Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site 9780857459770

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Borders of Belonging: Investigating Landscapes of Danishness Today
Chapter 1. Dybbøl and the Danish Nation: History and Context
Chapter 2. Out of Sight: Reconsidering the Modern Museum
Chapter 3. The Banalities of Being Danish: National Identity at the Castle Museum
Chapter 4. Sensing 1864 at the Battlefield Centre
Chapter 5. The Fate of the Nation at the Battlefield Centre
Chapter 6. Danish Heritage Today: Cosmopolitan Nationalism and the Reappearance of the Romantic
Conclusion. Paradoxes of Modern Belonging: Reassembling Heritage, Nation and Experience
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Borders of Belonging

Museums and Collections Editors Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra Editorial Advisory Board Chris Gosden, University of Oxford Corinne Kratz, Emory University, Atlanta Susan Legêne, VU University Amsterdam Sharon Macdonald, The University of Manchester Anthony Shelton, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Paul Tapsell, University of Otago, Dunedin As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public. V . The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific. Edited by Nick Stanley V . The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation. Edited by Paul Turnbull and Michael Pickering V . The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display. Louise Tythacott V . Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Claire Wintle V . Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site. Mads Daugbjerg

Borders of Belonging Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site

M D

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2014 Mads Daugbjerg All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Daugbjerg, Mads.    Borders of belonging : experiencing history, war and nation at a Danish heritage site / Mads Daugbjerg.      pages cm. — (Museums and collections ; volume 5)    Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-85745-976-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-85745-977-0 (ebook)   1. Schleswig-Holstein War, 1864—Campaigns—Denmark—Dybbøl Region— Historiography. 2. Sønderborg slot (Sønderborg, Denmark) 3. Historiography— Social aspects—Denmark. I. Historiecenter Dybbøl Banke (Sønderborg, Denmark) II. Title.   DL236.D38 2014  943'.076—dc23 2013023300 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-0-85745-976-3 hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-977-0 ebook

C List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction. Borders of Belonging: Investigating Landscapes of Danishness Today

vi viii 1

Chapter 1. Dybbøl and the Danish Nation: History and Context

17

Chapter 2. Out of Sight: Reconsidering the Modern Museum

47

Chapter 3. The Banalities of Being Danish: National Identity at the Castle Museum

77

Chapter 4. Sensing 1864 at the Battlefield Centre

104

Chapter 5. The Fate of the Nation at the Battlefield Centre

131

Chapter 6. Danish Heritage Today: Cosmopolitan Nationalism and the Reappearance of the Romantic

156

Conclusion. Paradoxes of Modern Belonging: Reassembling Heritage, Nation and Experience

180

Bibliography

188

Index

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F 0.1. Parading soldiers on Dybbøl Day, 18 April 2006

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1.1. Map of Denmark and the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, 1817

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1.2. Map depicting the Dybbøl defences and their surroundings before the Prussian attack in April 1864

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1.3. Vilhelm Rosenstand’s 1894 painting depicting the counterattack of the Danish Eighth Brigade at Dybbøl

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1.4. Niels Simonsen’s 1864 painting of Danish infantrymen retreating from Danevirke

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1.5. The Dybbøl Mill symbolically guarded by historical cannons

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1.6. Tourist brochure cover from 2005 depicting the Dybbøl Mill as a picnic setting

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1.7. The Dybbøl Battlefield Centre entrance flanked by Danish flags

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2.1. The Sønderborg Castle in winter

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2.2. Layout of the first floor of the Sønderborg Castle Museum, as it stood in 2006

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2.3. Glass cases with 1864 rifles at the Sønderborg Castle Museum

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2.4. Landscape miniature model of the Dybbøl battlefield from the Sønderborg Castle Museum

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3.1. Otto Bache’s 1888 painting of the Equestrian Guard embarking at Korsør in 1848

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3.2. Graphic map of Denmark’s size in 1863 and in 1865

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4.1. Miniature model of a Danish redoubt, from the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre

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4.2. Martin Bigum’s 1996 painting, National Retreat (Millenium)

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4.3. Handout offered to visitors to the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, 2006

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4.4. Visitors in the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre’s reconstructed open-air redoubt

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5.1. Playground sandbox with wooden ‘artillery’ pieces at the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre

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6.1. Red Cross memorial stone set outside the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre

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A T         and 2007. Although the responsibility for the end product is mine alone, the manuscript has been enriched vitally by a number of highly qualified people. First and foremost, at Aarhus University, Nils Bubandt has taught me more about anthropology than anyone else. His clever, suggestive and often surprising probes into my material and field, and his marvellous ability to unfold the big issues of our discipline in what seems like mundane cases to the rest of us, have been and remain a constant inspiration. At Roskilde University, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and Bruno Ingemann both added valuable input to my initial research, each in their own ways. Coming from social geography and communication studies, respectively, they provided me with a healthy dose of nonanthropology along the way and backed up my unconventional methodological choices when I faltered. At the University of Manchester, where I spent an immensely fruitful period as a visiting scholar in the fall of 2007, Sharon Macdonald was of crucial support. Her vast field expertise in studying the paradoxes of heritage practice meant I benefitted enormously from my stay in the English northwest, and her careful readings and suggestive comments have set their thorough marks on this book. Many other colleagues, in Denmark and abroad, added input along the way. I have presented and discussed my findings from my Dybbøl fieldwork at a number of seminars, conferences and workshops – at Danish venues in Aarhus, Sandbjerg, Roskilde, Fuglsø and Odense, and internationally in Manchester, London, Nijmegen, Kassel and Istanbul – and received feedback and constructive criticism from a wide range of respondents, all of whom I cannot hope to mention here. But they include my wonderful colleagues in Aarhus, including my former peers in the Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography, whose copresence constituted a vibrant, ambitious and fun milieu of ethnographic exploration. On the international scene, a particular mention must be made of Richard Handler, another leading figure in the anthropology of nationalism and heritage, and a key inspiration for my own work. I first met Richard at a research

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seminar in Aarhus in 2008, and again at several points since then, including a visit of mine to Virginia in 2010. I hugely appreciate his sincere and curious inquiries into my work, and much admire his ever-friendly attitude and room for guidance amidst a frantic academic schedule. Other scholars whose feedback on my presentations has influenced the present book include Mike Crang, Tim Edensor, Richard Jenkins, Eric Hirsch and Kevin Hetherington. The welcoming staff at my two main field sites, the Sønderborg Castle Museum and the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, eased my way in and made my fieldwork feasible and pleasurable. From the very outset, my project was received with curiosity, interest and support. Head curator Peter Dragsbo and centre manager Bjørn Østergaard will know to share my thanks with their hard-working staff. Special thanks must, however, be directed at Inge Adriansen, senior curator at the castle museum, whose encyclopaedic historical and archival knowledge continues to amaze me. Apart from her expertise and guiding role in the field, Inge has repeatedly taken time out of her busy schedule to read and comment on draft material of mine, and also guided me in finding maps and other illustrations. I have put these key persons and their colleagues in a potentially awkward position, insisting that they could act, similarly, as uniquely qualified expert advisors and as key informants of mine whose perspectives and positions I have scrutinized in my analysis. I applaud them for accepting this ambiguity, for letting me into their institutional worlds and for their willingness to share knowledge and doubts about the 1864 heritage with me. A vital part of the sharpening of my argumentation has resulted from my publication of three articles based on my 2006–7 fieldwork. This also means that fragments of the book’s findings and arguments have been published in article form, although never in the contextualized and coherent shape that the monograph format allows for. I am grateful to the publishers of the following journals for allowing me to adapt and reproduce parts of the original articles. In the International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 15, no. 5 (2009), in an article entitled ‘Pacifying War Heritage: Patterns of Cosmopolitan Nationalism at a Danish Battlefield Site’, I provided parts of Dybbøl’s historical context (in this book’s chapter 1), a sketch of the theoretical base regarding modernity and nationalism (chapter 2) as well as my first take on the discussion of what I call ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ (chapter 6). In Museum and Society, vol. 9, no. 1 (2011), in a piece called ‘Playing with Fire: Struggling with “Experience” and “Play” in War Tourism’, I analyzed the intricacies of the experiential heritage paradigm and the ambivalence of visitors and staff regarding the issue of ‘play’ in relation to war sites (parts of chapters 4 and 5), and included a discussion

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of Scott Lash’s idea of a ‘second modernity’ (introduced in chapter 2). The visitor perspectives were analyzed further in a third article, published in History and Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011), in a special issue on ‘Globalized Heritage’ guest edited by myself and my colleague Thomas Fibiger. That article, ‘Not Mentioning the Nation: Banalities and Boundaries at a Danish Heritage Site’, grappled with the issue of nationalism and the attempted downtoning of its salience at Dybbøl (found here in chapter 5). Furthermore, I thank Thomas for letting me reutilize ideas stemming from our jointly authored introduction for the special issue, bits of which are included here in chapter 6 and in my conclusion. Apart from the publishers and editors of these journals, I also wish to extend my thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers involved in strengthening the arguments, scope and clarity of my articles. I thank the staff at Berghahn Books, including Mark Stanton and Adam Capitanio, and the Museums and Collections series editors Mary Bouquet and Howard Morphy, for their professional and helpful guidance, as well as the anonymous book manuscript reviewers whose comments and constructive criticisms allowed me to improve the flow of the text and tighten my argumentation substantially. A final acknowledgement must be expressed to my meticulous proofreader on the home front, Søren Thorsøe, for all his hard work and continuous backing, on the manuscript and beyond. Most of all, however, I pass on my deepest gratitude to my wife, Ann-Mari, who ensured that the three little future heritage tourists got by whenever their busy daddy was roaming. I dedicate this book to her.

Introduction

B  B Investigating Landscapes of Danishness Today In modern landscapes everywhere, people persist in asking, ‘What happened here?’ The answers they supply, though perhaps distinctly foreign, should not be taken lightly, for what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth, and while the two activities may be separable in principle, they are deeply joined in practice. If place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social traditions and, in the process, personal and social identities. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine. —K. H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places

T   - D-   D Hill has come to be regarded as an icon of Danishness. Its geographical location at the crux of Denmark’s most important historical battlefield, and its history of repeated ruination by enemy fire and subsequent reconstruction, have secured the mill the status of an emblem of Danish loyalty, sacrifice and steadfastness. It marks the scene of the defeat of the Danish army at the hands of Otto von Bismarck’s Prussians in 1864, and the loss of lives, land and Danish dreams of European power. Although, seen from an international perspective, the 1864 war was but a minor conflict, it is commemorated in Denmark as a decisive, indeed defining, moment in the nation’s history. As recently as 2006, the Danish Ministry of Education officially canonized the battle of Dybbøl as a compulsory primary school history subject – alongside another twenty-eight key events and figures in history, including Tutankhamen, Columbus, the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin wall (Undervisningsministeriet 2006: 19).1 In Denmark, Dybbøl is deemed important. This book investigates the museological and heritage practices and paradoxes linked to this symbolic war site. It concerns ‘what happened here’, in the sense suggested by Keith Basso (1996: 7) above; ‘what people make of their places’ as ‘closely connected to what they make of themselves’. It

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is thus a book about the role of museums and heritage in place-making processes, including – as part of that – the vexing issue of the fate of the nation as a collective imaginary and experienced entity in an era cross-cut with various and variously expressed agendas of national belonging and global awareness. It explores the institutional afterlife of the 1864 war and especially the ways in which contemporary visitors to two very different institutions in the Dybbøl vicinity literally make sense of the war heritage and its national connotations. In staking out and analyzing the important distinctions between the stagings of the past in these two settings – one a conventional collection-based museum, and the other a newer, experientially oriented ‘battlefield centre’ – the book thus also comprises a comparison of particular paradigms and practices of exhibition making and experience making. In pursuing these complexities in practice, I draw upon, but also challenge and seek to nuance, theoretical positions in the fields of museology and heritage, tourism and place theory, and nationalism and modernity studies. Basing my analysis on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at this important symbolic site, I am concerned with how categories such as ‘heritage’ and ‘nation’ obtain meaning, not by way of abstract theorizing but through the everyday life that surround sites such as Dybbøl. ‘With regard to nationalist thinking’, Michael Billig insists, ‘one need not ask “What is a national identity?” but “What does it mean to claim to have a national identity?”’ (1995: 61). Furthermore, we must ask, with Richard Jenkins, ‘how, and under which circumstances, does ethnicity come to matter, if it does?’ (2011: 18). Borders of Belonging investigates the circumstances of such claims, as they are variously uttered, assumed, performed, denied, contested and/or reconfirmed in a specific heritage setting. This includes ‘ways of conceiving of “us, the nation”, which is said to have its unique destiny (or identity); it also involves conceiving of “them, the foreigners”, from whom “we” identify “ourselves” as different’ (Billig 1995: 61; and see Jenkins 1995; Barth 1969). In my case, this foreign Other is an overwhelmingly German Other, as Dybbøl has traditionally been regarded, since 1864, as a site charged with a profound, defensive Danishness, and also, in symbiotic fashion, with a distinct anti-Germanness – although, as we shall see, such ingrained positions have been challenged in recent years, both in the heritage sector and beyond. Denmark, a country with a historical reputation of tolerance, liberalism and social egalitarianism, has in recent years seen a notable political slide towards the right.2 This includes the emergence and rise of the antiimmigrant Dansk Folkeparti or Danish People’s Party (DPP), which has wielded a considerable influence on Danish political agendas and juris-

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diction since the turn of the millennium.3 In 2001, a landmark election ousted the social democrats who had been in power since 1993 and saw new prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of the political party Venstre4 form a coalition government with the conservatives, resting on crucial parliamentary support from the DPP, a centre-right axis that was to dominate Danish politics and policies for a decade. The 2001 shift coincided with the 11 September attacks on the United States, a turning point that led to Danish cooperation in the U.S.-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and a strong commitment from the Fogh Rasmussen government to the global ‘war on terror’. In turn, engagements such as these have meant that Denmark has increasingly become a target of opposition and aggression. This was most ardently exemplified by the so-called cartoon controversy in 2005–6 sparked by the publication, in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, of a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Danish and international Muslim communities protested over what they saw as a grave violation of the Muslim stricture against the depiction of a holy figure. The outrage escalated into a diplomatic crisis between Denmark and much of the Islamic world, resulting, among other things, in attacks on Danish embassies in the Middle East and the withdrawal from Copenhagen of ambassadors of Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The newspaper’s editors insisted that the publication was meant as an experiment investigating the limits of artists’ self-censorship, seen to threaten the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression.5 Nevertheless, a steady stream of ‘revenge’ acts by criminals targeting Denmark or Danish interests have marred the reconciliation process; these include the 2008 car bombing of the Danish embassy in Islamabad and the attempted murder in 2010 of one of the Muhammad cartoonists by an axe-wielding Islamist breaking into the artist’s home. Although utterly peaceful in contrast, my Dybbøl field setting must be seen as circumscribed by these larger contexts and the ways in which Danish ‘identity’ and ‘values’ are fought over and contested more broadly. As we shall see below, the Danish foreign policy adopted at the time did impact on the framing and representation of Dybbøl, if often in indirect fashion. In the following, I present a brief vignette from the field to introduce a set of tensions of central importance to my larger study. Even though it is taken from a commemoration context that is not directly connected to the two main institutional settings of my study, the ambivalences surrounding it will be found again in various forms in the institutional analyses that follow. I then provide a brief overview of the book’s structure and the relationship between its chapters. I round off this introduction by devoting a few pages to discussing the methodology of my ethnographic research.

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Dybbøl Day: Reconciliation and Reservation Each year on 18 April – the date of the Dybbøl battle – the fallen from the 1864 war are commemorated in the Dybbøl hills. A wreath-laying ceremony has been conducted here by the Danish military every year since 1921, when Northern Schleswig – the region known in Denmark as Sønderjylland, literally ‘Southern Jutland’ – had been voted back into Danish hands following the German defeat in World War I.6 Tradition has it that platoons from the nearby sergeant school in Sønderborg parade here and that the school’s current commander gives a short speech. The ceremony, conducted at a memorial grove comprised of four mass graves holding both Danish and Prussian war dead, used to be an exclusively Danish affair focusing on issues of (Danish) bravery, sacrifice and determination against all odds. In recent years, however, the ceremony has been altered significantly, beginning in 2001 when the sergeant school’s then commander, Lieutenant Colonel J. P. Rasmussen, decided to invite along German soldiers. He had been approached and spurred on by a long-term German holidaymaker in the region, who had convinced him that a new reconciliatory perspective on Dybbøl and its symbolism was desirable. The ceremonial inclusion of German troops, inspired by similar initiatives at other European battlegrounds, triggered a storm of protests in local and even national Danish media. National-minded citizens were enraged at the prospect of ‘once again hearing the sounds of German boots marching on Danish soil’, as one letter to the editor had it (quoted in Larsen 2005: 100).7 The Jyllands-Posten took a similar anti-German stand in its editorial, asserting that Dybbøl is ‘a symbol of the confessional Danishness’, a ‘memorial grove and a national symbol’ suitable ‘not for explanation, but for remembrance’ (Jyllands-Posten 2001). It also stated that ‘a German element’ in the commemoration would ‘express that all is equally valid, and that in the last instance it does not matter whether you view things from Danish or German perspectives’ (ibid.).8 Member of Parliament (MP) Søren Krarup of the Danish People’s Party took the matter to Parliament, urging the minister of defence to ensure ‘that the Dybbøl Day remains a Danish commemoration’.9 While obviously the battle of Dybbøl itself is beyond living memory, dark memories of the German occupation of Denmark during the 1940s are still prevalent and seem to become inscribed onto ‘Dybbøl’, which older generations of Danes have been brought up to regard as a symbol of Danish courage and ultimate sacrifice. Responding to the roar of criticism levelled at his decision, Commander Rasmussen decided to introduce a number of reservations on the German participation. These reservations – seven in total – were upheld during

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the time of my fieldwork, but have, interestingly, recently been lifted.10 Thus, for instance, the invited German soldiers in 2006 had to attend the commemoration ceremony unarmed; they were not allowed to fly their colours; they were banned from marching on Danish soil; and no German speeches or military tunes were performed.11 All in rather profound contrast to the Danish soldiers parading on the ground next to their German colleagues (see figure 0.1). The result was an oddly unbalanced ceremonial practice in which the German guests – heavily outnumbered and deprived of all military symbolism but their uniforms – stood shoulder to shoulder with, but were in effect sidelined by, a Danish platoon of fully equipped sergeant trainees comprehensively demonstrating their national loyalty. The closure of the 2006 wreath-laying ceremony struck me as particularly uneven, as the asymmetry of the alleged reconciliation was painstakingly spelled out. The Danish platoon, led by the horns and drums of the regional military brass band Slesvigske Musikkorps, marched on, weapons shouldered, the red-and-white flag held high, down the hill to the town of Sønderborg. Meanwhile, the lesser German unit simply broke ranks – as prescribed by the no-march reservation – almost like a football team at halftime. The sight of uniformed soldiers in solemn ceremonial mode

Figure 0.1. Parading soldiers on Dybbøl Day, 18 April 2006. Closest, the fully armed Danish platoon of sergeant trainees. At the back (in lighter berets), the unarmed Germans. Photo by the author.

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casually breaking formation and suddenly chatting, laughing and having a smoke appeared out of place here in the midst of the heavily ritualized setting, and certainly very ‘un-parade-like’, in particular in the light of the continued Danish performance. Deprived of any military symbolism, to the point of not even being allowed to act as ‘authentic’ parading soldiers are supposed to, the Germans were reduced to extras in the Danish show of true comradeship. In a symbolic reversal of the actual 1864 war result, this time the Danes came out on top, marching on and lauded as the conflict’s true long-term victors. The ambiguous premises of the 2006 Dybbøl Day – the exclusivist Danish celebration in friction with the alleged reconciliation motives – were mirrored in the rhetoric of the event. For instance, in his speech, the newly appointed sergeant school commander, Lieutenant Colonel Viggo Ravn (Rasmussen’s successor), first stressed the unique Danishness of Dybbøl: ‘The brave Danish defence – in the face of poor military conditions – turned Dybbøl into a symbol to many Danes. Dybbøl became a symbol of Danish courage, of endurance and of faithfulness. Dybbøl continues to be a symbol of Danishness.’ He followed up by stating that ‘as a Danish officer, there is certainly no doubt that I had rather seen that it had been a Danish victory’ (than a defeat) that was being commemorated here. But then, in a sudden turn of rhetoric, Ravn went on to immediately dismiss this national line of thinking by adding that what was being commemorated today (i.e., in 2006) was ‘neither victory nor defeat’. Instead, he said, ‘we are gathered here in a common wish to pay respect to the heroic effort, to the courage and the sacrifice demonstrated by the soldiers who gave their lives here in the fighting at Dybbøl’. Here we see the national perspective waning in the favour of a transnational or cosmopolitan one. The soldiers’ lives lost and mourned today were no longer exclusively Danish, and the virtues celebrated were not Danishness and national pride but understood to be nonspecific or ‘generic’ military qualities such as courage and sacrifice. In support of this slide from national to transnational agendas, Ravn called attention to the allied nature of present military operations across the globe: Today, Danish and German troops are allied in NATO and have soldiers deployed in some of the world’s hot spots together. Danish and German troops are gathered here today to commemorate those who fell on both sides – those who paid the highest price. (emphasis in original)

The reconciliatory agenda of Dybbøl Day was closely linked up with contemporary engagements. Indeed, the last part of the speech came across as an effort to legitimize the Danish military presence across the globe,

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especially in Iraq. The praise given and respect shown at Dybbøl Day were thus not only directed at the fallen from 1864, but also at the Danish soldiers abroad today who, in the words of the commander, ‘on a daily basis demonstrate their courage and endurance when they go out on patrol despite threats of roadside bombs and snipers’.12 By shifting the meaning of Dybbøl from the regional 1864 war to the global battlefield of the present – from then to now – the ceremonial inclusion of German NATO allies appeared appropriate, even self-explanatory. And yet, the seven reservations on the German participation ensured that the ceremony remained, in all its ambiguity, a display of Danish colours and loyalty.

Erasing while Embracing the Nation: A Chapter Overview The tension between inclusive, reconciliatory or cross-boundary perspectives on the one hand, and exclusive, introspective or national perspectives on the other, recurs in different guises in the chapters that follow. The bulk of my fieldwork was conducted in two institutions, an old museum and a newer so-called battlefield centre, each one presenting the 1864 history but doing so by very different means. Thus, Borders of Belonging comprises a comparative analysis of contemporary practices at two heritage institutions devoted to the interpretation and representation of one historical event. Apart from this introduction and a conclusion, the book consists of six main chapters. It can be envisaged as a ‘sandwich’ consisting of two contextualizing chapters (1 and 6) with four chapters squeezed in between them. Of these four central chapters, two concentrate on the Sønderborg Castle Museum, while two analyse the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre. Chapter 1 contains the historical and geographical contextualization of the project. I document and discuss the historical significance of Dybbøl, first in terms of its key role in the 1864 war, then regarding its development into an important ‘memoryscape’ (Edensor 1997: 178) for German and, in particular, Danish commemoration. In my discussion of contemporary Dybbøl, I devote some space to account for the strained historical relationship and a bitter dispute, culminating in 1999–2000, between the two main institutions of my study, the castle museum and the battlefield centre. The institutional history is unfolded in order to situate and ground a number of rather abstract concepts – such as history, heritage, experience and nation – in the firm empirical realities of my study. Zooming in on the Sønderborg Castle Museum, chapter 2 aims to challenge and refine the idea of the modern museum as an institution devoted primarily to the disciplining of civic subjects through visual encounters

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with ‘their’ heritage. I do this by connecting my findings to a broader conception of the modern revolving around Scott Lash’s (1999) concept of a ‘second’ modernity, rooted in Romanticism and challenging the order and reason of the ‘first’ modernity of the Enlightenment. This understanding of modernity runs through the book as a whole, serving to accommodate a nuanced analysis of actual heritage practices ‘on the ground’. Analyzing visitors’ interactions in and with the museum exhibition space, I demonstrate how they can be understood as both processes of ‘enlightenment’ and of ‘experience’. Visitors are shown to be driven by rationalist as well as romantic urges, requesting visual overview sometimes and multisensory immersion at other points. In chapter 3 I concentrate on the issue of national identity as it relates to the castle museum’s war exhibitions. I discuss how curatorial intentions to represent the Danish nation as a historical construct meet with firm structural resistance in the encounter between site and visitors. I argue that a set of powerful and related overarching concepts such as nation, heritage and history, deeply ingrained as ‘objective’ categories of thought in the vast majority of visitors, mean that the constructivist agendas of the museum’s curators do not resonate with – or indeed feature at all in – most visitors’ experiences at the castle museum. Drawing upon Billig’s suggestive notion of ‘banal nationalism’ (1995), I thus demonstrate how the constructivist agendas of the museum curators contribute, paradoxically, to nonconstructivist, ‘banal’ readings of being Danish at the castle museum. Turning to the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, chapter 4 and chapter 5 mirror the two preceding museum chapters, in the sense that the first analyses the centre as a social arena characterized by oscillation between rationalist and romanticist engagements, while the next addresses the specific issue of national identity as it is negotiated and performed at the centre. Furthermore, chapter 4 discusses the centre staff’s self-image as what I term a ‘countermuseum’, casting their institution in contrast to conventional museums, subscribing instead to new paradigms of ‘learning’ and ‘experience’, prominent concepts in the current Danish cultural and educational sectors. The chapter therefore also holds a theoretical discussion of the experience concept itself and the widespread tendencies in the heritage sector to embrace experiential approaches. I connect this trend to the insights of Lash and analyse how visitors to the battlefield centre navigate its experientially engaging reconstructed milieu, but also – in line with my analysis of visitors to the castle museum – how such practices operate side by side with seemingly contradictory desires for overview and dispassionate enlightenment. Chapter 5 once again takes up Billig’s notion of banality in investigating recent developments at the battlefield centre. While the centre at its

Introduction

9

founding in 1992 was conceived in a peculiar ethnic-romantic national spirit, during my fieldwork its staff struggled to shake off this legacy and distance the centre’s activities from its romantic moorings and renegotiate its stance into one of inclusion and reconciliation, much in line with the Dybbøl Day ceremonial restructurings described already. The chapter proceeds to analyse visitor practices as they relate to these issues of national identification, and a number of curious differences between Danish and German visitor practices and perspectives are discussed. In particular, I highlight the banal ways in which the national significance of Dybbøl is unreflectively reconfirmed among Danish visitors, even as explicit Danish biases are renegotiated and silenced at the centre. Finally, in chapter 6 I seek to broaden the discussion, looking to connect my findings from the two main institutional field sites to wider societal tendencies. Thus, I argue that the heritage developments at Dybbøl can be taken to illustrate, in condensed form, a set of modern predicaments facing Denmark and other Western countries. I take up recent, if rather disparate, theoretical suggestions that ‘society’ is increasingly ‘cosmopolitan’ (e.g., Beck 2000, 2002) and/or characterized by ‘experience’ (Schulze 1992; Pine and Gilmore 1999) and interrogate these claims in light of my empirical findings. These unsettle and complicate the grand diagnoses considerably, as, for example, the growing transnational outlooks often turn out to contain simultaneous expressions of national celebration, even if these take new and subtler shapes than previously. Regarding the notion of experience, I investigate and assess the lingering legacies of Romanticism inherent in the experiential heritage turn and especially in the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999) as this assumingly novel regime of value is embraced and put to work by Danish policy makers.

Studying Heritage Practice: A Few Words on Method When I arrived at Dybbøl in the beginning of April 2006, I was inspired by the argument from Richard Handler and Eric Gable that, despite the prodigious amount of academic studies of museums and heritage sites, ‘most research on museums has proceeded by ignoring much of what happens in them’ (1997: 9, italics in original). Much museum and heritage research – which has of course only accelerated since Handler and Gable’s seminal study of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1990s – still proceeds from a historical point of view or, at best, works with what Handler and Gable call ‘already produced messages’, i.e. texts, documents, visitor questionnaires and interviews ‘conducted after the fact’ (9). Determined to contribute

10

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to remedying the lack of analytical focus on the actual social practices that provide heritage sites with meaning, I situated myself squarely in the midst of the Dybbøl heritage landscape. I pursued what Peter Metcalf has termed ‘the ethnographic perspective’ and the ‘mobile positioning’ of the ethnographer: What I have called the ethnographic perspective is, at its best, an example of mobile positioning. What the ethnographer can do, in a way that it is very hard for any particular informant to do, is shift the point of vantage repeatedly, placing first this ethnicity in the foreground, and then another, within some fairly restricted field. None of this is to deny the subject positioning of the ethnographer, nor to disclaim that ‘objectification’ is the result, as much as ‘objectivity.’ It is simply the best that can be done. (2002: 107)

In my effort to do ‘the best that could be done’ to capture the real-life complexities of the historical battlefield and the various interests, agendas and paradoxes imbued in it, I frequently shifted my focus and perspective, attempting to accommodate as many different viewpoints as I could and to map and analyse their interrelations. Borders of Belonging is my attempt to condense and communicate a number of key insights emerging from my time in the field. In this process of condensing and ordering, however, my written account often veils the messy fieldwork practices in which participation, interviewing, note taking and analysis blended, overlapped and enriched each other – or indeed sometimes obstructed each other. Sharon Macdonald (2002: 16), in her rich study of the action ‘behind the scenes’ at the London Science Museum, reflects on her intentions to let the ‘messiness’ of her field engagements shine through her account without losing a sense of narrative. In my own case, and stuck with the same problems, I cannot help but feel that my own resulting narrative in some ways glosses over the often productive obscurities and inconsistencies of my practical engagements. Thus, the apparent neatness, order and chronology of the present book needs to be regarded, to a certain degree, as a necessary editing of notes, insights and experiences that often took haphazard, impulsive and unregulated forms in the field. My main fieldwork was conducted in April–September 2006 (i.e., the tourist season) and supplemented by a number of short follow-up trips in 2007 and 2008. With the site of Dybbøl and the town of Sønderborg only a two-hour drive from my home, I did go to and fro a lot. Typically, however, I would stay over for periods of three to four nights at a time, lodging in a former farmhouse located right in the heart of the Dybbøl conservation area. My accommodation in this old but beautifully situated house was generously provided by the Sønderborg Castle Museum. At times, I

I

11

would share the house with others, including seasonal employees attached to the Battlefield Centre. In other periods, I would be left to my own notes and laptop. From this base, I split my time roughly equally between the Sønderborg Castle Museum and the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre. Most days saw me spending the better part of the day in one of these institutional settings, sometimes split between both. Also, the location of my lodge in the very midst of the listed, historical battlefield allowed me to trawl the Dybbøl hills and its tracks, groves and ruins thoroughly by foot. The town of Sønderborg, two kilometres down the road, housed the castle museum but also boasted a series of essentials for my well-being, such as supermarkets, shops, tourist offices and pubs. Most evenings, however, were spent at the old house on Dybbøl Hill, writing up field notes while occasionally enjoying the incredible views across Vemmingbund Bay. During my many hours spent at the two main institutions, most of my time was devoted to experiencing the 1864 heritage from the tourists’ point of view, talking to visitors and sharing seats, rooms and tour guides with them. I also joined centre and museum staff in their ‘backstage’ activities, daily routines, meetings, meals and postwork social events of various kinds. I had access to the museum’s archives and library, and was assigned my own desk in the museum, to which I would occasionally return to study or write up notes. Despite my backstage access, most of my institutional time was, however, spent hanging out in the visitors’ areas of the two institutions, studying the life unfolding in and around the exhibition spaces and sites. I also spent time in various other settings. I rubbed shoulders with Sønderborg locals and sang along on high-flown hymns in the crowded gym hall of the Sønderborg sergeant school on Dybbøl Day. For several days I shared house, meals and opinions with the enthusiastic group of historical reenactors who occasionally stage ‘living history’ war episodes at the battlefield centre grounds. I visited a number of other sites of memory and venues of relevance to my study. I often dropped by the iconic Dybbøl Mill itself, which held two small exhibitions set up by the castle museum. I also occasionally sat in at the local tourist office, talked to staff there and joined a number of events arranged by the tourism agency. And so on. All, of course, in my pursuit of the contemporary meaning of Dybbøl, conceived both as a physical site and as a symbolic conglomerate of often clashing interests. One of the principal ideas of my project was to register, map and analyse visitors’ engagements with the two heritage institutions’ different takes on Dybbøl’s history. As part of my fieldwork, I therefore conducted a series of on-site semistructured interviews with Danish and German visitors, dis-

12

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cussing their visits, their impressions of the institutional settings and their relation to the 1864 heritage. I conducted nineteen recorded interviews (with a duration of nineteen to fifty-two minutes) with visitors, nine at the museum and ten at the battlefield centre. Most of these included more than one informant, most often a couple or a group of (up to four) friends. Although of course not everyone in these groups contributed equally, my interviews ‘gave voice’ to fifty informants, of which thirty were Danish and twenty German. I collected roughly half as many interviews with German visitors as with Danish.13 On top of these semistructured interviews, I experimented with a more unconventional form of data collecting. While my visitor interviews were conducted on-site, they still constitute what Handler and Gable (1997: 9) call ‘completed texts’ and ‘past responses’ to museum or centre visits, and as such contain retrospective reflection of the heritage experience. This is of course the nature of interviews. And while I spent a lot of time observing and tracking visitors in the museum’s war exhibitions and at the battlefield centre, such observations inevitably miss out on much detail concerning the individual visitors’ experiences. As Macdonald (2002: 242) has noted, ‘eavesdropping’ in museums can be quite difficult. As a supplement to these classic ethnographic methods, I thus decided to employ what I refer to as the video specs method. Devised by Dr Bruno Ingemann, the method involves a set of plastic spectacles with a tiny built-in camera and microphone.14 Placed on the heads of individual visitors, the specs serve to register and tape the actual routes taken, choices made, objects looked at, time spent, and conversations between specific visitors. It thus provides the researcher with a series of minute detail absent from standard observation, while in contrast to interviewing it actually provides a picture of ongoing visitor practice, not retrospective reflection. It was quite evident from the outset, however, that the utilization of the specs required some careful methodological reflection. Indeed, given its somewhat ‘gimmicky’ nature, the method became an issue of both contestation and amusement prior to my fieldwork. The specs were easily the part of my project that attracted the most comments from colleagues (‘Oh, so you’re the guy with the funny glasses?’). Quite a few openly questioned the value of the unconventional method, which, in their predictions, would only provide me with informants’ idealized performances. According to these sceptics, visitors would ‘stage’ themselves and act in order to impress the ethnographer and display their ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Darbel 1991). Determined nevertheless to test the method as a supplement to my more conventional ethnographic methods, I went into the field rather cautious and ready to analyse my video data as my

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13

informants’ attempts to please the fieldworker and behave ‘appropriately’ in a museum setting. What happened, however, was that the vast majority of those who agreed to wear the specs insisted that it had not affected their visit in any significant sense. ‘You got it exactly as it would have been anyway’, as one informant put it. What to do with this kind of information? One possible strategy would have been to overrule such statements as naïve and analyse the recordings as staged performances anyway; in other words, insist that the informants were indeed ‘faking it’ for the fieldworker. The problem with such a perspective, apart from the distrust contained in it, is its fundamental notions of ‘true’ and ‘fake’ practice. In my opinion, the assumption that if only we could get rid of all those annoying and interfering technological media and filters, we would somehow be able to grasp the ‘true’ meaning of the ‘real’ social situation, is flawed. Of course the visitors ‘perform’, but they – and I – do so all the time. In regular interviews, people routinely attempt to please the fieldworker. And even during allegedly nonintrusive ‘fly-onthe-wall’ observation sessions, informants stage themselves, perhaps not to me, but to other visitors, friends, even their own families. Considered as a supplement, then, and as a method through which informants of course inevitably present themselves in specific ways, because that is what humans do all the time, the video specs method in my experience worked as a valuable contribution to my data collection. Its specific contributions to my study have to be assessed as I present my data and analyses along the way, but a few further general comments are in order here. I ended up with eleven video specs recordings – seven with Danish visitors, four with German – of approximately forty minutes duration each. The method had the distinct advantage that it provided me with detailed data from a group of visitors to which regular interviewing does not cater too well, namely, families with smaller children. In general, I hesitated to ask parents for standard interviews, as they typically had their hands quite full; I found it inappropriate to suggest to them to take out of their schedule roughly half an hour to speak to me. The video specs, on the other hand, were perfect for this segment, as they had to be worn ‘on the move’ and thus involved only a slight delay as visitors were ‘wired up’ by me. What is more, not only were such groups characterized by lots of talk and social interaction, opening up for analysis better than silent recordings of slow-moving museum readers (although my material does contain such recordings too), but such families also tended to quickly forget about the specs, in particular the kids, as there were so many other things going on. My informants did in fact seem to forget about or neglect the specs. I rounded off all video sessions by conducting a short (eight- to ten-minute)

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interview about the informants’ general impressions of the site and their reactions to the specs. I suggest, then, that the video specs method covers ground not captured by standard interviews or observation. Furthermore, it provides me with highly detailed material concerning the actual ways in which people literally engage with and ‘see’ the heritage sites. In my chapter overview above, I stated my intentions of challenging the ‘visual’ and ‘disciplinary’ take on museums and heritage. In tourism studies, John Urry’s seminal notion of a specific ‘tourist gaze’ (1990) similarly stresses the power of the eye in tourism. My video specs recordings, in a very concrete sense, capture actual tourist gazes on the ground. But by doing so, they also serve, as shall become evident, to nuance and challenge the ocularcentrism implied in the idea of the gaze by pointing to the multifaceted and often confusing nature of perception. I am of course not the first to point out that ‘gazing’ is more than a mere physical activity of the eye; but while it has become commonplace to note that this is so, it is safe to say that the ways in which ‘perception’ and ‘experience’ unfold in multisensory practice are still severely understudied. One aspiration of this book is thus to contribute to an empirically grounded critique of the hegemony of the visual. I conducted interviews in Danish and German, and all translations into English are my own. This also goes for translations from written Danish and German sources. Realizing that you inevitably lose a slight share of the native expression in translation, I have, in the cases where I quote written sources, provided the original quote as an endnote. In the numerous cases where I cite informants’ oral statements, however, I have not provided the quote in the original language. If I had done so, it would have meant a massive increase in the number of endnotes and a general cluttering of the text. In a few cases, I have opted to provide original-language expressions or words (in italics) also, when no satisfying direct English translation could be found. An example is the German concept of Mahnmal, which implies a certain reflective-conscientious subject position that English terms such as ‘memorial’ and ‘monument’ do not contain. This language policy of mine is in effect no different than that pursued by most other ethnographers doing fieldwork across the globe, but the process does spur an increased reflection on linguistic barriers when translating from your own native language into English. In my citation from written sources, an ellipsis contained within parentheses (…) signifies that a bit of the original text has been omitted. Likewise, in my written representation of oral field material, (…) means that I have left out a brief part of the interview, while an ellipsis not contained within parentheses merely indicates a short pause on the part of the

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informant. In some cases, I have taken the liberty of adding to the quotations one or two explanatory terms, which I then provide in brackets. For example, in the case of someone quoted as saying ‘Because this [land] was German [then]’, the informant’s exact oral statement in the interview situation was: ‘Because this was German.’

Notes 1. The full list of canonical subjects (in Danish) can be found at https:// www.emu.dk/gsk/fag/his/historie-kanon/indeks.html (accessed 17 December 2012). 2. Uffe Østergaard, writing in 1992, described Denmark as ‘a country with a huge public sector dominated by an ethos of libertarianism and solidarity and with a Conservative party that is more socialist than most socialist parties in Europe’ (7). 3. Opponents have never hesitated in labelling the DPP nationalist and populist, while the party itself officially contends that in the DPP ‘we are proud of Denmark; we love our country and we feel a historic obligation to protect our country, its people and the Danish cultural heritage’, an obligation said to imply ‘the need for a strong national defence, and secure and safe national borders’; http://www.danskfolkeparti.dk/The_Party_Program_of_the_Danish_ Peoples_Party.asp (accessed 17 December 2012). 4. Venstre (literally ‘the left’) somewhat confusingly belongs on the right side of the political spectrum. As the largest and historically dominant force on the Danish right, it is a conservative-liberal party in the Nordic agrarian tradition, advocating free trade and historically supporting the interests of the peasantry. 5. Several political analyses of the cartoon crisis emerged in its wake. See LindeLaursen (2007); Müller and Özcan (2007); Rytkønen (2007); Ammitzbøll and Vidino (2007). 6. A historical contextualization of the Dybbøl battle and the 1864 war will be provided in chapter 1. 7. Original Danish wording: ‘[Andre har talt om,] at de “ikke vil høre tyske støvletramp” på Dybbøl.’ 8. Original Danish wording: ‘[Dybbøl er] et symbol på den bekendende danskhed. (…) Dybbøl er en mindelund og et nationalt symbol. Her skal ikke forklares, men erindres. (…) Et tysk islæt ville være udtryk for, at alt er lige gyldigt, og at det dermed i sidste instans er ligegyldigt, om man anskuer tingene fra dansk eller tysk hold.’ 9. The full enquiry from 14 May 2003, in its original Danish wording: ‘Er ministeren enig i, at Dybbøldagen, dagen for prøjsernes storm på Dybbølskanserne den 18. april 1864, er en dansk mindedag, forudsætningen for sønderjydernes udholdenhed under det tyske fremmedherredømme 1864–1920, og

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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at det derfor er både rigtigt og naturligt, at Dybbøldagen forbliver en dansk mindefest, idet der deri ikke ligger noget modsætningsforhold til vores tyske naboer?’; http://webarkiv.ft.dk/Samling /20021/salen_spor/S2909_222.htm (accessed 17 December 2012). Thus, at the 2011 Dybbøl Day ceremony, for the first time, the German paraders were allowed full symbolic participation, including flagging, armament and a speech given in German by the German ambassador to Denmark. The two final reservations regarded the Dybbøl Day’s evening programme, as the Germans were not allowed to participate in the memorial service given in a Sønderborg church and were similarly banned from the subsequent memorial banquet at the town’s sergeant school. All quotes are taken from the written version of the speech on the website of the Danish Armed Forces, http://forsvaret.dk/fko/ (accessed 10 May 2006; link no longer active). Original Danish wording: ‘Det tapre danske forsvar – under dårlige militære betingelser – gjorde Dybbøl til et begreb for mange danskere. Dybbøl blev et symbol på dansk mod, på udholdenhed og på trofasthed. Dybbøl er fortsat et symbol for danskheden. (…) Som dansk officer skal der ikke herske tvivl om, at jeg hellere havde set at det havde været en dansk sejr. Nu er det hverken sejr eller nederlag vi er her for at markere i dag. Vi står her i et fælles ønske om at vise respekt for den heroiske indsats, for det mod og for den opofrelse som blev vist af de soldater, der faldt i kampene her ved Dybbøl. Danske og tyske tropper er i dag allierede i NATO og vi har soldater indsat sammen i nogen af verdens brændpunkter. Danske og tyske soldater er sammen her i dag for at mindes dem, der faldt på begge sider – dem der betalte den højeste pris. (…) [Vores soldater] demonstrerer dagligt deres mod og udholdenhed, når de kører ud på patrulje på trods af truslen fra vejsidebomber og snigskytter.’ At the time of my fieldwork, about 30 per cent of the castle museum’s visitors were German. No statistics regarding the national composition of battlefield centre visitors existed, but it varied according to season. The centre manager estimated that in August, up to half of the centre’s visitors were German; during July around 10–15 per cent; and the rest of the year, less than that. Only 3 per cent of the centre’s many visiting school groups were from German schools (personal communication). See Ingemann (1999) and Gjedde and Ingemann (2008) for further reflections on this method.

Chapter 1

D   D N History and Context ‘D’            land some two kilometres west of the town of Sønderborg and giving name to a nearby village. It is, in Tim Edensor’s (1997: 178) terminology, a ‘memoryscape’, comprising ‘the organisation of specific objects in space, resulting from often successive projects which attempt to materialize memory by assembling iconographic form’. This chapter details the spatial, institutional and commemorative geographies of Dybbøl and outlines the history of this important Danish memoryscape. Below I provide a brief historical outline of the nineteenth-century events that lent Dybbøl its (national) fame and turned the name itself into an icon of Danishness. This is also the story of how, ‘in the wake of military and political disasters a middle-sized, multinational, composite state was reduced to the small, linguistically and socially homogeneous nationstate we know as Denmark today’, as Østergaard has put it (2004: 34). I then go on to outline the contemporary setting in which I found myself during my fieldwork, highlighting a number of the important ‘nodes’ in its meshwork of meaning, including my two main field sites: the Sønderborg Castle Museum and the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre. Particular attention is paid to outlining the strained historical relationship between these two institutions, as this strife sets the scene for later chapters’ analyses and discussions of their current institutional positions and practices.

Historical Dybbøl: The 1864 War and Its Context The 1864 war between Denmark and the two leading powers of the German Confederation, Prussia and Austria, came about as a result of the unclear and complex legal status of the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein

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and Lauenburg, lying on the southern edges of the Danish monarchy (see figure 1.1).1 These regions were part of the Danish conglomerate state, but not of the Danish monarchy proper. The two southernmost duchies, Holstein and Lauenburg, shared a parallel membership in the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), the loose union of thirty-nine independent states and city-states that had been formed in 1815 in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. This meant that in these territories, the Danish king held the title of duke with a seat in the German Federal Assembly in Frankfurt, while reigning as king in the rest of Denmark. It was, however, Schleswig, the northernmost duchy, that was to become the crux of the conflict. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Denmark was characterized by a political climate of destabilization, tension and decline. The Danish state was literally shrinking; Norway had been lost in 1814 as a result of negotiations following the Napoleonic wars,2 and Indian and African colonies were sold off in response to the financial crisis following those same wars (Sørensen 1996: 30; and see Sanders 2007: 154; Gjerløff 2007: 12). Still, the ‘German’ duchies, together with the sparsely populated North Atlantic dependencies of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, as well as West Indian colonies, meant that the Danish conglomerate state was characterized by a pronounced ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity (Østergaard 2004: 30). The 1830s and 1840s saw revolutionary thought sweep over Europe, leading in Denmark to the dissolution of absolutist monarchism and the adoption of a democratic and, at the time, extraordinarily liberal constitution in 1849. However, these same revolutionary currents also led to demands for independence from the Danish Crown in Schleswig and Holstein. In parallel with these political changes, and partly spurred by them, a notable shift from what has been termed ‘civic’ to ‘ethnic’ conceptions of the nation occurred, taking root in Denmark throughout the 1840s in particular. I shall discuss these variants more thoroughly in later chapters; for now it suffices to say that civic nationalism, revolving around notions of ‘republic’ and ‘citizen rights’ as conceived in the French 1789 revolution, stresses individual and rational commitment to national citizenship and the free will of the liberated, sovereign people. This contrasts sharply with ethnonational interpretations, emanating primarily from German thinkers conceptualizing the nation in terms of ethnicity, language and Volk (Calhoun 1997: 89). The specific political-historical context of Denmark in the first half of the nineteenth century provided fertile ground for the import of such ethnonational (or romantic-national) thinking, personified by key Danish thinkers and poets of the time such as Henrik Steffens, Adam Oehlenschläger, B. S. Ingemann and N. F. S. Grundtvig.

D   D N

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Figure 1.1. Map of Denmark and the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg. Produced in 1817 for use in the Danish schools. © Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot.

