Author: johanneswilm

Ok, could there be a term more self-reflective than “my identity”? I think it would be hard to match. My thought on the subject are therefore mainly not meant as a look into my own personal psychology, but rather as an example of how non-nationals create identity or identities from a person who has tried to get passed the most obvious contradictions.

First and foremost, one of the main problems for non-nationals in reflecting on their identity is the complexity that their status gives them. Most people can cook their identity down to a few attributes like race (in the US) or nationality (in Europe), but multi-nationals can not do that in the same way. Not only is it a matter of adding another word, but as at leats two of the attributes will be defined in opposition to oneanother, so further explanations will be neccesary to communicate one’s identity correctly. Whenever one is stuck in a situation of having to present oneself, one will have to choose between either using a few hours on explanations or cutting out all but one of the attributes within a given category (nation or race).

After having reflected upon it, I have tried to stop letting myself be reduced to one of those categories, however, as the examples in my personal history show, the most common strategy is probably to deny one of the attributes, simply by “forgetting” all about it (language, cultural codes, etc.)

Here we have a few examples of how I tried to handle identity in different ways: In Bisbee, AZ, I managed to use enough space to represent all of Germnay, Denmark and Norway as well as showing my sympathy for US-Americans and dfferentiating myself from the Europan population at large. In Molde, N, I do not manage to have just as broad a profile and for the international press, I choose to be Norwegian. While in this student newspaper in Oslo, N, I am simply a “border person”. I think it is due to the surplus of knowledge on the matter in Flensburg, D, that I can not only give a view that I am from several countries, but also be abl to critisize the “Danishness” that people carry at large.

As we can notice, it is not only about the amount of information that is given, it is also about the way it is presented. Being German and Danish can mean many things, as the above excerpts show.

Until I update this page very soon, but if you know Norwegian, you can get most of it out of my 300+ comments from Klassekampen Forum to which I was subscribed until last fall.

In German check out the Solid Forum and my 294 comments there.

For Danish head on over to Flensborg Avis

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