the Danish King as their overlord in the Treaty of Ribe of 1460, they simultaneously made him pledge dat se bliven ewich tosamende ungedeelt [Middle Low German for: that they shall forever remain undivided]. Constitutionally, this treaty is the birth certificate of Schleswig-Holstein. It made the land an odd construction indeed: a real union half under Danish suzerainty and half under German suzerainty. One of the oddities resulting from this is the fact that, as from the year 1815, the Danish King in his capacity as the representative of Holstein had a seat and a vote in the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) seated in Frankfort on the Main. The patriotism awakened all over the continent at the time was one of the causes of the Great European War in Schleswig-Holstein. Revolutionaries, enthused by the ideas of the first German parliament assembling in Frankfort s St. Paul s Church (Paulskirche), sought the detachment of the Duchies from Denmark. On the other hand, the party of the Eider Danes [the Danish National Liberals] called for the irreversible incorporation of Schleswig into the Danish crown. Prussia, initially allied with Austria, entered the stage as a European stabilizing power and defeated the Danish troops near Düppel in As a result, the Duchies were neither divided nor became independent, as revolutionaries such as Uwe Jens Lornsen had hoped, but 6 7

5 together became a primary Prussian Province and, as such, part of imperial Germany in Berlin had thus succeeded Copenhagen. However, the new rulers had drawn the new border north of Haderslev, with the consequence that the unquestionably mainly Danish-speaking and pro- Danish Nordschleswig had been annexed. A potential for new conflicts had thus arisen. A mutually and permanently recognized border between Germany and Denmark was created only after the German defeat in World War I and the referendum of 1920 by which the border was moved southwards to somewhere just outside the city gates of Flensburg. Following the surrender of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, the dissolution of Prussia by the Allies and the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, Schleswig-Holstein gained its autonomy as an independent federal state in accepted and Integrated: the Danish and Frisian Minorities The political culture of the Land has its very own character because of the presence of two minorities, the Danes and the Frisians. Some 50,000 people are today counted as belonging to the Danish minority, almost all of whom live in the Schleswig area. Their political rights and their autonomy were laid down in the Kieler Erklärung (Kiel Declaration) of 1949 and the Bonn- Kopenhagener Abmachungen (Bonn Copenhagen Agreements) of 1955, which apply the principle, A Dane is whoever wishes to be a Dane. Notable in this connection is the new State Constitution of 1990, in whose Article 5 the Land formally commits itself to the protection and promotion of minorities. In so doing, Schleswig-Holstein is leading the way Europe-wide as regards the integration of national minorities. The Danes have their own school system, associations, press, culture, sports and health system which are all generally very well-regarded for their efficiency and performance; specifically they have their own hospitals, churches, theaters and libraries, as well as one Danish grammar school in Flensburg and one in Schleswig, whose graduates are admitted to universities both in Germany and in Denmark. Because the Südschleswigscher Wählerverband (SSW: South Schleswig Voters Association), the political representation of the Danish minority, has been exempt from the five-percent clause, it has since 1946 been able to have at least one representative in the Kiel Landtag, with the exception of the years 1954 to Out of the 166,000 inhabitants of the District of North Friesland barely more than a third see themselves as Frisians, and among these there are no more than 10,000 speakers of the Frisian language. That said, the Frisians do not regard their vernacular as just another dialect, e. g., a variation of Low German, but as a separate language in its own right a fact that has by now also been proven linguistically. Unlike the Danes, this minority does not run its own schools or health institutions, but a comparatively close network of Frisian associations, folk-dance and traditional-costume groups is covering the towns and villages of the North Frisian district. In addition, the Nordfriesisches Institut ( North Frisian Institute ) in Bredstedt is very much engaged in cultural and scientific lecturing and publication activities. In the course of the 1920 referendum, the long-simmering disagreement within the Frisian movement over whether to align itself politically with Germany or with Denmark caused an internal rift. The greater part of the movement expressed its pro- German attitude in the Bohmstedter Richtlinien ( Bohmstedt Guidelines ), the smaller one, the Nationale Friiske, even today considers the SSW Member of the Landtag as its extended political arm. The differences between the two groups, though, have long been resolved, and their representatives in the Friesenrat ( Frisian Council ) work together constructively. 6. Strong Influx of Expelled Population after World War II Far more than by all else before, the politics, culture and society of Schleswig- Holstein were shaken up by an invasion by sea and by land during the last months of World War II. We are referring here to the refugees and expellees who on their arrival had in most cases saved no more than their naked lives and perhaps some bags and trunks. Whilst the population of Schleswig-Holstein stood at just 1.6 million in 1939, by 1946 it had increased by a million people, most of them coming from Pomerania and East Prussia. They, too, brought with them cultures worth preserving; they, too, spoke in distinctive dialects; and they, too, formed their own political representation to wit the Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten [BHE, translates roughly as: the Association of Expellees and of Those Deprived of Their Civic Rights], but not much of all this has remained to date. The BHE, which initially played a dominant role in the political arena besides the CDU and the SPD, 8 9

6 was also discredited by the fact that old Nazis used it as a political home to continue pursuing their political careers in the now democratic polity. The descendants of the expellees now resident in the northernmost federal state are socially fully integrated; they are almost indistinguishable Schleswig- Holsteiners and Federal Republican Germans. 7. The Impulses for Trade and Commerce as well as for Cultural Change Have Mostly Come from the Coasts Up until well into the 20th century, Schleswig-Holstein had been regarded as the quintessential agrarian state. As a matter of fact, the triad of farming, fisheries, and sea travel characterized the economic history of the Duchies for over one thousand years. At present, agriculture and forestry contribute a mere 1.4 percent to the state s GDP. Services (57.2 percent), the manufacturing sector (20.7 percent), and trade and transport (a combined 20.7 percent) have long made up the lion s share of the state s GDP. The Land between the seas has of course not been spared by the vast structural changes and reorganizations of modern economic life. Be that as it may, a look back into the economic history and economic geography of Schleswig-Holstein is really quite telling, if not intriguing. It reveals that the impulses for trade and commerce as well as for cultural change have almost always come from the seashore and not from the evidently economically underdeveloped inland country. Even the Ox Trails (Ochsenwege) were nowhere farther away from the North and the Baltic Sea than a few miles; these were historically grown trade arteries on which cattle were driven southwards from the extreme North of the Jutland Peninsula to the gates of Hamburg to be offered for sale. Economically speaking, the eastern coast characterized by ports and entrepôts with a sizable maritime industry has always been far more important than the western coast with its equally lovely and sleepy fishing towns like Husum, Büsum or Tönning. Depending on the depth and the specific nature of the fjords and bays, during the past thousand years trading towns (have) assumed central, even dominant functions beyond the Baltic Sea proper as far as Northern, Eastern, and Central Europe. In the early Middle Ages the Vikings built near present-day Schleswig and the shallow Schlei inlet their emporium Haithabu [Hedeby], through which they 10 shipped goods from Scandinavia to the South. In the High and Late Middle Ages, Lübeck, the Queen of the Hanse (Hanseatic League), developed not only into an economic power but also wielded great political influence throughout Northern Europe. Flensburg, at its zenith in the 18th century, used its fleet of sailing ships fit for the high seas to develop the lucrative trade with spirits and spices imported from the New World. As for Kiel, it was systematically expanded during the late 19th and early 20th century to become an Imperial Navy port, reflecting the megalomania of the Wilhelminian era. (In Chapter 2 the history of Schleswig-Holstein will be treated in greater detail.) Nowadays, following the upheavals and the political opening up of Eastern Europe, ships can freely enter almost any port around the Baltic Sea, a fact that could further increase the importance of Kiel and Lübeck as ferry ports and as international commercial hubs. Visitors may now already notice that not a day passes here on which no superlarge tub puts to sea, bound for Oslo, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Kaliningrad, Riga, Tallinn or Klaipeda. As for cargo handling, Lübeck ranks at the top with 17.9 million tons of cargo handled per year. Kiel handles 3.8 million tons of goods per year. The ship-building industry, that other important maritime economic branch with a centuries-old tradition, has been pressed hard by the Japanese and South Korean competition. However, the ten shipyards of the Land may be said to be back on an even keel now, albeit on a lower level of business activity. They currently employ some 4,500 people, whose main business is the construction of container ships, special ships and submarines. Even so, it is simply no longer right to say that the economic ups and downs of Schleswig-Holstein s large port cities are wholly determined by the order situation of the shipyards based in these cities, considering that a largescale economic diversification has been undertaken in the region. By the same token, that adage of an earlier time, If the Howaldtswerke catch a cold, Kiel will get pneumonia, is hardly true any more. 8. The Great Importance of Tourism Tourism continues to play a vital role in the economic life of the state. Some 250,000 people are employed in this economic sector throughout the year or seasonally. 11