In fact, within the Danish conglomerate state two parallel ethnonationalist movements emerged and collided, as independence-bent, Germanspeaking Schleswig-Holsteiners squared off against Danish nationalists – led by the newly formed National Liberal movement – aspiring to enlist Schleswig, but not Holstein, into Denmark proper. While Holstein, and smaller Lauenburg, were inhabited almost exclusively by people regarding themselves as German, Schleswig was torn between a ‘Danish’ population in the north of the duchy and a ‘German’ in the south, although with considerable overlaps, cross-sympathies and bilingual groups. The buildup to the armed conflict between Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark that followed in 1848 saw an acceleration of anti-German agita-

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tion in Denmark. In these formative years of the Danish democracy, the ‘Other’ against which Danish identity was pitted and constituted was, thus, a German Other (Østergaard 2004: 33).3 The threats against a shrinking Denmark, and the question of where to draw the border between Danes and Germans, were key factors for the embracement of an ethnonational thinking that gripped leading Danish politicians, poets and artists in these years. Thus, whereas the decades around 1800 had been characterized by attempts to define the relation between the individual and the nation in terms of rationality, utility and ‘the common good’ – a civic or patriotic project – the 1840s saw the rise of a romantic and ethnic conceptualization of this relation (Damsholt 1999a, 1999b).4 The peasantry was assigned a new and mythic role as bearers of ‘authentic’ Danish virtues. Following major agricultural reforms in the late eighteenth century, the peasants were increasingly being recognized, and began to recognize themselves, as a selfgoverning and self-confident class of fundamental economic importance to the Danish economy (Østergaard 1992: 5). And whereas earlier the peasants had been seen from ‘above’ as a mob of uneducated subjects in need of enlightenment and change in the pursuit of the common good, they were now cast, in poetry, art and political discourse, as primordial representatives of the Danish Volk, in need of protection and preservation. The need for change was relocated onto the state, which was increasingly seen as having to conform to ‘the people’ and not vice versa (Damsholt 1999b: 43; and see Burke 1992: 294–98). The First Schleswig War 1848–1851 – known in Denmark as the ‘Three Years’ War’ and in Germany as the ‘revolt’ (Erhebung) of the SchleswigHolsteiners – was in effect a civil war within the Danish state between two parallel nationalist camps. It resulted in a narrow and hard-fought Danish victory. More than anything, however, it was the intervention of the European great powers that dictated the outcome. The Prussian army had lent the Schleswig-Holsteiners its considerable support during the first part of the conflict but had been forced, eventually, to withdraw under pressure from Russia. Despite being thus largely decided elsewhere, the Danish victory intensified ethnonational sentiment in Danish public opinion. The so-called ‘spirit of ’48’, a jubilant, self-confident and fervently romanticist current of national pride, swept over Denmark. In terms of political solutions, the 1848–51 war was, however, inconclusive. At a London conference in 1852, the dominant European powers agreed on a ‘simple peace’, a set of regulations that did not clear up the obscure status of the duchies but retained the status quo: Schleswig-Holstein was returned to the Danish king, while the Danish government in return had to promise not to tie Schleswig closer to Denmark than Holstein. The 1852 London treaty thus

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impeded the Danish National Liberals’ desires to annex Schleswig, but not Holstein, into the Danish kingdom proper. The still unclear status of the duchies caused no end of headaches to the young Danish democracy. In particular, it was the working out of a federal constitution for the conglomerate state as a whole that proved impossible to execute. The Danish 1849 constitution – Europe’s most liberal at the time – was only in force in the monarchy proper, while Holstein’s and Lauenburg’s membership in the German Confederation meant that here, the conservative rulers of Austria and Prussia asserted powerful influence. In between, Schleswig, neither member of the German Confederation nor of the Kingdom of Denmark, was a grey zone in which the boundary between Danish and German was continuously contested. A strict Danish language policy enforced in Schleswig schools and churches in the 1850s served to heighten tensions. After several attempts at drafting and redrafting a federal constitution that would satisfy the opinion of the Danish National Liberals as well as the conservative princes of the German Confederation – plus secure goodwill from traditional Danish allies England and Russia – positions came to a head during the early 1860s. The National Liberals demanded a ‘Denmark to the Eider’, the river separating Schleswig from Holstein, in what would amount to an incorporation of Schleswig, but not Holstein, into the Danish monarchy. Danish prime minister C. C. Hall, weary of the political deadlock over the duchies, decided in 1863 to gamble, believing in English as well as Scandinavian support for his cause: he issued a declaration that in effect excluded Holstein from the rest of the Danish state. By sidelining Holstein but not Schleswig, it constituted a clear breach of the 1852 London protocol guaranteeing the two duchies’ parallel connection to the Danish Crown. Immediate protests from the German Confederation ensued, followed by months of international negotiation and pressure on Denmark to withdraw this declaration. The Danish government, however, stood firm, even though it knew that its course would lead to conflict with the German powers, and even though Swedish and English diplomatic support soon turned out not to extend to promises of military assistance in a potential war. In the midst of the turmoil, the Danish king, Frederik VII, died. His successor, Christian IX, a conservative German-speaking prince from Schleswig and a strong opponent of the Eider program, found himself forced by public opinion to sign the new federal constitution for Denmark and Schleswig in November 1863. War was inevitable. ‘The Danes had thus precipitated a crisis’, notes Embree (2006: 29), ‘for which they were unprepared and the consequences of which they completely misjudged.’ In

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January 1864, Austria and Prussia moved to occupy Holstein and Lauenburg. On 18 January, they demanded that the Danish November constitution be withdrawn within two days, and when this did not happen, they crossed the Eider and marched on Schleswig. War between the two German powers on the one side and an isolated Denmark on the other had broken out. It soon turned out that ambitious Prussian minister-president Otto von Bismarck was not simply waging war on behalf of the two duchies in order to secure their independence. In a speech to his king, Wilhelm I, delivered just before the war, Bismarck revealed his intentions to conquer and annex the two duchies into Prussia (Sauntved and Eberhardt 2007: 57). As it turned out, the 1864 war was to be Bismarck’s first of three wars that would unify the new German Empire under Prussia’s and Bismarck’s leadership. This larger scheme required a showdown with Austria, which followed in 1866, before the final and most important victory over the French in 1870. In other words, Denmark’s breach of the 1852 London treaty provided Bismarck with a golden opportunity to initiate the first part of his great plan that was eventually to lead to the founding of the German Empire in 1871. The 1864 war itself was a mission impossible for the Danish army. As early as February, it had to retreat from the defences of Danevirke in southern Schleswig, as hard frost threatened to solidify the wetlands that protected the flanks of the line. The decision to evacuate Danevirke (literally ‘work of the Danes’), a line of defensive earthworks believed to hail from the Viking ages, was a sound one seen from a military perspective. Nevertheless, Danish commander-in-chief Christian de Meza had to face an enraged Danish public and press, who saw in the loss of this mythical line a crippling blow to the Danish cause. One correspondent of the National Liberal Copenhagen paper Dagbladet wrote: Poor soldiers, poor officers, poor Denmark! How heavy to be small, and double heavy to be ruled by people who could not endure the thought of the streams of blood which every one of Denmark’s sons would happily shed for our homeland. It is beautiful to be human, but not yet on humanitarian grounds to forget that which is yet higher: honour! Goodbye, precious Danevirke, whose name resonates so powerfully in every Danish chest! (quoted in Sauntved and Eberhardt 2007: 87)5

As a result of his tactically sound but publicly intolerable decision, de Meza was dismissed by the Danish government. The ‘humiliating’ evacuation of Danevirke was to influence the subsequent decision to stand fast at Dybbøl, no matter the costs.

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Having retreated in good order, and repelled an Austrian attack along the way, the Danish army was relocated to the two flanking positions of Dybbøl and Fredericia. Parts of the Prusso-Austrian alliance went north and conquered the entire peninsula of Jutland over the spring and summer of 1864. But it was at Dybbøl – a system of fortifications and open redoubts in eastern Schleswig, a few kilometres west of the town of Sønderborg – that the outcome of the war was to be decided. The Dybbøl ridge had already achieved national fame as a scene of battle in the 1848–51 war. Back then, the windmill at Dybbøl had been destroyed by enemy fire. After its reconstruction, it was ruined once more in the 1864 war, and then rebuilt again by the millers. Hence its mythic status as a Danish emblem, refusing to give in to the enemy – ‘twice shot into ruins’ yet ‘raised again as a mill house’, as a stone plaque outside the mill still proclaims today.6 The mill was (and is) invoked as an easily understood metaphor for the indomitable Danishness of the area and its conquered, but unquelled, population. The natural defensive qualities of the ridge, protected on two sides by water, and with the island of Als as an important hinterland providing opportunities for fast retreats, made Dybbøl an ideal defensive position in the 1864 war. From 1861, a system of Danish redoubts and trenches had been planned and partially built, stretching across the peninsula of Sundeved (see figure 1.2). These defences, although nowhere near finished, were to be the scene of the Danish defeat on 18 April 1864. During the months prior to the actual storm, Prussian long-ranging artillery had conducted a systematic devastation of the Danish positions, leaving the Danes unable to return fire with their shorter-range guns. The battle itself lasted a mere four hours and resulted in some three thousand casualties, before the Danish army was routed and forced to retreat to the island of Als.7 After the battle, a ceasefire was implemented and peace negotiations were undertaken in London. During the months of diplomacy that followed, the Danish delegation rejected a number of proposals for a revised border across Schleswig presented to them. Thus, the London conference was broken, and mainly due to Danish stubbornness. When the ceasefire expired, the Prussian army moved quickly to take the island of Als, the last bit of Schleswig that had remained in Danish hands. After this final blow, Danish morale was shattered, and surrender followed quickly. The ensuing ‘peace negotiations’, undertaken in Vienna, left Denmark with a disastrous outcome, much harsher than the prospects discussed in London. The duchies had to be ceded in their entirety and the new border drawn much farther north, at the Kongeå River separating Schleswig from the monarchy proper. The Danish state had lost one-third of its territory

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Figure 1.2. Map depicting the Dybbøl defences and their surroundings before the Prussian attack in April 1864, with the town of Sønderborg as an eastern anchor. Map produced for the German anniversary celebrations of the victory in 1914, based on an original from the German War Archives. © Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot.

and two-fifths of its population. Although most inhabitants in the duchies considered themselves German, Schleswig contained about 170,000 inhabitants of Danish orientation (Bjørn and Due-Nielsen 2006: 260) who were now forced under Prussian (and after 1871, German) rule that was to last until 1920.

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Dybbøl As a Site of German and Danish Memory After the war, the battle of Dybbøl was mobilized in the service of both German and Danish nation building (Adriansen 1992). On the German side, Dybbøl (or Düppel, as the German spelling has it) was retrospectively celebrated as the first in a three-stage series of wars leading to the 1871 formation of the German Empire. ‘Without Düppel, no Königgrätz, without Königgrätz no Sedan, without Sedan no German Empire’, as one of the period’s German slogans had it, with reference to the three decisive victories of the German wars of unification against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870).8 In terms of concrete inscriptions of collective memory, the Prussian victors laid out a memorial grove in the very hills of the Dybbøl battlefield, in which 421 Danish and 28 Prussian soldiers were laid in mass graves (Adriansen and Schartl 2006: 14).9 A number of modest memorial stones were set up in the area to honour fallen Prussian officers. More striking, however, was the 22-meter Düppel-Denkmal monument, erected right in the centre of the battlefield, immediately next to – and standing taller than – the Dybbøl Mill. A similar, but slightly smaller, sister monument was set at Arnkil, celebrating the Prussian conquest of the island of Als. With their distinctly neo-Gothic architecture, the monuments were a thorn in the side of those who saw Dybbøl as a sacred Danish site. Seen from the victorious side, however, the DüppelDenkmal monument constituted a new and popular tourist sight catering for a large number of German school excursions. It thus worked to support the growing German national identity and also acted as a prototype for the many victory monuments erected in Germany after 1871 (Adriansen 2003b: 256). A new hotel, Düppelhöh, was built opposite the monument, illustrating the growing significance of (domestic) tourism around 1900. The hotel survived until 1990, when it was torn down to give way to the contemporary battlefield centre. The years of German rule (1864–1920) thus saw a rising national utilization of Dybbøl by Germany. This culminated in 1914 with the fiftieth anniversary of what was termed ‘the liberation of Schleswig-Holstein’. These large-scale celebrations were a national German matter, with thousands of 1864 veterans participating and Emperor Wilhelm himself scheduled as the main speaker. He did not make it in the end, but instead sent his brother, Prince Heinrich, who in his speech promised the veterans assembled to maintain the conquered land (‘our Nordmark’) and saturate it with German ‘spirit’ and ‘essence’ (Adriansen 1992: 272–73).

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Seen with Danish eyes, the sheer sacrifice of the Dybbøl soldiers had turned Dybbøl into a mythic site of national importance. As Ernest Renan pointed out in his famous 1882 lecture on the nation, ‘where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort’ (1990: 19). With Gold and Gold (2003), we may also refer to such sites as ‘landscapes of regret’: These are places deeply etched in social memory as scenes of defeat and loss, sometimes tinged with anger or disgrace. At the same time, landscapes of regret are not solely places for lament and despair. Their uncomfortable history is ameliorated by compensating factors, such as pride in gallantry, demands for redress of perceived brutality, and hopes for renewal. (113–14)

The alluring powers of defeat have been noted also by Bruce Kapferer (1988) in his compelling study of the Gallipoli campaign of the ANZAC troops during World War I. Kapferer analyses the Gallipoli events as a national myth ‘involving a process of rebirth’ which is ‘virtually biblical’ (126). He goes on: Gallipoli is often taken as a terrible defeat. But in the story as a whole it is a key event in the discovery and reformation of a coherent identity. A movement out of chaos, one which is almost demonic but which obscures the real character of Australians, is revealed in the suffering of Gallipoli. Reborn, the Australians become conquering heroes. (126)

In my introduction, I discussed how the parading Danish soldiers on Dybbøl Day seem to embody a parallel stance of triumph or rebirth. Sharon Macdonald (2005a: 55) argues that ‘national rituals and memorials played an important role in providing occasions on which to remember heroism and triumph even in the face of loss, and in performing the nation as a united entity’. The ways in which Dybbøl today is regarded both as a terrible defeat, but yet at the same time celebrated as the cradle of the ‘pure’ Danish nation, attest to the same ambiguity. Still today, the consequences of the 1864 war are sometimes in Denmark characterized as an ‘excretion’ (udskillelse) of the ‘German’ duchies, suggesting a more or less inevitable, organic and healthy process in which impure body parts are expelled (see, e.g., Korsgaard 2004: 305). Although from a Danish military perspective the battle had been hopeless from the outset, and it would have been wiser to vacate the position before the Prussian charge, the defeat lent Dybbøl a heroic glow, which retreat would not have (Adriansen 2003b: 251–52). Thus, in the decades that followed, as Denmark suffered from what became known as the ‘wound-fever’ from Dybbøl, countless odes and songs were written in praise of the battlefield. One example of this is Danish

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poet Holger Drachmann’s influential 1877 account of his travels in the border region. He termed Dybbøl ‘the Danish Thermopylae’, referring to the Greek mountain pass in which a heavily outnumbered Greek force in 480  held off the advancing Persians (Adriansen 2003b: 252–53). Gold and Gold note how the Thermopylae comparison was also evoked in the Scottish case of the battle of Culloden: ‘a comprehensive defeat with sufficient redeeming factors to allow historians to find something to celebrate’ (2003: 120). Similarly, and almost simultaneously, at the iconic American Civil War field of Gettysburg, ‘[n]ewspapers described the battle within the providential sweep of history, labeling it an American Waterloo, Thermopylae, or Armageddon’ (Weeks 2003: 13). These parallel references attest to the development of an international iconography of defeat in the nineteenth century, in which modern battlegrounds were elevated to a status alongside sites of ancient mythology in the name of the nation. Other examples of the period’s poetic and artistic national effort to mythologize the 1864 defeat include Johan Ottosen’s protest song from 1890, ‘Det haver saa nyligen regnet’, a stark proclamation that new generations of Danes will rise to reclaim their fathers’ losses. Today, as I shall discuss in chapter 5, the tune is utilized as the soundtrack in one of the battlefield centre’s audiovisual shows. In painting, the 1864 war was portrayed in equally romantic tones, in pieces such as Niels Simonsen’s depiction of the winter retreat from Danevirke, or Wilhelm Rosenstand’s equally glorifying representation of the counterattack of the Eighth Brigade at Dybbøl (see figures 1.3 and 1.4). Literature, poetry and imagery from artists such as Drachmann, Ottosen and Rosenstand thus played a crucial role in securing Dybbøl an iconic status. Paintings were popularized by numerous reproductions in various media, including, in the case of Simonsen’s Danevirke piece, as toy theatre scenery (Adriansen 2003b: 208). Also, a wide selection of silverware, porcelain, textiles, souvenirs and other small-scale items utilizing the Dybbøl iconography – first and foremost, the mill – were put into production. History schoolbooks from around 1900 portrayed the Dybbøl defeat in a profoundly heroic glow and routinely voiced the hopes of reunification with the Danes south of the Kongeå River (Adriansen and Jenvold 1998). In other words, the national struggle was not restricted to hot-headed National Liberals but formed part of the Danish mainstream, and was present in literature, art, school curricula, public discourse and material culture. Danish author and Nobel Laureate Henrik Pontoppidan penned a poem in 1918, when Danish hopes of border revision began to materialize, that was published in the large Danish paper Berlingske Tidende and later used for one of the pro-Danish posters in the 1920 border revision campaign.

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Figure 1.3. Vilhelm Rosenstand’s 1894 painting glorifying the Danish counterattack, Attack of the 8th Brigade at Dybbøl (original Danish title: Ottende Brigades angreb ved Dybbøl). © Det Nationalhistoriske Museum, Frederiksborg.

Figure 1.4. Niels Simonsen’s iconic 1864 painting, Danish infantrymen draw a gun carriage on the retreat from the Dannevirke position in 1864 (original Danish title: Danske infanterister trækker en kanonlavet ved tilbagetoget fra Dannevirke stillingen 1864). © Det Nationalhistoriske Museum, Frederiksborg.

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In it, Pontoppidan coined the metaphor of the ‘robbed daughter, deeply lamented’, finally set to return to her mother (reproduced in Adriansen 2003b: 347).10 The poem is a good example of the symbiosis of art, poetry and popular culture concerting, at the time, to mythologize the national struggle for the retrieval of the lost land. Dybbøl was at the crux of this struggle, as it came to be celebrated as one of the prime sites of Danish national spirit – a site where Danish blood had been spilled, and lives lost, in defence of the national territory. Following German defeat in World War I, a plebiscite in Schleswig was forced through by the victorious powers of the war. The border was to be decided according to the principle of ‘the peoples’ right of self-determination’ most often ascribed to American president Woodrow Wilson (Sauntved and Eberhardt 2007: 228). The result was the present-day border, drawn in 1920, separating the former duchy of Schleswig into a Danish and a German part, and coming very close to some of the proposals rejected by the Danes during the London negotiations in 1864. As it turned out, then, only six years after Prince Heinrich’s bombastic promises to the German veterans, Dybbøl was once again in Danish hands. The ‘long-lost daughter’ – or, at least, parts of her – had returned, and a steady Danification of the landscape was initiated at Dybbøl. The battlefield was transformed into a national park, proclaimed ‘the property of the Danish people’ by Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning in 1924 (Adriansen 2003b: 265). A local committee set in motion the erection of hundreds of smaller memorial stones for Danish officers in the area, gradually transforming Dybbøl into a Danish-only site of memory. The 1930s saw a further strengthening of Danish memorization in the area, including a memorial column raised in commemoration of the Nordic volunteers in the two wars of 1848–51 and 1864. Still, the two towering Düppel and Arnkil victory monuments remained an ever-present, concrete reminder of the former German rule. Danish authorities attempted to officially do away with them, suggesting different trade-offs with the German authorities, but to no avail. Then, during the German occupation of Denmark during World War II, the neo-Gothic monuments came to serve as popular sightseeing destinations for the German troops, as well as for those members of the German minority in Denmark who aspired to an annexation of Schleswig into the Third Reich (270). In 1945, however, the monuments met their end. One week after the Allied forces had lifted the German occupation of Denmark, both the Dybbøl and the Arnkil monuments were blown to pieces by unknown perpetrators, most likely members of the Danish resistance movement.

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The commemorative space of Dybbøl has thus, quite literally, been the object of inscription and reinscription of various national memories. The Danification efforts, initiated in 1920 and continued, with renewed passion, after 1945, were thus conducted and spelled out in clear and militant opposition to the great enemy to the south. Dybbøl came to be a site charged not only with stout and defensive Danishness, but also, in symbiotic fashion, with distinct anti-Germanness. After 1864, ‘on the basis of [a] conscious demarcation from Germany and all things German, the modern, popular and democratic Denmark emerged’ (Østergaard 2004: 32–33). Dybbøl was one of the premier nodes in the continued symbolic assertion of this self-conception. The Danish 1920 reunification celebrations took place in the very hills of Dybbøl, and since then, a number of popular assemblies and celebrations deemed to be of national importance have been set here. These include reunification anniversaries in 1945, 1970 and 1995, commemoration anniversaries of the 1864 defeat (notably, the one-hundred-year commemoration in 1964), as well as a number of other popular rallies and meetings (see Adriansen 2003b: 262–72). In sum, Dybbøl was cultivated, over the years, into a profound icon of indomitable Danishness and a ‘landscape of regret’, in Gold and Gold’s (2003) terms. The decades under German rule were characterized by Danish melancholy, but also by martial and heroic renderings of the Dybbøl defeat and rising hopes for reunification, as exemplified by the works of Drachmann, Ottosen, Rosenstand and Simonsen. When, in 1920, northern Schleswig was returned to Denmark – as a coincidental side effect of the Great War in which Denmark played no part – national hopes turned into cheering. This turn of events has meant that while the battle of Dybbøl itself resulted in utter Danish defeat, the collective memory clinging to it is very much a memory of the national struggle for claiming back the motherland’s ‘robbed daughter’ and eventually succeeding, in 1920, after fifty-six years of German rule. The strong national sentiments clinging to Dybbøl were fuelled by anti-German emotions in the wake of the world wars, most dramatically epitomized by the 1945 iconoclasm directed at the German victory monuments at Dybbøl and Arnkil.

Contemporary Dybbøl: Heritage Layout, Network, Nodes The system of historical redoubts and trenches at Dybbøl form a threekilometre line across the peninsula of Sundeved, with the town of Sønderborg located some two kilometres behind (i.e., east of ) the line. Sønderborg bridges the sound of Als, the narrow strip of water separating the

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mainland from the island of Als, which constituted a crucial hinterland for the Danish 1864 positions. A thin belt of land on both sides of the historical battle line constitutes a listed conservation area, owned and managed by the Danish Forest and Nature Agency (Skov- og Naturstyrelsen) under the Ministry of the Environment. The ruined redoubts found here today are primarily remnants of German fortifications built on top of the remains of the Danish trenches in the decades following the 1864 war. Apart from these ruins, the area is dotted with a plethora of smaller memorial stones and groves, most of them set here by Danish authorities following the 1920 border revision. The two most significant buildings within the conservation area, at least for my purposes, are the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre and the Dybbøl Mill, facing each other on each side of the main road running westwards from Sønderborg. Together with the Sønderborg Castle Museum, these two institutions arguably form the main venues for the official narration of the 1864 war history. Until recently the three institutions were deeply at odds regarding the representation of the 1864 events. In particular, the battlefield centre has been an object of controversy right from its opening in 1992, strongly opposed by both the managers of the mill and the castle museum curators. In the next section, I detail the strained centre-museum relations that did not soften until 2004, when the castle museum took over the responsibility for the running of the centre. The mill itself housed two small exhibitions as well as a souvenir shop. It is owned by the joint Societies of Danish Soldiers (De danske soldaterforeninger), who, in a move similar to the merging of the museum and the centre, handed over the mill’s daily operation to the castle museum in 2005. Thus, during the time of my fieldwork, an incipient partnership between the three institutions was developing, gradually replacing old resentments. On top of these three key institutions, a number of other actors and forces exert various kinds of influence on the Dybbøl memoryscape. It is hardly surprising to find that the Danish military holds a strong interest in the area. The Societies of Danish Soldiers acquired the mill in 1920, when they worked to erect a properly impressive flagpole outside the iconic building in time for the reunification celebrations to be held in the hills at Dybbøl that year (Adriansen 1997: 32). Today, the Danish flag flies here every single day of the tourist season. In 1937, the Societies added a bust representing King Christian IX, Denmark’s monarch in 1864, between the mill and the flagpole. To complete the picture, the flagpole is still ‘protected’ by four historical cannons, set up each year (again, restricted to the tourist season; roughly April–October) by the Danish military, pointing westwards, symbolically reestablishing the Danish defence of 1864 against

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the Prussian besiegers (see figure 1.5). This setup means that today’s tourist, standing at the flagpole, will be able to fit into one photographic frame a condensed set of national symbols: the Danish colours, monarchy and military, merging to figuratively defend the homeland in front of the white mill, which has become an iconic landmark in itself.

Figure 1.5. The Dybbøl Mill and the tall flag mast on Dybbøl Hill, symbolically guarded by four historical cannons that have seen action in the 1848–51 and 1864 wars. Photo by the author.

DybbØl and the Danish Nation

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Apart from its hand in this most central heritage setting, the Danish military also acts as convener of the annual Dybbøl Day commemorations on 18 April. On top of the wreath-laying ceremony discussed already, each year the day’s official programme consists of another two main gatherings, a memorial service in the Sankt Marie Church in Sønderborg – at which the sermon is always conducted by the garrison chaplain of the Sønderborg sergeant school – and a subsequent evening gathering in the sergeant school’s gym hall. Dybbøl Day thus contains an explicit ceremonial linking of military virtues, national obligation and Christian messages. Another key stakeholder at Dybbøl was the Danish Forest and Nature Agency. It managed the 160-hectare conservation area comprising the historical systems of redoubts and trenches, including the planting and maintenance of the area’s grassy slopes, kept by grazing sheep. The agency also upheld the walkways and in situ signposting at the historical earthworks, and maintained an information booth next to the battlefield centre’s parking lot. During the time of my fieldwork, a representative from the agency headed a so-called Dybbøl Group including representatives from the castle museum, the battlefield centre and the local municipalities, which met occasionally to discuss and implement initiatives regarding the public interpretation of the Dybbøl area. In 2001, the agency estimated the annual number of visitors to the Dybbøl conservation area to be one hundred thousand (Skov- og Naturstyrelsen 2001: 3), although no confirmed statistics are available. In comparison, the number of annual visitors to the castle museum during the time of my fieldwork was roughly sixty thousand, the battlefield centre hosted roughly forty thousand people and the mill saw fifteen thousand visitors per year. Such statistics lead to the mention of one final domain impacting on the Dybbøl heritage: the local tourism sector. The Danish tourism industry, working under the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, is organized in a hierarchical system of agencies of which the Ferieregion Sønderborg agency constitutes one of the local nodes. Themes related to history and heritage feature prominently in the branding of the region. This was explained to me as an obvious choice by the local tourism manager, who stressed the uniqueness of the setting: ‘This is where it happened’, she said, ‘no one can copy and resemble our history elsewhere.’ She went on to stress the iconic qualities of the mill: I am pretty sure we all have a relation to Dybbøl Mill. We use it in a very tangible way in our marketing, especially on the Danish market, because it arouses the national feeling. So we always include the Dybbøl Mill in our thinking, for instance, when it comes to photo material.

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Indeed, the wealth of tourism brochures, leaflets and websites promoting the area routinely utilize the mill’s iconicity. One such brochure, picked up during my fieldwork, depicts the mill on its cover, the Danish flag flying behind it, and a picnicking family playing in the grassy hills next to it (see figure 1.6). Inside the brochure, the mill again features prominently and is referred to as ‘the symbol of Danish courage’ (Ferieregion Sønderborg 2005: 7). On its website, the Sønderborg agency displayed the mill in its section for ‘cultural tourism’, under which heading it was stated that ‘this region is nothing less than a living history book’.11 A casual glance at the postcard rack in any of the central Sønderborg supermarkets, overloaded with mill postcards, reconfirms the symbolic status of the Dybbøl Mill as a distinct place marker and tourist brand. While on the one hand Dybbøl is, of course, a relatively fixed spatial entity, on the other hand its significance is continually reasserted in a cluster of relations between actors, institutions and agendas, both close and distant. In the vicinity, other smaller yet notable sites of memory include locations at Arnkil, Bøffelkobbel, and Broager, all related to the 1864 war, as well as the small Deutsches Museum Nordschleswig in Sønderborg, run by representatives from the German minority in Denmark. On a wider scale, the Sønderborg Castle Museum, the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre and the mill can be seen as nodes in a larger Danish network of institutions interpreting the nineteenth-century war heritage. Further north, in Ebeltoft, the restored frigate Jylland provides visitors with hands-on experiences of the maritime aspects of the 1864 war. Museums in Kolding and Fredericia house collections from the 1848 and 1864 wars, while the Danish Museum of Military History in Copenhagen retains a huge collection of weaponry and war equipment from all armed conflicts in which Denmark has taken part, including the 1864 war. Also significant is the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, north of Copenhagen, holding a number of important period paintings from the 1864 war, including both Simonsen’s and Rosenstand’s iconic pieces mentioned earlier. Transnationally, the Sønderborg Castle Museum in particular upholds a tradition of cross-border co-operation and joint initiatives with a range of German museums and institutions in Flensburg and the rest of Schleswig. While I do not intend to detail these various institutional domains and their interrelations, my point is to stress the fact that Dybbøl and the 1864 heritage cannot be considered an isolated and purely regional entity. Rather, one may imagine Dybbøl as part of a network of relations or an ‘assemblage’ composed of a set of differently connected actors, sites and interest groups relating to the 1864 events. ‘Taking an assemblage perspective on heritage,’ Macdonald points out, ‘directs our attention less to finished “heritage prod-

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Figure 1.6. The Dybbøl Mill as a recreational family setting. Reproduced from tourist brochure cover (Ferieregion Sønderborg 2005).

ucts” than to processes and entanglements involved in their coming into being and continuation’ (2009b: 118). My study is precisely a charting and analyzing of such processes of entanglement. In these networks, the two institutions I discuss below, the Sønderborg Castle Museum and the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, are major nodes, but they are enmeshed in relationships with a wide range of different and differently situated institutions, agencies and societies beyond the physical settings of Dybbøl and Sønderborg.

The Castle Museum and the Battlefield Centre: Wars Over War Memories The Sønderborg Castle Museum and the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre have a strained historical relationship. For my purposes, this history is of interest

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because it highlights a number of key issues relevant to the analysis of my collected material and demonstrates that today’s practices and paradoxes relate to these histories and developments. The overall tension elucidated by the institutional conflict can be summed up as one between proponents and opponents of ‘experience’ as a viable media for (war) heritage interpretation. In addition to this main problem, issues of reverence for the war dead, of national bias, and of the degree to which specific wars can hold general ‘lessons’ transferable to other conflicts emerge and clash. The battlefield centre was opened in 1992, initiated by private funding and aiming at commercial survival with no public support (see figure 1.7).12 Originally conceived as a ‘visitors’ centre’, it was planned to provide an introduction to the surrounding area by means of audiovisual media and landscape models. Through their centre visit, visitors’ subsequent visual engagements with the ‘real’ Dybbøl landscape were thus to be framed and guided. As Mark Neumann has pointed out, tourist sites ‘are public places that privilege particular ways of understanding the world’, and ‘[r]ather than gaze upon places and objects in any pure or natural form, we more often confront a series of cultural discourses that veil things and places in terms of value and significance’ (1988: 22). By virtue of its alternative form, the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre was planned as an alterna-

Figure 1.7. Entrance section of the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, welcoming its visitors with an avenue of Danish flags. Photo by the author.

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tive to conventional ‘glass-case’ museum communication and imagined as giving voice, so to speak, to the mute historical landscape. As such, the centre was envisaged also as a democratic project. Its founding figure and first manager, archaeologist Hans-Ole Hansen, thus told me that he considered himself an ‘exponent of 90 per cent of the Danish population’ who were unable to read the complex historical traces in the landscape without interpretive support. In combination with these alternative and democratic aspirations, a profound and arguably romantic national Danish bias characterized the early centre. It finds perhaps its clearest expression in the formulations of the architects who won the 1989 competition for the centre building, Michael Freddie and Ernst Lohse. In their winning proposal, they stated: The centre building itself is shaped like a sharp corner of a defensive bastion. As a national monument, it gushes forth from the soil, a memory of the horror of the war – an inferno when Denmark was overrun – but at the same time a testimony to courage, strength and will to survival. (…) The visitors’ centre shall be a monument in the landscape – a romantic monument to Danishness – set exactly at Dybbøl, which became the proof that Denmark was worthy of survival as a nation. (Freddie and Lohse 1989, quoted in Adriansen 1992: 280–81)13

Material from the early battlefield centre reflected this same romantic conception, speaking for instance of Dybbøl as ‘the very heart of the Danes’ self-image’ and the site where ‘justice triumphed’ at the 1920 reunification.14 Indeed, a number of the centre’s initial installations, many of which are still in use, convey a distinctly romantic vision of Danishness and the Dybbøl defeat while not leaving much room for the Prussians. When I discussed this with founder Hansen, he granted that at the time of planning – the late 1980s and early 1990s – there was indeed no inclination to include the ‘others’: [The original idea was] that if the Germans want to tell their 1864 history, they must build a centre on the other side of the border. This is the Danish history (…) told in a particularly lucid way. That was the idea. Why on earth should we build something in which German history was included? A very clear conception, and very widespread among Danes. And there are still Danes who say so: that the Germans must build their own.

The exclusivist and ethnonational rationales were reflected in the construction and contents of the early centre. They were to clash forcefully with representatives from the Sønderborg Castle Museum in the years to come. The curators of the castle museum,15 which boasts its own collections and exhibitions on the 1864 war, had a very different view of Dybbøl. Though

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geographically at the very nexus of the national conflict that gripped many Danish minds during the years of German rule, the museum was never a fierce bastion of ethnic Danishness. In the sensitive matters of border drawing and national belonging, it has remained remarkably neutral and consciously dispassionate. This outlook was already inherent in the very founding of the museum in 1908, during German rule, when a group of historically interested men established a local Heimat society16 and, soon after, a museum to house its growing collection (Gjerløff 2007: 71; Adriansen and Dragsbo 2008). The initiative can be traced to Sønderborg’s German-oriented bourgeoisie, and although it did meet with some resistance from the town’s pro-Danish proponents, the society’s and museum’s strictly apolitical and local-regional (as opposed to national) stress on collecting archaeology and folklore met with success (Adriansen and Dragsbo 2008). Its local-regional focus mirrored the period’s general mushrooming of local homestead-oriented museums all over Denmark.17 In a Zeitgeist obsessed with documentation and scientific measurability, the many new museums’ foci were rarely national in scope but exclusively regional or local, each new institution in effect carving out and supporting their own ‘mininations’.18 The fact that the Sønderborg Castle Museum’s first head curator, German journalist and self-taught archaeologist Jens Raben, was allowed to stay in office even after Sønderborg was voted back to Denmark in 1920 can be interpreted as evidence of the museum’s explicitly neutral and two-stringed19 Danish-German stance. The opposing views on the national issue constitute a deep-seated difference between the museum and the centre. At the centre’s opening in 1992, however, a more immediate concern for the castle museum was the issue of visitor numbers. The centre’s planners had estimated an annual stream of visitors of one hundred thousand, which would enable the centre to survive on market conditions (i.e., without public subsidies). These estimates turned out to be wildly optimistic, however, and at the time of my fieldwork, the centre attracted a more modest thirty-five to forty-five thousand visitors per year.20 What is more, this number rather accurately equalled the sudden decline in annual visitors to the Sønderborg Castle Museum, plunging from ninety to one hundred thousand to fifty-five to sixty-five thousand in the years after the centre’s opening. Centre manager Hansen’s optimistic hopes for a ‘synergetic’ effect, according to which the two institutions were envisioned to benefit mutually from each other’s presence, did not readily materialize. And while the centre, contrary to its founders’ predictions, required considerable public economic support, the castle museum faced cutbacks from the same municipalities. ‘So basically

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we sent money up there [to the centre], that’s how we felt it’, as one museum staff member told me during my fieldwork. Aiming to address a number of communication issues that had emerged after its opening, and to discuss scenarios to aid its ailing economy, the centre in 1994 set up a working group headed by Hansen and invited the castle museum to contribute as well. One of the cardinal aims of the group was a future expansion of the centre, including, in the vision of Hansen, large outdoor reconstructions of a Danish 1864 redoubt. The castle museum representatives, however, objected to these ideas, which they found diffuse and in effect harmful to the historical Dybbøl landscape. Undaunted, Hansen carried on, and in 1998 presented an ambitious multistage expansion plan for the centre. The report, entitled ‘The reinforced Dybbøl story’ [Den forstærkede Dybbølfortælling] set off a dispute that was to last for more than a year and manifest itself in regional and national Danish media. The ambitions of the proposed project were to communicate to the public the ‘conditions of war, conflict and peace work’ and to offer a ‘unique perspective on the present in the light of the past’ (quoted in Rasmussen 2005: 106).21 The centre wished to widen its scope to include both the 1848–51 and the 1864 wars, as well as World War I and the 1920 reunification.22 In particular, it wished to address the younger generations, whose sense of history, it was said, had been replaced by ‘forgetfulness’ (Fonden Dybbøl Banke 1998: 4).23 In the updated 1999 version of the plan, four stages were penned out. The first comprised the outdoor reconstruction of half a Danish 1864 redoubt, in which historically costumed staff were planned to guide visitors, conduct cannon firings and reenact episodes from the 1864 war. The second and third stage pertained to the construction of a large new underground complex with a number of exhibition halls in which various types of media were to involve, move and motivate visitors. Lines were to be drawn from these earlier wars to recent and contemporary conflicts. Visitors were understood to be ‘characterized by the wish for peace and the fear for war’, and it was presumed that ‘the question will arise with them: how is peace doing, at this moment, globally?’ (Fonden Dybbøl Banke 1999: 3, italics in original). To correspond with these global issues, a number of scale and full-size models of trenches, war scenes and soldier dummies from the different wars were planned. Interactive maps and screens would update visitors on current global conflicts. A new interactive medium, a ‘scenorama’, was to ‘reproduce a historical situation in which the audience can walk about’, and would seek to ‘affect the senses in a deeply serious play’ (7). Less ab-

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stract were the descriptions of a number of hands-on activities and experiments, most of them of an action-oriented nature such as letting visitors direct a searchlight and simulate the detonation of a sea mine. Most significantly, perhaps, the report contained plans for the construction of an underground shooting range, ‘for reflection and respect for firearms through self-test with muzzle loaders under skilled supervision’ (5).24 In sum, reconstructions, dioramas, touch screens, reenactment activities and hands-on options were to provide visitors, particularly younger ones, with ‘lessons’ on the nature of war, on the basis of the 1864 events at Dybbøl. The new global outlook seemed curious in light of the centre’s firmly Danish point of departure and might be seen as the dawn of a new transnational or cosmopolitan stance. Amidst the global agendas, however, the two reports also contained solid doses of Danish bias, in particular in the 1998 version. For instance, a corridor in the centre was described as a ‘passage towards the light, the 1920 reunification, and the view of the landscape of Schleswig [Sønderjylland] of our time’ (Fonden Dybbøl Banke 1998: 14).25 As we shall see, this swaying between romantic nationalism and an alleged cosmopolitanism recurs in the heritage practice of the centre today. A subsequent paper, resulting from a seminar held at the centre in October 1999, elaborated on the global parallels the centre wished to draw. The paper stated that a ‘connection to Serbia, Kosovo/Kosova, Chechnya, Northern Ireland, etc.’ would be desirable, and formulated what was termed ‘thought-provoking statements’ like, ‘Connection between the 1848–51 war and the Balkan wars: Schleswig-Holsteiners = Croats and Danes = Serbs’ (quoted in Rasmussen 2000: 180).26 Together with the shooting range plan, this suggested Balkan parallel was the point most vehemently opposed by critics in the months that followed. Also, accompanying centre aspirations to be(come) a key research centre for supervision of graduate and Ph.D. students were assailed as out of sync with real-life conditions, given the sparse staff resources of the centre. A heated media debate ensued. Most significantly for my purposes, four curators from the Sønderborg Castle Museum levelled a sharp attack on the proposed centre expansions. In a scathing feature article in the national Danish broadsheet Jyllands-Posten, they presented a long list of perceived problems with the plans. According to the curators, the main problem was that ‘contrary to other institutions in the entertainment industry’, such as Tivoli and Legoland, the centre ‘considers itself a research institution’ (Kjærgaard et al. 2000). And with some sixty-one million Danish kroner spent, in the curators’ estimates, if and when the expansions were implemented, the centre – ‘nothing but an expensive amusement’ – would rep-

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resent the largest-ever investment in Danish history interpretation. The article went on to pick on a range of the concrete initiatives. It accused the centre of harming the authenticity of the landscape by planning on reconstructing Danish fortifications on a spot where they had never actually stood. It said the centre risked reproducing stereotypical images of Germans as aggressors and Danes as victims, in particular in their plans to let children operate rifles in the shooting range; the curators found the alleged reflection motives of the idea ‘hypocritical’. They also criticized what they saw as the centre’s emotional exploitation of the past, exemplified by plans to construct a ‘memory hall’ for reflection with models of dead soldiers, when the Dybbøl landscape already contained numerous graves and memorial groves. And they specifically warned about trivializing the specificity of the 1864 events in the attempts to draw explicit parallels and ‘lessons’ to present conflicts. Specifically, the Balkan parallel to the 1848–51 war was said to be a ‘cheap actualization devoid of analytical depth’.27 Much of the curatorial criticism must be read as accusations of bad historical craftsmanship, as an academically founded critique arguing that the complexity of historical events was not sufficiently reflected. On a more basic level, the museum spokesmen also called into question the fundamental aim of the centre’s plans, namely, the intent to draw general lessons from the 1864 events on the nature of war. In the conclusion to their newspaper piece, the museum curators contended: ‘War history cannot be communicated in the language of war, if reflection and respect are what count. The real Dybbøl story can only be deduced from the silent landscape.’28 The article, and a backup editorial from the editor-in-chief of Der Nordschleswiger, the regional paper of the German minority in Denmark, infuriated the centre’s most prominent political patron and board chairman, county mayor Kresten Philipsen. In a counterattack on the pages of Der Nordschleswiger, he called the curators a ‘bunch of know-all scribes’, unable to ‘call attention to themselves’ and therefore choosing to ‘criticize others’ instead (quoted in Rasmussen 2000: 185).29 This in turn intensified media attention, and the following month saw a storm of articles and opinion letters in papers such as Jydske Vestkysten and Jyllands-Posten, the majority voicing their opinions against the centre and Philipsen. Following a reconciliatory talk with the castle museum curators, Philipsen conceded to have been largely uninformed about the museum’s continuous objections against the centre plans over the years. In a diplomatic turn, Philipsen then suggested the appointment of a committee headed by Henrik Becker-Christensen, historian and Danish consul general in Flensburg, to evaluate the centre’s plans. After another month of public debate, including a heated meeting at the Sønderborg library with live coverage from

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both of the national Danish TV stations, the consul general presented his evaluation. The Becker-Christensen report was, on almost all accounts, in support of the centre critics. While not completely alienated from the first-stage reconstruction plans, the consul general expressed strong concerns with the underground complex planned as the second and third stages of the ‘reinforced Dybbøl story’ (Becker-Christensen 2000). Echoing the curatorial criticism, he raised doubts about the level of historical qualifications at the centre; dismissed the shooting range as unethical; termed the Balkan parallels ‘untenable’; pointed to factual historical flaws; and called on the centre to keep its focus on the 1864 war. He concluded that the centre seemed in need of external academic-historical support and suggested a formal co-operation with the Sønderborg Castle Museum, hinting at the possibility of an official merging of the two (ibid.). The report in effect buried the more wide-ranging aspects of the centre plans. On the basis of the consul general’s recommendations, county politicians decided to restrict implementation of the centre expansion to its first stage – the reconstruction of half a Danish redoubt – and abandon the rest. Furthermore, they determined, in 2003, to transfer the responsibility for the daily operation of the centre to the castle museum. This turn of events, unthinkable as it may have seemed in light of the recent conflict between the two institutions, means that during my fieldwork years, the running of the centre was in the hands of its former sharpest critics. For this to succeed, a great deal of diplomatic skill was required. This arrived in the shape of Peter Dragsbo, appointed head curator of the castle museum in 2002, who managed to pour oil on the troubled waters. Hans-Ole Hansen, the battlefield centre’s grand old man, mastermind and fervent defender of the expansion plans, was transferred from his manager position to a new role as co-ordinator in charge of the reconstruction project – ongoing during my fieldwork and only completed in the spring of 2007 – while his former second-in-command, Bjørn Østergaard, took up the reins as new centre manager. The centre controversy is instructive because it lays bare a number of basic positions, perspectives and agendas. Although the two main institutions involved, the museum and the centre, differed in their approaches to the issue of the nation, this difference was only part of the controversy, and not in a very direct form. Instead, what was clearly spelled out here was a disagreement over appropriate forms of history interpretation – what we may call the ‘how’ of heritage communication – including the uses or abuses of ‘experience’. While both sides seemed to agree that Dybbøl is and should be an important national site affording the cultivation of a certain

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historical reflection, the conflict was very much about how such a potential cultivation could be achieved – a disagreement over what could be termed the road to reflection. Centre founder Hansen, believing to represent 90 per cent of the Danish population and envisaging the centre project as a democratic one, insisted that involvement, experiment and what was called ‘self-sensing’ could lead to such a desired state of reflection. On their part, the castle museum curators – those whom the county mayor had classed as ‘know-all scribes’ – dismissed the experiential prospects and put their faith in the innate qualities of the ‘silent landscape’. In a response in Jyllands-Posten to the curators’ critical feature article, Hansen claimed that only a select and academically trained cultural elite was able to deduce anything from the ‘silent landscape’. ‘But what about the many other people?’ he asked rhetorically, and stated that the landscape was not only ‘silent’ but ‘mute’, even ‘deaf-mute’ (quoted in Rasmussen 2000: 191).30 The difference between (pleasant) silence and (inhibiting) muteness sums up the positions. Given its romantic national moorings, it is somewhat ironic that when the centre presented a set of plans that seemed to soften or even completely reverse its initial exclusivist stance – speaking suddenly of international peace work and universal lessons to be drawn – it was promptly assailed by critics. The museum curators, in their bracketing of the centre as a hollow amusement park, seemed to insist on a segregation between ‘culture’ and ‘entertainment’, which the centre had challenged by its ambitious but also vague and somewhat rambling plans. At the same time, it was evident that the patronizing manner in which the museum curators in their tide-turning newspaper article had sought to debunk the centre plans was seen by their opponents as indicating their highbrow and ‘know-all’ attitude. Not all roads, it seems, lead to reflection, and arguments over signposts, obstacles and potential dead ends are very much part of the everyday making of national heritage at Dybbøl.

Notes 1. The historical literature on the 1864 war is vast. My brief and necessarily simplified outline is compiled primarily from Bjørn and Due-Nielsen (2006); Nielsen (1992); Christensen and Stevnsborg (2006); Sauntved and Eberhardt (2007); Embree (2006). In my discussions of the history of commemoration and struggles over national identity, I have drawn particularly upon the indispensable work of Adriansen (1992, 1997, 2003a, 2003b, 2007), as well as Damsholt (1999a; 1999b), Korsgaard (2004), and Østergaard (2004, 2007),

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

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and various chapters in Feldbæk’s edited four-volume history of Danish identity (1991–92). My outline of the centre controversy is based primarily on Rasmussen’s (2000, 2005) detailed accounts. The tiny duchy of Lauenburg was the ‘compensation’ granted Denmark for the loss of Norway (to Sweden) at the 1814–15 Vienna Conference. See also Jenkins (1995: 381–85). For reflections on the general ways in which national formation has utilized ‘counterimages’ to bolster internal cohesion, see Macdonald (2005a: 54–56). For more on the slide towards romantic or ethnic nationalism in Denmark, see Korsgaard (2004); Adriansen (2003b); Rerup (1992); Sanders (2007); Gjerløff (2007). Original Danish wording: ‘Stakkels soldater, stakkels officerer, stakkels Danmark! Hvor tungt at være lille, og dobbelt tungt at regeres af folk, der ikke kunne tåle tanken om strømme af blod, som hver af Danmarks sønner med glæde ville udgyde for vort fælles fædreland. Det er smukt at være menneskelig, men endnu ikke af menneskelighedshensyn at glemme det som står endnu højere: æren! Farvel du dyrebare Dannevirke, hvis navn giver så kraftig genklang i hvert dansk bryst.’ Original Danish wording: ‘Tvende gange skudt i grus, atter rejst som møllehus.’ Both sides in total, counting dead and wounded. For more details, see Sauntved and Eberhardt (2007: 135–36); Embree (2006: 26–71). Original German wording: ‘Ohne Düppel kein Könniggrätz, ohne Königgrätz kein Sedan, ohne Sedan kein deutsches Kaiserreich’ (Adriansen 2003: 257). This grove is the contemporary site of the annually recurring wreath-laying ceremony discussed in this book’s introduction. Original Danish wording: ‘en røvet Datter, dybt begrædt’. Original Danish (and rather poor) wording: ‘Denne region er ikke mindre end en levende historiebog’; http://www.visitsonderborg.dk (accessed 10 May 2008, link no longer active). The centre’s Danish name is Historiecenter Dybbøl Banke, literally translatable as History Centre Dybbøl Hill. In its English-language promotional materials, however, the centre labels itself a ‘battlefield centre’, which accounts for my use of that term. The centre manager explained this naming policy as a choice based on the fact that the term ‘battlefield centre’, according to him, covers an acknowledged institutional type in the English-speaking world. The centre’s German-language brochures label it a ‘Geschichtszentrum’, paralleling the semantics of the Danish name. Original Danish wording: ‘Selve bygningen er udformet som et skarpt hjørne på en forsvarsbastion. Som et nationalt minde vælder den op af jorden, et minde om krigens gru – et ragnarok da Danmark blev løbet over ende – men samtidigt et vidnesbyrd om mod, styrke og vilje til at overleve. (…) Besøgscentret skal være et monument i landskabet – et romantisk monument for

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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danskheden – placeret netop ved Dybbøl, som blev beviset på, at Danmark var værdig til at overleve som nation.’ Early battlefield centre brochure reproduced in Rasmussen (2000: 175). Original Danish wording: ‘[Dybbøl Banke] er selve hjertet i danskernes selvforståelse. På én gang symbol på tapperhed i kamp mod en overmægtig angriber og stedet, hvor “ret vandt sejr” ved Genforeningen i 1920.’ The Danish name of the museum is Museet på Sønderborg Slot. In 2006, it officially merged with the region’s other state-supported (art, cultural history and natural history) museums to form the larger museum conglomerate Museum Sønderjylland. The society’s official bilingual name was Altertumsverein: Verein zur Pflege der Heimatskunde für Alsen und Sundewitt – Foreningen til Bevarelse af Oldsager og Oldtisminder for Als og Sundeved. After Sønderborg had been voted back into Denmark in 1920, it changed its name to the shorter Danish name Historisk Samfund for Als og Sundeved (Gjerløff 2007: 71). For an overview of the founding dates of all Danish museums up to 1998, see Floris and Vasström (1999: 387–92). See Confino (1997) for an inspired analysis of the parallel ways in which ‘the nation’ served as ‘a local metaphor’ in imperial Germany from 1871 to 1918. The German concept of Zweiströmigkeit (literally two-stringedness) is often used to designate the mutual and conscious effort to oppose national tensions in the border region. The so-called Copenhagen-Bonn declarations, signed by Danish prime minister H. C. Hansen and West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955, stress the wish of the Danish and German governments to promote friendly and peaceful coexistence among the populations on both sides of the Danish-German border. During its first season, the centre attracted seventy-two thousand visitors. After that the number stabilized around forty thousand. Original Danish wording: ‘[Historiecentret skal opbygge] kontakt mellem borger, uddannelsesinstitutioner og forskningsinstitutioner om oplysning om krigsforhold, konflikt og fredsarbejde.’ ‘Reunification’ (Genforening) is the term that has historically been (and still is) routinely used in Denmark to describe the 1920 border revision. Strictly speaking, it is imprecise to speak of reunification, since the duchy of Schleswig never formed part of the Danish monarchy before 1864. Original Danish wording: ‘For kendskabet til historien er hos unge generationer i Danmark, og i egnene syd for landegrænsen, desværre blevet så ringe, at den historiske bevidsthed for de fleste er afløst af historisk glemsomhed.’ Original Danish wording: ‘De besøgendes indtryk (…) vil blive præget af ønsket om freden og frygten for krigen. Spørgsmålet opstår hos dem: hvordan har freden det i dette øjeblik set på verdensplan? (…) [I scenoramasalen] er en historisk situation gengivet, som publikum og undervisningsgrupper kan færdes i. Sanserne søges påvirket i et dybt seriøst spil. (…) Skydebanen er

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25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

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til eftertanke og respekt for ildvåben gennem selvprøve med forladegeværer under kyndig overvågning.’ Original Danish wording: ‘Tredje afsnit (…) er til sidst gangen frem mod lyset, Genforeningen 1920, og udsynet over vor tids sønderjyske landskab på Dybbøl.’ Original Danish wording: ‘[Herfra skal ske en] kobling til Serbien, Kosovo/ Kosova, Tjetjenien, Nordirland etc. (…) Kobling mellem krigen 1848-51 og Balkan-krigene: slesvig-holstenerne = kroaterne og danskerne = serberne. Et tankeskabende statement!’ Original Danish wording: ‘(…) i modsætning til andre institutioner inden for underholdningsbranchen – Tivoli, Legoland og BonBon-Land – betragter [Historiecenteret] sig selv som en forskningsinstitution. (…) [Historiecentret er] en dyr fornøjelse og intet andet. (…) Det [skydebaneplanerne] synes vi lyder hyklerisk. (…) [Balkanparallellen] er en letkøbt aktualisering uden analytisk dybde.’ Original Danish wording: ‘Krigshistorie kan ikke formidles i krigens sprog, hvis det er eftertanken og respekten, der tæller. Den virkelige Dybbølfortælling kan kun udledes af det tavse landskab.’ Original Danish wording: ‘(…) en flok bedrevidende skriftkloge (…). Da man åbenbart ikke evner at fremhæve sig selv, bruger man tiden på at nedgøre andre.’ Original Danish wording: ‘Men hvad med de mange andre mennesker? (…) Ellers er stedets magi kun tavsheden. Stumt. Døvstumt.’

