I was born into the Danish minority, my mother being from Copenhagen and my father being from Kiel. As many born into an ethnic or national minority, I did have mixed feelings about the national agenda that many of the 50,000 people strong group’s ‘nation builders’. On the one hand, there have been pictures of me in the local (German) newspaper in the early nineties, when I and three other class mates decided to paint our faces with Danish flags during a visit of the Danish queen to Schleswig. On the other hand, I was kicked out of the Danish minority scouts in 7th grade (although the scouts have different amounts of power across Sydslesvig, they are generally tied very close to the Danish schools and it is hard to do good in school without being a member), amongst other things, because I refused to swear to “god, king and fatherland”, arguing that most of us were not believers in gods, certainly I was a republican (and felt that I had the right to be just that without being discredited as being ‘un-Danish’), and I argued that most of us did not have some certain ‘fatherland’ that we could relate to completely.

Nevertheless, the only place where they seem to be willing to publish just about anything I send in is in the Danish minorities daily newspaper Flensborg Avis. Mostly it’s reader’s letters, but see for yourself