7 In Travemünde, Westerland and Glücksburg the bathing and spa culture date back to the 19th century. Measured against the number of residents, more people holiday in Schleswig-Holstein than in any other federal Land. In 2010 alone six million guests could be welcomed in the land between the seas, of which more than 25 percent came from North-Rhine Westphalia. About a third of the total turnover of 5 billion achieved in the tourism industry is generated by day visitors (total GDP of Schleswig-Holstein in 2010: approx. 74 billion). In the last few decades the economic structure of the Land has undergone fundamental changes. Schleswig-Holstein has turned from an agrarian and ship-building state into a location for high-tech industries. Within the manufacturing sector this branch now even ranks first in terms of turnover (greater than 20 percent) and the number of people employed (greater than 20 percent). The expansion of the tertiary sector (trade and commerce, transport, services, the public sector) to the detriment of the secondary sector (the producing industries) has continued unabatedly. In 2010 the tertiary sector made up no less than three-fourths of the state s net domestic product. Industry and the crafts accounted for one-fifth, agriculture and forestry for just 1.4 percent. In regard to its GDP, Schleswig-Holstein has the lowest percentage of the producing sector and the highest percentage of the public sector among the old federal states, and the structural change is continuing. 9. Administrative Organization During long periods of the land s history before the creation of the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein its administrative organization and division into districts oftentimes followed a complicated, if not confusing course. The conflicts between the Germanic tribes and the Slavs, the Germans and the Danes as well as between the nobility and the free peasantry have also left their marks in this area. The administrative entities which gradually formed over time often resulted from a difficult, hard fought-out reconciliation of interests, which most of the time rather hampered than facilitated an efficient and orderly administration of the land. It was the ordinance concerning the organization of the district authorities as well as the district representation in the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, issued in 1867 by Prussian states- 12 man Otto von Bismarck, by which the two Duchies were restructured to form 20 rural districts. This reform would prove its worth: New administrative structures only rarely had to be formed thereafter, notable examples being the dissolution of the District of Bordesholm in 1932 and Lübeck s loss of its status as an Imperial Free City by operation of the Groß-Hamburg-Gesetz [Greater Hamburg Act] of It was then only the great territorial reform of 1969 and 1970 by which the present division into eleven rural districts was created (cf. Figure 1). Pinneberg is the smallest as well as the most densely populated district; Rendsburg-Eckernförde, almost the size of the Saarland, is the one with the greatest territory. In the eleven districts there are now a total of 1,116 communities plus 81 communities and towns/cities having their own administrations. The largest one of these, lying not far from the city gates of Hamburg, is Norderstedt (population: approx. 75,000), an artificial construct which received its city rights not before the 1960s. In addition to that, the Land has four administratively independent cities (kreisfreie Städte): Neumünster, Flensburg, Lübeck, and Kiel. Lübeck (population: approx. 210,000) and Kiel (population: approx. 238,000) are the only large cities and urban agglomeration areas of the Land. 10. From the Statutes of the State to the State Constitution The first statutes for Schleswig-Holstein were adopted by the Landtag on 13 December The choice of the term statutes a legally far less substantive term than that of a constitution is attributable to the fact that the founders of Schleswig-Holstein rated as low the chances of survival of a federal state marked by the misery of refugees, economic hardship and high unemployment and thus consciously decided against drawing up a charter that claimed almost absolute validity. It was the (Social Democratic) government itself which assumed that the provisional construct which was Schleswig-Holstein would in the not too distant future merge into restructured Länder. In fact, then, it was to take more than forty years before, in August 1990, under the next Social Democratic government, the Statutes of the State (Landessatzung) became the State Constitution (Landesverfassung). In essence, the Landessatzung of 1949 was a concise organization statute which avoided the formulation of programmatic state objectives. One remarkable thing about it is the strong position assigned to the Minister President, maybe also owing to the Weimar Republic experience. The Minister President ceases to hold office only by voluntarily stepping down or by a forced resigna- 13

8 Almost fifty different newspapers with a total circulation of more than 500,000 copies are published daily in the Land between the seas. Until the beginning of the 1980s, these privately organized information media competed with pubtion, not however automatically when the newly elected Landtag assembles. The highest representative of the government was meant to embody power and continuity. Under the impression, or more precisely, the shock, of the Barschel Pfeiffer scandal, the Landtag decided on 29 June 1988 to set up a committee of inquiry tasked to study based on new[ly emerged] constitutional and constitutional-political information possibilities of effectively checking the government, [to study possibilities of achieving] citizens greater political involvement, [to study possibilities] of strengthening the Landtag as well as [possibilities] of improving its work conditions and its working methods, and [tasked] to make suggestions for appropriate amendments to the Landessatzung. Whereas the Statutes of 1949 had only been adopted by a simple majority of the SPD representatives, the work of the committee of inquiry was unanimously approved by Parliament on 30 May Not long after this the State Constitution of Schleswig-Holstein was signed into law. Whereas it had been stipulated in the old Statutes that Schleswig-Holstein would strive to reorganize the federal territory, suchlike declarations were deliberately omitted in the new constitution. It was positively a landmark decision by Parliament to institute direct-democratic constitutional elements in Schleswig-Holstein. Accordingly, political decisions can now not only be made by elected representatives of the people but also directly by the electorate, specifically by means of popular initiatives (Volksinitiativen), petitions for referenda (Volksbegehren), and referenda (Volksentscheide). The call, We are the people! shouted by the former GDR citizens rights movement it could be heard just when the controversial deliberations of the committee were held may have been of crucial importance for the committee to reach its conclusions (surmises von Mutius). Article 6 of the State Constitution declares the promotion of equal opportunities for men and women as a state objective. Whenever vacancies in public decision-making or deliberative bodies are to be filled, equal numbers of women and men shall be represented in such bodies, if possible at all. Further, Article 7 defines the protection of the natural foundations of life as a state objective. The State Constitution defines as state institutions the State Parliament (Landtag), the State Government (Landesregierung), and the State Constitutional Court (Landesverfassungsgericht). The number of Members of Parliament 14 used to be fixed at 75, but is no longer so as a result of the new election law passed in Article 26 says: The State Government is the highest governing, decision-making and executive body in the executive power branch. The government is headed by the Minister President (i. e., the state premier), whose term of office is now strictly limited in time to the duration of the election period. During this time, he or she can only be removed from office by way of a constructive vote of no-confidence (Article 35). Schleswig-Holstein is as yet the only federal Land in which the chairperson of the strongest party not supporting the government, i. e., the leader of the opposition, is provided for in the Constitution (Article 12). This probably strengthens his or her position and raises his or her emoluments. The scope of functions and the responsibilities of the State s Audit Office (Landesrechnungshof) were defined very broadly: Pursuant to Articles 55 and 56 of the State Constitution the State s Audit Office is not only charged with fiscal control of the government but also with checking all institutions and communal corporations including private persons, to the extent that they receive financial contributions out of the state s budget or administer state assets. The State Constitution of Schleswig-Holstein may be regarded as the most modern of all German state constitutions, at least as far as its organizational-legal part is concerned. In several instances it served as a model during the constitutional process in the new federal states in Eastern Germany. 11. The Media Landscape The Barschel Pfeiffer scandal had once again demonstrated the important role of the mass media in a modern-day democracy. As is the case in the other German federal states, in Schleswig-Holstein the media scene consists of a public and a private sector. The regional studios of the NDR and the ZDF are under public law. Other radio and TV broadcasting institutions as well as newspaper publishing houses are privately held; so the private sector comprises both electronic and print media. 15