Chapter 2

OUT OF SIGHT Reconsidering the Modern Museum A  ,  S C M     epitome of what Scott Lash has termed ‘high modernity’: a bastion of Enlightenment values and beliefs rooted in ‘the rationality of Cartesian space and Newtonian time’ (1999: 1). Here reason, objectivity and chronology seemingly come together to structure an unflinching ‘order of things’ (Foucault 1970) to be consulted and consumed visually by the public (see figure 2.1). This chapter is about the making and sustaining of such orders and rationalities. But it is also about why this is not a sufficient analytic perspective if we want to understand the realities of museum visiting. By focussing on the actual ways in which visitors make use and sense of the castle museum’s war exhibitions, I aim to refine the understanding of the modern museum as a predominantly ‘rational’ and visual arena, and to open up room for a less ‘orderly’ and more nuanced take on its role and the human-material relationships it affords. This does not mean that seeing is unimportant. Indeed, the war exhibitions at the castle museum that I found myself in during my fieldwork were clearly designed for visual consumption, for the gaze. This, I suggest, makes the museum excellently suited for a detailed enquiry into what in fact goes on when people engage, visually and otherwise, with exhibits, and for studying how their museum experiences hinge on a range of related multisensory and intellectual stimuli. Thus, by analyzing how various visitors actually saw and sensed the galleries and the museum, I interrogate the notions of vision and order that much museum theory takes for granted as belonging to modern museum space. I demonstrate what such theories do not capture – what is left, so to speak, ‘out of sight’ – leading me to reflect, towards the end of the chapter, upon a reconsidered notion of modernity itself, better suited for facilitating a multifaceted analysis of contemporary museum practice.

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Figure 2.1. The Sønderborg Castle Museum in a winter framing. © Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot.

In the House of Enlightened Noninvolvement In the eyes of its curators, the castle museum is an institution of enlightenment. During my fieldwork, I once discussed the dense text boards of the museum’s war exhibitions with the curator who had been in charge of the design back in the 1970s, Dr Inge Adriansen.1 She told me that even though she was aware that very few visitors actually took the time to read through these, she felt the museum had a ‘duty to the public’ to offer the possibility of a ‘brief account’ of the Danish-German history here. In the same vein, she said that ‘it is not a duty for people to read this at all, it is an offer for those who wish to know more’. The museum, in this curatorial view, is conceptualized as a civic institution with an obligation to inform the public. This public, in turn, is understood as a collection of free individuals of whom at least some will accept the offer granted by the museum. Knowledge is taken to reside in text and the gaining of knowledge to be the outcome of reading. This corresponds to Macdonald’s observation that ‘the discourse of “the public” and “the community” is (…) part of the way in which [museums] imagine themselves’ (2005b: 217).2 In the Sønderborg case, the conception of the museum as a civic promulgator of information and enlightenment was coupled with a strict insistence on noninvolvement. The museum was, in this view, a scientific institution, responsible

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for observing, collecting but not interfering. One of the clearest examples in my material of how such a distanced noninvolvement stance translated into practice derives from the celebration of Dybbøl Day. At the 2006 wreath-laying commemoration, I noticed that the manager of the battlefield centre, Bjørn Østergaard, was among those who put down a wreath in the memorial grove in praise of the fallen 1864 soldiers. In contrast to all other contributors in the ceremony, however, he did not approach any of the grove’s four mass graves – three of which hold Danish war dead, the last one Prussians. Instead, he laid down the centre’s wreath in the middle of the grove, at the foot of an old oak tree. When, afterwards, I asked him why, he explained that after the battlefield centre was put under the wings of the castle museum, the centre’s participation in the wreath-laying ceremony had been up for internal debate among staff (i.e., among himself and the curators of the castle museum). Before that time, the centre used to contribute each year with a wreath at the main Danish gravestone. But now the situation had changed, the manager told me, ‘because now I am museum. And we should not influence history, we should observe it.’ In light of his newfound institutional identity he thus adopted – indeed, saw himself as embodying – a ‘museum’ rationality, and opted to lay down the wreath at the oak tree in between the gravestones, because, as he argued, ‘the oak has its root in both the German and the Danish graves’. In such a logic of national impartiality, Østergaard’s new museum status meant to him that he could not, as it were, ‘choose sides’, because that could be interpreted as ‘influencing’ the course of history. ‘Being museum’, as he phrased it, was assumingly characterized not by participation, but by detached and impartial observation. The museum, in this interpretation, is an institution devoted to dispassionate, rational enlightenment. The centre manager’s self-conception represented a radical break with the centre’s 1992 ideological point of departure, rooted in romanticist and emotionalized conceptions of Dybbøl’s relevance and meaning. For my current purposes, the episode concisely captures the imagined qualities of distanced, scientific observation and impartiality taken, by the museum professionals themselves, to reside in the very term ‘museum’.

The Power of the Eye: Theorizing Museums, Modernity and Nation Ideals of detachment, objectivity and distance, such as those expressed by the wreath-laying centre manager, do not come from nowhere. They are

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not ‘natural’ or God-given – just as the conventional glass cases of the museum ‘are not ideologically transparent’ (Classen and Howes 2006: 218) – but are themselves closely tied to specific historical currents of modern thought. Indeed, the museum institution is often considered an emblem of modernity. Borne from Enlightenment ideals and rationales, the public museums that sprang up all over Europe in the wake of the French Revolution served to communicate and legitimize these same ideals, as they contributed to the conceptualization of ‘their’ territory and the disciplining of ‘their’ public (Macdonald 2003: 1–2). Such rationales concern the relations between subjects, objects, human collectives (sometimes envisaged as ‘cultures’) and territories. One of the most widely acclaimed theorists on early museums, Tony Bennett, contends: From the early modern period, museums have been places in which citizens – however they might have been defined – have met, conversed, been instructed, or otherwise engaged in rituals through which their rights and duties as citizens have been enacted. They have also been, from roughly the same period, primarily institutions of the visible in which objects of various kinds have been exhibited to be looked at. (2006: 263)

This corresponds neatly with the stance of the curator stressing to me the museum as a space of information for the public. Museum visiting, in such a perspective, is viewed as a civic ritual. As temples of modernity, museums work, Bennett suggests, as places in which ‘citizens’ go to learn of their ‘rights and duties as citizens’ (263). And crucially, this instruction is held to be an activity for the eye: the museum is analysed as a civic space of seeing. Elsewhere, Bennett stresses how late nineteenth-century British and Australian museum planners ‘placed a premium on visual instruction’ and held a strong conviction in ‘the virtues of an ocularcentric and objectbased pedagogy’ in contrast to the period’s usual teaching on the basis of written sources (2004: 160). Thus, the use of objects was, at the time, seen as a democratic project, as the museum was envisaged as ‘a national educator, to teach by the eye’ (160). As Martin Jay has noted, ‘it is difficult to deny that the visual has been dominant in modern Western culture in a variety of ways’ (1992: 179). The museum institution epitomizes these ‘scopic regimes of modernity’, even if the specific constellations of these regimes have differed over time (179). Bennett, in his work, investigates precisely how museum visualities have been variously organized and imagined in different epochs (esp. 2004: 160–86, 2006; and see also Hetherington 2007: 157–69). Within tourism studies, John Urry has famously argued that tourists adopt a certain ‘tourist gaze’ (1990, 2002) and that tourism experiences are funda-

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mentally of a visual nature. Urry – heavily inspired, like Bennett, by the work of Michel Foucault – examines the socially and culturally encoded ways of seeing that mass tourism has given rise to, in which the tourist ‘is in some sense trained, or at least predisposed, to look at scenes and sights in the expectation that they are out of the ordinary’ (McCrone et al. 1995: 35). Bennett, likewise, focuses on the ways in which museums have facilitated self-disciplinary or ‘governmental’ gazes and technologies among their publics (Foucault 1991; Bennett 1995). In his analysis, the public museums emerging in the late nineteenth century epitomize ‘a new governmental relation to culture in which works of high culture were treated as instruments that could be enlisted in new ways for new tasks of social management’ (Bennett 1995: 6).3 In contrast to earlier forms of government directed at physical regulation and prohibition, this new approach aimed at transforming ‘the inner lives of the population [so] as to alter their forms of life and behaviour’ (20). As noted by Bennett, the museum was also a national educator. The birth of the modern museum is intimately connected to the fervent nation building of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and the gazes cultivated and understandings implied in them were also often visions of the nation. The archetype and mother of all public museums in this regard is the Louvre, symbolically opening its gates and the former collections of the monarchy – now reconceptualized as the ‘national patrimony’ of ‘the people’ – to the public in 1793 (Abt 2006: 128). Macdonald argues that in the French case, ‘the opening up of the formerly princely collections was an eloquent symbolic assertion of the new ideals of “égalité, fraternité et liberté”’ (2003: 1, italics in original). In more general terms, the new national museums that began to spring up across the continent from this point may be regarded as institutions supporting the constitution of new ‘imagined fraternities’ all over Europe. Thus, the public museums emerging from the ashes of the French Revolution were institutions devoted to the constitution and cultivation of ‘the people’ of the nations in question. At the same time, they constituted important nodes in the legitimization of imperialism and the making sense of messy colonies – the ordering of what Edensor (1998: 22) calls ‘colonial space’ – and these territories’ allegedly ‘natural’ subjugation to European powers (Anderson 1991: 163–85). The ethnographic museum thus became ‘a model of an ideal colonial empire in which perfect order was imposed upon the natives’ (Classen and Howes 2006: 210). However, one finds important differences in the ways that national fraternities and peoples were understood in various European states, and also in the same state in various periods. Of particular relevance to my study is

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the difference between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism mentioned already (see chapter 1; and see A. Smith 2010; Lægaard 2007; Díaz-Andreu 2001). The paradigmatic, if simplified, contrast in this regard is that between France and Germany. ‘Thus’, says Henningsen (2007: 93), while a civil nation-building effort rooted in the Enlightenment, taking as its model the American and French revolutions, relied on the self-regulating and selfdetermining individual, this was opposed by a conceptualisation of the nation based on special qualities – race, blood, language and history.

The voluntary element of civic nationalism is most famously spelled out in Ernest Renan’s 1882 coining of the nation as ‘a daily plebiscite’ (1990: 19), a position I will discuss more thoroughly in chapter 3. Ethnic perspectives are routinely ascribed to German (pre)romanticists such as Johann Gottfried Herder and, most programmatically, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose ardent 1807–8 ‘addresses’ to ‘the German Nation’ (Fichte 1955) became an incentive for Prussian and German romantic nationalism. In contrast to Renan’s stress on a people’s historical and ongoing ‘desire to live together’ as the basis of a national community (1990: 19), Fichte’s fierce strand of nationalism was based upon theories of the ‘natural’ or ‘primordial’ connection between language, culture and Volk, and came to have a deep influence on Nazi ideologies of race. Craig Calhoun reminds us, however, that though the distinction is real, it is not between two completely separate phenomena. France and Germany, and all of Western and Eastern Europe, have been shaped by the international discourse of nationalism – including both ethnic claims and civil projects of popular political participation. (Calhoun 1997: 89)

This is indeed the case in Denmark. In chapter 1, I pointed to the shift from civic to ethnic conceptualizations of ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’ taking place in Denmark in the central decades of the nineteenth century (Damsholt 1999a). Indeed, the 1864 war is often interpreted as the definitive break with civic nationalism in Denmark (e.g., Østergaard 2007), after which an introspective and ethnically oriented nation (re)building began to dominate Danish political and intellectual thought. The proverb ‘What is lost externally shall be regained internally’4 became popular after the war, as a reference not only to the economic loss of the rich duchies but also, in a metaphoric sense, to the Danish character and Volksgeist in dire need of bolstering. Whether conceived as vehicles of ethnic or civic nationalism, or any combination thereof, the new public museums were sites that encouraged their visitors to think of and reflect upon difference by making those dif-

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ferences – whether taken to be natural, social or cultural – visible (Bennett 2006: 278). This brings us back to the key power accorded to the eye. In Macdonald’s (2003: 5) formulation, the public museums invited people to conceptualize a sense of national or racial difference from others; and to experience their own worlds as relatively and reassuringly governed ones. They helped to convey a sense of both stability and progress. They helped to instantiate a ‘scientific’, ‘objective’ way of seeing – a gaze which could forget its own positionedness. They helped to think identities as bounded and coherent.

The public museums, and particularly those of national scope, were thus constitutive, as well as legitimizing, factors in the service of the nation building of the nineteenth century, working to render a new world picture of ‘discrete, spatially-mapped, bounded difference’ self-evident (2). In this worldview, a people without a museum was conceived as a people without culture, without property and, by implication, without legitimacy (2–3; and see Handler 1985, 1988). The modern processes of reconceptualizing the world, at home and abroad, were thus undeniably processes characterized by desires for order. Macdonald argues that the nineteenth-century museum suggested ‘ways of seeing’ that supported the cultivation of a vision of what she calls ‘the world as exhibition’,5 entailing a detachment of the viewer – ‘thinking of themselves as outside or above that which was represented’ – and a belief that ‘it was possible to find external viewing positions from which the world would appear as ordered and complete’ (2003: 3–4). She goes on to parallel this trait of the modern museum with the search at tourist sites for viewing platforms allowing for ‘panoramas’ or ‘bird’s-eye views’ of the landscape (3–4; see also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 54–55). The detachment of the viewer in the quest for objective, scientific knowledge is a cornerstone of Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment thinking in general. In Edensor’s words, ‘Western empirically based thought has maintained that modes of representing the world can mimetically reflect the reality that they confront’ (1998: 15). In this modern belief in one-to-one representation, the ‘politics of looking’ expresses a ‘privileging of vision, the distanced authority of the onlooker and the consequent passivity of the scene under view’ (16). Needless to say, the museums were not alone in these ordering processes. In Bennett’s analysis, the emerging public museums formed parts of a wider ‘exhibitionary complex’ (1995: 59–88) comprising a range of related cultural phenomena, key among which were the international exhibitions and the new department stores of the nineteenth century (see also Hinsley 1991; Rydell 2004; Hetherington 2007: 103–29). This ‘complex’, Bennett argues, worked by reversing existing norms of governing that had

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been characterized by efforts to make the populace visible to its governors, instead now rendering ‘the forces and principles of order visible to the populace – transformed, here, into a people, a citizenry – rather than vice versa’ (1995: 62–63).

Speaking of Vision: The Discourse of Seeing at the Castle Museum Such a contextualization in time is of key importance for grasping the nature of the modern museum. For understanding the historic emergence of the institution, as well as the larger set of ordering technologies, visual regimes and discourses of which museums formed parts, genealogies of the museum institution, such as those offered by Bennett and others, are indispensable. Yet they also leave something out. If the analytical ambition, like mine, is to gain insight into museums’ and other heritage institutions’ contemporary realities, we need to focus not so much on plans, intentions and histories as on analyzing actual, ongoing museum practice, including processes of seeing.6 These include other senses and operations than those of the eye. In the apt words of David Crouch, ‘Vision is not sensed and made sense of separately from other senses but in interrelation and tension with them (…) In tourism it is through rather than “in front of ” spaces that we experience where we are’ (2002: 212). The Sønderborg Castle Museum is, as its name suggests, a museum, laid out according to ideals of chronology, detachment and scientific rationality. But it is also a four-winged castle whose commanding and picturesque renaissance setup seems to facilitate a less rational, more romantic set of attitudes in visitors, who are not only drawn there to gain ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ but also to access the atmosphere of bygone ages by exploring the nooks, crannies, dungeons, winding stairs and great halls of the castle. It is, following Crouch, precisely ‘through’ rather than ‘in front of ’ the museum that the public relates to its exhibits, spatial layout and stories. Still, the conception of vision as the museum sense is so deeply ingrained in the museum’s communication practice – and, indeed, in the public conception of what a museum is all about – that it is hardly ever questioned; looking at things is what the museum is thought to be about, by staff as well as visitors. One visitor explained, on my question about the difference between museums and other tourist attractions: A museum, to my mind, is about looking … you look, whereas some other attractions can be, like, you take part, where I am active. I am very rarely active at

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a museum. It is not like I am part of the museum. I am a contemplator of the museum, but I am not … [participating, whereas] at other sites, I can be an active participator. (retired self-employed wholesaler from Copenhagen, Denmark, male, age seventy-four)

This comment demonstrates how the idea of detachment between subject and object, discussed already as part of the curatorial self-image, underlies the museum visit (‘it is not like I am part of the museum’). Note also how this visitor opposes ‘being active’ to gazing (‘looking’, ‘contemplating’), which by implication is regarded as a ‘passive’ activity. The idea of the museum as a house of vision is part of a set of commonly held, habituated and institutionally endorsed images and notions of ‘the museum’ and of appropriate museum behaviour. The museum is understood to be an institution of hushed and silent contemplation, of seeing but no touching, and of marked distance between exhibits and observer as well as between experts and amateurs. At the time of my field studies, next to one of the castle museum’s few non-glass-covered arrangements – a setup of three old rifles, a red coat and a soldier’s drum – one found a small sign announcing ‘Please do not touch the exhibits’ in four languages. Such a label, working to assert and maintain distance, can be regarded as an archetypical trademark, even a cliché, of the modern ‘custodian’ museum. At the battlefield centre, as we shall see, the staff went to great lengths to cast their institution as a counterimage to this archetype, actively encouraging visitors to touch objects, immerse themselves and transgress and venture into all parts of the centre grounds. At the castle museum, however, touch was ruled out by law, and violators – almost inevitably kids – were most often duly reprimanded by ‘their’ grown-ups; whether parents, grandparents (often a little softer), teachers (harsher) or others. This goes for sound too: noisy children were hushed and asked to lower their voices, and even adult visitors often conversed in low voices in the galleries. The hush was remarkably different to the constant noise, clatter and buzzing of activity at the battlefield centre. On one occasion, I witnessed two preschool children sitting astride two smaller cannons in the museum’s war exhibition, obviously enjoying the ride, before being told off and reprimanded by their mother as she entered the room. At another point, I felt my own instincts supporting such deeply rooted notions of appropriateness and proper museum behaviour as I found myself in a gallery with two teenagers, left alone for a moment by their teachers, fiddling with the freestanding rifle arrangement. I felt a strong urge to go and reprimand them but did not do so in the end – upholding, one may say, my own imagined ‘detachment’ from my objects of study.

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The museum is believed to be a site for the eye. The museum – understood both as a general category and as this specific Sønderborg institution – encourages visual-only engagement and constrains others, constraints resonating with already-held and habituated conceptions in most adult visitors brought up to regard museums as houses of vision, not sound, and most certainly not touch. This resonates with Classen and Howes’s description of the nineteenth-century museum, where ‘strict bodily discipline was required from museum visitors who were expected to become as close to pure spectators as possible: not to touch, not to eat, not to speak loudly, or in any way to assert an intrusive multisensorial presence’ (2006: 208). Deeply embodied, habitually appropriated and institutionally endorsed conceptions of ‘the museum’ support its status as a predominantly visual arena, as a place to go to see stuff. The understanding of tourism and heritage sites as sites of visual consumption is deeply rooted in the ways that visitors consider and talk about museums and, more broadly, about their holiday activities. ‘In a convention of Western tourism which has become so taken for granted that it risks passing without remark’, notes Judith Adler (1989: 8), ‘it is often said that people travel to “see” the world, and assumed that travel knowledge is substantially gained through observation.’ When, for instance, a visitor told me that each summer, he and his girlfriend would pick one part of Denmark and then ‘select all the sights and historic sites we find worth seeing’ (police trainee from Aalborg, Denmark, male, age twenty-seven) in that region, he was clearly using the term ‘see’ in a broad sense, as a synonym for ‘going to’. Another told me that she and her husband came to the castle museum because they thought ‘it would be exciting to go into Sønderborg Castle and see the history that is here’ (social worker from Odense, Denmark, female, age sixty-two). Also, several visitors characterized Dybbøl as a site ‘worth seeing’ – using the parallel Danish and German terms seværdighed/Sehenswürdigkeit – while others termed Dybbøl a ‘must-see’, employing the English term. Such unreflective reproduction of a discourse of seeing reinforces the fundamental conception of tourism and museum going as a primarily visual encounter. Indeed, the common usage of the term ‘seeing’ as ‘going there’ or ‘experiencing’ is a telling indicator of the discursive hegemony of the visual.7 No one would consider describing their holiday as going somewhere to ‘feel all the historic sites we find worth feeling’, to ‘smell the attractions’ of southern Denmark, or characterize Dybbøl as a ‘must-taste’. Even though feeling, tasting, smelling or listening might have been important parts of a particular trip, people almost without exception describe their holiday trips as activities to see stuff.

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The Museum’s War Wing: An Overview Crucially, however, what I have discussed above is just that: how people talk about going on holiday. When making sense of the exhibitions, the ‘seeing’ activities of visitors entail a wide range of related and overlapping sensory and intellectual activity. Before I go on to scrutinize these in more detail, a brief overview of the frame of my visitor studies, what I call the museum’s ‘war wing’, is necessary. This term is my own designation and refers to the fact that in this part of the castle, visitors were invited to stroll through approximately one hundred years of regional history pivoting around four key conflicts: the First Schleswig War of 1848–51, the 1864 war fought between Denmark and the Prussian-Austrian alliance – including the battle of Dybbøl – and the two World Wars. As such, the ‘Other’ against which Denmark and Danish identity formation was pitted in the war wing was of an exclusively ‘German’ nature.8

Figure 2.2. Layout of the first floor of the Sønderborg Castle Museum, as it stood in 2006. What I call its ‘war wing’ comprises the halls numbered 18–25 in the map. Reproduced from a museum leaflet offered to visitors.

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Comprising, at the time of my fieldwork, six interconnected main halls laid out like beads on a string, as well as a handful of adjacent minor rooms, the wing was governed by a strict chronology of four conflicts constituting pivotal nodes around which the historical narrative of one hundred years of troubled Danish-German relations was staged (see figure 2.2). Of the four conflicts, the 1864 war took spatial prominence, taking up two main halls plus a third lesser gallery, while, for instance, the regional effects of World War I were compressed into half a main hall, and World War II was assigned one main hall. The exhibition layout was dominated by glass-covered cases of war paraphernalia – weapons, uniforms and other equipment – interspersed with a range of colourful period paintings and large boards of rather dense explanatory text (see figure 2.3). Here and there one found occasional freestanding (i.e., non-glass-covered) larger exhibits such as the aforementioned rifle arrangement, two small ships’ cannon, a grandfather clock, or a World War II parachute hanging from the ceiling. A centrally located 3-D miniature model of the Dybbøl battlefield, together with a large number of maps, provided strong cartographic evidence of the wars, their courses and their consequences. The main text boards were exclusively in Danish, while the brief labels next to individual exhibits (e.g., ‘Uniform

Figure 2.3. Danish and Prussian rifles opposing each other inside one of the glass cases from Sønderborg Castle Museum’s 1864 exhibition. Photo by the author.

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used in the Danish Brigade (1944), trained in Sweden in preparation for operation in Denmark’; ‘German field glasses – belonged to Captain von Güldenfeld, who fell on March 19, 1864’; ‘Danish soldier pipes’; etc.) in many cases had German translations as well. The wing’s exhibition setup stemmed from a major rearrangement in the 1970s. One of the most striking features of the exhibition halls in this part of the castle was the large number of historical oil paintings adorning its walls. These hold a key position in the visitor analysis that follows, and thus merit a special mention here. As soon as they stepped into the first hall of the wing, visitors were welcomed by a huge oil painting, Otto Bache’s depiction of the 1848 embarkation of the Danish Equestrian Guard at Korsør Harbour. The vibrant painting, arguably the eye-catching centrepiece of the hall, evidently attracted visitors, who paused here to admire the colourful rendering of the Danish cavalry. Often during my fieldwork visitors would comment on the painting’s impressive level of detail or the artist’s ability to paint horses, shiny armour, or some other detail. The Bache painting, hailing from 1888, was one among dozens of related genre pieces displayed in the war wing. All of them were the products of Danish artists, and except for those in the World War II hall, all hailed from the period 1850–1925. Thus, they belong to a particular period of Danish art history, sometimes labelled its ‘silver age’, following on the heels of the ‘golden age’ of the first half of the nineteenth century, a period dominated by national romanticist currents.9 The war art displayed here – produced in a period of national spirit, under the shadow of the Danish defeat in 1864 but also fuelled by the nationwide struggle for regaining the lost land – framed and informed the exhibition’s glass cases, displayed objects and text boards in complex ways. In the following sections, I identify two dominant ways in which visitors made use of the paintings and configured their relationship with the larger exhibition context.

Empathetic Immersion: Period Paintings as ‘Picturing’ Tools The artworks provided the gallery space with colour, atmosphere and life and allowed the visitors to quite literally picture to themselves the war events and in a sense ‘reattach’ the detached objects and bits under glass into a larger whole. An excerpt from my video material exemplifies such an imaginative utilization of the paintings, and the ways in which they were often drawn upon in relation to personal or group biographies, in visitors’ navigation and interpretation of the war exhibitions.

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Video Case: Feeling Sorry for Horses and Men This family consists of a father (F) who wears the video specs, a mother (M) and three daughters of an estimated age of eight (D1), six (D2) and two (D3). They are in the first room of the war wing, devoted to the 1848–51 war between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein secessionists. F, looking at a painting depicting the local militia of farmers from the Danish island of Als, says: ‘Take a look at how the soldiers walk through the cornfield, girls.’ M: ‘That farmer is not going to be happy.’ [referring to the trampled corn] F: ‘He sure isn’t.’ D1: ‘Were they hunting out there?’ F: [laughs] ‘No … well, yes, for the Germans.’ The family walks into the side gallery of the hall through a passage in which different uniforms are displayed behind glass. They take a brief look at the uniforms, M reading aloud from the labels next to the uniforms. They then pass on into the side gallery, where three paintings by Danish battle painter Niels Simonsen decorate the walls, depicting three specific battles of the 1848–51 war. M reads aloud from the frame of one of the paintings, where the location of the battle is inscribed: ‘Midsunde …’ D1: ‘What is it?’ F: ‘It is a battlefield.’ D1 points to a dead horse in the painting: ‘Oh no, poor thing …’ F: ‘But that is how it was in war. Some rode horses, and some had to walk.’ M: ‘And sometimes the horse died.’ F: [agreeing] ‘Sometimes the horse died. But so did the men [points to the first painting]. Right?’ D1: ‘I feel more sorry for the horses.’ F: [laughs] ‘You can think that. But don’t you also feel sorry for all the men that had to take part?’ He walks on to the next painting, to which his wife is pointing while she addresses the daughter. M: ‘If this was your father lying dead there, I’m sure you’d feel more sorry for him than for the horse, I hope.’ D1: ‘Yes, I sure would.’ D2: ‘So would I.’ D1: ‘But those [dead people] that I didn’t know …’ M, interrupting, pointing to the third painting: ‘See how close the cannons stood. Imagine how much noise there’d be. Do you remember how much noise the small one made? [referring to the family’s previous visit to the battlefield centre, where they had witnessed a cannon demonstration] D1, D2: ‘Yeah,’ ‘Oh yeah.’ M: ‘Then imagine how much noise this many cannons would produce.’ D1: ‘Yes, he [the battlefield centre guide] said that the small one made just as much noise as the big one.’ M: ‘Yes, but imagine how much … when there were so many, and each cannon shot twice.’

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D1: ‘And they would count, 1-2-3, and then they’d all go off at the same time.’ M: ‘Yes.’ D1: [in the background, counting] ‘One, two, three, PRRRWWW!’ M: [says to F] ‘You wouldn’t have felt well in your ears after a few days there.’ F: ‘No.’

During their study of the paintings, the family members drew upon their previous experiences at the battlefield centre and mobilized them in their collective making sense of the paintings. The mother, in particular, succeeded in firing the imagination of her daughters when she called attention to yesterday’s cannon roar at the battlefield centre and asked them to imagine that level of noise multiplied many times. Also, by engaging with her daughter’s compassionate comments on the dead horse, she challenged the girl’s reflections (‘Imagine this was your father …’). Thus, the relevance of the paintings to this particular group of visitors relied on their specific collective ‘biography’ (having visited the battlefield centre yesterday) and their immediate emotional impressions (feeling compassion for the dead horse). They utilized collective memories and shared imaginations by picking out elements of the picture’s motif (a dead horse; the cannons) and associating these with potential scenarios (‘what if this was your father’; ‘one, two, three, fire!’). Clearly, then, we find a strong social element in the ‘gazing’ activities of this family. Strictly speaking, they were not employing other senses than vision in their making sense of the paintings; however, by reflecting upon them in relation to their previous, physical experiences from the battlefield centre, they collectively conjured up the noise and the ‘feel’ of the cannonades.10 The rich paintings facilitated sensations and invited people to reflect upon the nature of war. As was often the case, this family did not reflect a lot upon the specificities of the individual wars during their stroll through the wing. Instead, their activities and talk seemed to concern what we may term ‘war in the old days’ in a more general sense, as when the father told his kids ‘that was how it was in war’. Similarly, the themes brought up by them were rarely site specific, but related to universal themes of war (death, sorrow, noise). This ‘nonspecific’ tendency is evident in another video specs recording, during which a young woman spent a great deal of time contemplating the paintings, often in silence, but in between commenting to her boyfriend on particular details or traits. In my postvideo interview with the couple,

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when I asked her why she was particularly drawn to the paintings, she said that ‘it is something about sensing the atmosphere’, and that in the Bache painting, ‘you can imagine these horses are really lively’ (daycare worker from Copenhagen, Denmark, female, age twenty-six). Her boyfriend added: Also, I think that one reason that the paintings speak to us so well is that we do not have a film, right? About Dybbøl and those days. In Denmark, people tend to make contemporary films, not films like Braveheart – about Dybbøl or … there could be one. (bricklayer apprentice from Copenhagen, Denmark, male, age twenty-four)

At a later point, in describing his own fascination with the war exhibition, this young man returned to the potential of a feature film on the wars: I think that war history is very interesting. Perhaps it is because you do not have it in the same way today. Nowadays, it [war] is more serious, with terrorism and so on. But [here at the museum] I lost interest when I reached World War II, because I have heard so much about that in school, and seen so many films. I think we should have an old one [film]. I’m more into Braveheart and such.

The qualities of the historical paintings, according to these visitors, lay in their abilities to fire the imagination and evoke atmosphere, filmic grandeur and a sense of vibrancy. Like the family described above, they utilized the paintings for such imaginative work, imagining ‘what it must have been like’ at the time. The young man quoted above took the case further in expressing his hopes for a filmic representation of the 1864 war in the style of Braveheart, relating ‘Dybbøl and those days’ to a(n imagined) period in which war was not as ‘serious’ as today but more ‘interesting’, according to him. In a way comparable to the preceding example of the family, this couple looked to the paintings in their reflections and associations, which were not concretely tied to specific 1848 or 1864 events, but more to a sense of oldness and a fascination with the dramatic spectacle of ‘those days’. The paintings obviously engaged people, sparkled creativity and evoked a sense of atmosphere. Also, they provided visitors with contexts or wholes understood to be missing from the dispersed and detached objects exhibited in glass cases – the individual weapons, equipment and so on. Another visitor said about the paintings: They give a lot of atmosphere. And you can see how their clothes were. You can see the more or less silly hats they wear, the feathery tassels. I mean, if we compare to today, they almost remind you of some kind of carnival, right? There is a picture, in there, where there is some kind of gathering at Korsør [Bache’s depiction of the Equestrian Guard] (…) That gives a pretty good picture – or so I think – of how

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they looked back then, and how they behaved. But some of them actually look a bit carnivalesque, a bit ridiculous. (retired engineer from Horsens, Denmark, male, age sixty-eight)

In this quote, we see how an argument on atmosphere blends into a more general appreciation of the painting’s ability to provide a general ‘picture’ of the period; the viewer contrasting the ‘silly hats’ of 1848 with the norms of today in a way similar to the previously quoted young man’s comparison of war then and now. Note this visitor’s small touch of doubt or reservation – ‘or so I think’ – in his assessment of the painting’s realism. The painting gave ‘a pretty good picture’, he estimated, not only of the appearance but also of the alleged ‘behaviour’ of people ‘back then’. In other words, the picturing that the historical paintings afforded pertains not merely to visual images, but to a more holistic and immersive sense of the life of the period, as indicated also by the family imagining the roaring cannon batteries in the previous video example. My visitor material contains ample evidence of such a ‘picturing’ tendency, in which people stressed how the paintings allowed them to sense the context missing from the individual exhibits behind glass and implement a sort of ‘reattachment’ of the detached objects into semantic wholes. Two other visitor comments exemplify this further: I think they [the paintings] give some sort of picture of how it all fitted together, I mean the things behind glass. And the picture, one reckons, belongs somehow with the exhibits. (tool maker from Kalundborg, Denmark, male, age forty-four) On the one hand it is art, on the other it belongs to history, to the depiction of history. Either way that’s fine. (Q: So you find the connection between the paintings and the objects obvious?) Yes. They belong somehow to each other. (builder from Bayern, Germany, male, age thirty-nine)

Most people did not find the presence of the oil paintings in a history museum curious at all, many describing their presence here as natural or self-explanatory. Even though on the one hand he classified them as art, on the other the visitor quoted above took the paintings to belong to ‘history’, adding that the glass-cased objects and the paintings ‘belong somehow to each other’. Yet another visitor said she viewed the paintings as ‘illustrations’ of the historical periods (retired economist from Hamburg, Germany, female, age sixty-four). Her husband, a retired doctor, agreed and then referred to a particular glass case holding the uniform of a named Danish soldier who survived the 1864 war and went on to become a distinguished professor of medicine – a fact mentioned in the exhibition text. He explained:

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With history, emotion always plays a role, that you can feel it, emotionally. And I found, for instance, the simple range of uniforms of the colleague from Denmark who went on to become a professor of medicine in Copenhagen – I actually knew his name, had read some of his stuff. And his small selection of field equipment was therefore suddenly of interest to me; he was an old colleague [laughs]. (retired doctor from Hamburg, Germany, age sixty-four)

Even though this comment does not concern the paintings, it can be seen as an instance of the same trend I have been pointing to throughout the preceding examples: the ability of exhibits to move and spur visitors, and the tendency to invest them with personal meanings. Although laughing about it, this tourist clearly felt a connection to this (representation of an) 1864 soldier, not because of the soldier’s war deeds, but due to the fact that the visitor coincidentally shared academic interests and a career with this long-dead Danish figure (‘the colleague from Denmark’). He had read some of the soldier’s later academic work and sensed a vague connection between their personal biographies. ‘Gazing’ at museum exhibits is not merely an activity of the eye. Different visitors were attracted to the museum paintings in emotive ways, engaging with them according to personal interests, biographies and empathy. Of course they utilized their eyes for this, but in the same appropriative operation they also invested a variety of emotion and imagination into the dramatic artworks and used them to evoke sporadic connections and associations of a somewhat irrational, or at least nonsystematic and disordered kind. Thus, they obviously ‘saw’ the paintings, but a wide range of culturally and biographically encoded particularities circumscribed these visual encounters. The general stressing of the pictures’ atmospheric qualities and potential for emotional investment, and for being moved, is connected to a desire for sentiment and yearning arguably traceable to the romantic period and to specific templates and expectations handed down from Romanticism. I return to the issue of these romantic legacies in later chapters, most thoroughly in chapter 6. Embracing the feel of oldness and historicity that they sense in the paintings, museum visitors let their imaginations drift off and immersed themselves in the heroic and dramatic renderings of yesteryear’s wars. Such an empathetically oriented and immersive museum practice, widespread among the visitors of my study, is not really captured in Bennett’s and others’ theories, which stress the museum as an ordering and disciplinary machinery in which visitors are engaged in ‘rituals through which their rights and duties as citizens [are] enacted’ (Bennett 2006: 263). The visual consumption taken for granted in such studies, implying a serious and rational reading of the displays and their underlying

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order, seems to be sidestepped and challenged by the empathetic engagement of a public in search of affective resonance and atmosphere.

Rational Distancing: Reading Art As Period Representations Some visitors, however, engaged with the war paintings in a different and seemingly more critically reflexive or ‘rational’ way. In Bourdieu and Darbel’s classic work on art appropriation in France, they distinguish between individuals possessing ‘artistic competence’ and being able to decode a work of art in relation to its ‘stylistic indices’ – based on prior knowledge of art periods, schools or specific artists – and those unable to do so, left to read concrete artistic expressions according to categories of everyday life, ‘being completely unaware both of what defines the representation itself, and of what gives it specificity, namely its style as a particular method of representation’ (1991: 39–40). Whether we accept such a strict designation of ‘competence’ or not, it is evident in my own studies that there are clear differences between visitors’ modes of engagement and that these often correlate with levels of prior knowledge and education. A minority of the visitors that I spoke to and followed at the castle museum thus uttered a distanced view towards the artworks, questioning their portrayal of the periods and events in question, and reading them not as neutral depictions but as subjective artistic interpretations. On one occasion, my two interviewees – a Danish couple – differed in their individual responses to my questions on the period paintings’ contribution to the exhibition. First, the woman stated: They support some of the history, right, for my part. They support. Someone [the artist] has seen the things from back then and made it into a picture. It supports the episode that occurred, which they can then simply show us in another form. (clerk from Copenhagen, Denmark, female, age sixty-two)

This reading does not differ significantly from the examples already given: the paintings were taken to ‘support’ the rest of the exhibits, and the artists regarded as simple intermediaries, eyewitnesses having ‘seen the things from back then and made it into a picture’. The paintings were understood basically as one-to-one translations of the historical events. But then her husband voiced a more doubtful view: For my own part, they [the paintings] don’t tell much, because it is the artist’s perception of a particular episode, which then finds expression in his picture. It wasn’t necessarily like that at all. Thus it cannot be historical, except for the public image

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– the public image that existed [at the time] of that episode, on the basis of which the artist then forms his picture. (retired self-employed wholesaler from Copenhagen, Denmark, male, age seventy-four)

When I asked him whether that meant that he did not view the paintings as historical evidence, he continued: No [I don’t, because] for instance we have this really strict evidence, with [the picture of ] Christian II walking around the table, right? Some people see that as the final truth, but it turns out to be the biggest lie. And this could be the case with many of the paintings that are displayed here. Even though many of them are probably rather true in their representation.

Pointing to a popular myth of the medieval king Christian, once imprisoned at the Sønderborg Castle, and to the museum’s own debunking of the myth, this visitor did not put much faith in the historical ‘truth’ of the art in the war wing.11 He questioned the paintings’ historical validity, although he stressed to me that this did not mean that they were less interesting to him. Another Danish couple in their sixties expressed a similarly distanced view towards the artworks. The woman said she found the pictures to be ‘very exciting’ because they ‘provide that age’s view of what happened. And that I think is very exciting’ (social education worker from Odense, Denmark, female, age sixty-two). In support, her husband stated: ‘The paintings of the war events were probably done some years later. Denmark was in a state of shock [in the immediate aftermath of the war], and by then I guess they couldn’t paint it to appear as heroic as it [eventually] does’ (retired school principal from Odense, Denmark, male, age sixty-nine). He added that ‘these heroic images of the war must be something which has been cultivated, far away from Southern Jutland, perhaps in Copenhagen and wherever they did these sorts of paintings. Because this [land] was German [then].’ And he summed up: ‘So, it is an idea of some heroic deeds from a foreign country, in fact, at the time when they are painted.’ As indicated, such reflections over the production of the paintings were rare among the visitors of my study. Most seemed to understand the artworks as colourful but fundamentally ‘true’ renderings of the period in question – what Bourdieu and Darbel (1991: 40) call a ‘functionalist’ stance, insistent ‘that each image fulfil a function, if only that of a sign’ – and as illustrative pieces enhancing a holistic experience of context. This dominant tendency is tied also to a general complex of ideas of objectivity, causality and (objective) history widely taken to inhere in the museum institution, addressed below and discussed further in chapter 3.

Reconsidering the Modern Museum

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Both-And: Interchanging Empathetic and Distanced Engagements I have identified two somewhat opposed visitor stances towards the war heritage at the castle museum, exemplified by the period paintings. I termed these ‘empathetic immersion’ and ‘rational distancing’, respectively, and stressed that the empathetic mode is dominant in my field material. However, visitors do not simply and univocally ‘belong’ to one of these two poles; no visitor is only ever immersed and gripped by empathy, emotion and nostalgia, just as no one spends his or her entire museum visit at a calculating distance, in disregard of affection. This section concerns this key point: the interchanging operation of the two modalities, the ways in which people, often unreflectively, passed back and forth between ‘rational’ and ‘immersed’ modes of engagement. Many visitors uttered a view of the museum as a space for the learning of ‘objective’ history. Such viewpoints were particularly prominently voiced when I asked them whether the exhibition triggered any feelings of national belonging, to which the majority of my informants – including all German informants – responded in the negative. The retired German doctor already quoted on his feeling of connection to his ‘Danish colleague’ stated that to him, the museum aroused ‘no national feelings, pure theoretical interest’. He connected this nonemotive stance to his own country’s troubled and traumatic history: You see, my grandfather – this is a long time ago – he was an Emperor-loyalist (Kaisertreuer). And then the generation of our parents, they were National Socialists. And we were, from the beginning, brought up to be very strictly republican, in opposition to that. (retired doctor from Hamburg, Germany, male, age sixty-four)

Reflections such as these, common among German visitors, display a stringently systematic and ‘epochal’ understanding of history and its allegedly causal influence on changing German generations. Interpreting (German) history as a chronology of ruptures, with each period understood to cultivate ‘its’ own subjects in reaction to the previous generation, this segment of German visitors – raised in a postwar age of political republicanism and historical rationality – expressed a strictly nonemotional interest in the past and in history, relying on the objective collection of facts and documentation.12 Nevertheless – and this is my main point in the present context – this particular visitor did in fact describe his museum experience in terms of emotional value. We have already seen this in his expressions of connection

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to his ‘Danish colleague’ in the exhibition, quoted earlier: ‘With history, emotion always plays a role, that you can feel it, emotionally.’ At another point during our interview, when discussing the role of the museum’s historical objects in contrast to the copies and replicas employed at the battlefield centre, he explained how coming face-to-face with original artefacts affected him emotionally. Referring to a visit of his to Rome, where he had seen on display a certain historical document signed by Henry IV, he explained: And there it was, the document, and there I was … and you are moved. To me it is something special to see the original, because the original … Henry had signed it, it is his signature. And that is fascinating. (…) I can inform myself theoretically via books, or pictures, and I do so too. But seeing the original, the actual document with the signature on it, that is something special, and that connection moved me.

In this case, then, we have a visitor insisting that he had a ‘pure theoretical interest’ in history, and yet at the same time arguing that ‘[w]ith history, emotion always plays a role’. Enjoying, at different points during his tour of the war wing, the distanced (‘theoretical’) overview of the wars, their courses and their consequences, as well as the immersed, empathetic identification and association with specific objects and characters, the reasoning of this visitor illustrates the back-and-forth movements I suggest constitute a common feature of the museum experience. When I asked him to identify one particular exhibit in the wing as a highlight of his visit, he opted for the miniature battlefield model: The landscape model, where you have a spatial representation of the Dybbøl defences. Where you can see how the redoubts run in oblique lines across the peninsula, and where you can evidently see why such a great Prussian superiority was needed to take Dybbøl. I found that one [the model] really interesting, how everything was built up. And the different numbers [of the relative strength of the armies].

The model, together with its surrounding setup of maps and statistics boards, clearly spoke to his ‘theoretical’ interest and desire for overview (see figure 2.4). The massive oval-shaped exhibit, some 4 meters (length) by 2 meters (width) by 1.5 meters (height), portrayed the Dybbøl ridge in a 1:1000 scale, including the surrounding waters and the fringes of the town of Sønderborg across the sound. Squares and lines represented the formations of Danish and Prussian troops in red and blue, respectively, as they were organised before the 1864 storm on Dybbøl. Visitors were often attracted to the sense of complete, detached and allegedly objective overview that the model provided. Compressed and yet detailed, it afforded a

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detached bird’s-eye view on the battle and complied with visitors’ desires for order and rationality. And yet, the landscape model held other potentials as well. It was admired not only due to its rendering of overview and order, but often also in sheer admiration of the craftsmanship and the creativity that it somehow exuded. This is reminiscent of Alfred Gell’s account of his childhood visits to Salisbury Cathedral and, in particular, his admiration for a matchstick miniature model of the cathedral set inside the actual church. Gell states that ‘the building itself made no great impression on me, and I do not remember it at all’, but that the detailed two-foot matchstick model ‘provoked feelings of the deepest awe’ in his eleven-year-old heart (1999: 167). He utilizes the anecdote to argue that what is considered a work of art is surrounded by ‘a halo-effect of technical “difficulty”’ (166), a deep-felt admiration for the work and skill embedded in the object. In a related manner, many visitors to the castle museum paused to admire the Dybbøl battlefield model, not merely in order to gain an overview of the battle’s course, but employing a more diffuse aesthetic appreciation of its making. It was not merely a tool of enlightenment but also a work of art. A video specs example can illustrate these dual qualities of the scale model and serve as yet another illustration of the relationship and tension between distanced overview and playful immersion.

Figure 2.4. The Sønderborg Castle Museum’s 1:1000 scale landscape model of the Dybbøl battlefield, protected by Plexiglas. © Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot

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Video Case: Who Are the Red Ones? In this case, the video specs were worn by a Danish man and father in his thirties (F), visiting with his wife (M) and daughter (D), aged three. During his sixteenminute passage through the war wing – fairly fast-paced compared to most visitors – not once did he stop to read any of the main text boards, and not once did he or his wife mention any particular historical period, event or war. Instead, he seemed to eye the objects as curios, ‘old objects’ that appealed to him, his wife or his daughter by virtue of their being old, fun or simply different. He commented on a particularly cruel-looking sword, for instance: ‘Get hacked up by this, then I guess you are done looking good’. When the talk was on war – as it inevitably is in this part of the castle – it was not on any particular war, instead being simply about war in general, or sometimes war ‘in the old days’. However, upon entering the room with the scale battlefield model, an urge to understand it and read it ‘properly’ came upon him. The model, protected by a 50centimeter Plexiglas screen along its edge, has a wooden shelf running on its outside, providing visitors with a supportive option for bags or tired kids. The daughter, clearly fascinated by the scale landscape, tiny buildings and ships, spent quite a few minutes kneeling on the shelf, peeping over the Plexiglas. The excerpt below reports the family’s two-minute conversation at the model. M: ‘The red and the blue ones, are those men?’ F: ‘I don’t know …’ [inspects the board on the armies’ relative strength, reads aloud] ‘Denmark at the breakout of the war … commanded by General Dusomething …’ M: ‘The blue, those are Denmark. Who are the red then?’ D: [kneeling on the wooden shelf ] ‘Mummy, you are the red ones.’ M: ‘Am I the red ones? Then you are the blue ones.’ F: [moving closer to the statistics board, studying it] ‘I frankly don’t know …’ D: ‘Mummy, I’m the silvery ones.’ M: ‘Alright. In fact, there are no silvery ones down there. [to her husband] Should we move on?’ F: [slightly annoyed] ‘Yeah but, all the red must belong to something.’ [takes a thorough, one-minute look at the model and then the four maps above] D: ‘There is only a small one [points to a tiny model ship]. Is all the rest water?’ M: ‘Yes, the blue part is the water.’ F: [still trying to grasp the meaning of the model] ‘There must be … somewhere …’ D asks her mother something about the model [undecipherable from video recording]. M, to D: ‘The green is the land, the fields and so on.’ D: ‘Where are the fields? Are they green?’ M: ‘Yes.’ F: [resigned] ‘Well, I don’t understand a scrap of this. There is something about … I can’t really … There’s a whole lot of grey stuff, but the red – I don’t bloody know … [leaving his interpretation efforts, staring out of the castle window] Are you coming?’

