The Danish Minority - Contradictions in Paradise
By
Peter Kovacs Réka Petrovits The Danish minority in Germany is making fun of the concept of minority.
First of all it is surprising to find out that 50% of the Danish minority in Germany doesn’t even speak the Danish language and 30% doesn’t use this language in the family. If somebody chooses to be a member of the Danish minority, he should just apply, and after going through a process his request could be accepted. During this process he can justify his choice, and he's being informed of the rights and engagements of the people belonging to the Danish minority.
It’s also curious that 9 out of 10 Danish children don’t use the Danish language during the breaks at Danish schools. The real identity of these people comes to question: does language define culture? In the definition of a national minority the language is certainly on the top of the arguments, among several others like education, tradition and common sense of belonging to a community. Then how come, that these people, who don't even speak Danish consider themselves true Danes? The answer came at once: Denmark supports the Danish minority living in Germany, and on its turn the German state also gives them monetary support. The Dane children are privileged even before their birth, the pregnant women have a private nurse who is looking after them, and also a private doctor, because "what if the German doctors aren't good enough" (Jørgen Kuhl, the director of the Danish Minority Organization in Germany). It was shocking to hear that the members of the Danish minority can buy cheaper summerhouses just because they are belonging to a minority.
After the lecture of Jørgen Kuhl held on July the 8-th the conclusion could be that many people living near the German-Danish border in their free time, as a hobby are playing a game called ”let’s be a minority”.
To explain as clearly as possible the causes of the surprise about all of these facts enumerated above it’s useful to make a parallelism between the Danish minority living in Germany and the Hungarian minority in Romania. For the Hungarian people living in Romania the preservation of their language and their cultural identity is vital. Without the language we can’t speak about a real national minority any more. Nobody can be transformed into a person belonging to a minority (even at his/hers request), because this is not a course where the participants can be taught different things. The feeling of being part of a minority is in the blood, you get it at your birth. Also it’s impossible to talk about a member of a minority if the parents and the parents of their parents don't belong to that minority. Mr. Kuhl defined the concept of a person belonging to a minority, and stated that one can talk about objective and subjective criteria; isn’t it strange to mention the subjective criteria when the members of a minority get monetary help? The Hungarians from Romania are a national minority because they want to keep their language, culture and traditions alive, not because of some advantages. On the contrary: being a part of a minority can be a handicap in Romania. We hope that nobody will misunderstand our words: we don’t think that a minority is just about language and bad living conditions, but we believe that in the case of the Danish minority in Germany some people are putting their own interests in front of the interests of the minority as a whole.
An another very important aspect connected to this question can be associated with the economic situation of the countries: in a country where there are no deep economical problems there are also no problems connected to the minorities. Of course there are some exceptions but with money almost every obstacle can be removed. We have to underline that the majority who is living without serious monetary problems is more understanding than the other majorities who think that every right accorded to the minority means something less for them. These kinds of feelings can be kept alive, speculated and used by the nationalist politicians. For example: the Hungarians from Romania want their own university; a great part of the majority, ”guided” by nationalist politicians thinks that this can lead to the separation of Transylvania from Romania, so they will have bigger troubles than they do now. Probably in the same situation but in a rich country the members of the majority just shrug, and say: ”give it to them, we don’t want to hear about their complains any more”.
We have to mention that the monetary help from the kin-states can be very important. The Danish minority in Germany gets around 30 million DMs from the Danish state. On the other hand if the Hungarian government wanted to give some monetary help for the Hungarians in Romania the above mentioned politicians would say: “They're pumping money in Transylvania, and through this they're preparing the takeover of Transylvania!”
The purpose of the two states that are being involved in this minority-situation on the Danish-German borderline could also be questioned. Why are they spending all that money to convert Germans to Danes; what interest do they have to maintain the facade of a strong Danish community living in Germany, which in fact doesn’t fit in the image of a minority? They are propagating this solution as a model, but during our stay at the German minority in Denmark and at the Danish minority in Germany we observed that their leaders weren’t speaking too kindly about the other part.
P.S. We would like to underline that we didn’t have the time and the possibility to make researches on the situation of the Danish minority from Germany so our view about the presented situation can be attacked from many directions. We think that it can be interesting to compare the needs and expectations of the two minorities.