9 lic-sector radio and television, but then things got moving in the media landscape. To begin with, Gerhard Stoltenberg and Ernst Albrecht, the then-minister Presidents of Schleswig-Holstein and its neighbouring state Lower Saxony, pushed through the break-up of the broadcasting monopoly of the NDR center in Hamburg as well as a marked elevation in status of the regional broadcasting studios (Welle Nord, Schleswig-Holstein Magazin). But broadcasting really got into full swing not before the second half of the 1980s, when (in 1986) Radio Schleswig-Holstein (RSH) was the first privately operated German broadcaster to go on the air. Given that RSH is owned by the newspaper publishers of the Land, the Springer publishing house thereby exerts a demonstrable influence on the radio scene in Schleswig-Holstein. For example, the Hamburg group is a major holder of the Lübecker Nachrichten (a daily; circulation: around 114,000), owns parts of the Kieler Nachrichten (a daily; circulation: around 113,000), and wholly owns several newspapers in the outlying districts of Hamburg. So when the previously independent Schleswig-Holsteinische Landeszeitung merged with the Flensburger Tageblatt and now acting as the Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag with currently fifteen regional newspaper editions became the biggest print media association of the Land (circulation: around 200,000), this was done expressly to prevent the Springer publishing house from gaining a dominant market position in Schleswig-Holstein, both as regards the newspaper sector and radio broadcasting (RSH). The Medienanstalt Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein (MAHSH) has legal and program oversight over RSH and other private broadcasters formed in the interim (such as NORA, Delta Radio). All socially relevant groups in the states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein are represented in it. The MAHSH is the competent authority for the distribution of private radio and TV frequencies and acts as a media watchdog. 12. Education, Science, Culture and Leisure Like the other federal states, Schleswig-Holstein has a differentiated school system organized according to school types and school levels. As of the year 2010 there were: 632 primary schools (Grundschulen) attended by 114,000 students, 229 secondary general schools (Hauptschulen) attended by 29,000 students, 169 intermediate schools (Realschulen) attended by 57,000 students, 106 traditional grammar schools (Gymnasien) attended by 86,000 students, 25 comprehensive schools (Gesamtschulen) attended by 20,000 students, 104 community schools (Gemeinschaftsschulen: special 16 type of comprehensive schools) attended by 8,000 students, 36 regional schools (Regionalschule: combination of Realschule and Hauptschule) attended by 2,100 students, 11 Rudolf Steiner schools (Freie Waldorfschulen) attended by 5,000 students, and 146 schools for students with special needs (Sonderschulen) attended by 9,400 students. A further 5,600 students went to the schools of the Danish minority. The highly differentiated vocational training sector (Berufsschule, Berufsfachschule, Berufsoberschule [special types of vocational schools]; Fachgymnasium [special type of Gymnasium], Fachschulen [technical colleges], schools of the health-system) includes 371 schools attended by 10,400 students. These schools award a broad spectrum of educational qualifications, ranging from certificates obtained after completion of a traditional apprentice-ship (Lehre) within the framework of the dual system of vocational training (duales Ausbildungssystem) to the qualification for university entrance (Hochschulreife). All things considered, the school landscape between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea has been marked by stability and moderate progression, not by radical changes or discontinuities. The principal university of the state is the Christian-Albrechts University (CAU) in Kiel, founded in Some 22,000 of the state s 48,500 students were enrolled at the CAU as of The CAU is a major employer of the region, with some 6,000 employees on the payroll, including more than 400 professors; it is thus of no less economic importance for the city of Kiel than the Howaldt shipyard. The state capital is home to a number of further top-notch research and training centers renowned far beyond the region, namely the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Institut für Weltwirtschaft), founded as early as 1914; the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research (Forschungszentrum für marine Geowissenschaften); the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts (Muthesius Kunsthochschule); and the Fachhochschule für Verwaltung und Dienstleistung (a university of applied sciences for administration and services) in Altenholz. Lübeck is home to the University of Lübeck, which mainly offers courses in Medicine (Medizinische Hochschule), and the prestigious Lübeck Academy of Music (Musikhochschule). The former teacher training college (Pädagogische Hochschule) in Flensburg has been raised to a university. Aside from the locations just mentioned, there are universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen) in Wesel, Heide, Rendsburg, Pinneberg and Elmshorn. 17

10 Oddly enough, there is still a widely held (preconceived) opinion that art and science just do not flourish in this bleak country that so often gets badly hit by the elements. Frisia non cantat. That is the well-known line from Tacitus Germania, which was not only meant to express that the hoarse throats of this special breed of people make them very bad singers, but also that they are barbarians in quite other respects. Let us dwell on this idea a little longer and consider (North) Friesland as an example. This area, where dairy cows graze in lush, green meadows, is actually where great talents and thinkers of worldwide renown hailed from, such as the poet Theodor Storm, the historian and Nobel laureate Theodor Mommsen [received a Nobel Prize for his Roman History ], the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies as well as the educationalist Friedrich Paulsen. This is also where the expressionist painter Emil Nolde found his home and took refuge from the Nazis Tacitus would really have to stand in awe. Nonetheless, there has never been that one eminent cultural center in the land. For the Hanseatic City of Lübeck with its distinctive urban culture, London, Novgorod or Bruges were closer than any place in Schleswig-Holstein. The residence of the Dukes of Gottorp in Schleswig, a monumental Renaissance building dating from the 17th century, had more of an influence in Northern Europe than in its closer neighborhood. In the 18th century Eutin was called the Weimar of the North, it is true, but it was not really setting the tone culturally throughout the land. Kiel University has never taken over that role, either. In any case, the land was home to individual great poets, other literary figures, and artists, such as Friedrich Hebbel in Dithmarschen, Heinrich and Thomas Mann in Lübeck, Ernst Barlach and A. Paul Weber in Ratzeburg. Also, Siegfried Lenz, Günter Grass and Sarah Kirsch have for a long time been living and working in Schleswig-Holstein. Attempts to create a widespread cultural network reaching right into villages, churches and barns have only recently been made. One example is the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, which even boasts its own orchestra academy, in which no less a person than Leonard Bernstein until just before his death trained the young talents. Another example is the Ars Baltica Project of Björn Engholm, in which the artistic unity and diversity of all Baltic region states are documented and advanced. 18 In the field of the performing arts Low German theater deserves a special mention here, given the great, unbroken popularity it has always enjoyed. E. g., whenever the Plattdütsche Speeldeel [a Low German troupe] performs strong scenes or Döntjes a in halls and village inns up and down the country, it may be sure that all seats will be taken. 13. A Predominantly Protestant State In the presence of the reformer Johannes Bugenhagen the Representative Assembly in Rendsburg (Rendsburger Landtag) decided in 1542 to introduce the Reformation in Schleswig-Holstein. Henceforth its ecclesiastical order (ordinatio ecclesiastica) formed the basis of theological and judicial action. Schleswig-Holstein has thus long been largely Protestant. One hundred years ago, over 99 percent of its population were Protestant, although since then this percentage has gone down steadily. Today, the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church with its two bishop parishes Hamburg and Lübeck as well as Schleswig and Holstein encompasses 11 church districts comprising 594 parishes for some two million parishioners. The Roman Catholic Church with its 80 parishes and 173,000 members is much smaller in size. Its churches belong to the Hamburg archdiocese. The exact number of members of the Islamic religious community organized in thirty mosque associations is unknown. They have probably more than 50,000 members. Some 7,500 people profess to be Jehovah s Witnesses. Between the years 1933 and 1945 the Nazi tyranny almost completely annihilated Jewish life and Jewish culture. Only in recent years eight Jewish Communities have formed owing to the influx of Jewish immigrants mostly into cities, namely in Lübeck, Pinneberg, Bad Segeberg, Flensburg, Elmshorn, and Ahrensburg. There are also two Jewish communities in Kiel. Collectively, they have nearly 1,900 members, a witty anecdotes told in the Low German dialect 19