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This family’s museum visit was not about amassing historical knowledge or ordering the world. In fact, when after the video walk I asked him for their motivations, this family father stated that ‘we knew nothing about what was here, to be honest. We just needed to pass away the last day of our holiday’. Faced with the battlefield model, the daughter began playing (‘mummy, you are the red ones’) in a light and imaginative fashion that characterized the general approach of the family’s stroll through the war wing. As was true of most families with children, their visit was clearly structured to accommodate the daughter. However, when asked by his wife to identify the coloured troop markers on the battlefield, the father – who had not been bothered much with historical detail up until this point – was suddenly gripped by a desire to interpret the model in a ‘correct’ and orderly fashion. Annoyed that he could not, despite his best efforts, figure out who was actually fighting whom in the landscape setup, he looked in vain to the statistics board and the four maps above the model. Spending almost two minutes pondering the meaning of the model, he finally abandoned his project and moved on to another room of curiosities. In my interpretation, this visitor, generally unconcerned with history and merely out for a pleasant day to round off the family holiday, was caught off guard as his wife asked him to switch from his casual state into a more thoroughly ‘rational’ mode. Having strolled through the neighbouring galleries paying no real attention to the text boards on which the course of the Dybbøl battle is spelled out in detail, he arrived at the scale model unprepared. Both he and his wife clearly sensed that this room was somehow supposed to offer some kind of overview and felt they should be able to decipher it. Thus, the material installation and setup suggested a rational and orderly reading, and the fact that he remained unable to comply clearly annoyed him. Meanwhile, the two other family members utilized the model in a creative fashion, the daughter in particular spellbound by the model’s ingenuity in a manner not unlike the awe of eleven-year-old Alfred Gell. This, then, is an example of a ‘rational’ rupture in the unconcerned and playful attitude that many visitors bring to the castle museum. Although these specific visitors did stand out as particularly noninterested in historical context, many others displayed a similar not-too-bothered attitude to the informative and enlightening contents of the exhibition. They were not out to order the world and hardly subjects to any disciplinary power of the high modern museum; in this particular case, they were simply there to enjoy a day out in the atmospheric and historic setting of the Sønderborg Castle, passing away the last bit of their summer holiday.

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The disinterested and casual museum visitor poses a problem, even a provocation, to museum studies of the classic disciplinary type. It is a problem intimately connected to the issue of sight and seeing. Edensor has argued that ‘the focus on purposive gazing has often conjured up an instrumental, disembodied tourist so that undertaking tourist pursuits in a state of relaxed distraction – where tourists “switch off”, for instance – has been underplayed’ (2006: 26). Elsewhere, he insists that most of the time, tourists are precisely not pursuing ‘aims’ or objectives in any instrumental fashion – we may think, for instance, of ‘learning’ in the museum – but, rather, that ‘tourism is replete with rigid conventions of its own, habits and routines which shape the particular practices and experiences of tourists, and it is, therefore, also somewhat mundane’ (2007: 199–200). Indeed, many of the people I followed and talked to did not seem to reflect a lot over their motivations for visiting or the site’s alleged meaning or significance; to many, a day trip to the museum and/or battlefield centre was just something they did because this is what you are somehow ‘supposed to do’ when holidaying in southern Denmark. ‘I guess it’s a must when you’ve rented a holiday cottage in Gråsten. Then you got to go there’, as one (communication worker from Odense, Denmark, female, age twenty-nine) centre visitor remarked. Another said that ‘in those parts of the country we go to, we generally see what sights there are’ (retired factory worker from Vordingborg, Denmark, male, age sixtyfour). And a third visitor stated that ‘it’s like any other place. It’s part of history, and we’re nearby, and then we might as well see what is being told here’ (retired fitter and army officer, from Odense, Denmark, male, age sixty-two). Such comments, and the generally odd looks I got when asking people of their motivations for visiting, attest to a deeply ingrained culture of museum going and sightseeing as a mundane and routinized holiday activity.

Of Other Senses: Towards a Different Take on Modernity The complexities of visualizing and ordering in the museum that I have explored in this chapter are closely connected to the very idea of modernity. However, the dominant view of modernity as a rational and disciplinary force based on Enlightenment values does not really leave much room for such overlapping or ambiguous museum practices as I have described. Emotion, immersion and sensation are most often discarded as antimodern or merely ignored in museum analyses subscribing to such a view.

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I want to suggest, instead, that these qualities are deeply modern. I take my cue from the work of Scott Lash, who in Another Modernity: A Different Rationality (1999) dissociates himself from dominant conceptions of modernity. In opposition to the ‘first’ (or ‘high’) modernity of the Enlightenment and its rationality of progress, order and homogeneity, Lash argues, a second and often overlooked strand of modernity emerged. It is characterized by a ‘different rationality’ that does not merely accept order, progress and science as inevitable givens. Whereas the first modernity ‘is concerned primarily with epistemological questions, the other develops a critical stance toward knowledge and concerns itself more with ontology’ (Oakes 2006: 238). And ‘[i]f for the first, high modernity, humankind’s differentia specifica is the ability to reason, then for the second, the other modernity, it is experience’ (Lash 1999: 143, italics in original). Whereas the first modernity is ‘a modernism of “the ought”; (…) a highly moral vision, based on a very abstract and general morality’, the second modernity is ‘a modernism of “the is”; the here and now; la vie quotidienne’ (Lash and Friedman 1992: 2, italics in original). Lash understands these differences as handed down from early social science, and as resting on different philosophical paradigms. He proposes that ‘two modernisms developed in early sociological theory’ (1999: 111) and goes on to pinpoint them: One is French; the other is German. The French version is positivist. It is based on the model of an abstract ‘system’ which is then used to understand social relations. The German model is more of an interpretive sociology. It opposed systems and positivism, holding that the latter was corrupting real social relations. To this it counterposed an inner sphere modelled on the lines of a poetics. (111)

This German interpretive sociology originated in Romanticism. It emerged as a reaction against those who held, in the period around 1800, that ‘if German culture was ever to have much of a chance, it must do what it could to model itself (…) after France’ (114). ‘In opposition to this common wisdom’, says Lash, ‘and to French classicism as well as to the French Enlightenment, grew German romanticism and Kultur’ (114, italics in original). These romantic currents ‘counterposed the isolation of the poet to the positivist conception of science as a profession’ (ibid.: 115). The shifting visitor practices I have investigated can be said to oscillate between such ‘poetic’ and ‘scientific’ approaches. The castle museum curators, along high modern conventions, sport a scientific ideal of observation, distance and nonimmersion – a normative stance, focused on ‘the ought’ – while visitors on the ground navigate ‘the is’ in ways that entail

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both distanced and immersed stances. According to Lash, the second modernity implies a profound reshuffling of the meanings of both objects and subjects, revolving around an increased focus on ontology, being and sensation. On the status of ‘the object’, he argues: The object in the second modernity has become ontological. It is possessed with being. It is no longer reduced to a thing whose sole function is the assertion of valid predicative statements. The object in the second modernity gains vastly in status. It is now not just a speck, a point to be known. It comes to take on an ontological structure. It comes to take on a structure of meaning. A meaning that is not reduced to epistemological and utilitarian functions. The object in high modernity was not a thing-in-itself. It did not possess an ontological structure. The object’s ontological structure in the second modernity allowed it to take on epistemological functions, but also to be invested with affect, with desire, with care, to be lived by and lived with. As such, the object has been a highly mediated prism on to being, on to existential meaning. (339–40)

Such wide-ranging changes in the perceptions of the relations between subject and object – between thing and person – also entail new significance ascribed to art and language, a shift from earlier utilitarian functions in which they were considered mere instruments of communication – ‘pure means’ in Lash’s phrasing – to symbolic media full of meaning or ‘finality’. ‘Art becomes not primarily a means of depicting, but opens up on to existential meaning’ (340). This is in keeping with Herder’s (1965) and others’ stress on the qualities of language as the core of the culture or inner ‘spirit’ of a people or nation.13 In contrast to such a spiritual connection, Lash states, ‘first-modernity objects were not finalities but instrumentalities’ (341). Furthermore, and not least, these shifting landscapes of ideas entailed important reconfigurations of the subject – ‘no longer “above the world” in a hierarchical subject-object relation with the things in the world’, but ‘now in the world, situated in the world among the objects of the world’ (341). Even if such grand diagnoses may seem overly general, they capture a number of key turns and tensions at the heart of the heritage complexes that concern me here. In a very concrete sense, the subject-object reconfigurations that Lash discusses can be applied to the differing relations between visitors (subjects) and exhibits (objects) in my material, and the turn towards ‘experience’ dominant in today’s heritage sector. Furthermore, and leading up to my exploration of the question of national identity in the museum, it is evident that Lash’s understanding of early social science as tied up between two strands of thinking, one French, the other German, shares crucial parallels with the civic/ethnic distinction already introduced. Concepts of civic nationalism, emanating from France, were characterized

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by the idea of the nation as an instrumental and utilitarian construct, revolving around the idea of the pursuit of ‘the common good’, whereas German romanticist or ethnonational thinking cultivated a much more emotional relationship between land and being. How such ideological tensions translate into practice at the castle museum is the focus of chapter 3.

Notes 1. This chapter discusses the museum’s war exhibitions as they stood in 2006–7. Since then, a number of the halls in question, particularly those devoted to the twentieth-century regional history, have undergone significant restructuring. 2. Macdonald goes on to suggest that ‘[i]t is through such idioms (to some extent at least) that established museums define their own worth and perhaps even seek to morally elevate themselves over their newer counterparts’ (2005b: 217), aptly capturing an essential dimension of the museum-centre dispute I outlined in chapter 1. 3. Nick Prior (2002) analyses the modern art museum along a related optic of power relations, although his investigations rest more fundamentally on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu rather than on those of Foucault. 4. Original Danish wording: ‘Hvad udad tabes, det maa indad vindes.’ Different English translations exist. This one is taken from a publication by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (Udenrigsministeriet 2006: 3). 5. Macdonald adopts this Heideggerian term from Timothy Mitchell (1988). 6. Bennett readily acknowledges the nonpractical nature of his investigations. In The Birth of the Museum, he asserts: ‘My concern in this book is largely with museums, fairs and exhibitions as envisaged in the plans and projections of their advocates, designers, directors and managers. The degree to which such planned effects are evaded, side-stepped or simply not noticed raises different questions which, important though they are, I have not addressed here’ (1995: 11). 7. It has not always been that way. In a key paper on the origins of sightseeing, Adler traced transformations taking place in the seventeenth century, before which the aristocracy’s travel had been regarded as an ‘exercise in universalizing discourse’ and conversation with learned men. This was ‘increasingly overlapped, and eventually eclipsed, by another tradition, which gave preeminence to the “eye” and to silent “observation”. (…) Auricular knowledge and discourse, identified with traditional authority, Aristotelianism and the Schoolmen, are devalued in favour of an “eye” believed to yield direct, unmediated, and personally verified experience’ (1989: 11). Such a shift is, of course, intimately connected to the emergence of the ‘world as exhibition’ rationale I have discussed earlier. 8. I use ‘German’ here in a broad sense of the term, encompassing Prussian and Austrian elements. Of course, Germany as a united, political entity did

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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not exist until 1871. As we shall see, however, one finds a widespread tendency, among visitors, to bundle all the Danish enemies portrayed here as ‘Germans’. See my discussion in chapter 1 on the iconicity of certain paintings and images from the period, popularized over the years through printing and other reproduction techniques. In chapter 4, I will discuss these dimensions of the tourist experience in more detail, following Crouch’s call for relating ‘physicality to imagination, to social contexts and to a “making sense” of practice and of space’ (2002: 209–10). According to the myth, familiar to many Danish visitors, the former king spent his many years of imprisonment in the 16th century restlessly walking around a round table again and again, drawing his thumb along its surface and, over the years, forming a groove in the tabletop. In her fascinating book on the dealing with ‘difficult heritage’ in Nuremberg, Germany, Macdonald (2009: 134–39) provides a detailed account of how specific ideas of objectivity, facticity and ‘documentation’ informed the construction of the Documentation Centre at the city’s former Nazi Party Rally Grounds. As an immensely productive thinker operative in the period between what came to be known as Enlightenment and Romanticism, Herder cannot easily be pinned down as an archetypical ‘romantic’. Contributions stressing a balanced view on Herder, including his legacy from the Enlightenment, include Barnard (2003), Zammito (2002), Denby (2005) and Schmidt (1956).

Chapter 3

T B  B D National Identity at the Castle Museum T     S C M   to unsettle and challenge ethnonational perceptions of the Danish nation. Seen from a curatorial perspective, the war wing served decidedly civic and informative purposes by explicating, as an undercurrent below its exhibits, the histories of different understandings of what it meant to be Danish in the period 1848–1945. Even though rarely explicitly stated, a fundamentally constructivist approach to nationhood and nationalism thus circumscribed the museum’s war galleries. However, such points on the ongoing construction of Danish identity were rarely recognized by visitors. Some even took the exhibitions to convey exactly the ethnonational messages that the curators sought to confront. This chapter is about why this was the case. It contextualizes this clash of museum intentions and visitor practices by investigating the habitual reproduction of national identity in the castle museum. I analyse and discuss how visitors variously experienced, reflected upon and negotiated the aura of Danish identity that, while elusive, nevertheless in a rather tangible sense filled the galleries in the museum’s war wing. First, I explore the dominant curatorial ideologies at the museum and their relationship to the idea of civic nationalism. Second, in my analysis of visitors’ practices in the war galleries, I discuss how an air of Danishness, even if often explicitly denounced, nevertheless lingered in the museum halls. In this, I draw upon Billig’s (1995) work on ‘banal nationalism’ and argue that the Danish museum visitors, despite a number of differences, participated in the upholding and social reproduction of a firm and nonelective understanding of Danish identity. At the core of these processes lie powerful structural and cultural assumptions about what a museum is or should be, and what related key terms such as ‘history’, ‘heritage’ and ‘nation’ mean and do.

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Civic Nationalism: The Legacy of Ernest Renan I have described the Sønderborg Castle Museum as a ‘house of enlightened noninvolvement’, characterized by a sober and nonemotive outlook on national issues. From its very founding, its caretakers have aspired to balance Danish and German sympathies – as exemplified by the careful wreathlaying practices of the centre manager discussed in the previous chapter – and opted to concentrate on the scientific and allegedly objective unearthing of archaeology and folklore of an explicitly local and regional nature, avoiding ‘national’ stances as far as possible. The ideological positioning of the castle museum regarding the issue of the nation and national identity owes much to the idea of civic nationalism – sometimes referred to as ‘political’, ‘elective’, ‘contractual’ or ‘patriotic’ nationalism1 – the basics of which have been summed up by Sune Lægaard (2007: 41) thus: Dating back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the image of the nation is that of a community of citizens of the territorial state conceived as a voluntary association along the lines of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that is, as individuals bound together by their shared allegiance and consent to political institutions governing the state in their name and limited by respect for their individual rights.

Such descriptions, of course, concern ideal types rather than any actually existing states. Even though ‘the locus classicus of the [civic/ethnic] distinction’s elaboration has been the comparison between French and German conceptions of nationhood’, as Brian Singer has noted (1996: 310, italics in original), and although France, the United States and sometimes England have often been brought forth as examples of nations built on civic principles, the empirical realities are rather more blurred, as ethnic and romantic definitions and principles exist side by side and in confluence with strictly political or civic ones (A. Smith 2010; Brubaker 1992; Calhoun 1997; Singer 1996). The expressions and ramifications of such blurred realities are at the heart of my investigations. For the moment, however, I shall dwell for a moment on the idea of civic nationalism, as it was formulated in one of the seminal texts on the matter: Renan’s 1882 Sorbonne lecture, ‘What Is a Nation?’ (Renan 1990). Delivered in the shadow of France’s 1870 defeat against Bismarck’s Prussia, the main purpose of the lecture was to ‘deny any naturalistic determinism of the boundaries of nations’ (Gellner 1987: 8). Renan explicitly denounced what he called ‘Germanic’ (i.e., ethnic) approaches to nationhood. He dismissed race, blood and soil as primordial categories and stated that ‘nations are not something eternal’ (1990: 20).

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As such, several passages in Renan can be said to express a basic constructivist stance and share a certain, perhaps surprising, similarity with Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s much more recent and hugely influential (1983) work on ‘the invention of tradition’, though preceding it by a century. Opposing essentialist understandings, Renan declared a nation to be ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’ and ‘a large scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future’ (1990: 19). The nation’s existence is to be seen, in his celebrated phrase, as ‘a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life’ (19). And, in a rather explicit address to the German nationalists, Renan proclaimed that ‘a nation has no more right than a king to say to a province: “You belong to me, I am seizing you”’ (19). All of this is in accordance with the well-known main thrust of civic nationalism. I want, however, to point to a certain ambiguity in Renan’s classic text. In it, we find fervent passages describing the heroism and ancestral ‘glory’ that modern nations must be based upon: ‘Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea’ (19). Renan’s bombastically martial rhetoric and devout praise of the ‘ancestors’ insert a certain tension in his argument. If, one may ask, the nation is simply a daily reconfirmation of political allegiance, why bother with past heroes and great deeds? The wording in passages such as this seems peculiarly close to ethnic celebrations of the nation’s primordial superiority. In fact, suggests Martin Thom in his detailed historical contextualization of Renan’s lecture, Renan was characterized by an outright fascination with his enemies: ‘Bismarck’s Germany, in particular, after the Franco-Prussian war, stood [for Renan] as an incarnation of the military spirit which France had lost’ (Thom 1990: 30). Moreover, Thom argues, Renan himself actually came from a ‘Germanist’ position, celebrating the Germanic invaders of Roman Gaul, the Franks, as ‘a fierce, liberty-loving (but monarchical) Christian people, that had created a fresh civilisation in the midst of imperial decadence’ (25). He notes that while Renan did view the French Revolution as the birth of the nation, he also frequently made references to the distant Germanic invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries  (30). In his understanding of French ancestry and greatness, Renan thus elevated selected historical phenomena to a cultic status and seemed peculiarly close to the ‘Germanic’ nationalists that he formally opposed. In other words, although based on different criteria than those of the ethnic nationalists (grounding his nationalism in ‘history’, not ‘race’), Renan’s ar-

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gument carries a certain primordial logic in its own sacralization of history, ‘a rich legacy of memories’, ‘genuine glory’ and ‘the ancestors’ as key building blocks for the national idea (Renan 1990: 19). And when it comes to memory and commemoration, he explicitly emphasized the need for collective ‘forgetting’ as a prerequisite for national cohesion: ‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of ] nationality’ (11). Renan went on to state that ‘the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’ (11). Commenting on this line of thought, Thom (1990: 31) again stresses Renan’s semiromantic tendencies: ‘Indeed, the Germanism of Renan, reliant as it is upon the figure of the nomad and the barbaric invader, celebrates (…) feudal residues, and turns his back upon reason itself, in the name of rite, symbol, mystery, and brute force’. This ambiguity found in Renan’s seminal text – dismissing race and blood as historical constructions and yet encouraging ‘forgetting’ the inconvenient events in a nation’s past in order to maintain it as a civic entity – may be taken to imply the real-life blurring of civic and ethnic perspectives and arguments. But it also points to a conceptual weakness in the very term ‘civic nationalism’. On the one hand, its ‘civic’ part celebrates loyalty to a common set of political principles, to state building. On the other hand, its ‘national’ portion implies a valorization and a passionate rhetoric requiring a range of nonpolitical, cultural or even tribal elements. Any civic project needs its own cults, its own machinery of forgetting. Thus Renan, amidst his crusade against the Germanists, came close to assimilating certain aspects of their thinking. It should be noted that a crucial difference remains, as Renan explicitly acknowledged the need for, and encouraged the practice of, ongoing construction and reconfiguration of the nation and national memories, an acceptance of constructionism wholly foreign to primordialist positions.

Impossible Impartialities at the Castle Museum Upon a 2006 summer arrival at the Sønderborg Castle Museum, visitors were welcomed by a lineup of six Danish historical cannons, set up each spring on the castle’s parking lot by the town’s sergeant school. On the barrel of each gun one found a small, meticulous inscription in white, listing the efforts of this particular war participant. One such barrel inscription, for instance, read:

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I fought for Denmark’s cause in the 10th Battery 2/2 1864 at Mysunde 18/4 1864 from a battery on Als during the storm of Dybbøl

The first part, ‘I fought for Denmark’s cause …’, was repeated on every cannon barrel, followed by different batteries and battles listed on each. In this way, the personified historical guns – staunch, solid actors imbued with national character – were explicitly cast as witnesses of war. The nationally inscribed artillery pieces were thus staged as tangible, heavy and heavily laden heritage: the materiality of bygone ages, symbols of nationhood and sacrifice, preserved and handed down through generations to the Danes of today.2 The silent witnesses from 1864 guarding the castle museum epitomize the mission impossible of the local curators. As we shall see, they intended their museum to document the continuous construction of national identity and to present a balanced and impartial view on the Danish-German struggles in the border region. However, the vast majority of the museum objects, as well as the very setting in which these were organized and which framed the visitor experiences, were utterly and explicitly Danish. The cannons invited national readings. The public could not know that in the eyes of the curatorial experts, such pieces of (Danish) material culture were in fact supposed to document earlier periods’ ethnic or romantic views on the nation and move beyond or question them. They also could not know that the museum curators would love to display German nineteenth-century battle paintings from the 1848–51 and 1864 wars alongside the Danish oil paintings gracing the walls of the war galleries, but that very few such German artworks exist, or that those which do are safely stored in German museums. In short, visitors had a hard time figuring out that this was not supposed to be a house of ethnic Danishness. Tied up with such concrete problems, which are literally also problems of the concreteness of the material traces at hand, are problems connected to the understanding of key categories such as ‘history’, ‘heritage’, ‘museum’ and ‘nation’ and their interrelations. While in general the castle museum academics subscribed to constructivist positions on how such concepts and entities emerge and transform over time, the vast majority of visitors arrived with firm convictions of fixity and with expectations that museums, being warehouses of the concrete, should and must serve to anchor and uphold such fixities. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in an argument on ethnographic museums, identifies what she terms a ‘fetish-of-the-truecross approach’ in which ‘ethnographic objects, those material fragments that we can carry away, are accorded a higher quotient of realness’ than more fleeting and intangible expressions (1998: 30). Likewise, Laurajane

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Smith has pointed out how the ‘ability to equate tradition and memory to material items provides powerful authenticating “common sense” legitimacy’ (2006: 61). In the Danish case, the parking lot artillery constitutes one example of the substantial, material underpinnings of such commonsensical connotations. In turn, the clash of understandings between hosts and guests in Sønderborg framed and to a certain degree guided the work of the museum’s staff, dampening the emphasis that could be laid on constructionist messages. ‘While on the one hand museum staff may recognise the existence and even validity of alternative knowledges and truths’, as Macdonald (2005b: 218) has put it, ‘and while they may have come to understand their own role as mediatory rather than legislative, they rarely fully embrace relativism. Although “truth” in many museums may be understood as negotiated and plural (…) it is unlikely to be fully discarded.’ At the Sønderborg Castle, the fate of ‘truth’ was complex. It was, indeed, understood by its academic staff to be negotiated and plural. We may say that they openly embraced the constructivist parts of Renan’s agenda, while not sharing his take on heroism, ancestors and forgetting. Indeed, a key focus for the museum during the time of my fieldwork was exactly the illumination of cases of ‘inconvenient’ heritage and an insistence on presenting and discussing the malleability of the concepts of heritage and nation (e.g., Adriansen and Dragsbo 2005, Gjerløff 2007). Museum staff thus could not be said to subscribe to civic nationalism in Renan’s version, but only, so to speak, the ‘civic’ half of it: the dedication to nonfervent, distanced and scientific analysis of nation building. As such, they embraced parts of Renan’s agenda, in particular the ‘elective’ portions of it. Tellingly, a journal article penned in 2007 by the museum’s head curator bears the title ‘To Be or Choosing to Be: Language and National Identity As a Cultural Element’ (Dragsbo 2007)3 – stressing, in the spirit of Renan and with a term adopted from Goethe, the nation as an ‘elective affinity’ (Wahlverwandtschaft), a community based on individual choice. In line with this, the curators envisaged their institution as opposing primordial and national romanticist interpretations of nationhood, and as supporting and furthering the Danish-German Zweiströmigkeit (two-stringedness) of the region. Curators did not perceive their exhibitions to be eternal ‘truths’. This corresponds well with the basic principles of Renan’s key message that there is no naturalness or Geist behind the nation; it is shaped by history and must constantly be reshaped as such in a common ‘desire to live together’ (Renan 1990: 19). The nation is, in this perspective, a construct. In the case of the castle museum, this constructivist position is reflected in two exhibitions opened in 2006 and 2007. One, a temporary exhibition,

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was a collection of art – mainly paintings – donated, by Danish artists, ‘to’ Southern Jutland; that is, to the land considered, by Danish authorities, as Danish territory occupied by the enemy after 1864. The art collection was the result of a nationwide collection effort beginning in 1914 and formed a tangible ‘cultural support’ to the Danish struggle south of the 1864 border, on behalf of the Danish artist community in the ‘motherland’ (see Jenvold 1995). In line with this initiative, a new permanent exhibition, opened in 2007, focused on the key role of archaeology in contests over national identity, providing ample evidence of the uses and abuses of archaeological finds and their spin-offs in the Danish society at large (see Gjerløff 2007). Initiatives such as these illustrate the museum’s ambitions of actively initiating the public in the processes of construction and negotiation of the Danish nation and to be a repository of reflection over the continuous formations and reformations of national identity.

‘No Definitive Truth’: Curatorial Perspectives in the War Wing In chapter 2, I discussed various visitors’ engagement with the museum’s 1:1000 scale model of the Dybbøl battlefield. My own introduction to this central material installation was given by the museum’s most experienced curator, Dr Inge Adriansen, a folklorist and expert on national symbolism who had herself been in charge of the arrangement of the war exhibitions, set up in the 1970s. Even though, she said, it would probably be feasible to substitute the dated scale battlefield with an updated version, perhaps even including technical options to move its troop markers back and forth, this old museum piece had, according to her, ‘a special history that enables it to illustrate a crucial point’. Produced on orders from the German Ministry of War in 1913–14, she told me, the scale model was originally intended to illustrate the German victory at Dybbøl on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, held in Sønderborg (or Sonderburg, as the town was named in the German period) in 1914. This was where Prince Heinrich made his pledge to the assembled German veterans to hold on to the German Nordmark forever, as recounted in chapter 1. The celebrations, however, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. In the hustle and bustle of German mustering that followed, the scale battlefield model – originally designated for a subsequent exhibition at a Berlin museum – was hastily stored away in the attic of the Sønderborg Castle, set to be transported to the German capital after the war. As it turned out some years later, with German defeat in the Great War leading to regional plebiscite on the Danish-German border drawing, and eventually to Danish annexation of

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Northern Schleswig, the German-made scale model found itself suddenly on Danish soil – in the attic of what was about to be transformed from a German garrison into a Danish museum. The crucial point Adriansen took the model to illustrate regards its turbulent history. She explained to me: This model, which was [made] to glorify one of the great German victories, the first of the three German wars of unification (…), was then used, after 1920, to represent one of the disasters of Danish history. Both perspectives are equally true; it is simply a question of whether you have Danish or German sympathies, whether you are born here, or in Copenhagen, or Hamburg. But there is no definitive truth on the war.

This contextualization of the battlefield model was new to me. Indeed, it had to be, since there was no mentioning of its history of shifting meanings in the exhibition itself. A text board on the wall opposite the model spoke in statistical form of the relative strength of the Danish and Prussian armies in 1864, but there was not a word on the history of the scale model itself. In other words, the ‘crucial point’ that the model held in the eyes of the curator did not come across to visitors in any way. It was, we may say, an uncommunicated crucial point, requiring specialized historical knowledge and/or the presence of an expert verbal guide, as I was privileged to have access to. The fact that this vital information on the changing historical meaning of this key exhibit – in other words, its potential for illustrating vital points on the interpretation and construction of history – was not communicated to the public was recognized as a problem by Adriansen, who stressed to me that much of the war wing was, at this point in time, in dire need of relabelling. For a further exploration of this gap in communication – and, indeed, of concomitant gaps in perception – I will turn again to the war wing’s oil paintings. As will be recalled, the dominant visitor mode of engagement here was characterized by what I have called ‘empathetic immersion’, in which the colourful artworks were utilized in imaginative ‘picturing’ processes to grasp what it might have been like ‘back then’. They were generally taken to be atmospheric, vibrant and suggestive renderings of past life, but ultimately true and representative, one-to-one reproductions of how it was. The curatorial perception of the period paintings was, perhaps not surprisingly, characterized by a distinctly different stance and a pronounced tendency towards the other, ‘rational distancing’ modus that I found to be shared by a minority of visitors. This is in line with the museum’s general self-image as an institution of fact and enlightenment, not myth and

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Romanticism. I will give an example of this by returning to Otto Bache’s (1888) depiction of the 1848 embarkation of the Equestrian Guard at Korsør Harbour (see figure 3.1). In the background of the huge painting one finds the portrayal of a young, dignified-looking officer, a man who was to go on to become King Christian IX of Denmark in 1863. Such contextual information, however, was absent from the tiny label on the wall next to the picture, which restricted itself to the following brief statement: Otto Bache (1839–1927). The Equestrian Guard awaiting, in Korsør Harbour, embarkation to the front. Painted 1888. Belongs to the royal family.4

In a leaflet offered for guidance to visitors at the museum entrance, slightly more detail was provided, this time mentioning the painting’s important background character: In Otto Bache’s 1888 painting of the Equestrian Guard’s embarkation at Korsør on the island of Zealand on the way to the hostilities in Schleswig, the man who would go on to become King Christian IX of Denmark can be seen conversing to the ship’s captain. (museum leaflet, English version)

While only a minority of the castle’s visitors employed this leaflet for organizing their museum visit, at least it gave them a theoretical chance to identify the king-to-be in the picture. Most, however, were content to admire the colourful rendering of the Danish cavalry as the attractive work of a skilled painter – much in line with Gell’s (1999: 166) argument on ‘the halo-effect of technical “difficulty”’ of artworks discussed in chapter 2. Bache’s piece often left visitors caught up in reflection over the vibrancy of the horses in the picture or the difference between soldiery then and now, for instance, by reference to the quaint uniforms and ‘silly hats’ of the cavalry, as one visitor commented (retired engineer from Horsens, Denmark, male, age sixty-eight). The curatorial expert, in effect, saw a different painting. Stressing how the exhibition’s age was beginning to show, Adriansen explained to me how she, given the chance, would like to recontextualize the Bache piece: For this to work – and again: this is an exhibition of thirty years of age – we would have to put a label next to it, at least half an A4 page, saying: folks, this picture has been painted as a gift for King Christian IX’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1888. It is an attempt to show that the king, in contrast to all of his brothers, was loyal to the Danish state in 1848. (…) So this picture was produced because something was needed to stage him, being, as he was at that time, a young and insignificant Copenhagen prince.

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Figure 3.1. Otto Bache’s 1888 painting, hanging in the Sønderborg Castle Museum, of the Equestrian Guard embarking at Korsør in 1848, The embarkation of the equestrian guard in Korsør for the theatre of war (original Danish title: Hestgardens indskibning i Korsør til krigspladsen). © Museum Sønderjylland – Sønderborg Slot

Again, this detailed historical contextualization of the painting – like the curator’s explication of the scale battlefield model’s layers of meaning – was way beyond the scope of any visitor I spoke to. And again, it was exactly the basic constructionist messages, the ‘crucial’ points on the exhibits’ historiographical context, that were left unsaid. Interpreting works of art is, of course, always precarious. Certainly, most lay visitors to art museums hardly expect to be able to decipher the works as ‘experts’. It is important, however, that the Sønderborg Castle Museum is precisely not an art museum, but a museum of history. Here, the historical paintings serve a different purpose – tell a different story – than they would had they been parts of, say, a gallery of nineteenth-century art. When I asked Adriansen about the role of art in a museum of history, with specific reference to the Danish oil paintings as our case in point, she said that ‘in exhibits of a cultural historical kind, art is used first and foremost as illustrations of the points you wish to stress. Art does not have, as far as I can see, the independent role it occupies in an art exhibition’. Also, she stressed the artwork’s context – ‘who bought it, which interests it was made to serve, and so on’ – which she believed a history museum should stress in contrast to an art exhibition, in which issues of colouring, choice of motifs

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and composition would be at the fore. Indeed, such a contextual reading was exactly what the expert curator provided me with on our tours of the galleries. She also agreed, however, that much of this was sorely missing in the exhibition as it stood in 2006. Clearly, as we have seen, the visitor tendency to regard the artworks as ‘true’ representations of ‘how it was’ differs markedly from the curatorial stress on context and construction. Let me take a brief theoretical detour to qualify my argument on the difference between the two modes of appropriation. Tim Ingold has usefully distinguished between two modalities of representation and perception that he ties to the two entities of the map and the picture, respectively: Maps are supposed to furnish an objective record of the disposition of things in space, that is strictly independent of any point of view, whereas pictures show how these things might be experienced by a subject positioned somewhere in that space, or moving through it. (2000b: 235)

It seems, however, that what happened in the Sønderborg Castle Museum case was that only a minority of the visitors actually recognized the subjectivity and positionedness of the artworks, that is, their nature as ‘pictures’ in Ingold’s terminology. Most of them read the historical paintings much more like Ingold’s ‘maps’, as ‘an objective record’ of the motifs in question. Their assumed objectivity was strengthened by the context of the history museum. One may speculate whether a different and less ‘maplike’ perceptual modus would be discernible among visitors had the same works been arranged in an art gallery; certainly, the castle museum, in its devotion to chronology and enlightenment, framed them in an aura of factuality and science. Ingold links the map and the picture to the categories of ‘art’ and ‘science’, respectively. He supports his analysis on the work of Svetlana Alpers and her view that maps give us the measure of a place and the relationship between places, quantifiable data, while landscape pictures are evocative, and aim rather to give us some quality of a place or the viewer’s sense of it. One is closer to science, the other is art. (1983: 124)

These insights from Ingold and Alpers are valuable as general distinctions, but my findings seem to challenge their real-life clarity: what I propose is, in essence, that at the castle museum, the artworks were – literally and spatially but also in terms of their public reception – ‘closer to science’; or at least they were circumscribed by a ‘scientific’ framing that they could not escape.

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In sum, while it is surely not surprising that the curator knew more about the exhibits than the visitors, my point is that the gap between their readings was not simply a matter of missing or outdated labelling. It cannot be boiled down to a mere matter of miscommunication. Much more fundamentally, the disconnection regards basic, deeply ingrained and habituated ideas about what a museum is, and – equally important – what the terms ‘history’, ‘heritage’ and (as we shall see shortly) ‘nation’ mean. The constructivist rationales to which the curator subscribed belong on a different conceptual level than the agendas and expectations of the visitors. Not merely a higher level, but a level founded on a completely different epistemological understanding of ‘history’ as a negotiable and contested category – as open to interpretation and construction. Such a constructivist understanding of history, and thus of the museum’s role, was alien to the majority of the museumgoers of my study. Also, and importantly, such a constructivist agenda was virtually ungraspable in the war exhibitions as they stood during my fieldwork, given the ‘scientific’ nature of the arrangement of objects and text. Utterly traditional in its form, reminiscent of high modernity – strict chronology, glass-protected exhibits, dense text and a strong visual hegemony – the exhibition did not, in the eyes of the public, seem to offer multiple readings. Its form and layout suggested a high modern narrative of chronology, progress, history, truth – and, along with those, assumptions of nationhood.

Doing the Nation in the War Wing: Visitors and ‘Banal’ Danishness How may my discussion of the gap between public and curatorial perceptions of exhibits, and of the museum more generally, lead to an analysis of the shaping of national identification? The link, I suggest, can be established by utilizing Billig’s (1995) concept of ‘banal nationalism’. This section introduces his important work and goes on to investigate the ways in which the interaction between visitors and exhibits in the war wing can be said to be characterized by ‘banal’ appropriations of national identity. Thus, it traces key patterns in visitor practices in the museum’s war wing and their reflective or, more often, unreflective assumptions about nationhood and Danish identity. In a few cases, the lack of curatorial explication meant that some visitors in fact read the war wing’s intended, but generally unsaid, constructionist messages instead as ethnic expressions of Danishness. In chapter 2, I mentioned a visiting couple expressing a distanced and reflective view

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towards the paintings. One of them said she found the period paintings to be ‘very exciting’ because they ‘provide that age’s view of what happened. And that I think is very exciting’ (social education worker from Odense, Denmark, female, age sixty-two). We may say that visitors such as these shared the curatorial constructionist approach to the exhibition and the museum, although they possessed nowhere near as detailed historical knowledge. Interestingly, however, this particular couple found the war exhibitions highly problematic. In effect, they interpreted the exhibition as an expression of ethnic Danishness. When I asked them of their overall impression of the war wing, the woman said: ‘It is, in a sense, that the Danes are heroes, even though they lost.’ When I asked her what gave her this feeling, she elaborated: I think it is those pictures, those paintings, that are here. But also what we have learnt [in school]. When I walk through an exhibition like this one, then everything I have learnt in school – it is like a reiteration of that. Then I can almost hear my teacher lecturing on about how heroic the Danes were. (…) When I look at it, I see it very much as the Danes, that is us, paying tribute to our fallen heroes, and sort of taking strength in that. I think this exhibition suggests that. I don’t know whether that is the intention of it, but that is how I feel.

As should be clear by now, such a reading is definitely not in line with the curatorial intention. And yet, this woman had a very firm and uneasy sense that this was what the exhibition was about. Agreeing, her husband added: ‘In a way it [the overall impression] is a somewhat forced attempt to insist on a sort of national feeling that is on the decline in our world of globalization’ (retired school principal from Odense, Denmark, male, age sixty-nine). Such a critique ‘from below’ is interesting, then, because it reads into the museum a nationalist stance that is diametrically opposed to its selfperceived stand. These visitors clearly sought to contest what they saw as heroic expressions of Danish identity, but had no clue that the museum actually intended to do precisely that. Others sensed a similar ‘national’ atmosphere in the halls but expressed their reaction to it along more positive lines. Responding to my question about whether he felt particularly Danish when walking through the war wing, one visitor told me: Yes, I definitely do. One almost feels like picking up the Danish flag. (…) I don’t know what the hell it is. After all, Denmark lost – at least in ’64. We probably ought to … there’s nothing to wave the flag at, one may say. But anyhow, I feel that this surely is Danish land. (post office clerk from Sorø, Denmark, male, age fifty-one)

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Again, the visitor expressed his feeling of a certain national spirit emanating from the exhibits. Unlike the previous critical couple, however, he viewed this experience as a plus, though unable to point to the source (‘I don’t know what the hell it is’). The comment, ‘After all, Denmark lost – at least in ’64’ can be taken to point back to the paradox of ‘triumphant defeat’ in my introductory discussion of the ambivalent commemoration practices of Dybbøl Day. The visitor’s vague indication of loss, yet victory, finds resonance in the strangely victorious parade of the Danish soldiers at the Dybbøl Day ceremonies vis-à-vis their muted German colleagues. The operating logic seems to be that ‘we’ may have lost in ’64, but surely ‘they’ lost out in the larger historical perspective, and today, ‘we’ have emerged stronger than ever. In contrast to the two examples given above, however, the large majority of my museum visitor informants stated that to them, the national issues and Dybbøl’s symbolism were more or less insignificant. This was true of all of my German visitor informants and most of my Danish ones. What are we to make of such a dominant, explicit denouncing of the nation? In Banal Nationalism, Billig calls attention to the subtle ways in which a national sense of belonging is reproduced and the nation ‘flagged’ on a daily basis through ordinary and repetitive everyday practice (1995: 93). He uses the notion of flagging in a broad sense, not restricting himself to the waving of actual flags and the display of other physical emblems with obvious national connotations. Instead, he argues that national assumptions ‘have to be flagged discursively. And for that, banal words, jingling in the ears of the citizens, or passing before their eyes, are required’ (93). This leads him to an inspired analysis of the ways in which various linguistic representations, in print media in particular but also in literary prose and various other representational forms, are thick with deixis. This linguistic term is adopted by Billig to account for the unreflective use of banal pronouns such as ‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘the’ (as in the weather, the nation) that implies a natural ‘whole’ to which the reader/listener/audience is persistently discursively exposed and that thereby becomes naturalized through routine and collective practice, as ‘“we” are constantly reminded that “we” live in nations: “our” identity is continually being flagged’ (93). Likewise, and inspired by Billig, Edensor (2002) has argued that much theorizing on national identity has overlooked precisely its reliance on patterns of everyday life.5 Edensor shares Billig’s view that in the vast literature on nationalism and national identity, too much weight has generally been put on spectacular, ‘traditional’ and ‘official’ expressions of the nation. He contends that ‘besides these overt displays and self-conscious cultural assertions, national identity is grounded in the everyday, in the mundane de-

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tails of social interaction, habits, routines and practical knowledge’ (2002: 17). Informed by these critiques, I went into the field on the lookout for banal and mundane inscriptions of national meaning at Dybbøl. One may of course say that Dybbøl is hardly a very ‘everyday’ and ‘mundane’ setting. Instead, as a highly symbolic location taken to have (had) a decisive effect on the formation of the Danish nation and identity, it constitutes what Edensor calls an ‘iconic site’. Such places, he argues, contain ‘highly selective, synecdochal features which are held to embody specific kinds of characteristics’ that often take the shape of ‘monuments erected – often within larger memoryscapes – to commemorate significant episodes in an often retrospectively reconstructed national history’ (45). In such a perspective, one may question the banality of Dybbøl, as it seems to belong to the realm of iconicity as opposed to the mundane humdrum of everyday life. Nevertheless, I find the way that the theme of the nation was on the one hand explicitly toned down here – as in the museum’s conscious balancing of Danish and German perspectives – and yet, on the other hand, could not be ignored and continued to reassert itself, to parallel important elements of Billig’s argument. As we saw in the example of the historical cannons in front of the museum, the nation was pervasively present in the concrete, material traces of earlier epochs’ efforts to fight over and shape the Dybbøl landscape and the Danish nation. Likewise, popular conceptions of heritage or history, emanating from my talks with visitors, were loaded with banality, taken to refer to self-evident categories, assumingly objective essences more or less rigidly imagined as ‘national’. Thus, the ‘history’ my Danish informants reflected upon was almost inevitably Danish history, the ‘heritage’ that they pointed to was banally assumed to be Danish heritage, and the role and functioning of ‘the museum’ was correspondingly, if silently, understood to be of national scope. I will provide some examples of this widespread tendency. As argued already, the vast majority of visitors arrived at the castle museum with a very firm and deeply habituated perception of what a museum is. In my discussion in chapter 2 of ‘the discourse of seeing’, we saw how a museum was generally considered to be a site of hushed detachment – no touching, no yelling, no participation; clear demarcation in the form of glass cases, ropes, attendants – and of objective, scientifically based and chronologically organized learning. The form and the layout of the war wing undergirded such an understanding of the museum, and the exhibits themselves, tangible traces presented in orderly fashion, supported this view: here, visitors could see, with their own eyes, the physical evidence of the past. The material nature of the exhibits suggested fixture.

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I will suggest that the ‘nation’ belongs to the same category as the related terms ‘museum’, ‘history’ and ‘heritage’; indeed, that these key concepts were intimately connected and sometimes inseparable in the view of the majority of visitors. They were taken to describe natural entities ‘simply there’, banal phenomena about which ‘we’ could hardly say anything useful or reflect upon, because … well, because they’re just there, aren’t they? The following examples demonstrate such a banal and deictic conception of the nation and ‘our’ heritage. Responding to my question, ‘What characterizes a museum?’ one visitor simply stated: ‘It tells about our past’ (dental technician from Sorø, Denmark, female, age fifty-one). Her husband added: ‘It tells a bit of history’ (post office clerk from Sorø, Denmark, male, age fiftyone). And to my question of their understanding of the term ‘heritage’, she said: ‘That our past is not forgotten, or where we come from’. Here, we see Billig’s deixis at play, the unreflective pointing to ‘our’ past and where ‘we’ come from. Such comments reveal the perceived givenness of the relationship between heritage, history and national identity. Another visitor stated: ‘To me, it [heritage] means that we need to understand our own history’ (student from Aalborg, Denmark, female, age twenty-five). And her boyfriend chimed in: ‘That the most important things are preserved’ (student from Aalborg, Denmark, male, age twenty-seven). ‘Our own’ of course signifying ‘Danish’, and ‘most important’, likewise, implying a national perspective: most important to ‘us’, the Danes. Apart from such evidently deictic-national expressions, issues of regionalism often entered the equation. Many Danish visitors told me they regarded the Dybbøl legacy as not so much a national as a regional (sønderjysk) heritage. The young woman quoted above said, to my question on her relation to the Dybbøl symbolism: ‘Dybbøl doesn’t really mean anything to me. But it depends where you are from, because I believe it does [mean something] to those from down here.’ And her boyfriend added: ‘It’s part of history down here in Southern Jutland (Sønderjylland). It’s not a history we are part of. Not in my view, anyway. But it’s a history you’ve heard about. But it’s not one which makes me anymore Danish.’ Along similar lines, another visitor responded to my question on what she associated with the term ‘museum’ in this way: ‘I think it is very exciting to enter a museum and have a look at that part of the country (egnen)’ (canteen assistant from Kalundborg, Denmark, female, age forty-two). Notice how, in her formulation, the museum visit is likened to ‘looking’ at the land, implying a frictionless correspondence between the museum representation and ‘that part of the country’. This is, of course, in accordance with the discourse of visuality and sightseeing I have discussed earlier. When I

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asked her, ‘When you hear the word “heritage”, what does it tell you?’ she said: ‘I guess that is when you act to save a piece of history. And then … If you didn’t have that, then you’d never see it, would you? (…) I think it is something which belongs here [at the museum].’ In this passage, the perceived links, or even direct correspondences, between ‘museum’, ‘history’ and ‘heritage’ are obvious. The assumingly self-evidential nature of these links lead to tautological reflections like these: If we did not ‘have’ and did not ‘save’ the heritage by putting it into our museums, we would never get to see it, would we? When I followed up by asking whether she regarded Dybbøl as part of her own heritage, she said: ‘No, I’d say it’s more this part of the country’s [egnens] [heritage].’ In his seminal work on cultural policy and nationalism in Quebec, Richard Handler (1985, 1988) has analysed how a dominant set of ideas working to connect territory, people and material traces labelled as ‘heritage’ has emerged and come to be taken for granted. Of primary concern is the construct of the nation: This collective individual [the nation] is imagined (like a biological organism) to be precisely delimited both physically and in terms of a set of traits (its culture, heritage, or ‘personality’) that distinguishes it from all other collective individuals. The nation is said to ‘have’ or ‘possess’ a culture, just as its human constituents are described as ‘bearers’ of the national culture. (Handler 1985: 198)

In my material, the vast majority of Danish visitors shared such banal conceptions of the convergences of nation, history and heritage. But just as the nation was understood to ‘have’ its own culture, so the region – in this case Southern Jutland – was regarded as possessing an equally essentialized culture and to be populated with local culture bearers. In this perspective, Dybbøl and the 1864 war heritage were taken to belong specifically to the region, and the museum to be first and foremost a regional museum. Visitors coming from another part of Denmark, like those quoted above, often regarded themselves as domestic tourists, dropping by to take a look at the regional heritage. Nevertheless, Danish visitors from ‘up north’ almost inevitably displayed sympathies with the Southern Jutlanders, understood to have a primordial and/or historical connection with ‘their’ land and heritage. The expressed relations of such nonlocal Danish visitors to Dybbøl often operated along statements of the type: ‘I don’t care, but …’. That is, they stated they saw Dybbøl as primarily a regional symbol, but since it was important to the region, and to Denmark historically, they regarded it as an important national spot – even though for their own part, they claimed to be emotionally unconnected.

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One specific museum installation attracting a lot of attention from visitors was a board on the wall depicting the contours of the territory of two different ‘Denmarks’ of 1863 and 1865, respectively, in sharp white shapes against a deep blue background (see figure 3.2). Here, the drastic consequences of the 1864 war were spelled out in graphic eloquence, the reduction of the Danish territory following from the defeat profoundly salient. This dual map was highlighted to me by Dr Adriansen, the curator, as a personal favourite of hers, and as a point of departure she often chose when conducting guided tours through the war galleries. And indeed, the visitors I met during my field sessions often noticed and emphasized this particular board. During one video walk, a young woman, pausing to ponder over the dual map, remarked to her boyfriend: ‘It was actually one-third of Denmark we lost … that’s quite a bit’ (day care worker from Copenhagen, Denmark, female, age twenty-six). The dual map constituted a powerful illustration of a basic point that could be labelled ‘shrinking Denmark’. But for all its simplicity, it also held a strong and pure banality. The two differently sized white silhouettes, set off against an empty

Figure 3.2. The castle museum’s suggestive double-map depicting the war consequences for Denmark in simple and eloquent graphics. Photo by the author.

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blueness, detached pieces without any perceptually disturbing landmasses to the south, suggested clearly that those were the war consequences – for Denmark. No maps of any German territories in 1863 and 1865 were found here. No explanatory text disturbed the dual map’s powerful message, apart from a brief set of facts below each Denmark: numbers indicating the country’s area and population in 1863 and 1865, respectively, in support of the ‘shrinking’ message. The maps, of course, did not lie. The outline and the factual information given were accurate. But they also afforded a powerful deictic reading, as exemplified by the visitor comment above: wow, ‘we’ lost onethird of ‘our’ land. ‘Denmark’, as it were, was decontextualized, the maps working, in Anderson’s (1991: 175) terminology, as ‘maps-as-logo’, assumingly detachable pieces of a jigsaw puzzle serving to render the (idea of the) Danish territory graphically pure. In my follow-up interview with the above young woman and her boyfriend, the banality at work became evident again. She stated that in fact, she was astonished at ‘how much of one’s own history one doesn’t know of ’. ‘One’s own history’, of course, being Danish history, again documenting the widespread tendency to perceive history and nation as one piece. When I remarked that from what they had told me, I figured their hearts weren’t exactly swelling with national emotions, she laughed and replied ‘no’. But then her boyfriend added: But you can certainly identify with their [the local Danes’] thoughts, because they have been transferred to Germany for a period. So, to them, I can understand why it [Dybbøl] is something very Danish. We peeped out of the window down there [in the castle’s western wing] and saw the mill and the Danish flag on the pole. It is very Danish; I think I’d be able to identify with that if I lived down here. (bricklayer apprentice from Copenhagen, Denmark, male, age twenty-five)

This is a clear instance of what I called the ‘I don’t care, but …’ logic. Dybbøl was taken to be inherently regional, important and ‘very Danish’ to ‘them’, the locals – with whose thoughts this visitor could ‘certainly identify’. By stating how Dybbøl was not important (to himself ), yet very important (to locals, and, by implication, to himself as a Dane), visitor reactions such as these typify the powerful, banal reproduction of national belonging that went on at the castle museum. In the following, I provide a partial transcript of another visitor’s videorecorded walk through the museum’s war wing. In it, we follow the activities and interpretations of a young man and his girlfriend in the room housing the scale battlefield model.

