Jylland!

Edit: Photos have been added!

This past weekend I took a trip to Jylland (Western Denmark) with my core course. Every program spent Thursday through Saturday in various places around Jylland. It was a really enjoyable trip, though I apparently lost my camera somehow on the way back. I'm hoping it will be found in the tour bus so that I can share the awesome pictures that I took.

The trip started early on Thursday morning. We took a bus from Copenhagen to Jelling, which is where the "birth certificate of Denmark" is found: a runic stone inscribed by Harald Bluetooth which reads that he put this stone there to commemorate his mother and father, and that he united Denmark and made Denmark Christian. Harald Bluetooth also had a gigantic mound built to bury his father in, but then instead of the mound (which took slaves four years to build) he decided he wanted to bury his father in a church instead, so he made slaves build a church. Then another mound was built, seemingly for no purpose other than to make the church more central. The visit to the museum in Jelling was great: the tour guide was really excellent.

After Jelling, we went to Vejen, a small town with very little significance other than that it is the home of Hansen-Jacobsen, a wonderful Danish symbolist sculptor. There's a quite excellent museum there with Hansen-Jacobsen's work as well as the work of his friends and fellow symbolists. The sculptures are really quite stunning and awe-inspiring. They are generally not pleasant, per se, but are very well crafted and really make you think about what they mean.

Then we continued on to Sønderborg, where we stayed for the night. The evening included a concert of Beata Bilinska (a young Polish pianist) performing Chopin with the Sønderborg orchestra. It was really great music, and the concert hall itself was quite beautiful. Chopin is such a storyteller, I think, and there's this incredible air of longing to his music that Beata Bilinska captured really well. After the concert, our leaders took us out to a cafe/bar place, which was also really fun.

The next morning, after a great breakfast provided by the hostel, we went to the Dybbøl Banke, a museum which commemorates the war of 1864, in which most of Southern Jutland (Schleswig-Holstein) was taken by the Prussians (Otto von Bismark). This place is the site of the final battle. I think it's a really interesting historical moment, but the museum was a little bit dull and involved a lot of sitting in darkened rooms while either a huge, lit-up diorama was explained or a documentary was shown. The final stage was probably the best, in which letters from soldiers were read. I thought that did a really good job of portraying the challenge and humanity of wars and battles.

The entire region has a really interesting history. In Southern Jutland/Northern Germany, there's always been some overlapping of Danes and Germans, obviously, especially before Germany was united. And, due to this overlap, there's also been a lot of tension about the border. This is one of the issues we are really exploring with the course, since our course focuses on memory and identity in the Czech Republic, which has a much more violent and contentious history around the borders than there is in Denmark. In Denmark, the borders have been drawn and re-drawn a number of times (notably after 1864, when something like 1/3 of Denmark became German), but finally, after World War I, the border was put to a referendum, asking the people if they felt they were Danish or German. Now, the border is where there was the most definite split. There is still a German minority in Southern Jutland, and a Danish minority in Northern Germany. This is what we were exploring in depth on Friday.

Our next stop after the Dybbøl Banke was Frøslevlejren, a prison camp from World War II. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, the government adopted a position of collaboration, which meant that they maintained sovereignty, at least in name. Because of this, they were able to persuade the Germans to allow them to maintain their own prison camp for political prisoners in Denmark, and insisted that all Danish prisoners be kept in this camp, which was considerably less terrible than the German camps. These prisoners, it should be noted, were mostly not Jewish. Most of the Danish Jews escaped to Sweden shortly after Denmark was invaded, and the ones who didn't or couldn't (mostly very old people) were sent to the concentration camps in Germany. What is also interesting is that after the war was over, the prison camp was used for people who worked closely with the Germans during the war. Of course, many of these people were from the German minority, who felt like they were German and it only made sense for them to collaborate closely with the Germans in Denmark. The person who gave us a lecture at the beginning of our tour of the prison camp was very interesting, and seemed to feel a need to be defensive about the camp, especially about its use after the war.

After the prison camp, we went across the border to Flensburg, a German harbor town that's maybe one or two kilometers from the Danish border. We had a walking tour and then had some time on our own to explore the town. I felt a little bit like our tour guide, while giving us interesting, amusing snippets of town history (especially about merchants and how the trade system used to work and does work now) didn't necessarily give us information pertinent to our course's aims, namely what it means to be a border town with a Danish minority, although she pointed out some signs that have both Danish and German on them. What was interesting was that it felt quite different, even just a kilometer or two from Denmark. Not least because I was utterly unable to communicate with most of the shopkeepers and because they use the Euro and not the krone. It was a lovely town, though, with lots of really neat old ships and buildings.

Next on the agenda was Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark (1300 years old!!) where we stayed for the night and spent most of Saturday. We had a "birthday dinner" for Ribe with the ECH group that is traveling to Germany. The birthday dinner was apparently traditional Danish celebratory food, and was super yummy. After the dinner, some new friends and I decided to stop by a pub for a drink and then head back to our hostel. The pub we went to was very small, and it was obvious that everyone there was a "regular." One of the other students, Scott, and I chatted with the bartender for a little while when we got our beer. She was really nice, and she was curious as to what a bunch of American students studying in Copenhagen were doing in Ribe on a Friday night. Americans apparently don't really come to Ribe, and when they do it's usually in the summertime. We also met an Englishman who has lived in Ribe for a while, and it was fun to hear what he thought about it. Shortly after we sat back down with the other three students we came in with, a stocky old man with white hair sat down right next to Kyle, who has been studying here for a year now. We were a little unsettled by the sudden appearance of a friendly, incredibly drunk Danish man, but the bartender explained that he was the owner of the pub. The old man kept giving us free drinks and trying to speak in four different languages at once: Danish, German, Spanish and English. Although he was very hard to follow, he was also very friendly, so we didn't mind, even though it was a rather strange cultural experience. After he gave us each two free drinks, we decided it might be time to head back. We had a lot of fun laughing about it on the way back to the hostel, and the other two girls and I stayed up late talking (mostly because Kelley doesn't drink alcohol and had gotten two free Cokes instead, and was thus quite caffeinated).

The next day we spent in Ribe, wandering around the town on our own in the morning, visiting the Viking museum, and then seeing the cathedral. The Viking museum was really interesting, and I had a lot of fun after we were given a small tour of the museum (our tour guide was a bit difficult to follow) talking with Kyle and our trip leaders about language and history and how future historians will have a much rougher time of it than we do now, considering that nearly all of our information is preserved electronically now, and when the technology becomes obsolete, it will be impossible to salvage. This is of a lot of interest to me as I intend to be a librarian or archivist, so the question was fun to consider. After the museum we had a group lunch, and then had a tour of the Ribe cathedral. The cathedral is incredibly old, dating from the 1100s (which is about 200 years after the Danes were Christianized, to put that into perspective). It's an interesting mixture of architectural styles, with its Romanesque base and Gothic and historicist additions. Ribe's cathedral has been being modified and changed and used for years, and that continues to this day. For example, there is artwork painted behind the altar and stained glass windows which were added in the 1980s. The cathedral is also HUGE. It dominates the landscape, and really shows something about what was important to the people who built it. We also got a chance to go up into one of the towers (that was quite the workout, by the way, climbing all these flights of stairs) and look around. You can see for miles from the tower, since Western Denmark is incredibly flat. It was really a neat place to visit, though Scott and I were discussing, once we got down from the tower, how strange it is that people now appreciate the cathedral in a very different way than it was initially used. It felt a little bit like we were profaning a space that was meant to be holy.

Overall, though, the trip was wonderful! I think one of the nicest things was getting to know some fellow students better, and having some great stories to share with them.