11 organized into two regional associations: the Jewish Community Schleswig- Holstein (fairly orthodox in character) and the Regional Association of the Jewish Communities of Schleswig-Holstein (fairly liberal in character). More than one-third of the residents of Schleswig-Holstein are not affiliated with any faith, and their number is going up. 14. Coat of Arms The coat of arms of Schleswig-Holstein boasts the emblems of the two parts of the state. The two lions striding one over the other had been heraldic animals of the Dukes of Schleswig since The Schauenburg counts of Holstein had borne the leaf of a nettle since 1229/38. The first juxtaposition of the two emblems is documented for the 14th century. 20 History 1. Formation of the Land between the Seas Over there, twice within a day and a night the ocean floods a vast stretch of land in a mighty stream, so that in the eternal struggle between the two elements it remains undecided whether the area is part of the mainland or of the sea. Thus wrote the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder almost two thousand years ago in Rome with regard to the western part of the Jutish peninsula, but there is more to it than that. The permanent colonization of this uncommonly fertile coastal strip was only made possible by people of the marshlands who braved the sea or Blanker Hans, as the locals say [the fierce North Sea], a battle still being fought today. The social relations of these people were guided by the maxim: Wer nich will dieken, de mutt wieken. [ He who does not want to dike marshland, must retreat. ] If one continues to move eastwards from here, the marked differences in the geomorphology of Schleswig-Holstein will strike the eye, the previously mentioned succession of marshland, the sandy spine of the Geest, and the eastern hill land. It is interesting to note in this connection that the main economic incentives have always come from the eastern part of the land. Since the end of the most recent Ice Age the Baltic Sea has reached far inland here, forming deep fjords and bays in the process. This is where the larger towns and cities of the land were founded, whose ports depending on the development level of individual maritime technologies gained national and European, indeed for some time even global importance. In economic terms, the equally lovely and sedate small towns along the Western coastline have never ranked nearly as high as the eastern towns/cities that is, if, as was the case with the storied Rungholt, the Blanker Hans did not simply swallow them whole. 2. From the Early History and the Middle Ages to the Treaty of Ribe in 1460 The first port of international significance in Schleswig-Holstein was that of Haithabu, first mentioned in the chronicles of the Frankish Empire in AD 804. This settlement was situated not far from what is today the city of Schleswig on the Schlei, a Baltic-Sea inlet reaching so far into the interior of the land that it forms the neck of the Jutland Peninsula (Schleswiger Landenge). It may be inferred that the Vikings, the founders of Haithabu, had already a sound knowledge of geography and logistics. As distinguished from the 21 theme 2

12 names of the Saxons, the Jutes, the Frisians, and the Slavs who had immigrated into the then largely uninhabited North Elbia from the 6th century AD onwards the word vikingr does not denote some kind of ethnic origin but rather a way of life: It means as much as seafaring warrior. Just when long-distance trade was beginning to flourish, these sea warriors terrified all of Northern Europe. In AD 793, they slew the monks of the island monastery Lindisfarne on the eastern coast of England and here leveled one of the holiest sites of Christendom. In AD 845, they laid waste to Hamburg. Large parts of England, Ireland and northern France were for a time under their reign. In a peace agreement concluded with the Danish King Hemming, Charlemagne fixed the Eider River as early as AD 811 as the legal border separating the Frankish Empire from the Danish Kingdom. The Eider River would mark a border for more than one thousand years to come. It is worth mentioning, though, that precursors to the Danevirke, the East to West earthen rampart wall erected as a protection against incursions by the Franks, had already been built on the initiative of Herold s predecessors. At its heyday, some 1,500 people lived in Haithabu. Imported goods and export goods were traded here, such as, e. g., mineral resources from Norway, millstones from the Eifel, arms from the Rhineland, mountain crystals from the Caucasus, tin from England and this being one of the most important articles of merchandize slaves which the Vikings had brought back from their raids into East Europe. The town may well have been the largest slave market in Northern Europe. Although Haithabu had been founded by the Vikings, it is a historical fact that Danes, Swedes, Saxons, Frisians, and Slavs were later living and trading here, who in a continually changing distribution of power apparently challenged the claim to leadership by those who happened to be in power at any given time. Circa AD 950, after a church had been built there, the place was even raised to a bishopric subordinate to the Archbishopric of Hamburg and Bremen, even though, as the southern Spanish long-distance traveler Ibrahim ibn Jakub bears out, the number of Christians in Haithabu always remained small. Money, valuables and other material goods in a nutshell, earthly existence was what really mattered here. Haithabu had its own mints, there were art metal-workers, glass makers, cartwrights, balance makers, shipwrights, and makers of high-quality textiles. In the final analysis, the historical significance of this place lies in the fact that here a town had been founded to which achievements can be ascribed 22 which were basically comparable to those of Roman urban culture; as far as is known, Haithabu was the first such town in the northern hemisphere outside the Imperium Romanum and its Provinces. Sooner or later this success was bound to attract the attention of enviers from all quarters: Haithabu was thus several times raided and burned down before it was ultimately destroyed by the Slavs in Schleswig, lying on the other shore of the Schlei, for some time managed to fulfill the functions of a successor to Haithabu. Thereafter, Lübeck began its ascent to become a principal North-European trading center. The Schlei being just a shallow Baltic-Sea arm, it could not be used to transport the sheer quantity of goods needed by a population growing on all sides; the bulgy Hanseatic cogs needed much deeper waterways. At about the same time, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were formed out of the territories north and south of the Eider River. Of prime importance in this process was the fact that the originally Lower-Saxon noble family of the Schauenburgers was enfeoffed with Stormarn and Holstein. After the Danish Baltic-Sea empire had collapsed as a result of the Battle of Bornhöved in 1227, the Schauenburgers also palpably reached out for territory beyond the Danevirke. Only the Duchy of Lauenburg as well as Lübeck, a free and immediate city until the year 1937, remained outside their orbit of influence, although it had been the Schauenburgers who, in 1143, had conferred the status of a town on the merchants settlement on the Trave River [Lübeck]. From the late 13th century to the beginning of the 16th century, almost all of the East-West trade in Europe was in the hands of the Hanse (the Hanseatic League or Hansa). Hanse means as much as association of commercial travelers. The Guelph Duke Henry the Lion was the first to notice the pulling power of this type of alliance. He forced the Schauenburgers his vassals to cede Lübeck to him. After he had died, the Danes took hold of the town, but as early as 1226 Lübeck was granted a privilege by Emperor Frederick II which made it an Imperial Free City (Reichsfreiheitsprivileg). This made Lübeck whose population at the time is estimated to have been about 15,000 act like a sovereign ministate as regards the conduct of its foreign policy and especially its commercial policy. This privilege was in fact a fount from which the commercial success of Lübeck would spring. Two other important contributing factors were: firstly, the construction of a new type of commercial sea vessel, the Hanseatic cog, a big-bellied sailing ship 23

13 suitable for transporting bulk goods, which, interestingly, the Frisians had first used in the mud flats; and, secondly, the establishment of trading posts (Handelskontore), foreign branches in which all kinds of trade agreements one can think of were negotiated. In 1358, the first Hansetag [the Diet of the Hansa] was held. In 1418, Lübeck was made the caput omnium Hanse by it. At that time, 70 towns/cities were members of the Hanse, while merchants from a further 130 towns/cities enjoyed Hanse privileges, specifically the exemption from customs duties at Lübeck port. The sphere of influence of the Hanse stretched from the Low Countries to Russia and from southern Sweden to an imaginary line connecting Cologne, Erfurt, and Cracow. The Hanse was a great European power which could even face up to Emperors and Kings or, if need be, wage war against them, although diplomacy was really its most powerful means of bringing pressure to bear. Whenever brazen privateers engaged in open piracy, such as, e.g., the Victual Brothers, who seized and plundered Hanseatic vessels, the Hanse at once met its engagements as a protective power, albeit it that the captivation and execution of Klaus Störtebecker at around 1400 were directed by the city of Hamburg. Hanseatic clout was predicated upon the fact that the Hanse controlled buying and selling of staple foods and other important products medieval and early modern people needed to survive: fish, especially herring, salt, spices, corn, wine, tropical fruits, beeswax, timber, cloth, furs, iron and copper, to name but a few. The Lübeck port of transshipment then as now a bustling meeting place of all European nations served to control market areas and to recruit supplies. A monetary treaty and several treaties regulating security on the roads closely connected Lübeck with the Hanseatic City of Hamburg. There were a number of reasons for the long and steady decline of this merchants alliance. One was that, beginning in the 16th century, herring and salt the two most sought-after commodities of the Hanse could no longer compete with rival products offered by the Dutch and the French. Another had to do with a key question raised time and again during the economic history of the land: whether goods could better be transported using overland routes or using the sea route around the Jutland Peninsula. The novel types of ships used from the 14th century onwards better maneuverable than the cogs as they were soon circumnavigated Skagen (the Skaw), without ever entering the port of Lübeck. The Hohe Strasse, the overland 24 route connecting Lemberg with Leipzig, which had begun to be used ever more frequently, also bypassed Lübeck. A third reason ties up the fate of the Queen of the Hanse with the main political event in the early history of the land, the Treaty of Ribe of It led to another head-on confrontation with the Danish crown. In 1459, Adolf VIII of Schauenburg, who acted in a personal union as the Duke of Schleswig and the Count of Holstein and was also the uncle of the Danish King Christian I, had died leaving no heir. Between the Knighthood (Ritterschaft) and the nobility on either side of the Eider River a sense of belonging together had formed over a long period of time already, although it may not yet be called a national sentiment. Upon Adolf s decease this sense was reflected in an almost instantly formed oath association (Schwurverband), whose members vowed to elect just one figure as ruler over both lands. In this manner, the legally incontestable reversion of the Schleswig fief to the Danish crown and of the Holstein fief to the Holy Roman Empire was meant to be averted at all costs. Strictly speaking, then, the election of Christian I as the Duke of Schleswig and the Count of Holstein on 2 March 1460 in Ribe was a breach of the constitution and a revolutionary act, for Christian had to guarantee the independence of both territories from his own Kingdom as well as their absolute indivisibility: dat se bliven ewich tosamende ungedeelt [that they shall remain forever undivided], which only in the 19th century was shortened to become the nationalistic slogan up ewig ungedeelt. For the next four hundred years or so, the Kingdom of Denmark and Schleswig- Holstein were held in a personal union by a single ruler. There was one and the same highest authority in Copenhagen that decided on economic policies and financial affairs, as well as on military and foreign affairs. The centuries-old power struggle between Copenhagen and the Hanseatic League, culminating in 1370 when Valdemar IV Atterdag was forced to his knees by Lübeck in the Peace of Stralsund and had to abandon central trading posts in the Baltic-Sea region, flared up with a vengeance as a result of this comprehensive treaty, the reason being that Denmark, after all, not only was in control of the sea route from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, but also of the overland route linking Lübeck with Hamburg. One had not to wait long for the conflict to break out openly. As soon as 1534, Lübeck was again surrounded by Danish troops. This antagonism came to an end only when the economic giant of Holstein had, as it were, exited the political stage. 25