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Video Case: Why Didn’t They . . . The wearer of the video specs is a young man of twenty-six who used to serve in the Danish military and had been trained at a number of academies, including the sergeant school in Sønderborg. He possessed a basic, tactical knowledge of the 1864 war and described himself as being generally ‘interested in history’. He belonged to a minority of visitors who spent most of their museum visit reading. Indeed, his route through the war wing seemed dictated by the large and dense main text boards, as he often simply went from one to the next, with little or no regard for the exhibited objects. The historical oil paintings did not occupy him at all. His girlfriend accompanied him throughout but spent more time studying exhibits. They did not talk a lot, although occasionally exchanging rather hushed comments about this or that exhibit or information. In the room of the Dybbøl battlefield scale model, the specs wearer (W) joins his girlfriend (G) in front of the board detailing the relative strength of the armies hanging opposite the scale battlefield model. They study its numbers for a while in silence; then G says: ‘I mean, that is absolutely ridiculous … Not a chance’ [I believe she refers to the fact that the numbers on the board spell out the heavy superiority of the Prussian-Austrian alliance over the Danish forces]. ‘Plus Denmark had muzzle loaders, the Germans had breech loaders’. W walks on to the window niche, where he studies a selection of reproduced black-and-white photos from 1864 for about half a minute. He then turns towards the scale model. G, meanwhile, is contemplating a colourful oil painting of Danish handgunners in an 1864 winter field, and W takes a quick glance at that too, before taking up a central position facing the scale model, studying it. G walks round the model and places herself by the door to the neighbouring gallery, looking also at the scale landscape. W asks her: ‘Isn’t it curious, when you consider that they [the Danes] know that all the Germans … There are no German advances on this flank [gestures with right hand towards what represents the northeastern battlefield in the model landscape]. And yet they keep most of the reserves over here; you can see there’s one reserve there [points to a marker representing a Danish troop contingent on that same flank]. Why don’t they make sure that they’re ready to face the Germans over there, where the Germans have advanced?’ G: [shrugs] ‘I have no idea’. W keeps studying the field for a moment, then says: ‘It certainly was close’. G leaves the room, while W keeps studying the battlefield model for a while longer. He walks round to where G stood a moment ago and takes a look at the miniature landscape from that perspective, from the Sønderborg miniature town towards the Prussian lines. He also checks the four maps located above the model, tilting his head on one side to read the maps’ text. He then leaves the room by the same door as G.

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The scale model room was devoted entirely to overview. It was perhaps the one room in the war wing where the museum’s scientific stance was displayed most forcefully: a rational and distanced bird’s-eye view provided by the scale model, supported by four maps in different scale – this time with Germany and Europe on them too – and a centrally placed text board depicting the key statistics and relative strength of the opposing armies: number of troops, armament and casualties. According to the board’s information, the Danish 1864 army comprised 38,000 troops in total, all armed with muzzle loaders, as opposed to the Prussian-Austrian alliance’s 56,000 men, ‘mostly armed with breech loaders’. In the battle of Dybbøl itself, Denmark had 4,000 men in the redoubts and 5,000 men in reserve, opposing 10,500 Prussian storm troops and 27,000 reserves, according to the board. As for armament, Denmark boasted 68 cannon and 11 mortars, opposing ‘102 cannon in fixed batteries’ on the Prussian side. Finally, the Danish casualties on the board were reported as ‘Approx. 1,700 dead and wounded’ and ‘Approx. 3,000 prisoners’, versus the Prussians’ ‘1,200 dead and wounded’. These are, of course, facts. As in the case of the 1863/1865 dual map, the board provided factual statistics on the Dybbøl battle. Also, like we saw with the 1863/1865 dual map, the board held a basic message, or, better, afforded a particular response in most observers. In the case of the dual map, I termed the basic message ‘shrinking Denmark’; at the statistics board, the key message was crystallized in the young woman’s comment above: ‘not a chance’. The facts provided supported a reading of the battle in which Denmark was vastly outnumbered, and the Prussian superiority of men and machinery (‘in fixed batteries’) outspoken. In addition, the differing armament – muzzle loaders versus breech loaders – constituted a decisive factor. ‘Plus Denmark had muzzle loaders, the Germans had breech loaders’, as the visitor stated above. Note also that both informants in this case referred to the Danish enemy as ‘Germans’ even though the expression on the board was ‘Prussia-Austria’. The factual and nonbiased information board, together with the accompanying scale model, can be taken as an example of the general way in which the museum’s exhibition design and material and spatial layout supported the fundamental and widely shared conception of the museum as a site of rationality, causality, and truth. The satisfaction reported by many visitors from their visit to this particular room attests to the opportunity to gain a sense of overview, of understanding and of ‘having the facts right’. Indeed, the first time I visited the room myself, I enjoyed the factual and cartographic overview and felt that I had finally gripped the overall lines

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of the battle. In contrast, a longish and detailed report on the historicity of the battlefield model – such as the one given to me by the expert curator, stressing the scale model’s shifting meanings as a ‘crucial point’ of the exhibition – was not what most visitors were looking for. They did not come here for deconstruction. When, in the video walk example above, the young man asked his girlfriend about the ‘curious’ Danish tactics, he clearly viewed the battle (depicted in completely neutral form in the miniature, grey vs. red troop markers)6 from a banal Danish perspective. Although he posed a critique of the Danish performance, in effect questioning the strategy of the army’s commanders – why didn’t they transfer their reserves to where they knew the enemy was strongest? – his ponderings were solidly situated in a Danish viewpoint. The context for this was his already-given position, not only as a Danish museum visitor but also as a former Danish military man. We thus see that even a strictly factual, nonbiased and disemotional exhibition setup like this one was likely to be read and interpreted according to banal-national rationales and positions. Compare the young man’s comments above, for instance, with those of the German visitor quoted in chapter 2, who stressed the scale model as a highlight of his visit, because ‘you can evidently see why such a great Prussian superiority was needed to take Dybbøl’. Although in that case, the visitor stressed his ‘purely theoretical interest’ in the war, his perspective was a German one of what was needed to take Dybbøl, while the young Danish couple above spoke of the ‘ridiculous’ Prussian superiority and questioned the Danish military decisions. In both cases, visitors expressed rational and factual interests in the war and its strategies, but while one was inescapably German, the other was just as profoundly, indeed banally, Danish. In my postvideo interview with the Danish couple, this young man said that his interest was getting the facts and the chronology and interrelations between the different wars right. He stressed how, as a former military man, understanding the relationship between the conflicts, but also the details of the actual battles, the manoeuvres of troops, casualty rates and so on, was what mattered to him. Despite expressing such a dominant distanced strategic perspective, this did not mean that he refrained from connecting emotionally and along lines of national identification to the exhibits. Thus, when I probed about the alleged Danishness of the Dybbøl symbol, he said that he did indeed regard Dybbøl as something inherently Danish, and he termed the 1864 battle ‘a demonstration of Danish spirit of self-sacrifice against superior force’. He added that ‘in the case of Denmark, we are always up against superior force’. To him, Dybbøl constituted ‘a symbol of our ability to perform sometimes, even though we are

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the underdogs’. When I asked him whether he associated any particular feelings with these exhibitions, he promptly stated: ‘Yes, mourning, over the decision of the generals’ – implying, banally, the Danish generals – not to abandon Dybbøl but stay and fight. ‘It was a death trap’, he said, and added that he mourned ‘the tragedy of the death of so many Danes’. So, while throughout his tour of the galleries and in our interview, he remained mostly distanced and seemed to keep his analytically cool and nonbiased (if, as we have seen, positioned) view, this did not stop him from stressing and identifying with the utter Danishness of Dybbøl and praising the power of its symbolic value. He expressed, mirroring my earlier points on the paradoxical blend of loss and triumph, the double view that Dybbøl held a positive message (that ‘we’ can indeed perform sometimes, even as underdogs) and yet that Dybbøl was also a site of tragedy, mourning and the shortcomings of ‘our’ generals. Thus, his distanced analysis of the errors of the Danish decisions existed side by side with a much more immersed emotional perspective, mourning the fallen Danes. In line with my analysis of the overlapping and shifting visitor practices in chapter 2, this visitor’s museum experience again exemplifies how engagements characterized by rationality (order, structure, instrumentality) and empathy (immersion, emotion, spirit) crisscross and intersect, allowing visitors to take on different roles and display a shifting emotional investment at various points during their museum visit.

The Nation and the Problem of Mimetic Realism As I have sought to demonstrate in this chapter, the gap between curatorial intention and public consumption is not a simple matter of miscommunication. Although the war wing could indeed do with a retexting – and although parts of it have been significantly redesigned and undergone renovation since the time of my fieldwork – such renewals in themselves do not close the gap. At its core lie powerful, structurally supported and culturally imbued ideas about the nature and the self-evidential qualities of a cluster of central, and complexly related, concepts and entities: the museum, the nation, (the) heritage and (the) history. As I have argued, all of these were taken by the vast majority of the Danish visitors I encountered as emblems of objectivity, science and rationalism – qualities conveyed by the tangible, material evidence at hand – and by the ordering principles and chronologies according to which they were displayed. Furthermore, they were all taken, in a banal sense, to be self-evidently Danish: the Danish museum, heritage, history and nation.

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In their study of Colonial Williamsburg, the American open-air museum, Handler and Gable (1997) term such an understanding of history ‘mimetic realism’: the widespread assumption that the museum conveys the past ‘as it really was’ (223). They criticize this tendency from their own constructivist standpoint, confronting the American museum’s claims to authority ‘based on the institutional possession of historical reality’ (223). In contrast, Handler and Gable contend: History is not ‘the real thing’ but an interpretation of the past as we understand it now; history is not things, and its validity is not guaranteed by the possession of things (…) You cannot point to the past; it is not embodied in objects. ‘The past’ exists only as we narrate it today. The past is above all the stories we tell, not objects. (223–24)

Such a perspective is, in principle, shared by historians and other academic staff at Colonial Williamsburg. Nevertheless, according to Handler and Gable, this premise is being powerfully ‘overwhelmed by the much more frequently and routinely asserted idea that Colonial Williamsburg makes its historiographical choices based on the discovery of new facts and documents – based, that is, on an objective and disinterested search for the past “as it really was”’ (222). In my own case, the curators of the Sønderborg Castle Museum shared a general constructivist perspective on history and on museums. They found the war exhibitions to hold ‘crucial points’ geared towards passing on such constructivist perspectives. As I have shown, however, such points were rarely recognized or shared by visitors. I do not, however, believe that this can be boiled down to a question of mere communication and of, as Handler and Gable put it, the museum ‘confusing the public by claiming authority based on the institutional possession of historical reality’ (223). At least, not if such a confusion is understood to be the outcome of intentional scheming on the part of the museum’s decision makers. In my view, the ‘mimetic’ perspective on history, heritage, museums and – by implication – the Danish nation is widely shared and reproduced, not only by museum visitors but, on a much more fundamental level, in Danish society and its political and educational structure. It is also, in important ways, structurally supported by the museum and heritage industry at large. When, first, I say ‘widely shared’, I have already provided quite a bit of documentation as to how visitors imagined the museum and ‘history’ to be objective. Even the minority of visitors whom I described as expressing a more reflective or ‘distanced’ perspective on the war heritage seemed to share a basic conviction that the museum sought and should seek to represent the past as it really was. As one of the visitors I analysed as sport-

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ing a ‘distanced’ view put it in his judgement of the paintings, ‘it wasn’t necessarily like that at all. Thus it cannot be historical’. He questioned the validity of the paintings’ portrayal of history but did not challenge the objectivity of history itself. The only one of my informants to do this systematically was the war wing curator herself. So, in contrast to Handler and Gable, I do not perceive the museum practice as one in which the museum confused or mystified the public. In my analysis, visitors complied with dominant expectations and discourses and, we may say, got what they wanted. Most museum visitors did not expect (de)construction and (re)interpretation, they expected fact. Such expectations of facticity, in turn, framed and invariably influenced the working conditions and selfconceptions of the museum staff. As Macdonald has pointed out with reference to Zygmunt Bauman (1992): Just as religious institutions are widely regarded as ‘morality experts’ (Bauman 1992: 203) even by ‘nonbelievers’, established museums in particular are mostly understood as authoritative (if fallible) ‘knowledge experts’. (…) This gives them a respectability in public culture which makes some feel that it is irresponsible for them not to seek to provide viewpoints that are as consensual or ‘true’ as possible. (Macdonald 2005b: 218)

In other words, Macdonald suggests that museum professionals find themselves bound by expectation to pursue and present ‘fact’ and ‘truth’, even if they personally subscribe to constructivist approaches. When, second, I contend that the mimetic perspective is ‘structurally supported’, I refer not only to the suggestive form of the war wing’s exhibits conveying a powerful atmosphere of factuality, science and rationality. Also, and much more fundamentally, the mimetic perspective is enforced on a larger scale, as the museum and heritage sector in general is predicated upon a material and tangible perspective on the past. Danish museum structure rests on a system in which state-appointed regional museums of history and archaeology are each accorded a territorial domain – a slice of Denmark – as their area of scientific responsibility. In this sense the Danish (and indeed, international) museum structure, with its territorial divisions and subdivisions of state-supported museums, each designated a specific territorial bit, supports such an unproblematic semantic linkage between museum, land, heritage and history. These organizational principles thus undergird and reinforce the understanding of the nation as a collective individual ‘having a culture’ made up of, and legitimized through, objects, or what has come to be known as ‘cultural property’ (Handler 1985: 193). Such an ‘objectifying logic’, says Handler, ‘allows any aspect of human life to be imagined as an object, that is, bounded in time and space, or

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(amounting to the same thing) associated as property with a particular group, which is imagined as territorially and historically bounded’ (195). This or that piece of tangible ‘heritage’ must, according to this logic, be categorized as belonging to this or that region/museum. Of course, in an even larger, international perspective, this goes for nations too: this or that heritage belongs to this or that nation. What remains, then, is that such ingrained, objectivist and banal conceptualizations of the museum and its contents were rarely questioned at the castle museum. In addition, the curatorial motivation to engage the public in discussions about the nation as an ‘elective affinity’, and of ‘heritage’ as a constructed category, met with firm structural resistance, both regarding the war exhibition’s tangible form and layout, and, on a deeper level, in terms of profoundly habituated notions of the museums’ nature and responsibilities, mirrored in Danish and international museum and heritage structure and legislation. I principally agree with Handler and Gable when they assert that ‘mimetic realism (…) deadens the historical sensibility of the public’ and ‘teaches people not to question historians’ stories, not to imagine other, alternative stories, but to accept an embodied tableau as the really real’ (Handler and Gable 1997: 224). However, to me the most pressing questions concerning the construction processes in which museums are ceaselessly embroiled are not those reiterating, in various guises, that the past is always a construction – as Howsbawm and Ranger (1983), Handler and Linnekin (1984), and countless others in their wake have insisted for quite some time – but instead regard why and especially how the construction work of heritage sites, traditions and institutions nevertheless continue to make sense and yield meaning to people. The past may be a construction, but it is a construction people seem to want, a ‘necessary fiction’ of sorts (van Beek 2000: 167; and see Taussig 1993: xiii–xix). The Sønderborg Castle Museum, constituting an important node in the reflective and unreflective identity work of its visitors, served to turn such specific, Danish fictions into banal yet powerful ‘facts’.

Notes 1. Likewise, what I term ‘ethnic’ nationalism is also sometimes labelled ‘romantic’, ‘cultural’, ‘popular’ or ‘collective’ nationalism, or primordialism (Singer 1996: 309–10). 2. These guns are of the same type, and carry the same kind of inscriptions, as those set up on the crest of Dybbøl Hill, ‘guarding’ the flagpole and mill, as outlined in chapter 1.

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3. The article is written in Danish. The English title used here is taken from a short English abstract provided in the (Danish-language) journal. 4. Original Danish wording: ‘Otto Bache (1839–1927) / Hestgarden venter i Korsør Havn på udskibning til krigsskuepladsen i 1848. / Malet 1888. Tilhører kongehuset.’ 5. See also Jenkins (2011: 144–49). Preferring the term ‘everyday nationalism’, Jenkins acknowledges Billig’s pioneering work, although also criticizing it for not adequately affording the ‘affectual potency’ (147) of many of the unremarkable expressions and activities described as banal by Billig. 6. Indeed, there is hardly any Danish bias built into the original product, being, as discussed earlier, the 1913 product of the German Ministry of War.

Chapter 4

Sensing 1864 at the Battlefield Centre At the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre of the time of my fieldwork, staff members were always keen to point out that theirs was not a museum. Even though officially merged with the castle museum in 2004, the centre’s self-image hinged on distancing itself from conventional museum practice. The centre’s ‘reinforced Dybbøl story’ report from 1998, for instance, stated: Often, people term the battlefield centre a museum. But the centre has a different image of itself! (…) We consider ourselves a knowledge-educational activity centre (et videnpædagogisk aktivitetscenter), i.e. a centre in which we, by means of activities, provide insight into the past in an educational manner. (Fonden Dybbøl Banke 1998: 18)1

As this chapter will show, such a perception – what I will call a ‘countermuseum’ self-image – was still prevalent during my study of the site. And indeed, in many ways the centre did seem to be everything the castle museum was not: full of reconstructions and replicas (as opposed to originals); encouraging visitors to touch, get physical and ‘interactive’ (as opposed to looking at glass-covered objects); stressing oral and two-way communication (as opposed to written museum texts). Measured on such parameters, the battlefield centre constituted a prime example of the experience-based approach to historical interpretation that has swept over Denmark and many other Western countries over the last few decades. This chapter contextualizes the centre in such an overall development, but it also demonstrates that the institution cannot be seen as simply a provider of ‘experience’. In a number of ways, as we shall see, it draws upon a heavy legacy from the modern Enlightenment museum. Thus, just as I have pointed to the inadequacy of viewing the castle museum as simply a paragon of high modernity, this chapter unsettles the

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ingrained perception of the centre as a site of mere experience. After a brief contextualization of the centre in a larger experiential heritage landscape, I proceed to analyse the practices of centre visitors and demonstrate that their centre activities, much like those of the castle museum visitors, were comprised both of distanced, ordering and rationalist perspectives and of immersive, empathetic and experiential approaches.

The Heritage Industry and the Quest for ‘Experience’ Over the past two decades, it has become widely accepted that to stay in business, museums and historical attractions must stress experiential or multisensory communication, a personal, dialogic or ‘interactive’ involvement with the visitor, and speak to their sentiments and emotions instead of their reason and rationality (Hall 2006; McIntosh 1999; Bagnall 1996; Moscardo 1996). The conventional glass case museum is considered obsolete, as the customer of today is seen as requiring more than ‘pure’ enlightenment and ‘dry’ information. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 139) sums up this widespread stance thus: The presumption (…) is that visitors are no longer interested in the quiet contemplation of objects in a cathedral of culture. They want to have an ‘experience’. Museums worry that they will be bypassed as boring, dusty places, as spaces of death – dead animals, dead plants, defunct things.

Such beliefs are supported by booming fields of scholarship, emanating primarily from learning and communication theory (Falk and Dierking 1992; Hooper-Greenhill 1994; Durbin 1996; Hein 1998) and from marketing and business studies (Pine and Gilmore 1999; O’Dell and Billing 2005; Boswijk et al. 2007),2 with considerable overlaps between the two. The so-called experience economy – the title of a book penned by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore that came to have a profound impact on Danish cultural policy upon its publication in 1999 – is said to enable considerable commercial gain while also facilitating a deep and memorable emotional connection in customers. In chapter 6 I will discuss the book and its influence further, charting a set of broader developments that combined to install ‘experience’ as a powerful, if also somewhat diffuse, key concept in the Danish cultural policies of the first decade of the new millennium. In the heritage sector, the question of whether an increased stress on visitors’ physical and sensual experiences is the way to go is hotly contested, as we have seen exemplified in the recent dispute between the castle museum and the battlefield centre, outlined in chapter 1. In that specific

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case, the disagreement concerned what I termed ‘the road to reflection’ and featured the self-proclaimed democratic and educational motives of the centre staff pitted against the museum critics, who held that only the ‘silent landscape’ would convey the ‘true’ Dybbøl story. A key aspect of the argument regarded the role and utilization of experience and related terms such as ‘participation’ and ‘self-sensing’. When, during my fieldwork, centre personnel continued to stress that their institution was anything but a museum, the contours and positions of this earlier conflict emerged again. Centre personnel preferred to describe their institution as a ‘house of storytelling’ (fortællehus). Often, visitors were explicitly encouraged to reject ‘normal’ museum behaviour. On one occasion, I overheard a guide remark to a group of tourists that they must remember that ‘this is a site of storytelling, not a museum’ and state that here (implying in contrast to when visiting a museum), they were in fact allowed to climb the ramparts or take a walk in the moat. Later, he explained to me that he found it necessary to give visitors such instructions, as they possessed what he called a ‘built-in fear of museums’. ‘They are completely brainwashed’, he continued, and suggested I should study how visitors (according to him) notoriously followed the gravelled pathways outside the centre and remained unwilling to step outside the demarcated areas. In this institutional self-perception, the centre was perceived as what I call a ‘countermuseum’ devoted to relieving the public of their alleged subconscious, childhood-endorsed museum phobias or traumas. This is all the more interesting given the fact that in 2004, as outlined already, the centre was absorbed by the Sønderborg Castle Museum; in other words, the centre was officially (part of ) a museum during my fieldwork period. How should we, then, interpret the staff’s prevalent insistence on not being a museum? It was clearly meant to confront the conventional image of the ‘glass case museum’, understood to be an institution of hushed and silent contemplation, of seeing but not touching, of marked distance between exhibits and observer as well as between experts and amateurs; in short, a site of order, authority and visuality. In the countermuseum self-image of the Dybbøl centre, the basic philosophy was that such topdown ways of gazing at and learning about ‘reality’ were insufficient today. Instead, visitors, it was believed, needed to immerse themselves physically; they needed to smell the gunpowder, hear the thundering guns and feel the fleas in the hay-filled sleeping huts of the Danish 1864 soldiers. All, of course, in line with the general experiential turn in the heritage industry toward subjective, personal and multisensory communication. These currents are well-known from numerous studies of museums, heritage and cultural tourism. While some commentators and analysts are

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enthusiastic, others remain highly critical towards such altered forms of communication. This is true, for example, of the school of mostly British intellectuals who from the mid-1980s onwards levelled their guns at the expanding ‘heritage industry’ – the title of Robert Hewison’s critical book with the sombre subtitle Britain in a Climate of Decline (1987). The rapid growth of this ‘industry’ – comprised of open-air museums and historic theme parks, reenactment events, heritage trails (i.e., ‘Viking routes’), festivals, sanitized ‘historical’ waterfronts and so on – spurred an intense academic debate on the representation of the past. Apart from Hewison, leading proponents in this choir of critics include Patrick Wright (1985), Kevin Walsh (1992) and Tony Bennett (1995), all viewing the boom in heritage sites and open-air museums that practice ‘living history’ and strive to ‘reconstruct’ historical settings as deeply problematic. Accounts such as these often take the shape of a politically motivated (often leftist) criticism levelled at what is seen as sites and movements promoting conservative and/or capitalist ideologies. To give an example, Bennett, in his flogging of the open-air museum in Beamish in northeast England, concluded that ‘[a]n afternoon at Beamish can be most instructive provided that it is looked to less as providing a lesson in industrial or regional history and more as a crash course in the bourgeois myths of history’ (1995: 127).3 I do not intend to engage in a general for-or-against discussion about the qualities of the experiential heritage turn. Whichever view one takes, it is surely the case that the developments at the Dybbøl centre mirror these larger trends closely. In his important work on popular memory and heritage, Raphael Samuel – one of those sporting a less critical outlook towards the new heritage tendencies – provides a description that constitutes a remarkably fitting picture of the antiauthoritarian and ‘democratic’ ideals on which the Dybbøl centre rests: At the museums where ‘living history’ has been adopted as a watchword by goahead curators it takes the form of audio-visual display, using artists’ impressions, photographic blow-ups or replicas to exhibit what ought to be there but is not and contextualize the artefacts in a narrative whole. Instead of being temples for the worship of the past, these museums make a fetish of informality, discarding glass cases in favour of free-standing exhibits which ideally can be handled and touched, encouraging visitors to hob-nob with the demonstrators, and replacing galleries with intimate ‘rooms’. Instead of a solemn hush, the visitor is assailed by a cacophony of sounds. (1994: 177)

The Dybbøl centre was born into exactly such a spirit of touching, feeling and hobnobbing. The quote captures the basic ideology of the Dybbøl centre as well as that of a range of other recent Danish heritage centres and theme parks that mushroomed in the 1990s, backed by private and public

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funding. In the case of the battlefield centre, its experiential agendas can be seen as vying with more traditional exhibitionary conventions. Inspired by visitors’ centres in the United States and the United Kingdom, the Danish centre’s communication in the years following its opening in 1992 pivoted around two introductory audiovisual shows that still ran in loops there during my fieldwork. Another key feature was a so-called diorama. In this scenographic installation, visitors were set at eye level with a number of full-size and very lifelike dummies of Danish soldiers inhabiting a reconstructed 1864 trench. Although the filmic and dioramic forms were devised as alternatives to conventional museum exhibition, they still upheld a sharp separation between public and display. The diorama in particular, inspired by installations at the Imperial War Museum in London, contained a certain ambiguity, as visitors were engulfed in an atmosphere of ‘being there’ while at the same time clearly not actually being there. While, in one sense, visitors were immersed and sharing, literally, the perspective from the Danish trenches, in another sense they were physically distanced, separated by glass from the dioramic scene, and evidently not taking part. Thus, although clearly designed to take the visitors nearer, or even immerse them in, the scene at hand, the diorama was arguably predicated on classical high modern modes of distanced appropriation. It was only really with the centre’s open-air reconstructions of parts of a Danish redoubt, finished in 2007, that the centre delved into more direct hands-on and participatory communication forms. In a seminal essay first published in 1984, Stephen Bann (2004) argues that ‘museological modes of organising data have for some two centuries been polarised between two broad scenographic practices’ (Preziosi and Farago 2004: 15). Contrasting two early Paris museums, the Musée des Petits-Augustins and the Musée de Cluny, Bann argues that in what he terms ‘metonymic’ museum practices, objects are displayed according to chronological and/or stylistic succession while, conversely, ‘synecdochic’ museum practices aim to recreate a dramatic effect of ‘being there’, ‘creating a powerful “period” effect, and enveloping the visitor in the illusion of visiting the past’ (15–16). Open-air museums and heritage centres such as the one at Dybbøl would seem intuitively to belong to the ‘synecdochic’ style of practice. Bann’s work can be read as a counterargument directed at those analysts who take historical ‘period’ theme parks and heritage centres to belong to an ill-defined ‘postmodern’ era filled with simulacra and fakes.4 His aim – which I share – is not one of placing the two modes at ‘different points in a single evolutionary scheme, but of showing how their differing types of discourse relate to different epistemological totalities’ (Bann 2004: 73). Bann thus demonstrates that these contrasting museum

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paradigms are certainly not of a recent date and that the tension between them is indeed a foundational modern one. Summing up the main points of Bann’s paper, Preziosi and Farago (2004: 16) state: ‘In a very concrete sense (…) the history of museology since the early nineteenth century has entailed an oscillation between these two semiotic poles – what Bann calls the metonymic and the synecdochic – with every possible variation in between.’ The ‘poetics’ of the institution, as Bann puts it with reference to the respective main figures of the two museums, ‘is not Du Sommerard’s system, nor is it that of Lenoir. Instead it lies in the alternation between these two strategies’ (Bann 2004: 81). As my example of the centre’s diorama attests to, such an alternation or blurring of modalities can often be found to take place even within a single institution. Thus, the conflict between experiential and conventional exhibitionary forms is far from new. This is no less true of the Danish and Scandinavian context, where the open-air museum movement mushrooming just before and around 1900 – the Stockholm institution Skansen is generally acknowledged as the first of its kind, opening its doors in 1891 – was already driven by aspirations to multisensory experience and atmosphere (Rentzhog 2007; Wallace 1981). Drawing key inspiration from the international exhibitions of the nineteenth century (Stoklund 1993), the openair museum movement can be seen as a reaction against the dominant exhibitionary model of the period, aspiring, so to speak, to reenchant the museum with experience, sensuality and spirit. In a larger perspective, the open-air museum movement was part and parcel of a romantically inspired reaction against a paradigm of science, rationality and enlightenment, and often tied, explicitly or implicitly, to specific romantic national projects. ‘The Skansen movement blended romantic nostalgia with dismay at the emergence of capitalist social relations’, Michael Wallace (1981: 72) notes. ‘What they commemorated, and in some degree fabricated, was the life of “the folk,” visualized as a harmonious population of peasants and craft workers’ (72; see also Bennett 1995: 109–27). This larger romantic turn, which the open-air museums epitomized, contained a nostalgic yearning for ‘authentic’ and ‘primordial’ qualities of life, and insisted on speaking to visitors’ sentiments and feeling – not their reason. Thus, the open-air museums specifically aimed at capturing wholes, atmospheres and feelings instead of parts, causal chains and facts, as a reaction against the conventional glass case museum. In the open-air museum ‘the everyday is restaged, as a trace of an absent whole, and made into a spectacle’ (Crang 1999: 450). These experiential and romantic currents resonate well with the shift Lash has identified from allegedly objective reason to subjective experi-

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ence. According to him, the romantically inspired ‘second modernity’ entails a profoundly recalibrated relationship between subjects and objects, investing both with ‘being’, ‘inner experience’ (Innerlichkeit) or ‘ontology’. In a paper concerned with unwrapping the notion of experience and its contemporary relevance, Lash distinguishes between the German concepts of Erfahrung and Erlebnis – the latter of which, he argues, is essentially romantic and connected to the second modernity: Kant’s experience is thus epistemological experience. Ontological experience (Gadamer) is in the first instance poetic and from Romanticism (Schiller, Goethe). It is most often called Erlebnis and in contradiction to Kantian Erfahrung. We note further that Erfahrung is cognitive experience while Erlebnis is also aesthetic experience. (2006: 338, italics in original)

Such a general move from detached and assumingly objective knowledge to a much more immersive, subjective and indeed often romantic experience mirrors current trends in the heritage industry. As I shall explore further in chapter 6, the so-called experience economy encompasses a range of romantically (‘second’) modern ideas about sensuality, emotion and personal experience – and about the alleged ‘value’ of such experiences. During my battlefield centre study, as we shall see below, such ideas and shifts, vague and abstract as they may seem, took on very concrete forms.

Bird’s-Eye Views and Grounded Privates Schoolchildren constituted a key audience segment at the centre. A lot of Danish school groups, particularly sixth-to-ninth graders, visited the centre as part of a camp school stay in the region in which a visit to Dybbøl was considered more or less obligatory.5 Such groups would usually conduct two- or three-hour tours through the centre and its adjoining grounds, guided by a centre staff member – or ‘storyteller’ (fortæller), as they preferred to label themselves – who would take them to watch the two audiovisuals on the 1864 war and participate in a variety of so-called ‘knowledge-educational’ (videnpædagogiske) activities in the centre’s openair parts. These included hands-on undertakings such as bullet casting at the blacksmith’s, pancake baking from historical recipes, calculation of 1864 artillery ranges, and taking part as gun crew in firing the centre’s replica cannon. Inside the centre’s main exhibition hall, one of the central exhibits was a meticulously detailed 3-D miniature model of a Danish redoubt from the Dybbøl battle (see figure 4.1). At this particular exhibit, most school

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Figure 4.1. A bird’s eye view. The Dybbøl Battlefield Centre’s miniature model of a Danish redoubt. Photo by the author.

groups would be asked by the storyteller to stop and ponder the model. A recurring communicative script unfolded. ‘Now, imagine that we are all small blackbirds circling high over the Danish defences, looking down at the small soldiers’, the storyteller would suggest – or something very similar – and then go on to explain what the different miniature battalions of soldiers, batteries of cannons and wooden constructions were supposed to represent. The more experienced storytellers knew how to activate the youngsters by asking questions and/or telling small jokes, often stressing how this model related to previous or subsequent activities of the class (‘What do you think this little shed in the corner represents? The soldiers’ toilet, or privy, that’s right. Now, imagine twelve thousand Danish troops, plus the Prussians, that all had to go to the loo everyday – what do you think the ground water was like around here at the time? Disgusting, right? And where did people get their drinking water from back then, did they have a tap?’ etc.). Following such question sequences, whose content – despite the dialogic form – varied only slightly from tour to tour, the storyteller often rounded off the sessions by asking the pupils to kneel down or squat so that their eyes were level with the scale model’s ground level, set roughly one meter

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above floor level. With everybody squatting, the storyteller would then ask which parts of the miniature fortification they could physically see now – the inevitable answer being that all they were able to make out was the outside of the ramparts and the mouths of the cannons, with the inside of the redoubt being hidden from their squatting position. The storyteller would then explain that what little the pupils could visualize now – in contrast to their bird’s-eye view a minute ago – was all the Prussian attackers had been able to see when they stormed the Danish defences on the morning of 18 April 1864. This brief but recurring episode’s change of perspective, from the bird’seye view – the blackbird circling high above the battlefield – to the partial perspective of a Prussian storm trooper, in a very condensed fashion encapsulates a notable shift pertaining both to the form (how to tell) and the content (what to tell) of the centre’s communication. In terms of content, the episode highlights the increasing inclusion of former enemies, as the Danish kids were asked to identify, if only for a moment, with the Prussian attackers. Thus, contentwise, the reinterpretation concerns the issue of Dybbøl’s national dimension – on which I will have much more to say in chapter 5 – and a tendency to focus on the horrors of war in general, instead of on the specific and previously often glorified Danish last stand at Dybbøl in 1864. Regarding form, on which I will concentrate here, the shift suggests a tentative substitution of the distanced objectivism of the bird’s-eye view with the subjective and partial perspective of the soldier on the ground – in other words, in line with my previous analytical distinction, a shift from an ordering and rational gaze to an immersed and empathetic one. We could also, with Bann, phrase this as an example of the ‘alternation’ between different ‘museological strategies’ involving various, and shifting, perspectives on distance and proximity and these parameters’ assumed connection to yielding insight and resonance. The initial bird’s-eye view corresponds to a high modern belief in which the world is objectified, taken for granted, and subjected to assumingly unproblematic readings by the public. As an example of what Macdonald (2003: 3) labels the ‘world as exhibition’ gaze, it involves ‘a detachment of the viewer’ and a concomitant belief that it remains ‘possible to find external viewing positions from which the world would appear as ordered and complete’. Macdonald further argues that ‘this way of seeing helped “objectify” national identities’ (3) and relates this to Handler’s (1985, 1988) arguments on the objectification of the connections between territory, people and heritage.6 In the case of the Dybbøl centre, it was, as I have noted, conceived as a ‘democratic’ alternative to conventional museums, but it was also from

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its very opening firmly couched in a belief in detachment between viewer and viewed reminiscent of a ‘world as exhibition’ gaze. Hans-Ole Hansen, the founding figure and first manager of the centre, once explained to me how the centre had been designed reflecting considerations of visual facilitation. He outlined the international inspiration behind the centre and stressed the importance for such centres of presenting short, audiovisual (e.g., filmic) introductions to their subject. Such introductory shows, he said – shows that ideally should be given before the visitors’ actual, physical engagement with the site – should be ‘shows that in a direct way introduce people to: what has happened here? Or: which kind of landscape is this, what should you look for?’ He also told me that some of the U.K. and U.S. visitors’ centres that they had looked to for inspiration during the planning of the Dybbøl centre ‘had the most wonderful introductory images which caused you to … when you went out of the room, you looked at the things out there – the mountains, the valleys, or the conditions – much better’. These remarks correspond to the ambitions of the high modern museum to suggest ‘correct’ ways of seeing, and also to the ‘discourse of seeing’ at the castle museum discussed in chapter 2. In such an understanding, museums (or in this case visitors’ centres) are sites that should facilitate a ‘better’ way of gazing at the things ‘out there’. As observed by Tracey Heatherington in her discussion of national parks, these can be read as ‘attempts to superimpose order on the way visitors “see” a landscape and in so doing, it affirms a set of stories about environment, history and citizenship’ (2005: 143). Through audiovisual representation (films, slide shows, etc.), visitors’ subsequent visual engagements with the surrounding Dybbøl landscape were to be framed, guided and preinterpreted. Thus, these points on correct or ‘better’ ways of seeing also relate to the important issue of the ‘regulation’ of tourists (see Edensor 1998: 41–68) – ways to ensure, or at least render probable, that visitors move and behave in a predicted fashion. Perhaps the starkest evidence of the paradigmatic power of the bird’seye view at Dybbøl was the abundance of maps found in the relatively small centre building. This was one of the very first features that struck me when I set out on my fieldwork. When I arrived there in April 2006, the centre held countless maps; maps of Denmark, of Schleswig, of Europe, now and then, and in between; maps showing former borders and present borders; maps indicating the hometowns of Danish and German casualties from the wars; maps illustrating the movement of troops and the conquering of land; maps, even, showing the emergence and spread of the Danish folk high schools in the wake of the war, and of the communication lines of the telegraph system as of 1864; and more. On top of these many physical maps, the two key audiovisual shows were similarly dominated by

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cartography and bird’s-eye views, and featured maps with labels and arrows indicating important military manoeuvres, breakthroughs and routings in the battle. And of course, the 3-D miniature model where the squatting sessions were performed was also in a sense a map – at least when viewed from the bird’s-eye view. Why this cartographic obsession in the house so bent on experience? Of course, at the most basic level, the maps were there to illustrate and give an overview of the 1864 events. Like the castle museum’s 1863/1865 dual map, the centre maps do not lie. In my discussion (in chapter 3) of that particular exhibition element, I utilized Anderson’s image of the map as a detachable jigsaw puzzle piece to describe the processes by which the map can be turned into a banal ‘logo’, ‘pure sign, no longer compass of the world’ (1991: 175). Arguably, the maps at the battlefield centre serve similar functions of banality and authority. In Anderson’s discussion of maps depicting foreign colonies, he argues that these cannot simply be seen as neutral illustrations of land (163–85). Instead, they are interpreted as elements in a regime of possession and appropriation, characteristic of colonialism – not just depictions or models of reality, but also, and perhaps more importantly, models for reality, normative templates for how this or that land should be interpreted, gazed upon, read. Anderson sees the map, the census and the museum as three crucial tools of classification and authority of the colonial period. ‘Interlinked with one another (…), the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain’ (184). Given this inspiration, and resonating with Macdonald’s (2003) account of the formation of the national museum in the same period, the abundance of maps at the Dybbøl centre can be interpreted as conceptual tools supporting the establishing of authority and contributing to a general atmosphere of overview and order. The fact that no one could actually be bothered to read all the maps – except perhaps the anthropologist visiting over and over again – does not really matter; the maps and models served their duty as emblems of authority simply by being present. We thus see that despite its countermuseum rhetoric, the centre experience was in fact predicated, from the outset, upon a set of highly conventional assumptions about the organization of exhibits, visitors and gazes. The cartographic claims to authority suggest a high modernist rationale in which overview and reason are assumingly transmitted to the detached and distanced observer. Amidst the built-in claims to disinterested rationality and factuality, however, a powerful Danish perspective asserted itself at the centre. I shall return to the complex ‘fate of the nation’ in my next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that the 2006 centre, while going through a process of damp-

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ening national messages, was still characterized by a strong Danish bias. One found very few Prussian exhibits there, and the audiovisuals and dioramas put visitors profoundly in the shoes of Danish soldiers, hearing their voices, sharing their perspectives and their grief. In line with this overarching Danish perspective, the outdoor reconstructions, completed in 2007, were of the Danish defences only. Likewise, the scale model at which the squatting sessions were conducted did not depict any Prussian soldiers. In other words, in terms of spatial layout, material culture and display priorities, an exclusively Danish perspective continued to dominate the centre. The attempted silencing of the national biases that did indeed take place during my fieldwork thus did not really extend to the material level of centre exhibits, organization and design. Instead, it was left to the staff in their daily talks and dealings with visitors. The momentary Prussian perspective offered to the squatting school pupils at the scale model is one instance among many of such a renegotiation. This toning down of national biases was connected to another trend: an increased interest in ‘the ordinary’ as opposed to the spectacular and outstanding, coupled with a move away from heroic renderings of the Dybbøl battle. Samuel’s comment that ‘instead of being temples for the worship of the past, these museums make a fetish of informality’ (1994: 177) captures this stress on what we may call the ‘grounded private’ perspective. At the battlefield centre, this was centred on the figure of the private soldier, as opposed to the officers and decision makers of the war, and irrespective of national sympathies. Such a perspective literally approached the war experiences from the ground up – as in the case of the suggested Prussian storm trooper perspective – with all the confusion, fear and lack of overview implied in such a stance, reminiscent of the notion of ‘the fog of war’ ascribed to war theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1976). In the countless storytelling sessions conducted during my fieldwork, it was precisely the ordinary private of the war and his personal experiences, in contrast to the officers and generals of the armies, that was brought to the fore. Specifically, the story of one particular Danish 1864 soldier, Private Peter Hansen, was narrated time after time, in what was termed ‘eyewitness’ stories. This term again reflects a broader tendency in the heritage and tourism industry towards including historical ‘eyewitnesses’, or what in Germany is sometimes known as Zeitzeugen (literally ‘time witnesses’), persons who have lived through (experienced) the battle, event or period in question.7 In the case at hand, the storytellers acted as intermediaries, as they took on the role of the actual, historical eyewitnesses from 1864, sometimes speaking with ‘their’ voice in the first person or quoting from

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their letters and diaries. This was the case of Peter Hansen’s story, from which the most experienced centre storytellers were able to cite by heart. Peter’s story was not that special – it was precisely ordinary – but it was personal, and he was there. The authority of this ‘grounded private’ perspective is predicated on just that: Private Peter Hansen did in fact take part in the 1864 war; he was there. He did write letters and keep a diary. Although I never saw his original letters or diaries being physically presented to the public by storytellers, the Peter Hansen story held a basic claim to authenticity and authority. It is, however, a sort of authorization very different from that implied in the classical bird’s-eye view or ‘world as exhibition’ museum gaze, instead revolving around the personal presence of Private Hansen, as mediated by the storyteller. Contentwise, the storytellers took pains not to stress the divide between Danes and Prussians. Instead, the stories very often held basic messages of what we might term a nonheroic or perhaps ‘postheroic’ nature. By postheroic – a term borrowed from scholars of strategic and security studies (e.g., Luttwak 1995; Freedman 1998) – I mean that the stories verbalized at the Dybbøl centre of the time were no longer dominated by stories of outstanding (Danish) feats and the courageous deeds of individuals, companies and brigades (see also figure 4.2). Instead, we heard stories about such topics as bad hygiene, illness, desertion, sergeants drowning their own fears in alcohol and secret ceasefires between Danish and Prussian privates in the 1864 field. Peter Hansen’s personal story, as narrated time and again during my fieldwork, was full of postheroism: personal illness, cowardice, fraternization with the enemy and more. Typically, this specific eyewitness account was rounded off by the storyteller stressing that even though Peter ended up as a prisoner of war in Prussia, he was in fact treated exceptionally well there and released after a few months, free to return back home to his family in Denmark. The following excerpt from my field notes summarizes one storyteller’s conclusion of the Peter Hansen story as narrated to an eighth-grade school class: On the way to the prison camp, he [Peter Hansen] asked his Prussian captor for permission to go and wish his wife good-bye, which he was granted because he promised to come out again. ‘At that time a word was a word, my lads.’ Peter Hansen then went into captivity in Schweidnitz, where conditions were actually rather good, and he got back to Denmark in August ’64 and was reunited with his wife.

This is an example of the ways in which universal humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideals were stressed, at the expense of national ones, and images of enmity correspondingly softened. In sessions such as these, the basic message seemed to be that the Prussians were not bloodthirsty or evil, but

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Figure 4.2. Martin Bigum’s 1996 painting National Retreat (Millenium), a sarcastic and arguably post-heroic reinterpretation of Rosenstand’s classic piece (see figure 1.3), this time reversing the direction of movement and thus expressing a Danish rout instead of a counterattack. © Martin Bigum/ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst. Photo: Planet Foto, Bent Ryberg.

in fact civilized, even gallant (‘a word was a word’). And while the stories told were nominally about the 1864 war, the themes and issues brought forth concerned not so much this particular conflict as the nature of war and the horrors and costs of war in general. We may say that in place of conventional national boundaries, the borders at Dybbøl were increasingly being drawn on the basis of rank, with the ‘grounded private’, irrespective of nationality, symbolically pitted against the decision makers and ‘puppet masters’ behind the front lines. In the eyewitness stories, the 1864 privates were represented as enemies only on the level of technicalities – it just so happened, circumstantially, that they were on this or that side – while never depicted as bearers of deep-felt ethnonational identifications and hateful sentiments towards their counterparts. Indeed, ‘they were all people’ and ‘it was not their war’ (implying it was the politicians’ war) were two recurring statements in the centre’s storytelling sessions during my fieldwork.

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Finding Your (Own) Way: Visitor Practices at the Battlefield Centre The drive towards personified, experiential and postheroic war history interpretation I have identified at the Dybbøl centre thus coexisted with a strong, high modern legacy based on order, distance and classification. In the following, I shift my focus to the activities of centre visitors, to explore how they coped with the communicative milieu at hand – how they appropriated, engaged with, challenged, played with and transformed the Dybbøl heritage to meet their own ends. I discuss findings and patterns of my visitor material on the basis of field examples, mainly drawn from my video specs recordings. First, however, a few notes on the general structure of a visit to the battlefield centre will serve to stress the surprisingly strict visitor regulation that characterized the centre during my fieldwork. Upon arrival and admission, every single visitor and/or group was instructed orally on the route to take through the compound and the outdoor yard. This was not merely a casual bit of useful advice afforded to tourists, but a strict rundown of the ‘correct’ route to take, orchestrated by the ticket staff, with one specific senior staff member usually in charge (see figure 4.3). A typical verbal instruction from the centre’s most experienced front desk staff member – this one given in English to a group of foreign visitors and supported by her handing out a small map detailing the centre compound – went like this: In this house, we have four doors, A, B, C and D. Behind door A, I show three small films that last sixteen minutes in total. They show why the war came in 1864. When you have seen the film, you go out through door B to the diorama. Door C leads outside, where we have reconstructed parts of a Danish redoubt. And lastly, behind door D we show you a completely different film about the day of the storm. Thus, it is two very different films that you are going to see. (from field notes)

Note that nowhere were the visitors seemingly given a choice. This was laid out as the route the visitors would take through the centre. When I asked her why she was always so insistent on passing on this litany to every single visitor, the front desk staff member explained to me: ‘What I’m doing is to explain to you how you get the most out of your money. After that, we absolutely do not force people to do anything. You can walk around exactly as you please. But most people are very grateful to me for giving that explanation.’ Indeed, most visitors did seem happy about the strict instructions they were given at the ticket sales. In general, they took and followed the instructions, and almost all visitors I spoke to described the ticket staff as friendly, serviceable and informative, although a few of them

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Figure 4.3. A tool of information, and of regulation. Map of the open-air sections of the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre. Reproduced from a handout offered to centre visitors, 2006.

also grinningly noted that this particular staff member seemed somewhat persistent in her rigid guidance. In other words, visitors generally seemed to like to be regulated. They liked to feel that their visit was structured according to a master plan. All of my centre visitor interviewees, except for one couple (who said that they did not like to go in groups and preferred to find their own way around), told me they had taken the ticket staff’s advice on the intended route. Likewise, my video material contains ample references to ‘what she said’, referring to the front desk staff and discussions among the visitors of where the different doors were located and where they were ‘supposed’ to go next. In a related fashion, many paid close attention to the centre map that had been handed out to them at the ticket booth. All of this amounts to a general desire for order and structure. Following my discussion of cartographic overload and map-based authority at the centre, we may say that visitors in general seemed to enjoy the sense of a ‘cartographic’ authorization of and structure to their own visit. But my

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visitor material also demonstrates that along with such a longing for order and regulation, we find something else – a liking or even demand for opportunities to experience a loosening of this orderly structure, a space in which to employ their own creativity and engage in multisensory exploration of the site and its opportunities.

Video Case: Navigating the Blockhouse This Danish family consisted of a couple in their forties and two sons of fourteen and eight, respectively, holidaying in the area. The video specs were worn by the father. This is an excerpt from the family’s two-minute visit to the blockhouse, a rectangular, reconstructed wooden shelter located in the middle of the centre courtyard. In the yard, the father (F) walks directly towards the blockhouse’s open door, but then shifts his focus and goes to inspect the massive timber posts on the outside corner of the house, touching them, and then says: ‘Take a look at the timber they have built this from.’ Eldest son (E): ‘Yes.’ They walk into the blockhouse, kids first, stepping over the tall doorstep into the shadow inside. In here, a miniature model of the blockhouse and the retractable bridge is located immediately on the left. F says about the model: ‘There you can see how it is built up.’ Mother (M) walks on deeper inside, heads towards the raised wooden platform that runs along the inner wall, says: ‘Oh, this was where they [I think she refers to one of the storytellers] said you should go up and peep out [of the gun slits]. Then the grenades could go right in here, wrooom.’ F walks up on the platform too, moves closely up to a gun slit, says: ‘Yes. But that was because the wood was not as thick here [by the gun slits], right?’ Meanwhile, the younger son (Y) has ventured deeper into the long house and found the chest with soldiers’ equipment that the storytellers employ during their group tours. He calls for his elder brother: ‘Rasmus!’ No reaction. Y whistles, and then calls again, still to no avail. F looks round and walks towards the youngster, finding his way through the massive wooden posts supporting the house’s roof, seemingly taking care not to bump his head. In the background, E says: ‘Do you think they built it in full size?’ F goes up to Y, who is bent over the equipment chest, gazing through its glass lid, his hands folded on his back. Y lists the stuff he can see in it: ‘A sword, a hat, a bag, two guns . . .’ F gives a small ‘mmm’ in support and says: ‘That there is a breech loader, I bet.’ Y: ‘That was the type of gun, you know, we saw there … [at an earlier point of their visit]. It isn’t fully automatic.’ F then turns and walks back towards his wife, who is now studying the miniature model in the corner, touching the felt put on its surface to resemble grass.

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Meanwhile, E has stepped up on the raised platform and is peeping out of one of the gun slits. Y follows his father back and can be heard in the background saying to his big brother: ‘Over there [by the chest] are swords and guns and stuff.’ M pads the felt again, says [to her husband]: ‘It was quite smart to pour earth on top of it [the blockhouse], don’t you think?’ Simultaneously, E, joined now by his little brother, says from his position at the gun slit: ‘What I don’t get is … when they stand here, what are they supposed to shoot at?’ F looks at the boys, E gesticulating as if he is holding a gun in his hands in support of his question [I think his puzzlement derives from the fact that this side of the blockhouse faces inwards, towards the inner yard of the redoubt]. F: ‘If anyone attempts to get over … right?’ Y: ‘But, if there is gunpowder … or ammunition, and if they have broken through, then …’ The brothers keep talking in the background while F walks further into the house, towards a second door located at the far end. The others follow him. He stops at the door, turns round, waiting for the others. Then there is a low sound as if F knocks a few times on the massive wooden door [I think]. M: ‘Wow, what a door.’ F: ‘Yes.’ They all leave the house through the side door.

This particular recording gives an impression of the interpretive efforts and practices of centre visitors, employing both visual and more bodily modes of perception. The powerful multisensoriness of the experience of the wooden blockhouse is evident, with family members feeling and smelling the wood, touching the felt on the miniature model, and physically navigating the house, peeping out of the gun slits, taking up imitated shooting positions and watching out for their heads. The blockhouse clearly addressed many senses at once, and in that respect neatly exemplifies the general experiential trends in the heritage sector. Urry sums up these currents thus: No longer are visitors expected to stand in awe of the exhibits. More emphasis is being placed on the participation by visitors in the exhibits themselves. ‘Living’ museums replace ‘dead’ museums, open-air museums replace those under cover, sound replaces hushed silence, visitors are not separated from the exhibits by glass, and there is a multi-mediatisation of the exhibit. (2002: 119)

This, of course, resonates perfectly well with the ‘countermuseum’ selfimage that I have already described in which the centre staff were at pains to point out the tactile, participatory and non-museum-like qualities of their institution. The full-size blockhouse reconstruction facilitated pre-

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Figure 4.4. Visitors in the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre’s reconstructed open-air redoubt. Photo by the author.

cisely such multisensory and improvised immersive practice. We see in the example above how the family members got involved, physically and creatively, engaging with and interpreting the war heritage in playful and subjective ways, while in the process working to make sense of the site in terms of information they had picked up earlier during their visit. They let their curiosity take them through the building in unstructured and disorderly, explorative fashion (see figure 4.4). However, this is but one side of the experience. I want to draw attention to another point that I believe points to the duality of the heritage practice, namely, the miniature model positioned in the corner of the blockhouse, and the visitors’ use of it. Speaking from a ‘realist’ point of view – that is, one that focuses on the level of correspondence between the reconstructed blockhouse and its original 1864 counterpart – surely the scale model did not fit here. In other words, if the blockhouse, a major and prestigious construction project for the centre, was to make sense as an ‘authentic’ reconstruction of an 1864 blockhouse – and centre staff were very keen on its alleged authenticity and on getting the historical details right – it seems hard to justify having the scale model inside: surely, no real 1864 blockhouses were fitted out with miniature models of themselves. The model nevertheless clearly appealed to people. Visitors flocked towards it, obviously enjoying the condensed view it gave them of this mas-

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sive and somewhat confusing structure and, indeed, of the centre’s larger reconstruction project. Here, visitors were offered a glimpse of the efforts of the centre and the modern yet ‘historical’ craftsmanship that had gone into it. And like the miniature redoubt model where the squatting sessions were conducted, the blockhouse and bridge models provided the visitors with a brilliant bird’s-eye view. None of the tourists I talked to and followed raised an eyebrow at the placement of a miniature blockhouse inside the ‘real’ (reconstruction of a) blockhouse. They seemed to find its presence logical, even self-explanatory. ‘Here you can see how it is built up’, as the father simply noted in the above. In his study of the Indonesian Taman Mini theme park, boasting a range of scale models of the nation’s monuments and buildings, John Pemberton quotes from an Indonesian schoolbook in which a school class is taken to the park and to its miniature of the famed Borobodur monument: ‘Only now am I able to clearly understand The Borobodur,’ said Lina, ‘because up until now I’ve just seen its photograph.’ ‘With a miniature like this, we can see it in its entirety more clearly. If we went to The Borobodur, what would be visible would certainly be larger, the reliefs clear. But as to which door we entered, sometimes we’d get confused’ [instructs the teacher]. (Siswoyo 1978, quoted in Pemberton 1994: 246–47)

Even though parallels between Indonesian schoolbooks and Danish heritage tourism may at first glance seem odd, in my view the theme park’s (high) modernist devotion to order and clarity as a remedy against ‘confusion’ can be likened to the case of the Danish centre. In both cases, ‘understanding’ the structure in question hinges, at least partly, on a sense of overview and visual distancing from its messy full-size materiality. One way of understanding visitor practice at Dybbøl, I suggest, is by viewing it as predicated exactly on an ongoing interplay between aspirations towards both overview and confusion. The visitors’ enjoyment was derived from practicing both perspectival positions, and especially from alternating between them, as illustrated repeatedly in my field material. What this amounts to, then, is an understanding of tourist practice revolving around the (mostly unreflective) back-and-forth movement between distanced bird’s-eye viewing and more immersive and multisensory practices. This mirrors what I identified as ‘rational distancing’ and ‘empathetic immersion’ modalities of engagement at the castle museum. In the field excerpt above, as well as during the rest of the recording of this family’s centre visit, one finds a continuous interchange between the two modes of relating to the site and its tangibles. For example, the family experimented with ink writing and bullet casting at the centre’s smithy and

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explored the reconstructed moat on foot, but also took time to get their bearings and obtain an overview according to more conventional, panoramic patterns. One particularly illuminating piece of documentation of this is a video recording excerpt from the family’s short stop at the centre’s viewing point, which was, at the time, located on the compound’s highest point of elevation. It constituted essentially a classic panoramic viewpoint, framed by a wooden railing on which a number of information boards were attached, depicting and describing, in short informative prose, the scenery of the battlefield below.

Video Case: Panoramic Visions The father (F) walks towards the viewing point with his family members behind. He looks down at the moat and the bridge, then reaches the railing with a series of white information boards on it. Here, he stops and looks at the boards, presumably reading them, while the mother (M) and younger brother (Y) can be heard talking in the background. F looks out into the horizon, then down at the signs, and up again after a few seconds. As the others join him, F points out towards the horizon beyond the centre compound, with the map in his hand, and says: ‘I wonder whether that over there is the Kongeskanse [literally translatable as the ‘king’s redoubt’]. What you see over there. Or …’ The two sons have taken up positions at the railing, the elder brother (E) resting a hand on it. M: [in the background] ‘But can’t you see that [on the information boards]?’ F: ‘I think it is [the Kongeskanse]’. He looks up and down again a few times, his gaze alternating between the horizon and the information boards, then says: ‘When you look here [at the board], see? Then I figure that that over there must be the Kongeskanse.’ He looks up and down a few more times, slowly moving on. M says from behind [on seeing a guided tour group some distance away, in the moat, accompanied by a storyteller]: ‘It would also probably be good fun to hear those stories.’ F: ‘Yes.’ They move on slowly while F reads the boards in front of him. Y then asks: ‘Daddy?’ (F: ‘Yes?’) ‘How is it to wear that stuff?’ [referring to the video equipment] F, while they walk on, says: ‘You don’t feel it.’

In this recording, the family’s ‘panoramic’ practice was evident, as the specs-wearing father’s eyes flipped continuously up and down as he decoded the landscape in front of him according to the textual and graphic information of the boards. The viewing station – which has, since my fieldwork, been

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taken down – with its wooden railing and information boards invited and afforded a certain range of visitor practices. While it cannot be said, of course, to have forced or determined the visitors’ engagements or experiences, the material setup constituted a familiar and suggestive framework, with the railing providing for bodily support and, together with the line of information boards, also demarcating the area in which people were encouraged to pause and take in the surroundings (see Edensor 2002: 70). Of course, it also guided the direction of their actual gazes, organizing the ‘world as exhibition’ for viewers. While the above constitutes a textbook example of a panoramic (or bird’s-eye view) engagement with the war landscape, not everyone went about his or her viewing in the same structured and distanced manner. Below, my transcription of a video recording excerpt from another Danish family’s activities at the same viewing station presents a rather different way of making sense of the Dybbøl heritage. This group of visitors transformed the information and impressions at hand into their own very personal interpretation of the 1864 war events.

Video Case: Expanding on the War Again, the video specs are worn by a father (F) in his forties. He is here with his wife (M), his eleven-year-old son (S) and his seven-year-old daughter (D). The family has just left the blockhouse and walks along the side of it, where a large log is resting horizontally on two wooden blocks, running parallel with the blockhouse. D sees the log, points and shouts: ‘Oh, daddy, look! You can walk the tightrope!’ F: ‘Then jump up there.’ D changes her mind, says: ‘No, I don’t want to.’ F: ‘I see.’ Walking on, F says: ‘They have probably . . . this [the log] is probably just a piece of wood which they are going to work at, to make it into those [the processed blockhouse timber], I suppose.’ They reach a workbench with a fascine on it, located at the end of the blockhouse, next to the gateway palisade, and F points to the fascine and continues: ‘Just like this here. This has probably been . . .’ M: ‘You think they have been standing here, maintaining it [the palisade]?’ F: ‘I sure do. They have been working on it constantly, yes, and repaired it whenever they were being shot at, don’t you think?’ The son (S) jumps up the two steps of the palisade, looking out above the palisade posts, then pretends he is holding a gun and firing it. He then jumps down again and runs up the stairs, followed by D, then M and lastly F.

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M says, just before reaching the top of the hill: ‘Oh, there’s a good view from here.’ S, turning and looking out over the fields, says: ’Do you think I’d be able to hit a cow from here?’ D: ‘A cow?’ S says something [indecipherable] and walks towards the viewing point. The others follow. M: ‘Today there are cows here. There weren’t any back then, you know.’ D: [shouts] ‘There’s the rolling [retractable] bridge!’ They talk a bit about the retractable bridge. [Here follow a few seconds of instability in the recording] They then stop at the viewing point. F: ‘If you were to get some troops over the bridge in a hurry, then you had the bridge and you could simply draw it in quickly. That was …’ S: ‘Dead smart.’ D: ‘Daddy? Daddy?’ F: ‘Yes?’ D: ‘Erm … you can go down into the moat. And you can also go across the bridge.’ F: ‘Yes. I’d say, I don’t think …’ M reads one of the information boards, says: ‘An open redoubt, it says, it’s supposed to be that.’ S points down toward the bridge below: ‘But daddy, it’s no good having a bridge there, because there’s a gate there. Then you could just run up there [points over to the right and draws a circle] and up here.’ F: ‘Yes, right, but this is only part of …’ M reads on, says: ‘Here it says that Danish redoubt no. 7 was a so-called open redoubt which was not protected by a rampart on its rear side … It was difficult to defend this redoubt. You can understand that.’ F: ‘Yes.’ He looks towards the north, pauses for a few seconds, then continues: ‘Of course, they [the Prussian attackers] utilized their knowledge of the [Danish] redoubts, so they knew they had to … that’s why they came this way [points] via the the Sound of Als and then came down the other way round [turns while pointing out the circle he believes the Prussians to have taken]. And then they suddenly attack the [Danish] positions from the other side, from their weak side, perhaps, you see?’ D plays around with her sweater, listening to but hardly following her father’s explanation, but S listens closely and says: ‘Yes.’ F goes on: ‘And when they [the Prussians] then surprise them [the Danes] by drawing attention to … with such a heavy bombardment of [the town of ] Sønderborg, and of this position, so that all attention is turned towards this point – then they can more or less undisturbed cross the Sound of Als. That was smart.’ S: ‘Yes.’ D: ‘Look, now they are crossing the bridge!’ F turns his gaze towards the bridge, where two people are crossing, and says: ‘Yes.’ They all stroll back to the stairs from whence they came.

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This family – just as the one in my blockhouse example – engaged physically with the material reconstructions and the landscape, the son taking up position by the palisade, the daughter wanting to walk the log, etc. The tangible qualities and the spatial layout of the heritage milieu obviously afforded and encouraged bodily engagement. What I want to stress, however, is another point regarding the reflections and interpretations that this family’s navigation of the staged surroundings gave rise to. The father in particular tended to constantly verbalize his ongoing interpretation of the 1864 war episodes, drawing upon different sources of information, some of which he had evidently been picking up throughout his centre visit. In a strict historical sense, much of his interpretation work was highly conjectural. His unfolding of the ‘cunning’ Prussian battle plan, for instance, was definitely not in line with history books on the matter. The key focus for my current discussion, however, is not historical accuracy, but the extraordinary creativity displayed in this subjective appropriation of the Dybbøl events. Persistently and enthusiastically, and assisted by his family, this visitor kept conjuring up, expanding upon and transforming different tales of war and schemes of history that made sense to him. He seemingly could not help spinning stories and obviously enjoyed the challenge of trying to interpret the site as he walked along. What this example highlights, then, is the way in which the centre’s layout and form fostered creativity, and not only in terms of multisensory and physical affordances, but also when it comes to stimulating imagination. Visitors, at the viewpoint and elsewhere, of course directed their eyes towards certain points and vistas. But this was no simple or simply ocular activity. A number of theorists – often relying on implicit or explicit inspiration from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (e.g. 1962) – have argued for a stronger focus on the embodiedness of perception and of ‘seeing’ (e.g., Ingold 2000a; Crouch 2002; Edensor 2006). For my current purposes, the relevant point is not merely that tourists engage other senses in their ‘visual’ engagement, but also that they conjure up or imagine the sensory qualities of the stuff they look at. In the words of Crouch, ‘[e]mbodiment presented as only a physical phenomenon is incomplete. It is necessary to relate that physicality to imagination, to social contexts and to a “making sense” of practice and of space’ (2002: 209–10). The above example suggests exactly this: visitors’ centre experiences must not be conceptualized as merely bodily or physical, but as deeply connected to imaginations, memories and scenarios invoked on-site. The father pieced together different bits of information and prior knowledge in his attempts to present his family with a coherent picture. On some occasions, his guesswork corre-

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sponded fairly well to ‘historical fact’, and on others – as in this particular excerpt – it did not. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty, Crouch stresses the mental dimension of gazing, or rather of ‘making sense’. Even though we do, of course, at any given moment ‘see’ things, places, exhibit, and so on from one particular physical viewpoint, our perception of them is not restricted to this visual perspective. Instead, says Crouch, ‘places and their contents are seen from numerous angles and are apprehended as fractured but recomposed in mental processes’ (212). In other words, even though we only see a part, we imagine the whole.8 The family father’s striving for coherence, then, can be seen as one example of such a holistic apprehension. Importantly, however, his creative and explorative stance went hand in hand with a feeling of having been enlightened. At another point during this walk, the father thus remarked to his wife: ‘I definitely know more about this [1864 war] now than I have for many years. I might have known about it once, but I happily forgot. I think the [introductory] film in there gave a really good overview of the situation in a very short time.’ Once again, then, we see the creativity, immersion and self-exploration being balanced by an expressed feeling of enlightenment, structure and knowledge. The two perspectives performed in the squatting sessions at the scale model, the all-encompassing bird’s-eye view and the partial soldier-on-the-ground perspective, were thus replayed in the actual performances of the centre visitors. They embraced the disorderly and self-explorative modes of experiencing the war site, but they also craved orderly and panoramic enlightenment amidst their immersive practices.

A Sense of Ordered Disorder Visitor practice at the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre can be fruitfully analysed as an interplay between two perspectival modes, the ‘bird’s-eye’ view and the ‘grounded private’ experience. Even if the centre intuitively seemed to incarnate the latter, or what Bann called the ‘synechdochic’ stance – reconstructing parts of a Danish 1864 redoubt and aiming to provide visitors with a sense of the experience of ‘being there’ – my centre findings indicate that there were also distinctly high modern ordering processes at work. Transgressing Bann’s original either/or dichotomy, my material thus demonstrates that even within the walls of a single heritage institution, the two modes of appropriating the past operated in tandem, if also occasionally in tension. This supplements my analysis of the war wing of the castle

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museum well, a key point of which was precisely that visitors engaged in a similar two-pronged practice in which they embraced immersive or even romantic empathetic identification in a seemingly strictly high modernist spatial setting. Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes, in their edited volume Travels in Paradox (2006b), are among the few who have taken up and utilized Lash’s arguments on the second modernity in the service of tourism studies. The coexistence, in my analysis, of two apparently opposed modalities of perception parallels the main ‘paradox’ identified by Minca and Oakes, who argue that ‘the more we seek to order the world through which we travel, the more it confronts us with disorder’ (2006a: 15). Their book grapples with such contradictory modern tendencies, demonstrating, on the one hand, how tourists set out to map, structure and order their world in a cognitive sense, and yet on the other hand seek out and indulge in transgressions of this order in search of the unknown. Minca and Oakes state that: ‘Despite our desire for order, and despite relying on an industry that seeks to provide for this desire, travel nevertheless results in a paradoxical experience of ordered disorder’ (15, italics in original). While the notion of ‘ordered disorder’ may at first seem far-fetched and oxymoronic, I believe it does in fact convey a very concise diagnosis of the ambivalence characterizing the heritage practice at Dybbøl. My material is ripe with documentation of such a double desire to (on the one hand) ‘order’ the world and grasp the relations between nations, peoples, friends and enemies, and so on, while (on the other hand) immersing oneself, playing with and getting lost in the messy ‘disorder’ that the place afforded. In opposition to an Enlightenment rationality of progress, order, homogeneity and cognition, such a ‘second’ modern mode of being entails acceptance and even embracement of the contingent, confusing and disordered experience of modern existence. It includes a reflective ‘sensibility that accepts indeterminacy’, as Edensor puts it in his contribution to Minca and Oakes’s volume (Edensor 2006: 37). Quoting Lash, Edensor continues: While sensations pertain to reality, they can only indicate potential meaning and are therefore ‘not graspable by concepts, but only via feeling, only via the imagination’ (Lash 1999: 200). Emerging from the romantic imagination and fuelled by the dynamism of modernity, this sensibility wallows in the contingent and the indecipherable in search of sensation. (Edensor 2006: 37)

The video examples I have analysed in this chapter document such tendencies. The creative and innovative father coming up with his own flow of interpretation was caught up with, and attempting to navigate in, the inspirations that the reconstructed heritage milieu facilitated. His conjec-

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tural interpretive practice was tentative and suggestive; a work in progress, so to speak, to which he invited his family to contribute to and expand on. His stream of consciousness was precisely ‘not graspable by concepts, only via the imagination’. Still, as I have continually been pointing out, visitors anchored such explorative engagements and playful guesswork in the simultaneously ‘orderly’ and rational framework also provided at the centre: the maps, models, films, panoramas and other nodes of reason, ordering and high modernist clarification.

Notes 1. Original Danish wording: ‘Hyppigt kaldes Historiecenter Dybbøl Banke for et museum. Men centeret opfatter sig selv anderledes! (…) Vi regner os for et videnpædagogisk aktivitetscenter, dvs et center, hvor man ved hjælp af aktiviteter på pædagogisk måde giver indsigt i fortiden.’ 2. Gerhard Schulze’s earlier (1992) thesis on the ‘experience society’ is less business oriented but more comprehensive in its sociological claims. 3. For countercritiques, see, e.g., Urry (2002) and Samuel (1994). For a detailed overview of the debate, see L. Smith (2006: 11–43). 4. For another and more explicit critique of this strand of postmodernism, see Bruner (1994). 5. During my fieldwork, the annual number of school groups (each consisting typically of twenty to sixty pupils plus accompanying teachers) visiting the centre was around seven hundred, peaking in April–May and August–September, when up to seven or eight such groups might visit the centre on a single day. 6. In this argument, Macdonald (2003) thus also links, or perhaps collapses, the admittedly artificial analytical distinction between form and content – between ways of seeing and what is being seen – that I have set up here. 7. See, e.g., Jarausch and Sabrow (2002) for a discussion of this trend. 8. See also Ingold (2000b: 226–28) on Merleau-Ponty and ‘how to see the world from everywhere at once’, as well as Willerslev (2007) for an ethnographic account of the merits of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘having the world at a distance’.

Chapter 5

T F   N   B C D     , ,  D ment. Yet, I was struck by the degree to which staff members at the battlefield centre in 2006 strove to consciously avoid overt references to issues of national feelings or nationhood. This chapter is about this seeming paradox, about making sense of national heritage at a time when ‘the nation’ was widely taken to be a concept fraught with political incorrectness. Thus, it concerns the fate of the nation as a concept and as a somewhat outmoded, yet inescapable key theme in the day-to-day operation of the battlefield centre. The chapter documents the ways in which a current of reconciliatory, inclusive or cosmopolitan agendas and interests were impacting on the centre and its activities during the time of my fieldwork, amounting to what I term a ‘civic cleansing’ of the centre’s ethnonational elements. As part of my analysis of that movement, I discuss the ambiguous attitude of staff and decision makers towards the notion of ‘play’ and its relations to the centre experience. I then turn towards analysing, in some detail, the issue of national feeling and belonging in my visitor material, and the complex ways in which national interests and sympathies were on the one hand often denied relevance, yet on the other hand asserted themselves powerfully if ‘banally’ with many visitors. I discuss how, despite the attempted toning down, or even erasure, of the centre’s original Danish bias, the nation was still firmly there, always already present, lingering in the very materiality and historicity of the site. In the last part of the chapter, I explore some peculiar differences between the majority perspectives of Danish visitors and the more critical views relating to the perceived ‘playfulness’ of the centre, expressed especially by German tourists.

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Civic Cleansings of Ethnic Nationalism At its 1992 opening, the centre was shot through with heroism, sacrifice and Volksgeist. It was conceived, as detailed in chapter 1, in a profoundly ethnic or romantic national spirit, and with a clear if indirect reference to the Scandinavian open-air museum movement. I quoted the centre architects, who considered the centre ‘a romantic monument to Danishness’, a ‘testimony to courage, strength and will to survival’ and ‘the proof that Denmark was worthy of survival as a nation’ (Freddie and Lohse 1989, quoted in Adriansen 1992: 281). Surprisingly, at the time of my fieldwork, less than two decades onwards, staff members seemed to struggle to consciously avoid overt references to issues of nationality. As touched upon in my discussion of the centre’s ‘eyewitness’ stories, centre narratives were increasingly moulded along inclusive lines in which expressions of Danish sacrifice and Danish/Prussian enmities were softened, and general and ‘postheroic’ conditions of warfare were stressed instead. A number of the centre’s original installations, still in use during my fieldwork but dating back to its opening in 1992, conveyed a distinctly romantic, heroic vision of the Dybbøl defeat and the Danish spirit held to saturate the site, while not leaving much room for the Prussian perspective. I will give a few examples. A key product in this regard was an audiovisual piece entitled The Day of the Storm. This seventeen-minute show, running in loops in one of the centre’s two small cinemas, was completed in 1986, well before the centre building itself; in fact, it had formed part of the initial applications for centre funding. Thus, it can be seen as a central, tangible product or ‘file’ informing the decision-making process that led to the erection of the centre. Interestingly for my analytical purposes, The Day of the Storm show has since then (during 2008–9) undergone editing to bring it into line with a more inclusive view of the Prussians. I will go on to discuss this revisionary effort towards the end of this chapter, but first, I will discuss its 2006 incarnation, as it appeared during my fieldwork. At that point, the audience was presented with a series of slides with dramatic battle motifs from Danish period paintings, accompanied by a relentless soundtrack of Prussian shells raining down on the Danish defences. A voice-over narrated the story of the Prussian storm on 18 April 1864 as experienced by Danish soldiers, based on quotes from letters and diaries.1 The show faded out to the slow tune of one of the best-known Danish protest songs from the time of German rule, Johan Ottosen’s ‘Det haver saa nyligen regnet’.2 With its recognizable tune and use of evocative nature metaphors, the song has long formed part of mainstay Danish school curricula and thus of a shared cultural repertoire. In recent years, the power-

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ful, militant imagery of the song’s lyrics has been regularly utilized for pro-Danish causes. One example hails from the 2005–6 ‘cartoon controversy’ escalating into a diplomatic crisis between Denmark and the Muslim world, when Pia Kjærsgård, then leader of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, invoked the song’s line that ‘seeds of weed have flown across the fence’ in her reference to contemporary Muslim immigrants in Denmark (see also this book’s introduction).3 Though only performed instrumentally at the centre, the tune’s defiantly nationalist, anti-German lyrics underlay The Day of the Storm show in tacit fashion. This nonvocal, yet undeniably romantic national expression of Danish defiance is a telling example of the banal but ever-present national spirit lingering here. The Danish nation (and/or people, community, strength and so on) was rarely praised or heralded in any direct fashion at the centre, and, indeed, most of my visitor informants – to whose interpretations I shall return – did not verbalize national belonging as a major theme of their visit. The Day of the Storm show is only one example of how the centre was initially conceptualized as a Danish-only monument to the 1864 war. In other centre sections, the Danish perspective was similarly dominant. This was perhaps most literally the case in the diorama, another installation dating back to the early centre. I have already discussed the diorama’s intermediate position between immersion – ‘being there’ in the Danish trenches – and distance, maintained by glass and viewing platform. In this dark room, visitors, whether immersed or distanced, were invited to share the Danish view of soldiers manning an 1864 trench, literally sharing their perspective as they stared across the sound toward the Prussian lines. Underneath the loudspeakers’ loud and continuous rain of grenades, visitors could make out the muttered voices of the Danish soldiers, moaning and swearing about the Prussian shelling and their own poorer weaponry preventing them from returning fire. Here, visitors were sworn in as battle brothers on the Danish side, sharing collective desperations and enmities. These few examples will suffice to document the original (1992) battlefield centre stance, characterized by a rather explicit pro-Danish and antiPrussian outlook. The centre founder’s comment, quoted earlier, that the original idea was that ‘if the Germans want to tell their 1864 history, they must build a centre on the other side of the border’ illustrates this ideological point of departure rather bluntly. The material layout and spacing of the centre, and especially the parts of it dating back to its founding, suggested a profoundly one-sided reading of the Dybbøl battle. The revisionary effort that was nevertheless salient in 2006 took place mostly on the verbal level of face-to-face interpretation, such as we have seen in the

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case of the ‘eyewitness’ stories from the 1864 front. What motivated such a reconfiguration? A decisive factor was the influence of the Sønderborg Castle Museum, which took over centre operations in 2004. As will be recalled, the museum’s academics had been opposing the battlefield centre’s communication strategies and take on the Danish defeat right from the centre’s opening. Since it was put under the wings of the larger museum, the centre’s new museum superiors had sought to subtly counter its Danish bias and work towards a more inclusive and impartial stance on the war site. The symbolic ‘balancing act’ performed during the annual wreathlaying ceremony, discussed in chapter 2, is one example. One way of conceptualizing the initial opposition between museum and centre is along a theory of clashing conceptions of nationhood, ‘civic’ versus ‘ethnic’. The early battlefield centre obviously epitomized an ethnonational stance, with the primordial Danish Volksgeist understood to be inherent in this mythical site – as evidenced, for instance, by the centre architects’ expressions on the romantic qualities of the place. On the other hand, the museum, as we have seen, institutionalized a distinctly civic approach to issues of nationhood and an exhibition policy dedicated to ideals of enlightenment, detachment and reason. When I talked to the castle museum’s head curator, Peter Dragsbo, about his museum’s recent takeover of the centre operation, he stressed the importance of opposing black-andwhite ‘us versus them’ communication of the 1864 war: The [battlefield] centre should demonstrate war technology and the everyday life of the soldiers, but we cannot let situations arise in which the audience thinks ‘we’ and ‘them’. I remember saying to the storytellers up there: you must never say ‘we’, you must say ‘the Danish army’ and ‘the Prussian army’. You cannot say ‘we’ and ‘them’. And about this [group conducting historical] reenactment: I do not want to see them fight Danes versus Germans. But I would like to see them perform an extended advance, or fire systematic volleys, and all the rest.

This, in my analysis, is a very clear instance of the civic-minded museum curator confronting ethnonational elements: the 1864 centre was not (any longer) to be connected to a sense of ‘we’ versus ‘them’. It was not to evoke national emotions. Costumed reenactment and hands-on interpretation were deemed acceptable as long as they restricted themselves to rational research and pure demonstration (‘extended advance’, ‘systematic volley’), severed from specific content and the evocation of national feeling. We see, then, a definite reversal in the centre’s outlook over the course of less than two decades. Despite having been envisaged at its opening in 1992 as a guardian of and monument to Danishness – to remind ‘us’ about ‘our’ identity and the Danish ‘courage, strength, and will to survival’, in

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the words of its architects – centre staff in 2006 were instructed not to phrase their visitor communication along national lines.

The Thrill of the Big Bang: Feeling Dybbøl on the Ramparts How were such behind-the-scenes concerns and revisionary currents expressed and practiced in the day-to-day communication and encounters between staff and visitors at the battlefield centre? I want to move on towards a more detailed charting of the day-to-day concretizations of these abstract themes and the ways in which centre visitors coped with issues of national feeling. To ground my visitor data analysis, and literally ignite the discussion, I provide, below, a vignette from the field, taking us into the heart of one of the centre’s signature activities: its cannon firing demonstrations. Through the lens of the cannon sessions, a number of themes and frictions of key relevance to my study can be approached: the role of visitor participation, experience and thrill; the question of authenticity and the original versus the reproduction; the ambiguous status of ‘play’ in connection to war commemoration; and, of course, the vexing issue of national belonging. The firing of the centre’s replica cannon constituted the climax of any summer visit to the battlefield centre. Visitors arriving immediately prior to a cannon demonstration – of which there were four per day in the 2006 high season – would be instructed by the ticket staff, normally very keen on visitors following the intended route through the centre, to forfeit this and go straight to the cannon bank to witness the firing, and then return to the standard itinerary afterwards. The cannon sessions were the only centre activities to be marked out by staff like this, indicating their status as the key events of any summer visit to the battlefield centre. At this particular demonstration, taking place on a warm day of July 2006, a crowd had begun to gather at the ramparts even before the storyteller in charge had shown up. Some had probably noted the sign announcing the schedule – ‘We show you how to load a muzzle-loading cannon. You may even be lucky enough to get to join the cannon team!’ – while others would have been instructed by different staff members that the cannon was about to be let off. In any case, around twenty-five visitors had already taken up position here as the storyteller arrived, the number growing to between fifty and sixty over the next few minutes. Most were summer holidaying Danish families; roughly one-fifth were children aged ten or younger. The storyteller, a man around forty clad in low-key jeans and T-shirt, positioned himself on the rampart in the corner of the centre grounds,

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next to the centre’s replica cannon. This particular piece of armament was a smaller version of the centre’s full-size field cannon (also a replica) and was situated right next to this larger gun, which – out of security measures and bureaucratic hassles concerning the obtaining of licences from local police – was only let off on very special occasions, such as the annual Dybbøl Day. Standing on the rampart, the storyteller was slightly elevated from the crowd forming a semicircle below. Before the actual loading procedure, he opened the session with a short talk on the technicalities of different cannon types. In particular, he dwelled upon the difference between the Danish unrifled muzzle loaders and the Prussian rifled breech loaders. The superior rifled artillery, we were informed, had a much longer range, allowing the Prussians to undertake what he termed a ‘systematic devastation of the Danish cannons’ while staying out of range of the Danish guns. Picking up two small pebbles from the ground, the storyteller then exemplified the different trajectories of missiles from the two cannon types by tossing each stone a few metres, the first one (illustrating a curved, unrifled gun trajectory) thrown underhand, the second one (straighter, ‘rifled’) thrown overhand. The flat trajectory of the Prussian guns took the Danes by surprise, he told us, and recounted one particularly illuminating 1864 incident in which thirty-nine Danish soldiers, sheltered in presumed safety in a heavily built wooden blockhouse, were killed by one flat-flying Prussian missile – ‘because it could fly straight through the gun slits instead of landing on top of the four hundred tonnes of earth stacked on top of the blockhouse’. Moving on, the storyteller spelled out the sheer horror of the morning bombardment of 18 April 1864, during which eight thousand shells poured down upon the Danish positions in the course of just six hours. Realizing, he told me afterwards, that such abstract figures were hard to grasp for the public, he went on to ‘translate’ them, so to speak, or break them down into graspable entities, explaining to the crowd that this tempo equalled one explosion every third second. In support of this rendition, he then began counting out loud, clapping his hands loudly on every third beat to evoke the speed of the devastation: ‘21-22-[clap!]-2425-[clap!]…’, and so on. The verbal information given at such demonstrations varied. On other occasions, the storytellers might expand on alternative technical subjects, such as different ammunition types, techniques for calculating range or the strategic details of the Prussian bombardment of different parts of the Danish defences. On this very day, however, taking stock of the amount of impatient children among his summer holidaying audience, our storyteller decided to move on quickly to the key business: the loading demonstration. ‘I need some little helpers here’, he announced, attracting a forest of

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small hands rapidly providing him with two gun crews of five kids each. On each team, the participants were then assigned numbers from two to six (number one being reserved for the storyteller himself, as the crew’s commander), and the first team was positioned on posts according to these numbers around the small cannon. The second team was asked to wait for their turn but to pay close attention to the instructions given to the first team, and in particular to their own ‘counterpart’; that is, the kid who had been assigned as ‘fiver’ on the second team was asked to follow the actions of the first ‘fiver’, in order for the second team to repeat the loading procedure afterwards. Arranging his crew around the small cannon, the storyteller stated to his little helpers that ‘we cannot use the big one, because we do not want to have our feet run over by it, do we’, pointing to its huge wheels. Also, ‘the tools are different’, he said, holding out for our inspection the differently sized ramrods of the big and the small cannon – indicating that the operation of the big gun was not for kids. On the contrary, he said, ‘we can play with this [small] one’. In addition, we were assured that in fact the roar of the small gun was more or less as loud as its big brother’s. Clearly, the loudness mattered. People expected a big bang – what is a cannon without a deafening roar? – and the crowd would not accept an inferior kids’ version of the real thing. The storyteller thus seemed determined to convince us that even though the gun was kid-sized, its performance was not. In other words, what we were about to witness was not a misrepresentation – it was as loud as the big gun – but the best possible show, given conditions (the children having to participate). As it were, the children did not actually load the cannon during these sessions. Instead, they were guided through an imagined loading procedure, step by step, only pretending to clean, load and fire the gun, acting on a sequence of commands (e.g., ‘Bring … back!’; ‘Load!’; ‘Fire!’) from the storyteller. Only when each team had acted out the sequence and stepped down, the storyteller went on to the actual firing, which out of security considerations he always conducted himself. Nevertheless, during the team sessions he would often refer to the dangerous character of the children’s mission in a slightly humorous fashion. On this particular day, the storyteller stressed the importance of sponging the cannon barrel thoroughly in order to extinguish any glowing residue from the previous firing. If this was not done, he warned, upon loading there would be a risk of the gun going off with the ramrod still in the barrel. ‘But the flying ramrod was not the worst part’, he told the kid assigned to do the ramming, ‘the worst part was those arms of yours, still clinging to the flying ramrod.’ This particular joke was delivered, in slightly variable guises, at

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almost every single one of the dozens of cannon firings I witnessed during my fieldwork. Continuing the drill of his young crew, the storyteller asked us all to remember that ‘we are not the only ones firing cannons; out there are roughly 175 cannons firing at us’. He gestured towards the green fields beyond the reconstructed ramparts of the battlefield centre into imagined enemy lines. Explaining how this massive shelling resulted in cascades of earth pouring down over ‘us’, he sealed the vent of the cannon with his thumb to (pretend to) keep it free of dirt. He then went through the aiming procedure, the kids adjusting the cannon until it was on ‘target’. And then, after a final ‘FIRE!’ during which the designated gunner drew an imaginary string to let the cannon off, the first team was dismissed, and the second one took up their numbered positions around the gun. This time, the storyteller only gave short one-word commands, and the kids, having obviously observed the first team’s performance closely, completed the firing procedure in admirably strict fashion. Both gun crews were applauded loudly by the crowd before stepping down. Before the final bang, for which expectations had now been built up, the storyteller asked his audience how long time they thought this loading procedure would have taken the soldiers back in 1864. ‘One minute’, someone guessed. No; less than that, we were told. ‘Half a minute’, another said and was promptly congratulated; this was very close to the correct answer. Twenty-eight seconds, the storyteller informed us, was the exact time between two cannon shots when operated by an able crew. He stressed, however, that this rate of fire could only be upheld because everybody knew his exact role and duties, and then went on to compare this teamwork with the contemporary procedure of changing a wheel on a Formula One racing car. The 1864 gun crews, he told us, were not made up of the sparsely trained conscripts that formed most of the rest of the Danish army; instead, these were well-trained, professional soldiers. At this point, the storyteller produced today’s ammunition in the form of a small bag of flour, explaining how ‘we’ of course could not fire real grenades today. ‘You know why the cows over there are mostly white?’ he asked us, pointing towards the unsuspecting cattle on the opposing fields – I knew the answer, of course, having heard this joke ad nauseam, but kept my peace – ‘because we use flour for ammunition instead of real grenades’. Amused and thrilled, people now prepared for the big bang. Some were asked to back down a bit, as the storyteller checked the safety distance (‘far too many people have been damaged by cannons at this place over the years’) and stepped up on the rampart’s edge to inspect the moat beneath, ensuring that nobody was around just below the cannon mound during

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the firing. Then we were instructed to cover our ears, as the roar would be very loud. All eyes were on the ignition, ears covered, children kept in check by parents – and then, a deafening roar, as the small artillery piece performed its part. As always, the sheer loudness of the modest-sized replica gun took almost everyone by surprise. The roar was not only heard but literally felt, the recoil rocking the ground beneath our feet and resonating as a deep thump inside our chests, with gun smoke enveloping the crowd in a smelly cloud. Before the smoke cleared, the storyteller rounded off the session by inviting the children to come up and smell the cannon, now emitting a stinking odour surprisingly similar to that of rotten eggs. The small replica cannon never failed to impress its audience. The firing demonstrations, being key events around which other centre activities revolved, epitomized the centre’s experiential and multisensory approach to heritage communication. Destabilizing, roaring, smelly and interactive, the firing sessions were condensed expressions of the countermuseum philosophy. Indeed, when compared to the original nineteenth-century guns ‘guarding’ the museum – the ‘silent witnesses’ of bygone wars discussed in chapter 3 – the centre replica was everything they were not. It incarnated the playful, participatory and cacophonic outlook of the centre and its ingrained antagonism towards the solemn and hushed aura of the ‘authentic’ museum pieces. Disorder, transgression and physicality were at work here, even though the actual interaction between staff and audience was a highly choreographed one-way affair, with the storyteller giving the orders and telling the jokes, and the audience being just that: an audience witnessing a spectacular show of the power of warfare. In terms of communication form, the cannon firings were thus indexical of the centre’s experiential stance. But when it comes to the content of the performances, we may ask: what about the nation? Where and how do the idea of national belonging and the issues of Danish identity enter the equation? In the example given, one notes how the storyteller generally kept his distance from the historical events by stressing ‘the Danes’ and ‘the Prussians’ instead of using notions like ‘us’ and ‘them’ – in concordance with the museum head curator’s insistence. With Billig, we may say that the storyteller indeed seemed to avoid overtly deictic utterances. Only once in the above did he seem to ‘slip’, when asking the public to remember that ‘we are not the only ones firing cannons; out there are roughly 175 cannons firing at us’. However, in this case, the storyteller’s use of pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’) was intriguingly ambiguous. On the one hand, given the context and his prior explanation about Danish versus Prussian artillery and the Prussians’ ‘systematic devastation’ of the Danish defences, one could argue that the storyteller’s ‘we’ in this case denoted ‘we, the

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Danes’, and that the ‘175 cannons firing at us’ could be taken as an indication of the Prussian machinery of devastation directed at ‘us, the Danes’. But while such an interpretation of national intent might seem straightforward, in my analysis the pronouns invoked by the storyteller were of a different order. They were in fact not nationalized. Instead, and pointing back to my discussion of how the centre worked to move from specific 1864 stories towards ‘general’ themes on the nature of (any) war, the cannon demonstrations seemed strangely removed from the actual 1864 war. In my interpretation, the ‘we’ of the storyteller thus did not connote ‘we, the Danes’, but something like ‘we, the contemporary crowd’. And even though the replica cannon was positioned pointing westwards, towards the historical Prussian lines, the Prussians were rarely explicitly verbalized as enemies or targets. Instead, by utilizing humour, the target role went to the contemporary cattle on the opposing fields. The event was thus in a sense lifted out of its historical framework, at least in glimpses, by oral reference to the lush and peaceful present-day summer landscape. Instead of focusing on emotions of enmity and national distinction, the storyteller’s stress was on general and technical accounts of weaponry and, in particular, on the cannon crew’s teamwork and cooperation. In fact, more than anything, the sessions seemed to be about demonstrating the power of teamwork, as indicated by the oft-repeated comparison to the operation of a Formula One technician team. It was an educational show in which children could be taught, and indeed enjoyed being taught, the merits of teamwork and discipline – in front of their parents or families and witnessed by other parents and families. The reward was the ‘real’ firing conducted by the storyteller, like fireworks marking the end of a great show. The nation was thus rarely foregrounded during the cannon demonstrations. Even though the entire setup can be said to rest on one of the defining moments in Danish history and the defence of the nation, the firings were performed with very little reference to national emotions or sympathies. In line with the codex of the museum head curator, who did ‘not want to see them fight Danes versus Germans’, the sessions were somehow emptied of specific, human content and desperation and filled, instead, with generic lessons on technique and teamwork. And yet, the nation was hardly gone. The cannon firings and other centre activities took place on a stage inscribed with heavy and stubborn nationalism. Even though the staff’s oral and performative communicative practices downplayed issues of the nation, the silent framing was fervently and pervasively Danish: the cannon pointed westwards for a reason; all weaponry and equipment presented were Danish; the thirty-nine war dead reported by the storyteller

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were not ‘general’ nobodies but Danish casualties. The centre itself, built as ‘a romantic monument to Danishness’, embodied and reinforced an unavoidable Danish bias. Rarely brought forth as a key theme, the nation and its history thus nevertheless lingered at the battlefield centre; it was a contextual given without which the centre would never have been erected in the first place. I turn now to exploring the practices of centre visitors as situated in, and contributing to, these ambiguous processes of erasing while at the same time embracing the nation.

Banal and Not So Banal Mobilizations of the Danish Nation The majority of the visitors I spent time with during my fieldwork expressed viewpoints in line with the cosmopolitan ideals outlined in my discussion of the ‘civic cleansing’ centre policies. Motivations for visiting were very rarely voiced along national lines, and it was common to deny any national-emotional sentiment whatsoever connected to the site. Instead, many explained their grounds for going by reference to a takenfor-given holiday formula in which they described themselves as simply dropping by because that is what you are somehow ‘supposed to do’ as a tourist to the region. I discussed this logic of argumentation in chapter 2, quoting one visitor as stating that Dybbøl is ‘like any other place. It’s part of history, and we’re nearby, and then we might as well see what is being told here’ (retired fitter and army officer, from Odense, Denmark, male, age sixty-two). Then, as if sensing a need to justify this laid-back attitude, his wife explained to me that ‘we’re probably not that national-minded’ (primary school secretary from Odense, Denmark, female, age forty-six). I took this to mean that she and her husband did not accord Dybbøl any deep-felt symbolic or emotional value. The couple’s moderate historical interest seemed driven mostly by the fact that the husband had been an army officer and clearly enjoyed the technical and tactical information on the war. Instead of connecting empathetically with the Danes of 1864, they described themselves as being out to gather a bit of historical information without regard for national sympathies. However, such allegedly nonempathetic engagements did not occur on neutral ground. In a setting such as Dybbøl, saturated with national signifiers – flags, uniforms, maps, memorials – visitors found themselves in an utterly Danish framing. Also, and importantly, they did not arrive here as clean slates, but were always already positioned and characterized by particular understandings of what being Danish means. In this par-

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ticular interview, this became evident when I asked the couple whether they thought they had gathered any information about the Prussian side of things during their centre visit. To this, the wife responded: ‘I did not pick up anything [about the Prussians] except that they were the bad guys. (…) I don’t think [the centre] has said anything nice about the Prussians. I guess you wouldn’t expect that.’ She said the battlefield centre went some way towards documenting why Danes ‘always find the Germans to be bad’, and that she believed the 1864 defeat was one of the primary reasons for this feeling. She also noted that the funding that had gone into the centre was money well spent, since the centre ‘demonstrated how this national feeling was created’. So, while proclaiming herself to be ‘not that nationalminded’, and displaying a modest and nonemotional interest in the war, she nevertheless expected and found an anti-German stance permeating the centre. At another point during the same interview, her husband, prompted by me, sought to define the notion of heritage:4 ‘It [Dybbøl] is a part of the heritage (kulturarven), we can’t run from it, I’d say. When we inherit Danish culture, what lies before, then that’s it.’ This attitude, I suggest, is an example of banal nationalism at work. As in Billig’s analysis, we see how seemingly insignificant linguistic terms, pronouns such as ‘we’ or ‘us’, or the definite article, serve deictic functions: Dybbøl is considered part of ‘the’ heritage – implying the Danish heritage – and ‘we’ inherit Danish culture. In such a view, there was not a whole lot to be said about this process of inheritance, as it was understood to happen automatically, with accompanying rights, obligations, territories and boundaries firmly in place. In chapter 3, I quoted Richard Handler on this logic, in which the ‘nation is said to “have” or “possess” a culture, just as its human constituents are described as “bearers” of the national culture’ (1985: 198). In my material, the vast majority of Danish visitors shared such banal conceptions of nationhood, history and heritage. The Danish heritage was simply assumed to be there: ‘we’ can’t run from it, as the visitor above put it; after all, ‘we’ inherit the Danish culture. And ‘that’s it’, as he simply stated: the banality of the centre’s Danish-only and anti-German perspective was so strong that my questions on these issues were perceived as somewhat curious and hardly worth answering. Indeed, as I have discussed in my analysis of the castle museum’s war exhibitions, to most visitors the terms ‘history’, ‘heritage’ and ‘museum’ were intimately connected to ‘the nation’, to the point that they were regarded as inseparable. Taken to refer to natural entities, these labels were seen simply as descriptive terms ‘we’ could barely say anything useful about or reflect upon, precisely because they were understood as given and beyond discussion.

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These comments parallel those I analysed as part of the ‘banal’ reproduction of the nation in the castle museum’s war wing, in which visitors stated that the museum ‘tells about our past’ (dental technician from Sorø, Denmark, female, age fifty-one), ‘tells a bit of history’ (post office clerk from Sorø, Denmark, male, age fifty-one), and that the idea of ‘heritage’ is ‘that we need to understand our own history’ (student from Aalborg, Denmark, female, age twenty-five) and that ‘the most important things are preserved’ (student from Aalborg, Denmark, male, age twenty-seven). In such widespread understandings, the concepts of nation, heritage, history and museum are semantically woven together, their overlaps or even equivalence taken for granted, with ‘our own’ signifying ‘Danish’, and similarly, ‘most important’ implying a self-explanatory national perspective: most important to ‘us’, the Danes. While such key understandings thus undergirded their visits and activities, the majority of Danish centre visitors refrained from consciously identifying with patriotic sentiment. Not everyone, however, denied having been touched by a certain national feeling at Dybbøl. In line with the tendencies among museum visitors I discussed in chapter 3, a minority of Danish centre visitors stated to me that a distinct national spirit had in fact come upon them during their visits: Now, for the last few days [of our holiday], we have occupied ourselves with the history of Southern Jutland. And it’s almost like you do become a bit more national-minded. (communication worker from Odense, Denmark, female, age twenty-nine) Yes, you do get some kind of national feeling, right – after all, they fought for the country we are a part of today. (police trainee from Aalborg, Denmark, male, age twenty-seven)

When I asked this last young man why sites such as Dybbøl were important to maintain and ‘safeguard’, as Danish and international heritage legislation have it, he went on: We must remember who we are. Where we come from. Why we are as we are. Why people from Southern Jutland (Sønderjylland) have felt enmity towards the Germans, such things. And this is how to find out. It’s a way of being, and it’s a way we Danes have become the way we are – after special events like this [battle].