14 3. The Development of the Duchies until the German-Danish War of 1864/66 Modern history of Schleswig-Holstein began with a bang: The attempt of Christian s successor, John, and Duke Frederick to forcibly bring under their control the restive Dithmarschen ended in a fiasco. Since the High Middle Ages a Peasants Republic had formed in Dithmarschen; a college made up of 48 judges appointed for life constituted its political power center. In 1447, the Dithmarschers had even fixed this institution firmly in a constitution of their own, the Dithmarscher Landrecht [their common law]. Here, too, the eagerness to become independent had economic reasons, for the fertile marshland yielded high corn surpluses which could be sold at a profit in the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg and Lübeck. Before long, these two cities counted among the preferred allies of the unruly ones from the Western coast. Once again the Danish crown felt that forceful action had to be taken: It engaged a mighty army of mercenaries and ordered it to march in the direction of Hemmingstedt on the wet and cold 17 February 1500, where a defiant mass of defenders armed with no more than scythes and pitchforks was awaiting it, with as legend has it a woman as their leader. The Jungfrau (Virgin) Telse aus Hohenwöhrden confronted the enemy on top of a narrow dam and let open all the sluices to flood the polders. It then took only one advance before very many of the immobile, heavily armoured mercenaries slipped and fell into a wet death. Only in 1559 King Frederick II, aided by the Dukes Adolf and John the Elder, succeeded in putting an end to the proud Peasants Republic. If the military campaign was waged to gain dominion over all of Schleswig and Holstein, in what followed the Danish kings had only themselves to blame for the fact that through their blatant violation of the personal-union principle stipulated in Ribe and through the partitioning of the Duchies among themselves and their brothers, the political map that stretched from Haderslev to the River Elbe morphed into an intricately woven quilt. The fateful course, embarked on already under Christian s sons, was maintained, when, in 1544, Christian III, together with his brothers John the Elder and Adolf of Gottorp, once again carved up the entire land. To make matters worse, Frederick III, successor to Christian III, and Adolf later further split up the share of the deceased John. Henceforth, the royal, the Gottorp as well as jointly administered tracts of the land had to be distinguished. However, these tracts were not by any means forming contiguous stretches of land, but were scattered all over the country! And the King s subjects were really 26 the ones to suffer most from this arrangement. Proper governing was hardly possible that way, especially since the rivalries between the royal and the Gottorp lines were not long in coming. Yes indeed, Schleswig-Holstein had been preserved as a unit, but its internal political-dynastic structure had disintegrated to such a degree that it could easily become a playing field for intervening foreign powers. The Gottorp line was quick to see its chances and so made pacts with Sweden, Denmark s foe, with a view to gaining sovereignty over its far-flung possessions. Between the years 1700 and 1721 the Great Northern War over hegemony in the Baltic-Sea region raged between all countries bordering the Baltic Sea. Peter the Great visited Schleswig-Holstein and right away identified the crucial logistical problem of the land: The Russian Czar saw the disadvantage of not having a canal that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. For the moment, no one had the resources to carry out such a grand project. But cordial relations between the Russian Czar family and the Gottorpers were maintained. Duke Charles Frederick married Peter s daughter Anna Petrowna, whose only child Charles Peter Ulrich was wed to Friederike of Anhalt-Zerbst and was groomed to become the Czar at the Court in St. Petersburg. When, in 1762, he eventually became the Czar, he was murdered by order of his wife, who has gone down in history as Catherine the Great. With all her strength, she furthered the infrastructure development of her husband s homeland. She had no part whatsoever, though, in the construction of the Schleswig- Holstein-Kanal undertaken between 1777 and 1784 day and night, some three thousand men had to toil to dig this canal. Because the Eider River was navigable from Rendsburg onwards, only the 34 canal kilometers (approx. 21 miles) from Kiel to Rendsburg had to be dug, to a depth of approx. 3.5 meters (approx feet). After this masterpiece, admired all over the world, had been finished, however, only small sailing vessels with a maximum load-bearing capacity of three hundred tons could use it. Winds failing, these had to be towed, i.e., they had to be drawn by teams of horses along the banks of the canal. Even at the time of the inauguration of the canal, all this was not enough for the large sailing ships of a city that now, in the 18th century, saw its meteoric rise to become a major Baltic-Sea port. In 1727, the city of Flensburg was granted a royal privilege allowing it to trade in wine, spirits, salt, and tobacco; in 1759, the first Flensburg ships set sail for whaling campaigns off Greenland, and in 1765, Flensburg merchants 27