This is another example of Billig’s deixis in operation, related to the ‘selfexplanatory’ argumentation on why the centre is justified. The centre is considered crucial for ‘our’ national memory of who ‘we’ are and why. Describing his own experience of the national spirit, and stressing the feelings and ‘way of being’ of the Danes, this visitor attempted to express the

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elusive, but somehow felt, national sentiment that had crept upon him here. In a few cases, I stumbled upon Danish visitors who displayed very strong and deep-felt ethnonational connections to Dybbøl. In one such case, an elderly couple had taken their grandchildren to the centre, although they were clearly not at ease themselves regarding the centre’s communicative, dialogic and hands-on approach. They were locals, the woman having been brought up literally on the border in the 1920s and 1930s, with complex and troubled cross-border and split-sympathy kinship ties that had had profound personal consequences for her. She let me know at the outset of our interview that ‘we are very national[-minded]’ and stated that they (the couple) ‘had difficulties coping with the German national anthem, even at a football match’ (retired primary school teacher from Sønderborg, Denmark, female, age seventy-five).5 As schoolteachers, these elderly visitors had literally worked to transmit the history and symbolic significance of Dybbøl and 1864 to younger generations. They evidently considered Dybbøl a sacred slice of land, a solemn space for contemplation that they found had been somehow desecrated by the battlefield centre’s 1992 construction. The husband explained: Dybbøl is something special. And it has always been cherished, and nothing [has been] allowed to change at all. Dybbøl must be as it has always been. And then they build something [the battlefield centre] that absolutely does not belong here, landscapewise, in this area. I did not like that. (retired primary school teacher from Sønderborg, Denmark, male, age seventy-nine)

To visitors such as these, the national connotations of Dybbøl were in no way banal. In their eyes, Dybbøl was and should be heralded as an iconic site, its Danishness beyond discussion. Anthony Smith has referred to how nations ‘provide individuals with “sacred centres”, objects of spiritual and historic pilgrimage, that reveal the uniqueness of their nation’s “moral geography”’ (1991: 16). To visitors of these convictions, Dybbøl constituted such an iconic site. It is important to note that even among visitors who expressed such strong national connections to Dybbøl, these feelings were not necessarily constant aspects of their visit. Thus, my field material contains ample evidence of alternations between different modes of engagement with the war heritage, even on the level of the individual visitor, ranging from the playful and ironic to the serious and contemplative. In other words, there was no necessary contradiction between getting lost in emotionally charged reflections on Dybbøl’s national significance at one point, and displaying a detached and ‘rational’ interest the next minute.

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German Doubts: The Centre As ‘Adventure Playground’ I now turn from the Danish visitors to consider the views of German tourists at Dybbøl and some notable tendencies among them. As in the case of the Danish majority, most of my German visitor informants viewed their centre experience in a positive light. The tendency to deny national readings or emotional upwellings was even more pervasive among my German informants. What struck me as different, however, was the much more explicitly universal or cosmopolitan (as opposed to national) interpretation among many Germans. One visitor, for instance, explained his stance to me by drawing a parallel to a monument in the Kieler Fjord commemorating a World War II naval battle between Germany and England: ‘When I am there as a German, then I have no German feelings – only that it is so horrible, what happened there, with four thousand people dead’ (social education worker from Kiel, Germany, male, age fifty-six). This perspective, which refuses any national identification or significance to focus entirely on ‘human loss’, corresponds to the turn towards a humanitariancosmopolitan centre discourse we have seen expressed, for instance, in the ‘eyewitness’ stories. Another said: Inside the diorama, but also during my tour of the trenches, I tried to imagine how it was, sitting there as a soldier, showered by bullets and grenades. And you ask yourself: Why didn’t they deal with it through politics? Why must they always go at each other with cannons and guns? (retired engineer from Flensburg, Germany, male, age fifty-nine)

Again, no national perspective can be discerned. In contrast to the widespread tendencies among my Danish informants to invoke ‘we’ and ‘they’ as (banal) national signifiers, the ‘they’ in the above passage seems to refer to a diffuse but global humankind (‘Why must they always . . .’). Linked to such cosmopolitan viewpoints, a number of German visitors expressed a moderate critique of the Danish centre’s way of interpreting war. While many clearly enjoyed their day out and praised the centre’s philosophy of communication, they also often found it to be too lightweight and/or ‘playful’. One example concerns a German group of four visitors, two couples in their forties, who had been touring the centre. Throughout their circuit they were generally cheering and playful, joking at their own roles as tourists and at their various activities in the centre. For instance, one of the men cast a bullet and joked with the staff member acting as blacksmith, displaying a somewhat role-distanced stance toward the activity of bullet casting, seemingly perceived by him as somewhat childish (Goffman 1961). We may also describe the general attitude of the group

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as ‘posttourist’ (following Feifer 1985) in that they were deliberately playful, reflecting on their roles as tourists involved in a performance, knowing ‘that tourism is a series of games with multiple texts and no single authentic tourist experience’ (Urry 2002: 91). Whatever term we choose to describe such practice, I want to draw attention here to the clash between the party’s playful behaviour, displayed during their walk, and the more solemn attitude manifest in the group interview I conducted with them afterwards. In this talk, they all agreed that the Dybbøl centre, while interesting, did not succeed in transmitting the horror of war. In particular, they – in common with several other German tourists I spoke to – found the centre’s playground sandbox, in which kids could play with model cannons and build their own model fortresses with wooden blocks, to be highly inappropriate (see figure 5.1). They also regarded the clean and cosy look of the soldiers’ sleeping hut as problematic, and on the whole, they found the site to have too much of ‘a general feel of an adventure playground’ (Abenteuerspielplatz), as one of them coined it. He went on to suggest a range of other European historical war sites he had visited, which he said had been much more affectively ‘penetrating’ (eindränglich) (architect from Lübeck, Germany, male, age forty-four). Thus,

Figure 5.1. Contested playgrounds. The Dybbøl Battlefield Centre’s playground sandbox with wooden ‘artillery’ pieces, barely noticed by most Danish visitors, offensive in the eyes of many Germans. Removed in 2007. Photo by the author.

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although they had evidently enjoyed their tour of the centre, their postvisit critique seemed directed at the powerful material and spatial affordances of the centre, found guilty of fostering an improper atmosphere of play and frivolity – which they felt to have fallen victim of. Their resentment was thus not so much directed at their own performances as at the centre allegedly forcing them to adopt a cheerful stance and failing to convey a proper ‘penetrating’ attitude in them. Another company of German visitors levelled a parallel criticism at the centre. Like the group above, they too described their general centre experience in a positive tone. They stressed how they really liked the reconstructed milieu – the like of which, according to them, was rarely seen in Germany. One of them explained it thus: I thoroughly like reconstructions. (…) Because it is a more living approach to history. In a museum, where you have all the objects taken out of context, often you cannot understand them. If you see them in context, in a reconstruction, you understand them better. (regional politician from Kiel, Germany, male, age fifty-four)

In this regard, they shared most of my visitor informants’ positive evaluation of the reconstruction and ‘living history’ genre, seen as providing for better understanding of context, compared to conventional museums and traditional archaeological sites. What they liked, we may say, was the improved holistic experience available here. Nevertheless, and mirroring the previously quoted German group, these four men expressed strong reservations when our talk proceeded into the themes of national identity and appropriate war site interpretation. Again the sandbox was taken up. The visitor quoted above went on: We were really alienated from this children playground. I mean, as Germans we do not like such things. To say: we have a site where you go and have national feelings – in this case, for Denmark – such a thing would not be made in Germany, it is not appropriate. And to construct a children playground, where you have small cannons and such things … for a German that is … such a thing would not be made in Germany.

One of his comrades added: ‘Or inside that hut where the kids have to write letters as if they were soldiers. Write field mail. That seems pretty odd to us’ (dentist from Kiel, Germany, male, age fifty-one). A third member of the group agreed: ‘We find that very negative’ (social education worker from Kiel, Germany, male, age fifty-six). Thus, we see how these kinds of reservations towards play and pretension were not restricted to the actual handling of replica guns and weapons, but indeed applied to any activity

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casting children as soldiers. When I followed up by asking them of their thoughts of the fact that this reserved view seemed dominant among my German visitor informants, one of them explained: Because we have a very strong reservation against militarism. (Q: Because of the German history?) Because of history. Militarism is considered, by most, very negative. (…) But of course … there are also Germans who attend such things, and then practice traditional nationalism (Altnationalismus), so to speak. But that, to us, is automatically rightwingers (Rechtsradikale). You don’t do such things. (dentist from Kiel, Germany, male, age fifty-one)

Almost every German visitor in my field material seemed to share such strongly held antimilitaristic, and antinationalistic, sentiments. One of the critical German visitors continued his reflections on the inappropriateness of nationalism in connection with war memorials: We of course have the concentration camps, and similar sites, where the memories of that terrible history are described. But those, then, are sites of reflection (Besinnungsstätten) where you also depict the horror, and where people are directed towards reflection. (regional politician from Kiel, Germany, male, age fifty-four)

What is the difference between an ‘adventure playground’ and a ‘site of reflection’, we may ask – or rather, how does a site come to be perceived as one or the other by various visitors? There is no easy answer, except, perhaps, that ‘it depends on the context’. And as we have seen, the Dybbøl centre also worked, for some at least, as a site of reflection (‘Why must they always go at each other with cannons and guns?’). One of the key qualities of my German visitor material seems to be the light it sheds on the ingrained Danish banalities of the centre. None of my Danish informants ever mentioned the sandbox as a problem. Often I was under the impression that they did not notice it at all, or that it was conceived of merely as a convenient ‘parking lot’ for kids, a feature taken to be natural, even obligatory for a tourist attraction such as the battlefield centre. Likewise, the toy cannons and building blocks were never taken up by my Danish visitor informants. They simply did not sense the connotations of militarism and impropriety that many German visitors felt. It is interesting to compare the German critics above to the critical elderly Danish couple quoted earlier, as the two positions, while couched in contradictory – national versus cosmopolitan – arguments, display a number of parallels. Just like the German visitors, the self-proclaimed ‘very national[-minded]’ Danish couple found the centre’s playful and touristy feel disturbing. They contrasted this with their idea of a certain correct way to portray (an eternal, unaltered, now somehow lost) Dybbøl, connected

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to their strong, and historically embodied, national sentiment. Likewise, the German visitors quoted above held a rather definite idea of what an affective battlefield site ought to be like, only they did not speak along lines of nationality, but along universal or cosmopolitan ideals of paying respect to victims and the horror of war in general. Like the Danish couple, their ideas of proper war site interpretation were without a doubt strongly connected to profoundly habituated understandings of the notion and role of ‘history’. Evidently, the perceived relation between the concepts of history and nation differed markedly in the views of my German and Danish informants. As should be clear from both the Danish and German visitor engagements described in this and the previous chapter, the Dybbøl centre did afford a certain playful and explorative practice. Visitors were invited to touch, trample and immerse themselves, and to engage in conversation with staff and corporeal navigation of the reconstructed trench milieu. These qualities and norms were generally embraced and lauded by visitors, both Danish and German. In the eyes of some, however, such characteristics were offset by a perceived lack of seriousness and propriety. In effect, their immersion into a playful mode left some visitors with a bad conscience over the fact that they or (more often) the site had not lived up to expectations of what visiting a proper and appropriate battlefield site ‘ought to’ be about. The affordances of the ‘adventure playground’,in which almost anything could happen and weird tales and interpretations grow, thus existed in an uneasy and unclarified relationship to the stern requirements of ‘the war memorial’ – the German term Mahnmal better captures the conscientious dimension6 – that Dybbøl also, to many, was understood as having to fulfil.

Managerial Efforts: Avoiding Play, Cultivating Demonstration As mentioned, Danish visitors did not problematize the sandbox as a symbol of inappropriate militarism. There were, however, a few Danes who did view the sandbox as a problem: the curators of the Sønderborg Castle Museum. The museum takeover of the centre operation had not entailed a major shift of staff, but nevertheless a new and less romantic outlook was deemed appropriate by the centre’s new curatorial superiors. During my fieldwork, a number of meetings and discussions were held on the new role of the centre. A central concern in the institutional renegotiations was the issue of play and how to go about ‘demonstrating’ but not ‘playing’ war at the centre, as it was phrased. The playground sandbox with its toy cannons

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was one of the cases brought up. Peter Dragsbo, the castle museum’s head curator – who held, as quoted already, that ‘the centre should demonstrate war technology and the everyday life of the soldiers, but we cannot let situations arise in which the audience thinks “we” and “them”’ – insisted that the sandbox had to go, even though centre staff argued against it. Dragsbo had toured the centre with various German colleagues and knew about their negative view of the sandbox. He explained to me on one occasion that the sandbox seemed to ‘tip the balance’ for visitors from south of the border. In the spring of the 2007 season, the sandbox was therefore removed. Although negotiated and conducted in calmness and good order, this was one of the clearest examples of direct museum intervention in the centre’s daily operation during my fieldwork. The understanding of the centre as a site that should promote ‘demonstration’ but refrain from ‘play’ was in line with the German accusations targeting the perceived playfulness at a site which ‘ought to’ be about solemnity and reflection. However, adopting a stern ‘demonstration’ discourse was complicated by the fact that the centre’s very existence in effect relied on funding given on conditions of what could be labelled a ‘playful learning’ strategy. The centre was one of a number of so-called ‘knowledge-educational activity centres’7 receiving substantial support from the Danish Ministry of Education, conditioned on a set of participatory learning criteria. The ‘knowledge-educational’ activities of the centre included various practices that put visiting children firmly into the shoes of the 1864 soldiers. Much of the theory behind the ‘knowledge-educational’ paradigm hinged on a set of core assumptions about the advantages of play and participation in learning. In other words, ‘play’ was in a sense written into the economic structure of the centre. Creativity, experience and play were assumed to go hand in hand in furthering an ideal learning environment. The cannon firings were cornerstone elements of the ‘knowledge-educational’ program. Other activities under this label included calculating artillery ranges, casting bullets at the blacksmith’s and co-operating in operating the centre’s heavy retractable bridge. During my fieldwork, a future scenario was discussed in which visiting children were to march across the bridge into the redoubt, like a platoon of 1864 Danish soldiers might have done it, while under the ‘command’ of a storyteller. As we can see, the audience, and in particular the youngest segment of it, was thus routinely asked to identify with (certain) conditions of the Dybbøl soldiers, in educational activities bordering on play. Centre staff members were keenly aware that this was sensitive ground bound up with a complex set of ethical issues. They worked hard to avoid being lumped together with play and fun while embracing ‘demonstra-

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tion’ and ‘education’. Centre manager Bjørn Østergaard told me that to him, there was a fine but clear line between ‘playing’ and ‘demonstrating’ war. Playing was not deemed appropriate, demonstrating was. ‘We can march with them [the pupils]’, he said, ‘if we do it with commands that are correct’. He continued: ‘So we demonstrate it and have a talk about why you do that with soldiers. So that they reach an insight, so that they understand why we do so [march]. Or rather, why they do so within the military.’ Another staff member, a senior storyteller, told me about what he called the ‘knife-edge’ between playing and demonstrating and said that he always stressed to the teachers of visiting school groups that ‘we do not play war here’. Because, he said to me, ‘when you play war, then it’s like you want to teach them how to wage war, right? But you can demonstrate how they did back then.’ Indeed, storytellers routinely asked visitors to please remember that war is an awful thing, and that they should never wish to be in one. What is the difference between play and demonstration, as these concepts were invoked in practice at the battlefield centre? In order to shed light on this question, I will once again look to the work of Scott Lash for inspiration. In recent years, he has applied many of the ideas and insights of his earlier work on different configurations of modernity to what he and Celia Lury term ‘the global culture industry’ (Lash and Lury 2007). This ‘industry’ encompasses ‘cultural objects’ (3) with a global span, including cartoon and computer animations, major sport events, product branding and art happenings. Lash and Lury propose that a shift ‘from representation to thing’ is ongoing in these cultural-economic spheres (183). This is said to entail a shift from science/epistemology to art/ontology, two poles they take Kant and Goethe to represent, respectively: ‘Kantian’ science is about things-for-us appearances: that is phenomena. (…) Goethean art is about things-in-themselves: it relates to essences or noumena. Science is about the outer logic, the extensive logic, the connections between and external organization of these phenomena. Art, for its part, addresses Adorno’s ‘internal organization’ of the object, ‘its inner logic’. (186)

These thoughts clearly mirror Lash’s earlier arguments on the second modernity and his analysis of the German Erfahrung/Erlebnis distinction I have discussed in chapter 4. What Lash and Lury term the ‘global culture industry and informational capitalism’ (7) seems to share important characteristics with the second modernity Lash argued evolved from German Romanticism. Of particular and immediate relevance to my present analysis is the notion of play, which Lash and Lury assign a key role in today’s cultural domain:

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There is another piece to the puzzle of the shift from representation to the object: play. The narrative and representational social imaginary lies in the reader or audience, while the player engages the culture of things. For Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976) we can experience a cultural entity either, on the one hand, epistemologically or, on the other, ontologically. In an epistemological encounter, we relate to the entity from its outside; as a thing-for-itself. In an ontological relationship we relate to it from its inside: as a thing-in-itself. (Lash and Lury 2007: 189–90, italics in original)

As we have seen, the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre rests upon an outlook that fits this playful stance rather perfectly. It is a site of romantic engagement with the past, of sensual experience and of ‘getting ontological with the object (…) in play’, as Lash and Lury (190) put it. ‘In play, we descend into the world with objects. We deal not with a text but with an environment of cultural objects’ (190, italics in original). But this same powerful playfulness afforded by the experiential and experimental heritage approach is regarded also as a problem, by some visitors, to whom the centre experience takes on a rather ambivalent nature, as we have seen in the cases of concerned or baffled German visitors. In the light of this, let us return to the ‘knife-edge’ balancing performed at the centre and the negotiation of play and demonstration. As evidenced in my examples, what was deemed to belong under either of these labels was not always a matter of the concrete centre activities, many of which could be claimed to – and were indeed often accused of by various critics – contain elements of play. Instead, the difference, as explained to me by centre staff, seemed to be a matter of context; how the activities were framed, staged and presented. What the centre strove to avoid was that visitors actually imagined or pretended that they were in fact soldiers; or put differently, staff sought to ensure that visitors maintained a certain distance from the activity at hand. With Lash, we may say that ‘play’ was deemed too innerlich, too romantic, too invested with feeling and sensation. Conversely, ‘demonstration’ as a term had a high modern rationality and instrumentality to it: what was being taught here was thought to involve detachment and disinterested and objective ‘knowledge’. Continuing in the terminology of Lash, it seemed that centre staff, balancing on the knife’s edge, found themselves forced to reinvoke ‘representation’ and ‘epistemology’ in the face of accusations of ‘getting ontological’ and playful. They retreated into the safe territory of external representation, demonstration and what we may call ‘involved noninvolvement’ – participating without playing – while simultaneously having to work hard to maintain a clear difference from conventional museum communication, in

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order not to lose their hard-fought ministerial support conditioned on the stringent criteria of participatory learning. Where do these practical complexities leave Lash’s points on the second modernity and Lash and Lury’s arguments on the cultural industry of our time? As inspirational as I have found them to drive along my investigation, my studies question one key point in such theories, namely, their alleged epochal nature. What I have shown to be the case in the Danish heritage sector – and I believe its applications to be broader – is that even at a site seemingly emblematic of the current turn towards experience, such recent (or rather recently reinvoked) modes of emotional appropriation exist in constant tension with more conventional high modern practices premised on detached observation. At the battlefield centre, we may say, the first modernity ‘struck back’ against the frivolity of its second sibling. What characterized the parts of the cultural industries I have analysed was thus not so much an epochal and unilinear transition to a second modernity – a movement ‘from representation to thing’ – but rather an ongoing tension and never-settled ambiguity between these two poles. A final glimpse into the subtle symbolic manoeuvring between these contradictory demands at today’s battlefield centre can be obtained by considering a ‘construction redoubt’ (byggeskanse) that was built to substitute the torn-down sandbox after I left the field. This new feature, planned specifically to accommodate the centre’s school audiences, was in effect a mini version (at a one-to-five scale) of the full-size redoubt. Fitted out with mobile building blocks and elements, the scale redoubt was to allow school groups and other visitors to construct and adapt their own fortification, and learn about construction and strategic principles behind an 1864 redoubt. The first time the centre manager explained his plans to me I could not help thinking that this new construction site sounded remarkably similar to the recently razed sandbox. In fact, it turned out, the discarded wooden blocks and cannons from the bygone sandbox were reused as tools of learning at the new construction redoubt. But the new (reflective, controlled) ‘educational’ context, meant to substitute the former practices of (frivolous, unguided) ‘play’ of the politically incorrect cannon sandbox, seemed to make all the difference. This is a telling indicator of the ambivalent ways in which the principles of enlightenment, demonstration and representation were in constant friction here. In the face of the threat of unbridled play and emotional connection, we saw a return of ideals and forces connected to the first modernity and to the assertion of a modicum of order, discipline and distance at the centre.

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National Banalities at the Battlefield Centre At the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, formerly characterized by a distinctly romantic national outlook, new patterns of inclusion and reconciliation were on the rise. Analyzing these processes of change, I have argued in this chapter that despite its formal erasure, ‘the nation’ was inescapable, even as staff and visitors worked to transform the meanings ingrained in the materiality of Dybbøl. Particular attention has been paid to analyzing the positions and perspectives of heritage visitors, most of whom explicitly sympathized with the centre’s increasing stress on cosmopolitan ideals. Drawing upon Billig’s work, I have argued that the Danish visitors nevertheless displayed and reproduced a widespread ‘banal nationalism’ as they took Dybbøl and the 1864 war to signify key moments of ‘our’ (i.e., Danish) history, heritage and identity. Among German visitor informants I found a notable scepticism towards the perceived blend of national commemoration and playful hands-on techniques employed at Dybbøl. I will end this chapter by providing a final example of the banalities involved in the current editing of the past at the battlefield centre. As mentioned, The Day of the Storm audiovisual show has recently undergone reediting. Although the main reason for this was technical, as the slideshow was being digitalized, centre manager Østergaard told me he was taking the opportunity to edit the show so as to express a more ‘balanced’ view on the war, by including in it a number of Prussian letters, voices and images. This, of course, corresponds with the trend towards inclusion and impartiality I have described throughout. Interestingly, however, the show’s soundtrack – the tune of Ottosen’s anti-German protest song, discussed earlier – was not up for change. This would not be necessary, the manager told me, since the contemporary Danish audience at the centre ‘does not really register’ the old song’s martial undertones, as he explained. This, in my view, is a telling indicator of the changes taking place: the explicit Danish bias was being offset, Prussian voices and perspectives added. Yet the subtler, more deep-seated and indeed banal national attitudes remained, lingering in such indirect elements as the unsung lyrics of the well-known protest tune. In my dealings with visitors, no one ever raised an eyebrow about the choice of background music, but occasionally Danish visitors could be heard whistling its ear-catching, mournful tune after having watched the show. That people ‘do not register’ the bombastic Danishness of the tune is an exact indicator of banality. I believe Østergaard’s diagnosis was spot-on: although almost any adult Danish visitor would recognize the tune of the song from their time in school, it was sound to assume that very few of them actually reflected upon or recalled

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its lyrics and/or its anti-German content during their centre visit. And yet, with the song’s powerful nature metaphors having slipped unnoticed into the Danish mainstream – invoked, for instance, in political anti-immigrant rhetoric, as we have seen – its silent messages could hardly be said to have been forgotten as much as banally adopted. They quite literally went without saying. The whistling visitors spread the word without a thought. While they did not explicitly embrace ‘the nation’, they served as transmitters of its stereotypes through unreflective, routine, banal practice.

Notes 1. The main language of communication at the centre was Danish, but visitors were offered earphones upon entrance and given the options to select German or English commentaries (verbatim translations of the Danish storyline) to the centre’s two audiovisual shows. 2. I referred to Ottosen’s work in my discussion in chapter 1 of the national poetic support for the struggle for regaining the Danish land lost in 1864. The song’s title can be translated as ‘It has so recently rained’, and the lyrics invoke the atmosphere of bitter anger and stubborn resolve following the foreign ‘storm’ over Denmark. 3. On 6 February 2006, Kjærsgård wrote in her party newsletter: ‘Those seeds of weed that have flown across the Danish border – Islamists and liars – and who, with their tour of the Middle East, have added new and to Denmark life-threatening fuel to the fire in this conflict, we shall deal with ourselves’; quote from http://danskfolkeparti.dk/Frø_af_ugræs…_.asp (accessed 16 January 2013). Original Danish wording: ‘Det frø af ugræs, der er føget ind over den danske grænse – islamister og løgnere – og som med deres rundrejse til mellemøstlige lande pustede nyt og for Danmark livsfarlig ild i konflikten, skal vi nok selv tage os af.’ 4. The Danish term is kulturarv, literally ‘culture legacy’. It is common in Danish to refer to heritage in the definite form, ‘the heritage’ (kulturarven) – implying, banally, the Danish heritage. 5. The interview was conducted during the 2006 football World Cup held in Germany. 6. For discussions of the subtle German terminologies of war memorials and remembrance, see Till (2005: 82–86); Macdonald (2009a: 8–12). 7. The Danish term is ‘videnpædagogiske aktivitetscentre’. In 2012, fifteen such centres received political funding, including the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre.

Chapter 6

D H T Cosmopolitan Nationalism and the Reappearance of the Romantic S , I         settings of my fieldwork: the Sønderborg Castle Museum and the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre. My analyses have followed two distinct if often overlapping tracks, one concerned with changing communication forms, the other focusing on the content of the heritage narratives. Regarding form – or what we may call the ‘how’ of heritage – I have explored the movement towards experiential, multisensory and participatory approaches, especially salient at the battlefield centre. Concerning content – the ‘what’ of heritage – my investigations have focused on the fate of ‘the nation’ and national belonging as a somewhat silenced, but still profound master theme at Dybbøl. In this final chapter, I leave my two main venues in order to contextualize my findings in relation to current policies and currents in Denmark as well as internationally. This serves to illustrate that the tensions and tendencies I have analysed are not restricted to these two institutions, but can be viewed as characteristic of a set of entangled modern predicaments facing Denmark and other Western countries in the twenty-first century. The chapter is structured around two oppositional pairs: national/global and experience/enlightenment. While the first regards the issue of scale and belonging (content), the second pertains primarily to the modality of appropriation (form). In relation to each pair, I examine recent claims that ‘society’ is increasingly ‘cosmopolitan’ (Beck 2000, 2002) and characterized, more than ever, by a thirst for ‘experience’ (Schulze 1992; Pine and Gilmore 1999), and discuss these critically in light of my Danish material. I consider how the cosmopolitan turn in the heritage sector often includes a built-in dose of national thinking, and propose the notion of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ to account for this. I then investigate the experiential

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enthusiasm in a Danish cultural policy context, especially in the guise of the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999), and go on to discuss the romantic legacies arguably underlying this allegedly novel value and exchange system.

The National/Global Friction and the Logic of Cosmopolitan Nationalism For many years, the concept of heritage has been closely tied to the nationstate, to such a degree that ‘our’ heritage has most often implied our national heritage, in a ‘banal’ fashion, to adopt Billig’s (1995) terminology. The concept has been, and in many cases still is, so intimately tied to the idea of the nation-state and its institutions as to be nigh inseparable from them. In chapter 2, I charted how heritage, archaeology and the past were important elements in the nation building of the nineteenth century, mobilized and utilized in the ‘naturalization’ of new imagined national communities (Anderson 1991; Mitchell 2001). Working to reassert symbolic and physical borders and display differences between countries and populations, and literally tying these to ‘their’ territory through material traces dug up from its soil, heritage and archaeology helped materialize national histories and memories as the property of ‘the people’ in question. In David Lowenthal’s Durkheimian formulation, ‘[i]n celebrating symbols of their histories, societies in fact worship themselves’ (1994: 46). Heritage, he states, ‘distinguishes us from others; it gets passed on only to descendants, to our own flesh and blood; newcomers, outsiders, foreigners all erode and debase it’ (47, emphasis in original). In the case of Dybbøl, this distinguishing dimension of course corresponds to the traditional, introspective commemoration of the field as a site of Danish identity and sacrifice, ‘a symbol of the confessional Danishness’, as a newspaper editorial in Jyllands-Posten phrased its opposition to German participation on Dybbøl Day ( Jyllands-Posten 2001). While on the one hand such an exclusionary aspect continues to cling to the concept of heritage, on the other hand a current wave of global and/or cosmopolitan heritage work seems to suggest an opposite trend towards associating heritage increasingly with tolerance, universalism and inclusion. We have seen how such discourses and values have recently impacted profoundly on Dybbøl in general, and the battlefield centre in particular. On an international scale, UNESCO’s world heritage program is probably the best-known example of these currents. Closely connected to this is the idea that ‘memory’ itself has been uprooted – or has to be uprooted – from

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national scopes of thinking. Ulrich Beck, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, for instance, argue that ‘cultural memory can no longer be located territorially’ (Beck et al. 2009: 113). In their analysis, the Holocaust constitutes ‘the foundation for a cosmopolitan memory’ (112) reaching far beyond the nation-state. To them, the horror of the Holocaust frames and necessitates a collective memory of humanity calling for new understandings and actions – in conservation, commemoration and scientific approaches (see also Beck and Sznaider 2006). In this strand of theorizing about cosmopolitanism, the global sphere and the nation are regarded as opposites. For instance, in their plea for a ‘cosmopolitan research agenda for the social sciences’, Beck and Sznaider state that ‘cosmopolitanism does not only negate nationalism but also presupposes it’ (2006: 20). And they contend that ‘the light of the great cultural problems has moved on from a nation-state definition of society and politics to a cosmopolitan outlook’ (2). These are sweeping diagnoses indeed. I consider them to be too general, at least if we understand social and cultural analysis as an academic effort that aims at charting and interpreting real-life issues and problems as they unfold in practice (see also Macdonald 2013: 188–215). In my own case, the revisionary and postheroic efforts of the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre constitute one obvious example of the tendencies toward cosmopolitanization, and the recent inclusion of the German military in the annual Dybbøl Day another. In the following, I return to ponder the Dybbøl Day ceremonies and the negotiation between national and international allegiances. Here, heritage has not simply gone global: there is no neat epochal chronology in place in which older local or national meanings are unanimously overridden or rendered obsolete as cosmopolitan agendas simply ‘take over’. Although some scholars, in line with Beck et al. (2009), subscribe to a view in which the nation is losing out to global networks and dependencies – or even that we inhabit a ‘postnational’ era (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Habermas 1998) – my findings do not support such grand theses. In my view, it is pertinent to reinvestigate and stir up taken-for-granted oppositions such as those between national and global levels of thinking and identification, including ‘scalar’ assumptions ‘in which, say, the micro is seen as nestling inside the macro, or the local inside the global’ (Macdonald 2009b: 118). In this book’s introduction, I recounted one of the ambiguous Dybbøl Day performances I witnessed during my fieldwork, in which currents of ‘reconciliation’ could be seen, in my analysis, to struggle with concerns over ‘reservation’ at the annual wreath-laying ceremony. Modern German troops, invited to participate but bound by clauses on their part banning weaponry, the waving of flags, and marching on Danish soil, took part in a strangely two-faced display of Danish colours and muted reconciliatory ef-

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forts. Despite such ambiguities, a definite transnational and reconciliatory spirit permeated the day, expressed, for instance, in the comments of the ceremony’s host and main speaker, Viggo Ravn, then commander of the Sønderborg sergeant school, stating that what we were gathered to commemorate on that April morning in 2006 was ‘neither victory nor defeat’ but ‘the heroic effort’ and ‘the courage and the sacrifice demonstrated by the soldiers who gave their lives here in the fighting at Dybbøl’. No Danish priority was discernible, as ‘Danish and German troops are gathered here today to commemorate those who fell on both sides’. Towards the end of his speech, Ravn explicitly asserted that today’s enemies were no longer Germans or Prussians. ‘Today’, he stated, ‘it is not a battle against rebellious duchies, but a global fight against terror in favour of human rights, freedom and democracy.’ The enemy of our time was presumed to be of a different and subtler kind than earlier, according to this logic; it was the minions of global terror that we – the new ‘we’, including the modern Germans – were seen as having to confront. What was to be defended or celebrated, in such a perspective, was no longer the territory or boundaries of the nation in any strict sense, but a set of values and boundaries assumingly characterizing and uniting former adversaries in this new ‘global fight’, a grander but also drastically more diffuse struggle than the territorial wars of the nineteenth century. In addition to the morning wreath-laying ceremony, the 2006 Dybbøl Day’s commemorative events included an evening memorial service in Sankt Marie Church in Sønderborg, followed by a banquet at the town’s sergeant school. Like the morning ceremony, these two gatherings were organized and hosted by the Danish Armed Forces headquartered at the sergeant school. In terms of symbolic framing, they were both heavily laden national ceremonies, cluttered with flags, insignia and imagery oozing with Danish heroism and solemnity. Also, as per the seven reservations on the German participation in the event,1 they were both officially devoid of German attendants. Nevertheless, amidst the militaristic and utterly Danish setting, the messages of transnational cooperation and charity trickled through. During the church ceremony, the garrison chaplain in his sermon asserted that the ‘lessons’ from 1864 hold value today, not only to Danish citizens but also to the global community. Today, he preached, in the midst of ‘frightening reports from all over the world’, it was encouraging to notice ‘the Danish strength to help others in need’.2 Taking his point of departure in the Denmark of 1864, when the situation was ‘just as hopeless as in Yugoslavia a few years ago’, the chaplain praised what he called the contemporary ‘reserves of energy of the Danes’ being, according to him, displayed across the world. We, as churchgoers immersed in a strong,

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supremely Danish and soldierly setting, were left with a clear impression that the 1864 war and in particular the subsequent détente with Germany made ‘us’ particularly well suited for carrying out peacekeeping operations globally today. The sermon was thus profoundly transnational and cosmopolitan in its insistence on the moral obligation of individuals and groups towards others, including those across borders. ‘We have asked what we owe our fellow human beings, not what we owe our fellow nationals’, as Robert Post (2006: 1) characterizes the cosmopolitan outlook. Pheng Cheah (2006: 487) states that ‘the cosmopolitan’s universal circle of belonging embraces the whole of humanity’. In parallel with such a universal stance, however, a certain configuration of Danish superiority took shape through accounts and events like these, praising the Danish ‘strength’ and ‘energy’ as unique and uniquely positioned to help out the world today. This is a case of what I would label ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, in which universal and/or cosmopolitan values are routinely asserted as also quintessentially Danish values. Let me provide another example of this logic. During the time of my fieldwork, a potential future heritage scenario at Dybbøl was discussed, including the prospect of a so-called Red Cross museum. The fact that the two first Red Cross delegates in world history – a Swiss and a Dutchman – were present on the 1864 battlefield was marked at the time only by a modest memorial stone set outside the battlefield centre (figure 6.1). The proposed Red Cross museum, according to these plans, was to tell the story not only of those two particular pioneers, but also about the civil consequences of war, exiles and refugees on a global scale. At least, this was the vision of one of the project’s planners, a marketing director from one of the region’s large businesses whom I interviewed on the matter. He explained to me how such a museum would brand Dybbøl as what he termed a ‘cradle of peace work’ and Denmark as ‘one of the world’s leading proponents of humanitarianism’. Such comments are related to the widespread ideas about ‘our’ costly war experiences in the border region enabling ‘us’ to understand and solve conflicts on a global level, as evident in the garrison chaplain’s sermon. At the same time, they reconfigure Dybbøl’s significance from a theatre of war and bloodshed to a site of peace, hope and humanitarianism. Dybbøl, when inscribed in such new narratives of peacekeeping and Danish humanitarianism, is emphasized as a ‘peacekeeping’ template suitable for branding and export. Good for local business, and good for Danish interests abroad. Rationales such as those expressed by the Sønderborg commander, the garrison chaplain and the marketing director can thus be seen as aspiring to inscribe within the dominant discourses of universal values and cos-

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Figure 6.1. The modest Red Cross memorial stone set outside the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre. Photo by the author.

mopolitan ideals also a new national self-image: Denmark envisaged as a template humanitarian nation of global shepherds, particularly well suited for guiding the misled peoples of the world, including the ‘failed states’ in which the Danish military had been sent to intervene in recent years – a template understood to have its roots in ‘our’ costly but invaluable collective ‘lessons’ and experiences from 1864.

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Mobilizing Dybbøl Today: A Showdown with the Weak and the Cowardly Thus, although undergoing change, the national salience of Dybbøl cannot be said to have evaporated in light of the recent inclusive and cosmopolitan turn. Rather, the national significance of the site has been reconfigured and accorded a set of new qualities and potentials related to broader societal and economic dynamics, and to Denmark’s position on the global stage. As such, the meanings of Dybbøl, and of Danish heritage more broadly, are of course entwined with politics and policies. In the following, I analyse one specific and profoundly political position relating to Dybbøl and its meaning today, based on a speech delivered by then minister of education and MP Bertel Haarder in July 2007 at the official opening of the battlefield centre’s new outdoor redoubt and trench milieu. As a speech anchored at Dybbøl and the centre, it invoked, contextualized and interrelated a number of the key themes of my study, including the interweaving of nation and experience. At the same time, however, it widened perspectives considerably, utilizing Dybbøl as a stepping-stone for a much larger, holistic tale revolving around the themes of being Danish today and defending the homeland in times of crisis. It thus condensed a particular, powerful political vision relating both to the issue of the nation in a globalized world, and also to the role accorded to ‘experience’ in communicating and teaching new generations about this vision. Haarder was a veteran of Danish politics, a member of the Venstre party,3 and holder of a number of different cabinet posts in various centre-right governments since the early 1980s. Invited alongside the Danish queen, he opened his Dybbøl speech by stating that ‘I was there in ’64!’ He then went on to qualify this somewhat surprising claim: ‘Not in 1864, but in 1964, when the hundredth anniversary for the storm on Dybbøl was celebrated. I carried the banner of the Rønshoved High School, among countless other banners, all the way from Sønderborg to Dybbøl Hill.’ The minister recounted how King Frederik on that day in 1964 had delivered a pithy speech in which he had stated: ‘Back then [in 1864] there were no statements such as “What is the use!” (Hvad skal det nytte! ) Back then it was “Go on and endure!”’ The former king’s 1964 comment that Haarder referred to had been a critical remark on the Danish policy of passivity during the German occupation in World War II, and on the resigned political slogan, devised by the Danish social liberals (Det Radikale Venstre), on the questionable ‘use’ of maintaining a Danish national defence in the face of neighbouring powers who could invade and occupy Denmark with little effort anyway.

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In his 2007 speech, Haarder made the former king’s words his own as he contrasted the Danish passivity of the 1940s with the determination of the 1864 soldiers. He then drew a link to the present, framing his praise of the battlefield centre in a grand historical narrative: The wound [after the 1864 defeat] bled in the national soul ( folkesjælen) and turned the country introspective – and only healed properly very recently, seventeen years ago, when Denmark, after more than one hundred years of adaptive foreign policy during two world wars and a cold war, once again dared to join the world on equal terms with others.4

In this political mobilization of Dybbøl’s symbolic power, we see how a particular historical narration was given shape, pivoting around a string of armed conflicts in which Denmark was involved. It was a tale of defeat, darkness and ultimate recovery. In this interpretation, not only was the Danish army routed and destroyed in 1864, but the defeat also thrust the country as a whole into a dark and humiliating century of ‘adaptive’ (i.e., disgraceful) foreign policy. The defeat shattered Danish confidence and identity, which suffered for almost 150 years, until 1990, when Denmark again ‘dared to join’ the rest of the world, according to the minister. This purportedly crucial moment to which Haarder referred turned out to be Denmark’s decision to send a warship, the Olfert Fischer, to the Persian Gulf as part of the UN resolutions against Iraq during the first Gulf War. This political move, to the minister, signalled the end of a shameful and reluctant era and heralded the beginning of an ‘activist’ foreign policy, in which ‘we’ – ‘again’ (as we did in 1864) – ‘dare’ to take up arms and confront the world. Haarder went on to explicitly link Dybbøl to the deeds of Danish soldiers abroad today: Since then [1990], Danish units have distinguished themselves in innumerable peacekeeping and peace-building operations. The battle of Tuzla in Bosnia and the dangerous engagements in the Helmand Province in Afghanistan speak volumes that Denmark has joined the world (meldt sig ind i verden) with everything it involves, including the risk of an unexpected outcome, as in Iraq.5

Haarder’s 2007 speech shared many characteristics, in terms of content, with the Dybbøl Day rhetoric I have quoted already (‘Today, it is not a battle against rebellious duchies, but a global fight against terror in favour of human rights, freedom and democracy’). ‘Denmark’ had, in this thinking, finally come to terms with its humiliating pacifist past, ‘daring’ again to join the fray across the globe in the war for peace. As such, we may label it as a very overt expression of cosmopolitan nationalism, even though the minister was much more explicit in his celebration of Danish courage and

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uniqueness than the officers quoted earlier, and did not wrap his national agitation in much reconciliatory lingo. He did not, for instance, mention the Prussians or the need for reconciliation with and respect for the former enemy, instead praising Dybbøl as a site of utter Danish determination. It makes sense, nevertheless, to include the ‘cosmopolitan’ label, due to the explicit stressing of the global tasks at hand. Denmark had ‘joined the world’ – the Danish wording meldt sig ind implying a process of signing up for participation – with ‘everything it involves’. Haarder’s national rhetoric was thus much more explicit and indeed confrontational than the voices and practices seeking to soften and tone down the national perspectives I have documented at the battlefield centre. No postheroism in this case. In line with the foreign policy adopted by the cabinet of which Haarder formed part, he called for an explicit Danish interventionism abroad – even if outcomes might sometimes be ‘unexpected’, as he termed ‘our’ lessons from the second Iraq War – arguing in favour of a global order based on just, democratic and ultimately Danish values. As he went on to discuss the battlefield centre itself and its completed reconstruction project, Haarder praised the material and physical engagements made possible there. It was a celebration of ‘experience’, and more specifically of the experience of national sentiment. Voicing his enthusiasm for the outdoor reconstructions, he stressed their ample opportunities for learning. Here, he said, children could ‘equip everything with cannon batteries’ and ‘identify with the life behind the front’. It was of course hardly surprising, given his position as minister of education, that Haarder chose to stress the centre’s potential for learning. But one notes that what was to be learned here, according to his speech, was lessons of proper war conduct and national disposition. During his speech he reminisced, for instance, on how his own brother, a schoolteacher, had ‘loved to demonstrate to his pupils how to load a muzzle-loading rifle and crawl forward’. And again and again, national issues were brought up: ‘As world citizens, the children must know their history, for better or for worse. They are Danish today because someone stood up and fought for them to be so.’6 The centre’s educational and experiential potential, in the eyes of the minister, were of a distinctly national kind. The outright embracing of national sentiment, sacrifice and pride found in Haarder’s speech was, as I have noted, at odds with the dominant developments at Dybbøl, which pointed to a toning down of national perspectives. So was his undiluted excitement about the centre’s potential for play. The staff concerns and ‘knife-edge’ balancing between ‘play’ and ‘demonstration’, discussed in chapter 5, thus found no resonance in the minister’s utterly positive stressing of the value, for children, of being able to equip

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the reconstructed positions with cannon batteries and ‘identify with the life behind the front’, or of his brother’s instructions as to the loading of 1864 weaponry. In stark contrast to concerned voices such as those of the German tourists I have quoted who criticized the centre as ‘a site where you go and have national feelings’, Haarder precisely lauded this dimension and the centre’s revival of the Danish ‘national soul’. And in opposition to the critique of the centre’s feel of playfulness and of being too much of an ‘adventure playground’, as one of my German visitor informants put it, the Danish minister of education embraced these same adventurous affordances as the very key to teaching Danish youth about warfare and national allegiance in a global era.

The Enlightenment/Experience Tension and the Bolstering of ‘Cohesion’ Haarder’s 2007 speech was thus an expression of a particular political vision in which the national and experiential qualities of Dybbøl were understood to come together to form and inform the shaping of a bolstered Danish identity. It also documented the ongoing crafting, or work in progress, of a specific national narrative; a storyline relating, logically and causally, various dramatic moments in Danish history and assembling them into a cohesive plot in which past, present and future elements inform and lend meaning to each other. This was of course not Haarder’s narrative or policy alone. Rather, this understanding of the ways in which history, heritage and nation relate must be seen as a joint and co-constructed effort over which politicians and other actors and institutions struggle to assert influence. Haarder’s contribution was part of a distinct political project orchestrated by the centre-right government in power in Denmark from 2001 to 2011, the outlines of which I sketched in my introduction to this book. Below, I discuss some further aspects of this broader political project, and especially the key role awarded to heritage and culture as these terms were conceptualized and put to work in Denmark, politically and administratively, during the period of my fieldwork. In particular, I discuss the notion of experience as operationalized in Danish cultural politics. In chapter 4, I accounted for the surge of experiential communication approaches in the heritage industry in Denmark and beyond. Distancing themselves from ‘the quiet contemplation of objects in a cathedral of culture’, many museums have been concerned that they will be ‘bypassed as boring, dusty places, as spaces of death’, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 139) puts it, stressing the widespread assumption in the heritage sector

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that visitors demand an ‘experience’. According to Lash, if, for the first modernity, ‘humankind’s differentia specifica is the ability to reason, then for the second, the other modernity, it is experience’ (1999: 143, italics in original). In the Danish context, as mentioned, the age of experience was heralded by Pine and Gilmore’s book The Experience Economy in 1999. I will briefly outline some of the core ideas of this particular publication, since it came to assert a surprisingly strong and almost instant influence on Danish cultural policies, or rather on policies shaped and promoted in cooperation between the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs. ‘An experience’, Pine and Gilmore state in a paper published in advance of the book itself, ‘occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event’ (1998: 98). They regard the experience economy as the fourth step in a ladder of ‘natural progression’ of economic value (1999: 5). In contrast to ‘commodities’, ‘goods’ and ‘services’ – emblems of previous and allegedly outmoded economical regimes that the experience paradigm is argued to replace and supersede – ‘experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual or even spiritual level’ (1998: 99). As a consequence, in the new millennium, ‘manufacturers must experientialize their goods’ (1999: 16, italics in original). The company – we’ll call it an experience stager – no longer offers goods or services alone but the resulting experience, rich with sensations, created within the customer. All prior economic offerings remain at arms-length, outside the buyer, while experiences are inherently personal. (12, italics in original)

Pine and Gilmore’s theorizing weds commercial promise with a heavy use of dramaturgical metaphors. The subtitle of their book – Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage – is indicative of their coupling of an allegoric framework in which the everyday is viewed as drama, in the tradition of Erving Goffman (e.g. 1959), with a focus on strategic economic interest and outcome. ‘Staging experiences that sell’ is what matters in the updating of companies and businesses on the brink of the new millennium (1998: 98). Pine and Gilmore, in a direct and fast-paced rhetoric implying urgency and the need for bold and speedy decisions, call on businesses to ‘step right up’ to the challenges (1999: ix) and ‘let the action begin’ (24), in order to utilize experience as ‘an existing but previously unarticulated genre of economic output’ (ix, emphasis in original). These grand promises were quickly seized upon by Danish policy makers eager to jump on the experience wagon and embrace the venture be-

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tween commerce and culture. This embracing must also be seen in light of the increasing pressure on traditional Danish and Western European job functions, as companies increasingly outsourced production under the influence of ‘globalization’. In the face of that threat, the promise of experience as a new added value to compensate for loss in conventional industries seemed alluring. In a glossy 2003 report from the Danish government entitled ‘Denmark in the culture and experience economy’ (Danmark i kultur- og oplevelsesøkonomien), the imprints of Pine and Gilmore were substantial. The report contends: From the fusion between culture and business, a new type of economy has emerged. An economy based on an increasing demand for experiences, and built upon the surplus value created by creativity, in new as well as in more traditional products and services. (Danish Government 2003: 8)

It goes on to stress the global threats against Denmark seen to necessitate action on the experiential front: At a time of increasing global competition and in a knowledge economy such as the Danish, where competition is increasingly on innovation and creativity, it is important to differentiate one’s products from one’s competitors’ and to create a unique value and experience for the consumers. (8) 7

Even though this specific report was officially the work of the centre-right government in power since 2001, it is important to note that the experience enthusiasm was not tied to a specific political project per se. Indeed, under the previous Danish government led by the social democrats, then minister for culture Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen had voiced largely similar thoughts. A few years earlier, in an article laying the groundwork for a renewed experiential and market-oriented cultural policy, she wrote: We live in an age (…) when consumers seek experiences, context and meaning on the market. We buy a lemon squeezer for several hundred kroner because of its aesthetics. We buy organic dairy products and eggs because it is better for the animals. We buy more and more products that entertain, create meaning and provide identity. Art and culture are major suppliers of tales, stories, values and identity. Of that which separates as well as that which ties humans together. (Gerner Nielsen 2000: 6)

This reads more or less like a reiteration of Lash’s definition of the subjectobject relationship under second modernity. No longer pure instruments, goods are increasingly invested with sentiment and spirit. Paraphrasing Lash on the status of ‘the object’ in the second modernity, we may say that in such a light, goods come to ‘take on a structure of meaning’ that cannot

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be ‘reduced to epistemological and utilitarian functions’, and come to be ‘invested with affect, with desire, with care’ (1999: 339–40). Or, in the terminology of Lash and Lury, writing on the ‘global culture industry’, we may see this as a signal of the proposed shift ‘from representation to thing’ (2007: 183). This allegedly new economy was seen to hold a range of possibilities for Denmark, but also threats, according to Gerner Nielsen. Anticipating the 2003 report of her political successors, she stressed the need for a fusion of culture and commerce: The global, American-led entertainment industry is so strong that the free spaces that Danish cultural policy can create may become too few and too small. (…) If we do nothing, we can easily be run down. But the task is so great that the public sector cannot undertake it on its own. We must make use of the market. (Gerner Nielsen 2000: 6–7)8

Here, we see how ‘the market’ is conceptualized no longer – as most of Gerner Nielsen’s allies on the political left would have it – as a capitalist evil, but as a field of potential. The main threat towards ‘Danish culture’ at this point in time was envisaged to come from the ‘American-led entertainment industry’. Shortly afterwards, however, things looked different: the 2001 election saw a new political agenda set by the centre-right government under the confident leadership of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. This coincided with a radical reconfiguration of the global dynamics after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and meant that the perceived threats against Danish culture, and indeed the notion of Danish culture itself, were shifted. In the post-9/11 world of good and evil – the very world Haarder would address in his 2007 speech at Dybbøl – Danish culture, values and interests were now increasingly seen to be threatened from anti-Western forces with whom ‘we’ have to do battle. American culture, in this light, was no longer seen primarily as a threat (and no one mentioned entertainment anymore), but indeed as the most important ally for a small country with newfound ‘activist’ international ambitions. Under the centre-right government that came to power in Denmark in 2001, therefore, the enthusiasm for experience was not dulled, but increasingly coupled with an explicitly national cultural and heritage policy. As a first important move, the newly appointed minister of culture Brian Mikkelsen, MP for Konservative, the Danish Conservative Party, decided to restructure the Danish museum sector and centralize conservation and ‘safeguarding’ measures in a new national institutional body, the Heritage Agency of Denmark (Kulturarvsstyrelsen). Over the following years, Mikkelsen and his ministry launched a string of initiatives to combat what was

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repeatedly, by the government and its spokespersons, referred to as the ‘historylessness’ (historieløshed) believed to be particularly salient among the Danish youth. It was assumed that this youth, devoid of a sense of (national) history, was in dire need of guidance. Mikkelsen himself was the premier voice in this effort, attending to this alleged tendency with concern time and again. In 2004, for instance, he stated that ‘in order to contextualize our present and confront the historylessness which unfortunately is widespread – not least among our children and youth – it is important to increase our focus on the traditions from the past which we have all inherited’.9 Note the heavy deixis: ‘our’ present, youth and focus, are, needless to say, Danish dittos; and the ‘we’ who have all inherited the past traditions imply, of course, ‘we, the Danes’. Other changes in Danish cultural and heritage policy in these years included the implementation of free admission to all Danish museums for those under the age of eighteen, and for all age groups to the two national Copenhagen museums of cultural history and art. Mikkelsen explicitly stated that that decision had been made as a consequence of the ‘rootlessness and historylessness’ he saw in society (MetroXpress 2005).10 Such comments are intimately related to those from the same period, by Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen in particular, pointing to the threats to what was now termed Danish national ‘cohesion’ (sammenhængskraft). Another hotly contested cultural policy initiative taken by Mikkelsen was the compilation of a number of canonical lists, each listing twelve artworks and products supposedly part of an inalienable Danish heritage. The lists, despite their somewhat uneven selections of items, artworks and related phenomena, must be seen as a distinct conservative political project in support of Danish heritage and ‘cohesion’, and in response to the alleged historylessness of the younger generations.11 As noted in my introduction, in 2006 the cultural canon lists were supplemented with a canon of history for Danish primary schools, in which the battle of Dybbøl features as one out of twenty-nine must-learn events.12

Heritage Romanticism I have adopted Lash’s idea of a second modernity evolving out of German Romanticism, and argued that such a widened conceptualization of modernity allows for a fuller understanding of the turn towards experience in the heritage sector. In light of the Danish political actualities outlined above, I want to now pursue the linkages between experience, romantic thought and national feeling further, and to ask whether the recent obses-

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sion, in Denmark and elsewhere, with experiential heritage communication and appropriation also contains a certain neoromantic surge. If Pine and Gilmore’s demanding ‘costumer’ (1999) of today, or Lash and Lury’s ‘player’ (2007), indeed require emotional attachment and the cultivation of site-specific sensual relationships with products and brands – including heritage objects and sites – might that not also mean that this alleged economy of experiences features and nurses a number of neoromantic ideals and assumptions? Is the so-called experience economy essentially romantic, and, if yes, what does such a neo-Romanticism entail? This set of questions seems particularly pertinent given the coupling of experience and national ‘cohesion’ that we have seen to be part of Danish heritage policies after the turn of the millennium. Historically, romantic ideals and nationalist agendas have, of course, frequently been merged, sometimes with disastrous results, but it is important to note that Romanticism is not the same as romantic nationalism. Romanticism, used as a cover term for a series of complex philosophical, literary and artistic movements originating in the second half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe, stressed emotion as a source for aesthetic experience. Particular emphasis was paid to sentiments of yearning, trepidation, horror and awe in the individual’s confrontation with and appropriation of ‘the sublime’ and ‘the picturesque’. These currents and ideas asserted themselves differently in various artistic media and genres – and indeed impacted in various countries at different periods – but common characteristics, according to one encyclopaedic definition, included a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles. (Encyclopædia Britannica n.d.)