15 began the exceedingly profitable trade with the West Indies. Christopher Columbus had introduced sugar cane in this region, and now the crop was being cultivated on very large plantations and cut by countless slave brigades who squeezed out the sweet cane juice into barrels. Ships from the far-away Flensburg were moored in the ports, ready for the transatlantic transport of the (semi-) finished sugar mass. By 1799 the fjord city had no less than two hundred distilleries for the preparation of schnapps. Each year, close to 2,000 transoceanic vessels from the West Indies entered the port of Flensburg, with the quantity of sugar unloaded here amounting to some three million pounds. The recipes for the preparation of the finished products were treated as state secrets by the old-established family-run businesses of, e. g., the Sonnbergs, the Balles, the Hansens and the Dethleffsens; for no one was supposed to know how the gold of the Caribbean Sea was transmuted into Flensburg rum which even in the 20th century would continue to be a trademark of the city. Trade with high-alcoholic-content beverages boomed unendingly (or so it seemed), but later it turned out that it took the overseas ships simply too long to sail back and forth between Northern Europe and the Antilles. So one particular invention came just at the right moment, and it was not only to revolutionize seafaring: the steam engine. Even though in the beginning the captains of four-masters and fivemasters contemptuously called them Qualmschuten or Smokever, before long not much would work on board a ship without a steam engine. At the latest when the Flensburger Dampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft [Flensburg steamship company] had been founded in 1869, the windjammer of old essentially was no longer a w i n d jammer; for the combination of sails and machines would for a long time to come be without competition. By 1913, the tonnage unloaded per year in Flensburg had increased to some 117,000 gross register tons. At that time, though, the merchant sailing vessels were no longer white-red flagged because the Danish King had no more say in Flensburg. The end of the Napoleonic era, the Congress of Vienna and the founding of the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund, seated in Frankfort on the Main) in 1815 had far-reaching repercussions on the Duchies. From then on, Holstein and Lauenburg but not Schleswig were members of the German Confederation. All the same, the personal union agreed upon in the Treaty of Ribe of 1460 was effective just as before, so that the question of whether the Duchy of Schleswig together with Holstein should belong to Germany or to Denmark would later cause conflicts. The Act of the German Confederation (Bundesakte) 28 of 1815 had obligated all princes including, notably, the Danish King as the representative of Holstein in Frankfort to draw up constitutions for provincial legislatures [landständische Verfassungen, i. e., constitutions based on the territorial Estates of the member states of the German Confederation]. Liberally-minded professors at Kiel University called for speedily fulfilling this postulate, but at length it was a short pamphlet from the North-Sea island of Sylt which set the ball rolling in In a leaflet entitled Über das Verfassungswerk in Schleswig-holstein ( On the constitutional work of Schleswig- Holstein ) invariably using just one word for the name of the land the local Landvogt [broadly speaking, the governor] named Uwe Jens Lornsen, had called for the creation of a dual state extending from Haderslev to the River Elbe, of which foreign and defense policies should, as before, be made by the Danish King, but of which the Duchy of Schleswig united with Holstein should be a member of the German Confederation. This latter thing he was wary of stating expressly, but he quite likely presupposed it. Admittedly, Lornsen failed politically and in 1838 even took his life at Lake Geneva, but the question he had brought up would not go away. In 1844, waving their blue, white and red flag, the people embraced by the seas sang their own hymn for the first time: Schleswig-Holstein stammverwandt [ Schleswig-Holstein, of the same stock might be a translation of it]. During the three following singing festivals in Bredstedt the long wavering North Frisians joined the Schleswig-Holstein movement. In Copenhagen the party of the Eider Danes formed under Orla Lehmann, attempting to have the Danish Kingdom constitutionally expanded to the old border river. In stark contrast to them, the Assembly of the Representatives of the Estates (Ständeversammlung) of the Holsteiners, demanded the inclusion of Schleswig into the German Confederation. Meanwhile, in the Duchy of Schleswig between Tönning, Husum, Tønder, Åbenrå and Sønderborg a rigorous Danification policy had been initiated in the press, the administration and the judiciary, which, for one, the writer and lawyer Theodor Storm had to experience first hand. His most-hated school subject was ausführliche Beschreibung unseres Vaterlandes ( A Detailed Description of Our Fatherland ), which not ten percent of the citizens of Husum felt to be their fatherland, for fatherland meant Denmark. In 1843 he made a request to the Danish King as your most humble servant for admission to the bar, which, for that matter, was granted. But after he had refused to swear an oath of allegiance to His Majesty in Copenhagen, he was disbarred and went into exile: to Prussia. A sense of being 29

16 lost is weighing on us, he wrote after the Duchies had been let down by the European powers. In February 1864, the Danish Landvogt, in danger of losing life and limb, had to flee from Husum and Storm replaced him in wild circumstances. At this juncture, the conflict over Schleswig-Holstein was ripe for a decision. The revolution of 1848 in Paris had tremendously buoyed up both sides of this conflict. The Eider Danes demanded the unconditional annexation of Schleswig, whilst in Kiel a Provisional Government of the Duchies was formed. On 7 September 1848, the Landesversammlung ( State Assembly ) its composition was based on a general, equal and direct voting right for men passed the Staatsgrundgesetz für die Herzogtümer Schleswig-Holstein ( State Basic Law for the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein ), the first democratic German constitution. For the first time between the Alps and the North Sea equality before the law, freedom of speech, the right of assembly, freedom of association, the right to physical inviolability and inviolability of property as well as fundamental civic rights were guaranteed. The Duchies were to belong to Germany as a united, indivisible state and the personal union with Denmark was to last only as long as the male line of the Danish royal family had not become extinct. Copenhagen s response to this was the mobilization of its armed forces. Students in Kiel, followers of the nationalistic Turner movement and volunteers from all over Germany reinforced the weak army of Schleswig-Holstein, whose request for help was granted in Frankfort. Prussia too did not withhold its support. Now no one knew what would become of Schleswig. This unsettled political situation prompted England, Russia and France to meddle in. They feared that Prussia could expand its territory as far as Jutland, the weakening of Denmark resulting from this and a shifting of the European balance of power. The Prussians, having marched as far as Nordschleswig, had to turn around, and the people embraced by the seas were left to their own devices. There it was, that sense of being lost Storm had spoken of. Prussia temporarily withdrew from the war against Denmark in 1850 (Peace of Berlin). On 25 July of that same year the army of the Duchies suffered a crushing military defeat near a place named Idstedt, but the hope of the neighbour to the north did not materialize. In the London Protocols of 1850/52 England and Russia in particular imposed their will that Schleswig, a Duchy split along national lines, may neither be incorporated into Denmark nor become part of a new, 30 autonomous state to all intents and purposes that was the status quo ante. The Danish rulers over the Danebrog [Denmark s national flag] drew all the wrong conclusions from this broad hint : By ordering the use of Danish as a language of instruction in Mittelschleswig schools and as a second church language [language rescripts] they exerted nationalistic pressure precisely where most people wished to use the German language. In and of itself, this constituted a violation of the Protocols. This however was a matter of secondary importance compared with the signing of the Eider-Danish Constitution in Orla Lehmann and the Eider-Danish party believed that they had no time to lose to create faits accomplis in the complex political situation that had arisen after King Frederick VII had died without issue in In so doing, they only gave Bismarck a chance he had long been waiting for most eagerly in the distant Berlin. The clear breach of the law committed by Copenhagen arguably legitimized the Confederation-wide military mobilization, and, after the Danes completely misjudging the state of their affairs had let pass the ultimatum demanding the nullification of that constitution, on 1 February 1864 Prussia and Austria, the dominant powers within the German Confederation, crossed the Eider River. The Danevirke was soon taken. Then, for ten weeks, the Danish army was able to defend itself, before it was devastatingly defeated near the Düppeler Schanzen on 18 April. The subsequent peace negotiations, conducted in London, were unsuccessful because Denmark refused to leave the delineation of a new border to the outcome of a referendum, or to have the Duchy of Schleswig partitioned by a neutral arbitration tribunal according to the criteria of language and nationality; with the consequence that the new Danish King, Christian IX, ultimately had to cede Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg and hence two-fifths of his territory, including one-third of the population of the supranational Danish state (Peace of Vienna, 1864). Only two years later, the administration of the Duchies, first jointly assumed by Vienna and Berlin, but later separated, failed due to the Prussian-Austrian antagonism in the German Confederation. After the Habsburgers had been vanquished by the Borussian military machinery near Königgrätz, at Christmas 1866 Wilhelm I. could promulgate the unification of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein with the Prussian monarchy to form Prussia s twelfth (and lastly added) Province. 4. Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Dictatorship Despite its size, the new Province constituted just one primary administrative division (Regierungsbezirk). This was still a tribute to the spirit of Ribe. 31

17 For the rest, the new rulers did away with in part, medieval territorial divisions, special rights and privileges in towns/cities, the countryside, Kirchspielen b [(church) parishes], Harden c [communes], Ämtern [historical administration units], villages, and manors. When, in April 1869, the act concerning the constitution and administration of the towns/cities and Flecken d in the Province of Schleswig-Holstein had been promulgated, this was the first time that the judicature, the law of public finance, administrative law and local constitutional law were uniform throughout the Duchies, from Haderslev to Altona. One city which saw an unparalleled upswing under the new authoritarian state became a regional center and was made the regional capital in 1917: Kiel. In 1851, the Brandtaucher, the world s first submarine, had been assembled in Kiel. In 1865, the Prussian naval base was relocated from Gdansk to Kiel. In 1867, the construction of the Kaiserliche Werft ( Imperial Shipyard ) began; in 1882, the Germania-Werft (another shipyard) was constructed. During that same year, a certain event was first celebrated which would not much later become the non-official sailing world championship and would later suggest Kiel as a venue for the Olympic sailing competitions. Kiel then co-hosted the Olympic Games in 1936 and in The said event has also become the most popular festival (Volksfest) in Northern Europe, visited by more than 3 million guests per year. Of course the talk here is of Kiel Week, also known as Kiel Regatta (Kieler Woche). In 1887, the then 90-year old Kaiser Wilhelm I. at long last laid the foundation stone for the largest traffic project ever realized in Schleswig-Holstein, the Kaiser-Wilhelm- Kanal, so named when his grandson, Wilhelm II., inaugurated the canal in In 1948, by order of the Allies, it was renamed North Sea/Baltic Sea Canal (Nord-Ostsee-Kanal, NOK). The almost 100-km (approx. 61-mi) long construction, internationally just known as Kiel Canal, which debouches into the River Elbe near Brunsbüttel, is still the world s most-used artificial b Kirchspiel according to Lorenzen-Schmidt, K.-J.; Pelc, O. (Eds.): Schleswig-Holstein Lexikon, Neumünster 2000, p. 275 et seq.: parish of a pastor, administrative, judicial and assessment district as well as district providing a military contingent c Harde according to Lorenzen-Schmidt, K.-J.; Pelc, O. (Eds.), l.c., p. 213 et seq.: administrative district and court circuit on territory ruled by a German Prince d Fleck: a townlet or central location in the province on which certain privileges have been conferred, inter alia, the right to hold markets 32 seaway. The old Eider Canal was simply innavigable for the ever larger, now motor-powered types of ships. A total of 100 million tons of goods were shipped through Kiel Canal in 2010 alone, more than ever before. Nine out of ten containers arriving at the port of Hamburg will be transported to the Baltic-Sea area via Kiel Canal, and their number is greatly increasing due to the eastern enlargement of the European Union. Despite this, there continues to be strong competition from the alternative route around the north of Denmark, as there was at the time of Haithabu and the Vikings. This necessitates the further improvement of Kiel Canal. For example, near its bends and at other narrows sites the canal s bottom width is only approx. 40 m (approx. 131 ft.), not allowing the passage of superlarge container ships of the future. So Kiel Canal has been widened in places since In any case, Kiel Canal, the shipbuilding yards and the navy all contributed to the great increase of the population of Kiel. Where, as late as 1867, there lived just 24,000 people, there were 211,000 as soon as 1910, and the population curve then continued to go up. As a result of the wars waged against Denmark, Austria and France, the Prussian-dominated German Empire had been formed in 1871, a colossus right in the middle of Europe feared by many. It was home to considerable national minorities in Alsatia, West Prussia, and Nordschleswig. It had in fact been at the instigation of Napoleon III that the following clause was incorporated into the Prussian-Austrian peace treaty concluded in 1866: [...] that the northern districts of Schleswig shall be ceded to Denmark if the population makes clear in a free vote its desire to be unified with Denmark. In 1878, when France was still weakened after having lost the Franco-Prussian War ( ), Berlin s reaction was to strike out this passage altogether, to prevent freely elected Danish delegates who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Prussian Constitution from exercising their mandates, and then to tighten the language decree for schools, the church and the administration thrice by A particularly ignominious part in this policy of brutal Prussification was played by Matthias von Köller, appointed in 1897 to the office of Oberpräsident of the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, who distinguished himself because of his closeness to the Alldeutschen Verein [the Pan-German League]. His Köllerpolitik, sanctioned in direct terms by Wilhelm II., climaxed in the mass expulsion of Danish nationals from their homeland, which provoked sharp protest and outrage among liberals and Social Democrats in the German Empire as well as internationally. 33

18 The age of Imperialism and the struggle for world-wide recognition had now begun, the rights of national minorities were being trampled on everywhere, and it was all too soon foreseeable that the nations were heading for the first global war, perhaps at the latest after Bismarck s resignation. Not a single Nordschleswiger had been asked if he wanted to fight in a war for Germany, many evaded conscription by fleeing to Denmark, many bled to death on the killing fields near Verdun or elsewhere. In the fjord city of Kiel, of all places, the much-pampered favourite child (so to speak) of the Hohenzollerns, sailors ushered in their demise when they refused to leave port for a pointless suicide mission against England in a war that had long before already been lost. Instead, in early November 1918 they fraternized with shipyard workers, called a general strike, hoisted the Red Flag on ships of the Imperial Fleet, formed Workers and Soldiers Councils and took over power. On 9 November 1918, Wilhelm II. abdicated and Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic. A binding provision for a referendum on the political division of Schleswig was included in the Peace Treaty of Versailles. Separate plebiscites were then held on 10 February and 14 March Nordschleswig voted en bloc and registered a majority of 75 percent who were in favour of belonging to Denmark, although in the towns/cities most had opted for Germany, in Tønder even as many as 76.5 percent. In Mittelschleswig, the second plebiscite zone it stretched from the north of Angeln beyond the Soholmer Au to the North-Sea islands of Sylt, Föhr and Amrum voting took place community by community. Here, too, the outcome was unambiguous: 80 percent were for belonging to Germany, 75.2 percent in the particularly hotly contested Flensburg. Accordingly, the German-Danish border was moved southwards to a line running from an area to the north of Flensburg to an area to the south of Tønder. The old Duchy of Schleswig was now divided for the first time, but justice had been done to the people s will. The border definition of 1920 has proved its worth up to now, albeit that, as a consequence of it, on this side of the border there is now a Danish minority and on the other side there is a German minority. Forever gone are the days, though, when over here and over there organizations with the stated aim of revising the border formed. (On the German side, the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst, founded as early as October 1918, acted as the first such institution.) Whereas the new, democratic form of government, the System of Weimar, was very soon well-accepted in the towns/cities of the Province of Schleswig-Holstein not least because the SPD and the left-wing liberal parties had gained strength, the question poses itself whether the people in the countryside could at any 34 time at all relate to this system. For, after an intermediate stabilization of the political situation, at the end of the 1920s countryfolks abruptly turned away from supporting parliamentarianism, a fact that had its roots in a deep country-wide structural farming crisis. The number of bankruptcies in the agriculture sector assumed alarming proportions, as debt-burdened farmers could no longer pay off the interest on their credits because of the rapidly falling prices for milk, corn, cattle and pigs. As a consequence, a diffuse mixture consisting of anticapitalism, anticommunism, antisemitism as well as of nostalgic agrarian romanticism formed in the minds of farmers. This made them ever more susceptible to ideological, totalitarian solutions for their calamitous situation. Adherents of the Landvolkbewegung (lit.: Countryfolk Movement ) it was formed in 1928 out of radical rural protest, and its close ideological affinity to the now rising National Socialist Party, NSDAP, could not be overlooked tried to take the law into their own hands, committing bomb attacks against tax and revenue offices, courthouses and rural district offices (Landratsämter) which had ordered the forced auctioning off of farmsteads. It all started with a bomb attack on the rural district office in Itzehoe during the night from 22 to 23 May Under the title Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben [English title: Peasants, Bigwigs and Bombs ] the writer Hans Fallada and the film director Egon Monk impressively dealt with this disastrous part of the history of Schleswig-Holstein in literary and cinematographical form. When, in 1931, the Landvolkbewegung finally saw itself forcibly dissolved, a man who promised to achieve their aims had for a long time already been standing ready for the rural folks: His name was Adolf Hitler. In the case of Schleswig-Holstein there can be no question of a seizure of power (Machtergreifung) by the Nazis because here the NSDAP was entirely legally voted into power at the elections for the Reichstag of 31 July 1932, where its share of the vote was 51 percent. This may be compared with the NSDAP s election results in other parts of Germany at the time: Hamburg: 33.7 percent; Upper Bavaria: 27.1 percent; and Berlin: just 24.6 percent. The former Duchies had become a base for the brown [-shirted Nazi] mob. Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse Hitler s political foster child who was appointed as Oberpräsident in Kiel on 25 March 1933 nowhere met with resistance, but rather received frantic applause wherever he went. If few in number, there are nonetheless examples of persons who resisted with some effectiveness, persons who give honor to the Land. In this respect, it is probably not by chance that the two outstanding Resistance figures had received their political socialization in the liberal tradition of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. 35

19 Julius Leber, born in 1891, had quite early become a member of the Lübeck City Parliament (Bürgerschaft) as well as the editor-in-chief of the Lübecker Volksboten [a newspaper]. Deported into a concentration camp as early as 1933, he succeeded in making contact to Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg in 1937 and helped prepare the assassination attempt on Hitler of 20 July In October 1944, the Social Democrat Leber was sentenced to death and then executed. As a widely recognized integration figure he had been chosen by the heterogeneous Resistance circles to become the Chancellor of a government in a post-hitler Germany. On 18 December 1913, the saleslady Erna Frahm gave birth in Lübeck to her illegitimate son Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm. She managed to send the boy to one of the local elite grammar schools, where he passed the school-leaving examination (Abitur). At the age of 17 he joined the SPD, which he left after having graduated from that school in order to join a left-wing socialist splinter group. To be sure, the Nazis would have seized and arrested him just like Julius Leber, but at the last possible moment a shipmaster took the 19-year old via the Bay of Lübeck into exile to Scandinavia, where he was active in the Resistance press until 1945, using the pseudonym Willy Brandt. When he returned to Germany in 1945 and the occupying powers were about to divide up the country into zones, he retained the now familiar name. Mr. Brandt again became a member of the SPD and not least against considerable opposition from within his own party kept standing up for the indivisibility of his fatherland. Just a short while before his death in 1992 he could still witness that to use a phrase he had coined: What belongs together, is now growing together. The Wehrmacht had raided Denmark in 1940 in the absence of a declaration of war. But the hopes of the German population of Nordschleswig for a revision of the outcome of the 1920 referendum were dashed because Hitler intended to turn the kindred ( artverwandt ) Denmark into a model protectorate and into a bridge towards the North. In 1943 he therefore generously allowed elections to be held for the Folketing, in which the Danish National Socialists won no more than 3 out of 149 seats up for grabs. In 1944, the Gestapo arrested all of Denmark s police force, helped by not a few collaborators. Near the end of World War II, the peninsula to the north of the River Elbe had become a theater of war. The preferred target of the Allied bombers was Kiel, where out of the estimated 225,000 slave workers deported to Schleswig-Holstein no less than an estimated 36,000 worked themselves to the bone in armament plants. The submarine-building shipyards so much 36 dreaded abroad which eventually were relocated to the bunkers Konrad and Kilian were relentlessly carpet-bombed. In 1945, Kiel resembled a moonscape. The historic old part of the city of Lübeck had already been leveled to the ground on Palm Sunday Into these cities, which could not even offer enough intact living space for the local population, in January 1945 the biggest-ever evacuation operations for refugees got under way. All told, some 12.5 million people from Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia fled from the Red Army, most of them walking. More than two million fled on almost a thousand war ships or commercial ships. One out of three of these ships sank. The Wilhelm Gustloff is just one example among many that may be cited here. Having arrived in their new homeland and having been sheltered in camps hastily set up even as far north as Denmark, they encountered an explosive ethnic mixture of embittered bombed-out people, former war prisoners wandering about disorientedly, former concentration-camp inmates as well as former forced labourers from all the countries of Europe, who collectively were categorized as displaced persons and not least they also encountered old Nazis who had gone underground. In that dark hour the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein was born. In it, 2.6 million people were now living, no less than a million more than before the war. 5. Schleswig-Holstein as a Member State of the Federal Republic of Germany The 60 members of the first Landtag assembling on 26 February 1946 had been appointed by the British military government, as was the temporary Oberpräsident Theodor Steltzer, a former Resistance fighter of the Kreisau Circle (Kreisauer Kreis) and co-founder of the CDU, who from 23 August 1946 was permitted to call himself Minister President. Although the Allies dissolved Prussia not before 25 February 1947, they gave the Prussian Province of Schleswig-Holstein the provisional constitutional status of a Land as early as 23 August Mr. Steltzer filled his Cabinet with equal numbers of CDU and SPD members because he wanted the two peoples parties (Volksparteien) to act in concert to build up the fledgeling democracy that was exposed to risks from all corners. The stark reality he then had to face was that the SPD had won 43 out of 70 contested seats at the first elections for the Landtag of 20 April 1947, whereas the CDU had only 21 seats. However, the Social Democrats Lüdemann and Diekmann, who succeeded Mr. Steltzer, were also not much more than transitional figures. From 1950 on the CDU was at the helm for the next 38 years, several times on its own strength, several 37

20 times as part of a coalition government formed with the FDP (initially, it has to be said, not even as the strongest political force in the Kiel Landtag). The reinvigorated Danish movement as well as the mass of refugees then living on the territory of Schleswig-Holstein both had a major impact on the formation of the new party system in Schleswig-Holstein, so much so that the SPD, for a time the strongest party, ultimately had to fill the opposition benches, while the Danish minority and the refugees could sent their representatives into the Landtag. As late as 1957, 28.2 percent of the population of Schleswig-Holstein were refugees (The figures for, e. g., Bavaria and North-Rhine Westphalia were 19.1 percent and 15.3 percent, respectively). It is still a rather surprising fact that this did not entail any sort of radicalization or social explosion in the refugee camps, for these people had lost all one can lose except for their naked lives. They lived in gymnasia, dance halls, bunkers, shacks, earth holes, camps, and Nissen huts [corrugated-iron huts], often also with the locals, who at times had to be forced by the police to let in refugees. A sack hanging down from the ceiling or a chalk-drawn line would mark the boundary separating one family from another. The refugees just did not know whether they should integrate themselves or hope for a return to where they had come from. What is more, the Allies denied them (as a precaution) the right of free association a ban the refugees would soon circumvent. In early 1950 they had already founded the Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (BHE) in Kiel, an emergency party, as Jürgen Habermas called it. At the elections for the Landtag of that same year the BHE obtained no less than 23.4 percent of the votes cast and helped elect into office the CDU Minister President Walter Bartram, whose party had won just 19.8 percent. (The SPD had won 27.5 percent.) In 1954, in another coalition formed with the CDU, the BHE made it possible that a man became Minister President who, along with Gerhard Stoltenberg, must be counted among the major public figures of the post-war history of Schleswig-Holstein: Kai-Uwe von Hassel. The terms in office as Minister President of Mr. Stoltenberg and Mr. von Hassel add up to more than twenty years. The new Danish movement, which on 31 January 1946 formed the Südschleswigschen Verein (SSV) as a political umbrella organization, had basically two goals: the joining of Südschleswig with Denmark and the removal of all refugees from Schleswig-Holstein. The SSV had a point here: The 38 BHE had been used by massively and provably criminal Nazis from Breslau, Königsberg, and Stettin as a stepping stone and a camouflage to start new careers, which carried certain individuals even into the office of a minister and earned the Bartram Cabinet the abusive nickname coalition of the SA, the SS, and the NSDAP. However, the SSV s aim to expand Denmark to the old border marked by the Eider River became an even more divisive issue. Anyone championing this cause was welcome, even if he or she never in his or her life had had anything to do with the Danish Kingdom and spoke not a single word of Danish. In the SSV one was given work, bread and butter which meant quite something during the post-war time of want. Political opponents soon referred with contempt to the fat Danes (Speckdänen). And the SPD in Flensburg even split up because of this issue. One faction of the party appeared on a common list of candidates with the SSV and then outclassed all political adversaries in the first local elections held in the fjord city, polling 66.4 percent of the vote. In the elections for the Landtag of 1947, 33.5 percent of the electorate in Südschleswig voted for the SSV, which then had six Members of Parliament in Kiel. But a cutting wind was blowing from different directions into the faces of the 20th-century Eider Danes: Without further ado, the SPD leader Kurt Schumacher excluded the Flensburg secessionists from his party, and the Danish government assured the competent British in an official note that they did not wish to move that border. Schleswig-Holstein gave itself the constitutional foundations of a Land of the Federal Republic of Germany in the form of the Landessatzung (Statutes of the Land) adopted by the Landtag on 13 December 1949 the term Verfassung (constitution) was deliberately avoided because the outlook for a region so badly affected by the plight of refugees was far too uncertain. The Landessatzung was preceded by the Kiel Declaration passed by all parties on 26 September of that same year. It stated: Loyalty to the Danish people and to the Danish culture may freely be declared. It shall not be contested or verified ex officio. The intent of this declaration was to put an end to all discussions about who is and who is not a genuine Dane. Henceforth, the principle applied that a Dane is whoever wishes to be a Dane. This was expressly reaffirmed in the Bonn Copenhagen Declarations of March Just after that, the Kiel Landtag unanimously decided that the Südschleswigsche Wählerverband (SSW), which had formed in 1948 as a political representation of the interests of the SSV, should be excepted from the five-percent threshold during regional elections. Up to the present day the 39