The linking of these emotional and sentimental qualities with the homeland or the nation was at the core of romantic or ethnic nationalism, as discussed in chapter 2. This strand of thinking, emanating from German philosophers such as Herder and Fichte, revolved around the idea of the unifying essences of language, soil, culture and Volk, and can be seen as an intellectual utilization of the ‘toolbox’ of Romanticism in the service of German nation building. Via export to key Danish thinkers and poets of the period, these thoughts came to shape Danish national understandings as well, as sketched in chapter 1 (Korsgaard 2004: 203–11; Henningsen 2007). Romantic propensities thus do not, of course, automatically lead to nationalism, but we may say that Romanticism, with its stressing of

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individual, deep-felt experience and longing, as an ideological framework has proved historically to be extraordinarily well suited for national and nationalist causes. The ‘culture industries’ that Lash and Lury (2007) dissect include Disney films and animated universes such as Toy Story and Wallace and Gromit. A similarly globalized entertainment template of more direct relevance to my own field of heritage and national memory is Braveheart, the 1995 Hollywood blockbuster starring Mel Gibson as Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace. The film, grossing more than $200 million worldwide (Basu 2007: 87) and winning five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, can be viewed as an example of a major, immensely successful and profoundly experiential heritage product. Despite a dubious relationship with the historical record, the film has played a major role in the touristic rebranding of Scotland as a romantic land of moors, kilts and heroic struggle; ‘an elemental land of warrior men and wan maidens, of breast beating heroes fighting the overly rational English’, as one commentator in the Guardian had it (Kane 1995). As Paul Basu has observed, however, ‘our concern [as analysts] ought not to be with the authenticity of the film’s representation of Scotland and its history, so much as to understand how the film comes to inspire and represent the sentiments of a significant number of people’ (2007: 89). In Basu’s own work, focusing on genealogy and ‘roots tourism’ in the global Scottish diaspora, he provides examples of North American tourists identifying so strongly with the film’s storyline and conflicts and the struggle of Wallace and his men that they claim to have been powerfully moved, even altered, by their cinematic experience, amounting to ‘a mysterious sense of connection with this historical homeland of the brave’ (90). Thus providing a profound experiential stepping-stone for the identity work of the individual, Braveheart has also been exploited in more collective fashion for nationalist purposes. Edensor, in his analyses of the reception of the film (1997, 2002), argues that it ‘emerged at a crucial time for the reconstitution of Scottish identity’ (2002: 145). Upon its screening, its anticolonial messages were quickly seized by the Scottish National Party in their campaign for independence from the English (150). More generally, Edensor (1997: 188) argues that ‘the motion picture industry scours the globe in search of mythological narratives and heroes to re-enchant thematic narratives’ and identifies the major role of the experience industry in relation to (national) memory: The increasingly visual modes of remembering are instantiated in the audio-visual productions, film shows, simulacra and dramaturgical reenactments that are found

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at heritage sites (…) In many cases, memory is less articulated through gazing upon authentic artefacts and more through immersion in the excitement of the staged experience. Tourist marketing campaigns are increasingly organised around ‘heritage films’ and mythic fantasies. Thus familiar filmic landscapes, people and romantic tales mesh with the selling of place and history. (189)

This of course resonates perfectly with my own analysis of a general movement away from enlightenment gazes and towards experiential immersion. In Edensor’s formulation, the ‘shift towards the manufacture of an “experience” in the presentation of the past produces a form of remembrance that depends less on legislative authority and more on an authenticity of feeling, of sensual experience’ (183). The Braveheart example is useful for my present purposes because it highlights the extraordinary power of emotion and feeling in individual appropriation of and identification with particular ‘heritage’ products or brands. Furthermore, it points to the increasing breakdown of traditional patterns of authority and expertise and the unavoidable popular ‘seizure’ of certain experience products and narratives – however fictional and tenuously founded these may appear to academic historians – by groups with certain agendas, including nationalist ones. This attests, then, to the ways in which successful companies and institutions today are able to utilize such experiential products or narratives by mobilizing their powerful emotional or indeed ‘romantic’ potential. It is arguably romantic in that it privileges ‘emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect’ and involves an introspective and ‘heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities’ as well as a preoccupation with ‘the hero, and the exceptional figure’ and ‘his passions and inner struggles’, to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica (n.d.) definition of Romanticism again. In such endeavours, questions of rational and conventional historical expertise are commonly subordinated to concerns with immediate impact and affect. In today’s experiential cultural milieu, there are no clear lines or ropes separating expert from amateur or producer from consumer (Lash and Urry 1994: 272). Indeed, the complex and increasingly commercialized networks of heritage call ‘into question any straightforward distinction between the roles of virtual and real worlds in the processes of identity formation’ (Basu 2007: 91). One heritage genre positioned in the very midst of this blurry landscape between enlightenment and experience, between production and consumption and between expertise and amateurism is the phenomenon of historical reenactment. I have already mentioned the group of 1864 reenactors connected to Dybbøl, noting for instance how head curator Peter Dragsbo of the castle museum hesitantly allowed their presence at the battlefield centre, as long as they restricted themselves to ‘demonstrations’ of techni-

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calities and nonnationalized displays of tactics and manoeuvres. ‘I do not want to see them fight Danes versus Germans’, as he phrased his concerns to me. Below, I focus my attention more sharply on the performances and perceptions of the Dybbøl reenactors, for whom experiential and sensorial engagement with the historical environment was utterly crucial. The Jyske Landsoldater society was a small group of men that met up regularly to restage selected 1864 skirmishes and war episodes. During the time of my fieldwork, their numbers amounted to approximately twenty enthusiastic individuals investing a substantial amount of spare time and money in such stagings. Their uniforms were mainly home sewn, while their weapons were often original historical pieces. During the annual Dybbøl Day on 18 April and the days leading up to it, they gave demonstrations, talks and shows at the battlefield centre, and some of them returned to Dybbøl during the summer to volunteer as ‘living history’ guides there. They were not salaried by the centre, however, and conducted their performances out of personal interest and a passion for history. Although they also performed at other Danish venues throughout the year – at various historical festivals, open-air museums and military parades – they considered themselves closely connected to Dybbøl, as we shall see below. The following excerpt is from a group interview I conducted with four of the group’s key figures after a long day of reenacting. All four were males, ranging in age from their late twenties to approximately sixty years of age (my estimates).13

Interview Excerpt: Coming Home INTERVIEWER: Right. I don’t have so much more, but if we could, in conclusion, talk about those somewhat abstract themes about Dybbøl’s meaning for you as a group … I am aware that this is where you have all your stuff from, but do you think you could … FRANK: Do you mean pride or something like that? (Interviewer: Yes, or …) CASPER: Me and Sven, we have often talked about the fact that when we come down there [to Dybbøl], when we step out of the car, right, then you have some kind of feeling that … that you belong there somehow. SVEN: Yes (Sven expresses continual agreement with Casper; Thorsten also says ‘yes’ several times in the following). CASPER: And I can’t really describe what the hell it is. It’s like coming home, same feeling. You are there, and you can just feel it. You can go outside in the evening and sort of imagine that, well, a lot of things have happened here, it’s sort of a historical site, it has some sort of aura, I’m not sure how to describe it.

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THORSTEN: And simply waking up in the morning at half past five and look across the Vemmingbund Bay, and watch the morning fog lift. And think that … CASPER: You can almost see [the 1864 warship] Rolf Krake. THORSTEN: Yes, almost. You get inspired (besjælet) (Sven: Yes) (Casper: Yes, you do). FRANK: So you can say that we have a certain affinity with it [Dybbøl], like you have to your home, so we have an affinity with this site. SVEN: And I can only say that for my part, from back when I was a very little boy, I inherited my historical interest from my father. And we had the 1864 bible at home, it was called ‘Our last battle for Southern Jutland’ (Vores sidste kamp for Sønderjylland). And already as a small lad, I read it over and over again. I read about Dybbøl and Vemmingbund, and Nybøl and Broager and everything, and I knew all about it. About Lieutenant Ancher, and redoubt no. 2, the counterattack of the Eighth Brigade, and … I drew and I read, and like Casper says, and the others: when I come to Dybbøl, then it’s like coming home. I know it. I know it. It’s not like getting out in Nyborg or Silkeborg; Dybbøl, that’s different. And then you might call it patriotism (fædrelandskærlighed) or national feeling (nationalfølelse) – which apparently is an invective nowadays. But to us, or to me, it’s not an invective. I am proud to be a Dane. And I’m proud of our history, I am. I am proud of what the Danish army and soldiers achieved. Dybbøl, that is my second home, in here [touches his chest]. And people will probably say, ‘He’s crazy, he’s old-fashioned’, but then so be it. And I can live with that. CASPER: And you cannot help but try and make the audience feel that too, right (Thorsten: Yes), because when you feel like this, others must be able to see it too. THORSTEN: I feel like we are some sort of link between those who fell back then, and then our time. I experience a solidarity (samhørighed) and like I said before, an inspiration (besjælethed) from the spirit of the place and the things that have taken place there. CASPER: You can become quite moved when standing at the soldier grave [during the Dybbøl Day ceremony] (Thorsten: Sure) (Sven: Yes, so am I). Easily. SVEN: It might be 140 years ago, but still … it’s like it all happened yesterday. CASPER: They were human beings of flesh and blood, and they bloody shall not just be forgotten. SVEN: No, I think we owe that to them, wherever they are, that respect. CASPER: Often you think – I know that, we’ve talked a lot about it – what if they could see us? Would they regard us as pure fools, or what? If they look down upon us from up there [points upwards]. SVEN: No, I have the feeling that they sit there [thinking], ‘Well, we might not have done exactly as they do, but they have not forgotten us. We are not forgotten’. And we made sure that they were not forgotten. And I for one am proud to be part of that. It sounds a bit bombastic, but … THORSTEN: No, I can easily follow you.

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This, in my analysis, is heritage Romanticism. To these men – who knew very well that their ‘playful’ activities were frequently frowned upon by academic historians and the Danish museum establishment – Dybbøl and the Dybbøl history were serious business. To them, its mere name resonated with feelings of national pride and belonging. Coming to Dybbøl was like ‘coming home’; it was a site evoking strong national sentiments, ‘inspiring’ them with feelings that they were at pains to convey to their public: ‘when you feel like this, others must be able to see it too’, in Casper’s words. And, as evidenced by the last bit of the excerpt, they liked to consider themselves ‘links’ between the fallen Danish 1864 soldiers – whose postmortem judgement of their own performances they discussed among themselves – and their contemporary Danes. As should be obvious, there was quite a gap between this self-image and the principles of dispassionate ‘demonstration’ of technicalities endorsed by the museum head curator. In contrast to his stated reservations, these men’s deep-felt national sentiment was completely inseparable from their experiential involvements and understandings of self, place and belonging. Perhaps the clearest expression of a distinctly romantic attitude in the above was Thorsten’s attempts at describing his awe at coming face to face with the morning fog over Vemmingbund Bay and his and Casper’s imaginative efforts at calling forth – indeed, reexperiencing – the Danish ironclad Rolf Krake emerging from the mist. Likewise, Thorsten’s continual reference to the ‘inspiration’ coming upon him was decidedly romantic; the Danish adjective besjælet captures the idea of the surroundings filling the subject with urges and sentiment, in Thorsten’s case with ‘the spirit of the place and the things that have taken place there’. This spirit, in turn, was understood to be of a specific national kind. Sven’s detailed description of his inheriting historical interest from his father could be seen as his way of trying to get across to me the very concrete processes of childhood habituation and ingraining of memories and dispositions, including national feeling and pride. The reenactors thus embodied what Edensor, quoted above, called a ‘form of remembrance that depends less on legislative authority and more on an authenticity of feeling, of sensual experience’ (1997: 183). It is not that they did not like authoritative accounts or conventional museum exhibits, but they regarded these as ultimately insufficient in calling forth the understandings and inspirations of history. As Sven explained to me on another occasion when discussing the power of reenactment, ‘this is different from a dry little book from some history teacher in 1947 who told [the visitor] something he has forgotten all about’. This fits Richard Handler and William Saxton’s finding that although they are almost by definition

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deeply committed to ‘history’, ‘living historians explicitly devalue written history, history as it is found in books’ (1988: 243). What these enthusiasts strove for was to communicate their passions and sensing of history to others; ‘when you feel like this, others must be able to see it too’, as Casper said in the interview above. It was also, however – and to many reenactors more than anything – about sensing an ‘authentic’ past themselves, and by doing so, obtaining a sense of a ‘real self ’. ‘An authentic experience, to be achieved in the practice of living history, is one in which individuals feel themselves to be in touch both with a “real” world and with their “real” selves’ (243). Handler and Saxton, in line with Edensor’s quote above, term such a quest for felt realism ‘an authenticity of experience’ (245, italics in original). The reenactors, in my analysis, were textbook heritage romantics. I employ this term not in any derogatory sense but in an attempt to capture and designate how their attempts at coming to terms with their perceived relations between soil, self and (national) culture – as well as their idea of what an ‘authentic’ heritage experience was or should be – differed radically from the of the dispassionate perspective personalized by the reserved museum curator. This does not mean that they, anymore than him, were old-fashioned reactionaries (although Sven expressed his expectations, above, that that is how ‘people’ would most probably see him), but their experiences of their place in the world unfolded according to a ‘different rationality’, as Lash would have it, than that of the authorised heritage caretaker. The second modernity entails a populist and antiauthoritarian view of the modern, resonating well with my analysis of the reenactors’ position; indeed, it is a ‘low modernism’, a ‘modernism in the streets’ (Lash and Friedman 1992: 3). ‘It is a modernism not of the elite opinion makers of Öffentlichkeit (public sphere), but of the popular, of – in a thoroughly globalized context – das Volk’ (2–3, emphasis in original). The antielitist, even Völkish, performances of the self-made reenactors at Dybbøl incarnated such a ‘second modern’ position, as their stagings confused and provoked the custodians of order, rationality and distance. These heritage romantics defied and challenged the museum establishment, producing and consuming their own playful but nevertheless deadly meaningful modern experience, an experience that was not imposed from above but moved ‘from the ground up’ (10).

The Reality of Lived Experience: Sensing History, Nation and Purpose In chapter 2, I quoted a young Danish visitor to the castle museum displeased with the fact that ‘we don’t have a film’ about Dybbøl, and sug-

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gesting that ‘we’ should have a film ‘like Braveheart’ (bricklayer apprentice from Copenhagen, Denmark, male, age twenty-four). To him, Braveheart constituted an ideal template for a future Dybbøl film, and I argued that he and his girlfriend utilized the romantic oil paintings in the museum to imaginatively add atmosphere, ‘filmic’ grandeur and a sense of vibrancy to their visit. Interestingly, since the time of my fieldwork, an ambitious full-length Dybbøl film has in fact been planned and set into production, scheduled for release at the 150th anniversary of the war in 2014. The film will be based on two recent best-selling historical accounts of the 1864 events, penned by Danish historian and journalist Tom Buk-Swienty (2008, 2010). The books, historical accounts written in true eyewitness format, are based on both Danish and Prussian war participants’ letters and diaries, thus also adding a transnational dimension to the memory of 1864. As such – even if they were published after my fieldwork, and even if they were, as the products of a single author, unconnected in any direct sense to my field sites and institutions – Buk-Swienty’s popular and powerful books testify to the two main tendencies I have been analyzing: the rise of new and experience-near communication forms (what I have called, in chapter 4, ‘the grounded private’ perspective) and the increasing inclusion of Prussian voices in the hitherto exclusively Danish narrative of war. The adaptation of the books into a grand war epic for the big screen can be seen as the moulding of a piece of Danish ‘memory culture’ epitomizing both the embracing of ‘the market’ that former minister of culture Gerner Nielsen advocated in 2000 as well as the battling of the alleged ‘historylessness’ and lack of ‘national cohesion’ identified by the centre-right government after 2001. It is an alliance of commercial, cosmopolitan and national interests, and with experience-near, emotionalized and personalized history as the medium. ‘A lived experience,’ Wilhelm Dilthey wrote in the beginning of the twentieth century, is a distinctive and characteristic mode in which reality is there-for-me. A lived experience does not confront me as something perceived or represented; it is not given to me, but the reality of lived experience is there-for-me because I have reflexive awareness of it, because I possess it immediately as belonging to me in some sense. (Dilthey 1907–8, quoted in Jay 2005: 225–26)

What I have called heritage Romanticism is very much about instilling such a ‘reality of lived experience’ in cinemagoers, reenactors or heritage visitors. When such stagings or performances are made effective and affective, they constitute a powerful and powerfully experiential modus of communication – radically different from conventional exhibitionary

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paradigms premised on rational distance and aspiring to representation – in which alternative registers of identification and authorization can be activated and utilized.

Notes 1. See this book’s introduction. Interestingly, the seven reservations have since then been lifted, 2011 being the first year in which the German guests took part on conditions similar to those of the Danish hosts. 2. I have not been able to obtain a written version of the sermon. All quotes from it are based on my field notes from the day. 3. As noted earlier, Venstre belongs on the political right. See this book’s introduction. 4. All excerpts are from the written manuscript of the speech, archived at the Sønderborg Castle Museum. Original Danish wording: ‘Jeg var med i ’64! Ikke i 1864, men i 1964, da hundredåret for stormen på Dybbøl blev fejret. Jeg bar Rønshoved højskoles fane blandt utallige andre faner hele vejen fra Sønderborg til Dybbøl Mølle. Kong Frederik holdt en kort og fyndig tale, hvor han bl.a. sagde: “Dengang var der ikke noget, der hed ‘Hvad skal det nytte!’ Da hed det ‘gå på og hold ud!’” (…) Såret blødte i folkesjælen og gjorde landet indadvendt – og heledes først rigtigt for ganske nylig, for 17 år siden, da Danmark efter mere end hundrede års tilpasningspolitik under to verdenskrige og en kold krig igen turde melde sig ind i verden på lige fod med andre.’ 5. Original Danish wording: ‘Siden har danske hærenheder gjort sig utroligt fordelagtigt bemærket i snart utallige fredsbevarende og fredsskabende aktioner. Slaget ved Tuzla i Bosnien og de farlige træfninger i Helmandprovinsen i Afghanistan taler deres tydelige sprog om, at Danmark har meldt sig ind i verden med alt, hvad deraf følger, inklusiv risikoen for, at det går anderledes end ventet, som i Irak.’ 6. Original Danish wording: ‘[Her er] mulighed for, at børnene kan indrette det hele med kanonstillinger osv. I soldaterbyen kan de indleve sig i livet bag fronten. (…) Min bror elskede at demonstrere for sine elever, hvordan man lader et forladegevær og maver sig frem. (…) Som verdensborgere skal børnene kende deres historie, på godt og ondt. De er danske i dag, fordi nogen ville slås for, at de skulle være det.’ 7. Original Danish wording: ‘Ud af fusionen mellem kultur og erhverv er der vokset en ny form for økonomi. En økonomi, der er baseret på en stigende efterspørgsel efter oplevelser, og som bygger på den merværdi, kreativiteten skaber både i nye og mere traditionelle produkter og serviceydelser. (…) I en tid med tiltagende global konkurrence og i en videnøkonomi som den danske, hvor der i stigende grad konkurreres på innovation og kreativitet, er det vigtigt at differentiere sine produkter fra konkurrenternes og skabe en unik værdi og oplevelse for forbrugerne.’

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8. Original Danish wording: ‘Vi lever i en tid, (…) hvor forbrugerne søger oplevelser, sammenhæng og mening på markedet. Vi køber en citronpresser til flere hundrede kroner, fordi den er æstetisk. Vi køber økologiske mælkeprodukter og æg, fordi det er bedre for dyrene. Vi køber flere og flere produkter, der underholder, skaber mening og giver identitet. Kunsten og kulturen er storleverandører af fortællinger, historier, værdier og identitet. Både det, der kan skille, og det, der kan samle mennesker. (…) Den globale – amerikansk dominerede – underholdningsindustri er så stærk, at de frirum, dansk kulturpolitik kan skabe, kan blive for få og små. (…) Gør vi ikke noget, løbes vi alt for let over ende. Men opgaven er så stor, at det offentlige ikke kan løfte den selv. Vi må tage markedet til hjælp.’ 9. Original Danish wording: ‘For at sætte vores nutid ind i en sammenhæng og gøre op med den historieløshed, der desværre er udbredt – ikke mindst blandt vore børn og unge – er det vigtigt at rette et øget fokus på de leveringer fra fortiden, som vi alle har arvet.’ Press release from the Danish Ministry of Culture, http://kum.dk/nyheder-og-presse/pressemeddelelser/2004/septem ber/brian-mikkelsen-lancerer-historiens-dag (accessed 31 January 2013). 10. Original Danish wording: ‘Brian Mikkelsen udtaler, at initiativet sker som en konsekvens af, at han oplever en rodløshed og historieløshed blandt de unge.’ 11. The complete lists can be found at http://www.kulturkanon.kum.dk (accessed 28 January 2013). 12. In 2008, in the wake of the so-called cartoon controversy of 2005–6, these lists were followed by a ‘democracy canon’ featuring a series of texts considered crucial for the development of democracy, including its specifically Danish form. The list, compiled by an expert group appointed by the Danish Ministry of Education, is available (in Danish) at http://pub.uvm.dk/2008/ demokratikanon/ helepubl.pdf (accessed 28 January 2013). 13. Personal names have been changed for purposes of anonymity.

Conclusion

P  M B Reassembling Heritage, Nation and Experience T          . It is about the difference between classical museum exhibitions and newer experiential paradigms of relating to past events. And it is about the ways in which categories such as heritage and history come to take shape and take on meaning in and through social practice. As ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ meet in ‘place’ to produce, consume and thereby coproduce narratives of nationhood and belonging, such encounters are framed and influenced by a complex web of contextual forces, including trends and representations in art, tourism, politics and mass media. Neumann has argued that in the case of the Grand Canyon, ‘[p]ainted landscapes, guidebooks, advertising, travel articles and stereographs not only shaped the canyon into a marvellous spectacle and distributed it to the public, their pages and images traced a path for the spectator’s retreat into the interiors of a subjective landscape where image and experience became powerfully entwined’ (2002: 49). Likewise, Dybbøl, as a symbol and a site, can be conceived as an assemblage composed of similar entwinings of outer and inner worlds. My investigations have revolved around the distinction between the museum, conceived as a house of top-down expertise and of guarded, glasscased objects, and another, self-proclaimed ‘democratic’ or bottom-up approach to heritage as a genre of experiential and haptic encounters between present self and past otherness. In concentrating on how this stereotypical museum/heritage distinction variously informed the institutional lives in question, but also often collapsed and crisscrossed in surprising ways, I have striven to highlight a number of fundamental tensions or frictions underlying the interpretations of the 1864 war. Such tensions, and especially those circumscribed by the two oppositional pairs national/global and experience/enlightenment, must be seen not merely as useful tools for analyzing

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my Dybbøl material but as outlining a much broader territory of modern concerns and predicaments. In taking this approach, I have aligned my analysis with theorists of modernity viewing the modern not so much as a discursive and disenchanted field in which order, rationality and reason are seen to triumph over premodern thought and irrationality, an abstract Habermasian modernism ‘fully utopian in its hope for a communicative paradise’, instead focusing on popular practices, experiences, the ‘signs in the street’ (Lash and Friedman 1992: 2–3). Indeed, I have highlighted the disorderly, aesthetic and often corporeal engagements with heritage that fill my notebooks from the field. I have charted my informants’ experiences of a contemporary heritage setting shot through with paradoxes and anxieties concerning such major modern concepts and ‘grand narratives’ as history (conceived as the continually contested relation between ‘then’ and ‘now’) and national identity (understood as the similarly ambivalent relationing between self and other). In this focus on what Marshall Berman (1982) called ‘the experience of modernity’, my main theoretical signpost has been Scott Lash and his conceptualization of a second modernity (1999). Over the course of working with my field findings it has become clear, however, that a complete theoretical ousting of ‘first modern’ rationalities in favour of ‘second modern’ sensibilities would not provide a sufficiently nuanced picture of the real-life ambiguities at Dybbøl. Rather, I am in favour of abandoning an overly epochal understanding insisting on slicing modernity (and sometimes postmodernity) into temporal periods or epistemes. Indeed, I have analysed how various forces, currents and agendas – whose histories can be traced back to ‘first’ or ‘second’ modern paradigms and understandings – often operate side by side, sometimes conflicting and contested, but sometimes also in symbiotic fashion. One does not rule out the other. In other words, and in contrast to Lash, I hesitate in designating the second modernity its own, temporally conceived epoch, and remain sceptical towards the ‘takeover’ scenario implied in this. Chapter 4’s discussion of the delicate manoeuvrings and interpretations at the battlefield centre’s scale redoubt model, where visitors are invited to shift perspectives from the all-seeing bird’s-eye view to the confused gaze of the grounded, Prussian storm trooper exemplifies this oscillation practice in perhaps its most condensed form. In my analysis of institutional and visitor practices at the Sønderborg Castle Museum, I have attempted to refine and nuance the idea of the modern museum as an institution primarily serving to instil civic values, orderly conduct and discipline in its public. I have taken Bennett’s influential accounts of the historical formation of the museum (1995, 2004, 2006) to epitomize such a stance, in which museums are primarily seen as

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having been, from the early modern period, institutions in which ‘citizens (…) have (…) engaged in rituals through which their rights and duties as citizens have been enacted’ (2006: 263). The careful historical genealogies of the modern museum that Bennett and others provide are necessary and valuable. What they do not afford, however, is what I believe my broader conceptualization of the modern allows for: an analytical consideration of museum visiting conceived also as multifaceted experience. By not including such perspectives, one risks reinforcing a view of modern man as the vessel of a high modern subjectivity that privileges ‘the cognitive and moral over the aesthetic and the libidinal, the ego over the id, the visual over touch, and discursive over figural communication’ (Lash and Friedman 1992: 5). It is important to stress that I am not arguing that the modern museum was and is not a house of order and overview. My studies of visitor practices at the museum and the centre have documented that such high modern tendencies and agendas exist and indeed exert powerful influence in these institutional settings. They do, but they do not determine outcomes. For what my findings also demonstrate is that such ‘first modern’ rationales coexist and interchange with patterns of a less scientific, less disciplinary and less orderly range of practices and involvements more aptly regarded as remnants of ‘second modern’ tendencies rooted in Romanticism. Museums are thus spaces of both order and disorder, as they ‘involve a particular kind of mediation of, and interplay between, authoritative knowledge (science) and enchantment (magic) – an interplay which to some extent varies across time and space, and across different types of museums and their relatives’ (Macdonald 2005b: 210). My analysis, in chapter 5, of the struggle between ‘first’ and ‘second’ modern rationalities at the battlefield centre is an example of such a complex and ambiguous interplay. For visitors, this may result in what Minca and Oakes term ‘a paradoxical experience of ordered disorder’ (2006a: 15, italics in original). While clearly utilizing the museum space to gain distanced overview and categorize their worlds, visitors also frequently dive into much more haphazard and unbound practices driven by nonrational and emotional curiosities and by what I have characterized as ‘empathetic immersion’. In parallel with the appeal to rationality, one thus finds a simultaneous ‘desire for its transcendence, a shaking up of the experiential order’ (Edensor 2006: 37). We can also conceptualize this double desire by reference to the gaze. The nuances I have sought to make room for in my analysis thus find expression in the parallel and often intermingling operation of various and variously modern ‘ways of seeing’. Taking my cue, again, from Bennett, and his contention that museums have been, from the early modern period, ‘primarily institutions of the visible in which objects of various kinds

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have been exhibited to be looked at’ (2006: 263), I have been inherently sceptical towards privileging the sense of sight. This is true even as I have, as part of my collection of field data, intentionally placed video cameras on visitors’ foreheads so as to capture actual ‘tourist gazes’ (Urry 1990, 2002). As paradoxical as this may initially sound, my aim was never to utilize these recordings as indicators of the privileged status of vision, but instead to seek to understand how gazes and perceptions get assembled and employed in actual tourist practice, in conjunction with a broad spectrum of sensory work. My use of the video specs method must thus be seen as an experiment intended for enabling and literally grounding an analysis of gazes and perceptions as empirical and empirically graspable practices as opposed to discursive or metaphoric theorems. The recordings were, in other words, aimed at challenging the ocularcentrism of many museum and heritage studies, by pointing to the multifaceted and messy sensemaking that goes on when people ‘gaze’ at exhibits and heritage. This is perhaps most evident in my examples of battlefield centre visitors. As they navigated the site and its reconstructions in corporeal manner, they were busy ‘making sense’ of their experiences in the broadest sense of that expression; taking in, reading and interpreting the site by employing a range of related sensual stimuli and impressions. Sometimes, as in the case of the centre’s panorama viewpoint, the spatial layout directed visitors’ visual practices, their eyes, rather meticulously. At other points, their engagements were much more informed by touching, listening and smelling, and – importantly – by their ongoing intellectual efforts at assembling such stimuli into meaningful heritage narratives. I thus highlighted the imaginative ways in which visitors conjured up and elaborated on the exhibits and stories presented to them. The battlefield centre’s full-size reconstructions were shown to be especially prompting locales for such creative and often collaborative involvements. But at the castle museum too, despite its conventional no-touch policies, a parallel potential for creative intellectual labour and emotional elaboration was identified. The museum’s romantic period paintings were analysed as particularly potent catalysts of such a historically oriented imagining that worked to contextualize or ‘reattach’ the detached glass-cased exhibits in an imagined historical setting, inviting visitors to ‘feel’ what it ‘must have been like’ in the portrayed period. Thus, we may say that the period paintings at the castle museum and the reconstructed open-air milieu at the centre worked to stimulate visitors’ sense of empathy and engagement in rather related ways. My field material from the two institutional settings, including the video specs recordings, thus constitutes a body of data that can be seen to

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contribute to and empirically inform the growing body of literature questioning or wishing to move beyond the idea of the all-dominant influence of the gaze (e.g., Ingold 2000a; Crouch 2002; Edensor 2006). My study rests on a basic ethnographic curiosity insisting that it is insufficient to merely state that this is the nature of perception, and that we, as cultural analysts, need to collect and work through a bulk of empirical material in order to seriously grapple with the question of how such a multifaceted perception takes form and comes into being. Again, this follows my general intent to open up for a broader conception of modernity and modern subjectivity, as the first or high modernity ‘gives extraordinary privilege, (…) to judgement and especially to cognition’ and ‘correspondingly devalues the faculty of perception’ (Lash and Friedman 1992: 5). In working to remedy this, my field studies have been undertaken to contribute to an empirically grounded critique of the ‘visual imperialism’ (Edensor 1998: 18) still dominating heritage and tourism studies. If this book is then about the workings and framings of perception, and especially of the perception of the past, it is also fundamentally about the nature of experience. In his impressive work on the interpretations and applications of this complex concept in Western thought, Martin Jay notes that his intention ‘is not to provide yet another account of what “experience” really is or what it might be, but rather to understand why so many thinkers in different traditions have felt to do precisely that’ (2005: 1).1 In sympathy with this ambition, I have been occupied with analyzing the understandings and assumptions connected to ‘experience’ as concept and practice emerging from my fieldwork, rather than trying to define the elusive term itself. One of the initial and central ambitions of the comparative institutional setup of my study was to consider the clashes and grey zones between the established museum sector and the more recent experiential turn in the heritage sector. Dybbøl constitutes an apt site for such a study, given the recent controversy over interpretation forms at the battlefield centre. The museum’s seemingly profound high modern principles and the centre’s hands-on approaches seem worlds apart. In line with the view on modernity as an ambiguous field of contrasting configurations of order and disorder, however, my analyses have demonstrated that both institutions were characterized by intersecting high modern and ‘second’ modern practices. And just as I have challenged conventional understandings of ‘the museum’ as merely a high modern space of disciplinary and orderly instilling of civic values, my battlefield centre studies fundamentally unsettled a superficial view of the centre as a paragon of mere ‘experience’. Although born in a distinct romantic national spirit, the centre was shown

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to also rely heavily upon principles of visuality, detachment, regulation and authority traditionally accorded to high modernity. So while I have argued, briefly put, that the castle museum is not all enlightened knowledge, I have in a parallel but reversed fashion demonstrated that the battlefield centre is not all romantic experience. Furthermore, I have interrogated the very concept of experience, and especially the idea that it can be seen as the gateway into a hitherto untapped economy, an ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gimore 1999; Boswijk et al. 2007) emerging triumphant from sedimented layers of previously successful but now outdated economic regimes based on goods and services. In chapter 6 I traced how this idea found immediate resonance, at the turn of the millennium, in Danish cultural and economic policies, including the heritage sector, even as I also noted along the way that the experiential exhibition paradigm is in fact not of a recent date. Thus I argued, in chapter 4, that the open-air museums taking hold in Scandinavia and beyond around 1900 emerged as an early ‘experience economy’ in opposition to established positivistic exhibitionary regimes. This, again, challenges the epochal logic inherent both in Pine and Gilmore (‘a natural progression of economic value’, 1999: 5) as well as in Lash’s evolving history of the second modernity, or indeed of his and Lury’s related distinctions between an emerging ‘global culture industry’ and a previous ‘classical culture industry’ (Lash 1999; Lash and Lury 2007: 183). In my own experience, such attempts at slicing up history very often fall short once we begin scrutinizing the detailed mess of particular empirical realities. As intuitive and tempting such a periodical labelling may seem, it ultimately fails at capturing the clashes and paradoxes inherent in the parts of the experience economy or culture industry that I have been determined to chart. With Bann, we may say that the question is not so much one of placing the two modes at ‘different points in a single evolutionary scheme, but of showing how their differing types of discourse relate to different epistemological totalities’ (2004: 73). At Dybbøl, discussions of perception, experience, modernity and heritage all have to include the issue of the nation and national belonging. Even though I have insisted on accounting for inconsistencies and ruptures in established and official positions, a dominant, if hesitant and contested, movement towards transnational reconciliation and inclusion of former enemies should be clear. The German military has, in recent years, been invited to take part in the annual Dybbøl Day ceremonies. Similarly, the editing and ‘cleansing’ of former ethnic perspectives at the battlefield centre, and its attempts at instituting what I have called ‘postheroic’ ac-

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counts of the nature of (any) war, point in such a reconciliatory direction, aspiring to transgress national narratives. No longer commemorating anyone in particular, but rather any fallen soldier anywhere, such cosmopolitan and postheroic practices seek to render Dybbøl’s meaning generic or even universal. And yet, the nation is not gone, as I have been at pains to demonstrate, even if its constant confirmation relies increasingly on ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) rather than outright ethnonational expressions. With Macdonald, we may say that: Even if the predicted demise of the nation state has been exaggerated, it has surely become more difficult to ‘do nationness’ in quite the ways in which it was formerly done. At the very least, gestures to alternative narratives and to other kinds of moral legitimacy need to be made – and perhaps harnessed to a reconfigured way of being national. (2005a: 55–56)

My studies have enquired, precisely, into the ways in which the Danish nation is ‘done’ today and into the ‘other kinds of moral legitimacy’ Macdonald hints at. Such novel kinds of national self-assertion include, in my analysis, a conflation of cosmopolitan and national values through which, for instance, universal humanitarian and peacekeeping competences are being claimed as the domain of the Danes. This is what I have labelled ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’: a routine and unreflective equation of universal and national agendas and values. On a theoretical level, my ambition concerning the nationalism issues has been to unsettle the either/or distinction often implied between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In place of such a view, I have sought to allow for a nuanced, and empirically informed, consideration of the ways in which the global and the national scales are not simple oppositions but may be seen, more productively, as parallel collective imaginaries intersecting and feeding on each other in often symbiotic fashion. While cosmopolitan voices exist and assert dominance in many contexts around the world, and prominently so in the heritage sector, I believe we should, as analysts, be wary of automatically ascribing to those voices a morally superior status. Just as people and societies ‘do nationness’ in new ways, so they ‘do globalness’ too. Indeed, as my analysis of cosmopolitan nationalism demonstrates, doing globalness is often a way of doing nationness too. As Ulf Hannerz has pointed out, the ‘culturespeak’ of our time – the ways in which the concept of culture is called upon in various contexts, by different actors, with diverse agendas – is not restricted to right-wing fundamentalism but includes other variants of asserting cultural specificity and maintaining difference, including what he terms ‘celebrationist’

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approaches (1999: 398). This variety of culturespeak, according to him, tends to ‘merge with certain of the varied meanings of cosmopolitanism’, underlying, for instance, much of the work of UNESCO and other international cultural agencies (398). The point is that such celebratory practices of invoking ‘culture’ demand critical academic attention just as much as easy-to-condemn right-wing extremism. My call, in agreement with the appeal from Hannerz, is thus for a research agenda that does not unconditionally endorse ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the abstract but critically sets out to examine the shapes, claims and conflations of nationalism and cosmopolitanism today, in the heritage sector and beyond. The genres across which such ventures are formed are increasingly varied and the borders between them blurred. They include rationalist Enlightenment approaches such as those endorsed by the experts of the custodian museum, but they also increasingly find expression in media lingering on the brink of the official heritage sector and more squarely devoted to utilizing the power of experience, including tourism, cinematic and computerized interpretations, and corporeal reenactment performances. In the cacophonic landscape of the twenty-first century heritage industry, ‘different rationalities’ obsessed with experience and reinstantiating powerful romantic legacies must be taken into consideration in any meaningful account of the ways in which ‘national heritage’ resonates with popular sentiments of historical rooting and belonging.

Notes 1. This ambition parallels Billig’s (1995: 61) approach to studying the claims to national identity rather than the issue of what ‘really’ constitutes such an identity.

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Index Adenauer, Konrad, 45n19 Adler, Judith, 56, 75n7 Adriansen, Inge, 43n1, 48, 83–86 Afghanistan, War in, 3, 6–7, 163 Alpers, Svetlana, 87 Als, island of, 23, 25, 30–31, 60, 126 American Civil War, 27 Anderson, Benedict, 95, 114 anti-Germanness, 2, 4, 19–20, 30, 37, 41, 132–35, 142–44, 154–55 archaeology, role of, 38, 78, 83, 101–2, 147, 157 Arnkil, 25, 29, 34 art museums. See under museums artworks, 59–66, 81, 84–88, 169, 183 as part of Danish canon, 27–30, 34, 117, 169 as period representations, 65–66, 84–88 as ‘picturing’ tools, 59–65, 84 role of in a museum of history, 86–87 Austria, 17, 21–23, 25, 97 authenticity, 6, 20, 41, 109, 116, 122, 135–37, 139, 146–47, 171–72, 175–76 Bache, Otto, 59, 61–62, 85–86 Balkan Wars, 40–42 ‘banal nationalism’, 8–9, 77, 88–102, 103n5, 114, 131–33, 141–44, 148, 154–55, 157, 169, 186 Bann, Stephen, 108–9, 112, 128, 185 Basso, Keith, 1 Basu, Paul, 171 Bauman, Zygmunt, 101 Beck, Ulrich, 158 Becker-Christensen, Henrik, 41–42 Bennett, Tony, 50–54, 64, 75n6, 107, 181–83 Berman, Marshall, 181 Bigum, Martin, 117 Billig, Michael, 2, 8, 77, 88, 90–92, 103n5, 139, 142–43, 154, 157, 187n1 bird’s-eye view, 53, 68–69, 97, 110–14, 116, 123, 128, 181. See also cartographic representation; panoramas; vision, role of Bismarck, Otto von, 1, 22, 78–79 Bøffelkobbel, 34

border revision of 1920, 29–31, 37–40, 45n22, 83–84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 65–66 Braveheart (film), 62, 171–72, 176–77 Broager, 34 Buk-Swienty, Tom, 177 canon of Danish culture, 169 of Danish democracy, 179n12 of Danish history, 1, 15n1, 169 cannon firing demonstrations, 39, 60–61, 110, 135–41, 150 cartographic representation, 58, 68, 87, 94–98, 113–14, 118–19, 124, 130, 141. See also bird’s-eye view cartoon controversy, 3, 15n5, 133, 179n12 Cheah, Pheng, 160 Christian II, Danish king, 66 Christian IX, Danish king, 21, 31, 85 ‘civic cleansing’, 131–32, 141, 185–86 civic nationalism, 18, 20, 50–52, 74–75, 77–80, 82, 134, 181–82, 184 Clausewitz, Carl von, 115 collective memory. See memory, collective collective nationalism, 102n1. See also ethnic nationalism Colonial Williamsburg, 9, 100 constructivism, 8, 77–83, 87–88, 100–101 contractual nationalism, 78. See also civic nationalism ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, 156–57, 160, 186 cosmopolitanism, 6, 9, 40, 131–32, 141, 145, 148–49, 154, 156–61, 186–87 ‘countermuseum’ ideology, 8, 104, 106–7, 114, 121–22 Crouch, David, 54, 76n10, 127–28 Culloden, Battle of, 27 cultural nationalism, 102n1. See also ethnic nationalism ‘culturespeak’, 186–87 Dagbladet newspaper, 22 Danevirke, 22, 27 Danish Army, 1, 4–7, 22, 26, 31–33, 98, 159, 161–65

198 Danish constitution of 1849, 18, 21 Danish cultural policy, 105, 157, 165–70, 185 Danish Eighth Brigade, counterattack of, 27–28, 117, 174 Danish foreign policy, 3, 6–7, 162–64, 168 Danish Forest and Nature Agency (Skov- og Naturstyrelsen), 31, 33 Danish ‘golden age’ period in art history, 59 Danish identity. See national identity Danish military. See Danish Army Danish Ministry of Culture, 166 Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, 166 Danish Ministry of Education, 150 Danish ‘November’ constitution of 1863, 21–22 Danish ‘silver age’ period in art history, 59 Danish-German relationship as historical context for the 1864 War, 17–24 as perceived by centre visitors, 142–44 (see also visitor practice) presented as a string of historical conflicts, 57–58 as reconciliation, 4–7, 9, 154, 158–60 164, 185–86 (see also Zweiströmigkeit) as us/them relation (see Germany as Denmark’s ‘Other’) Danish Conservative Party (Konservative), 168 Danish National Liberals (De Nationalliberale), 21–22 Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), 2–3, 15n3, 133, 155n3 Danish Social Liberals (Det Radikale Venstre), 163 Darbel, Alain, 65–66 Day of the Storm, The, 132–33, 154 deixis, 90, 92, 95, 139, 143 ‘Denmark to the Eider’ demand, 21 Descartes, René, 53 Det haver saa nyligen regnet, Danish protest song, 27, 132–33, 154–55, 155n3 Deutsches Museum Nordschleswig, 34 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 177 diorama, 40, 108–9, 118, 133, 145 Drachmann, Holger, 27 Dragsbo, Peter, 42, 134, 150, 172 Düppel-Denkmal monument, 25, 29 Düppelhöh, hotel, 25 Durkheim, Émile, 157 Dybbøl Battle of, 1, 4, 23–24, 57, 97, 110–12, 115, 118, 136–41, 162 as ‘must-see’, 56 as a site of anti-Germanness, 2, 4, 26–30, 142–44 as a site of Danish memory, 1, 17, 26–30, 33–34, 91, 144, 162–65 as a site of German memory, 25, 83 Dybbøl Battlefield Centre, 2, 7, 31, 35–43, 104–30, 131–55, 156, 161–65 and visitor practice (see visitor practice) and visitor regulation, 118–19, 135

Index as ‘adventure playground’, 145–49, 164–65 as ‘countermuseum’, 8, 104, 106–7, 114, 121–22 and Danish bias, 37, 40, 114–15, 132–35, 141, 154–55 as ‘democratic’ project, 36–37, 43, 105–7, 112–13, 180 founding and history, 35–43 as house of ‘storytelling’, 106, 110–12, 115– 17, 120, 124, 134, 135–41, 150–51 as ‘knowledge-educational activity centre’, 104, 110, 150, 155n7 as object of 1999–2000 dispute, 35–43 as ‘romantic monument to Danishness’, 37, 132, 141 Dybbøl Day, 4–7, 9, 11, 16n10, 16n11, 26, 33, 49, 90, 136, 157–59, 163, 173, 185 Dybbøl Mill, 1, 11, 23, 25, 27, 31–35, 95, 102n2 Edensor, Tim, 17, 51, 53, 72, 90–91, 129, 171–72, 175–76 Eider, river, 21 elective nationalism, 78. See also civic nationalism embodiment. See visitor practice: and bodily engagement ‘empathetic immersion’. See under visitor practice Enlightenment, historical period, 8, 47, 49, 50–54, 72–75, 76n13, 78, 85, 104, 109, 129, 187 enlightenment, as museum quality, 8, 20, 47–49, 69, 78, 84–85, 87, 109, 128, 134, 156, 165, 172, 180–81, 185 epistemology, 73–74, 88, 108–10, 151–52, 167–68, 185 Erfahrung. See experience: as Erfahrung versus Erlebnis Erlebnis. See experience: as Erfahrung versus Erlebnis ethnic nationalism, 8–9, 18–21, 37–38, 44n4, 51–52, 74–75, 77–81, 88–89, 102n1, 117, 131–35, 140, 154, 170–71, 175–76, 185–86 ethnographic museums. See under museums ‘everyday nationalism’, 103n5. See also ‘banal nationalism’ experience as concept, 7, 9, 73–74, 75n7, 110, 130n2, 152, 166, 176–77 as Erfahrung versus Erlebnis, 110, 152 as tendency in the heritage sector, 2, 8–9, 36, 42–43, 104–10, 114, 121, 150–53, 156–57, 162–78, 184, 187 (see also ‘experience economy’) as visitor practice (see visitor practice: and experience) ‘experience economy’, 105, 110, 157, 165–68, 170–72, 177–78, 185 ‘eyewitness’ ideology, 115–17, 132, 134, 145

I Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 52, 170 ‘first’ versus ‘second’ modernity, 8, 47, 73–75, 88, 104–5, 109–10, 129–30, 151–53, 166–69, 176, 181–82, 184–85 First Schleswig War of 1848–51, 20, 57 ‘flagging’ the nation, 90 ‘fog of war’, 115 foreign policy. See Danish foreign policy forgetting, collective, 39, 80, 82. See also ‘historylessness’ Foucault, Michel, 51, 75n3 Fredericia, 23, 34 Frederik VII, Danish king, 21 Frederik IX, Danish king, 162 Frederiksborg Castle, 34 French Revolution of 1789, 18, 50–52, 78–79 Gable, Eric, 9, 12, 100–102 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 110, 152 gaze. See tourist gaze; sightseeing; vision, role of; visitor practice: and seeing Gell, Alfred, 69, 71, 85 German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), 17–18, 21 German-Danish relationship, see DanishGerman relationship Germany as Denmark’s ‘Other’, 19–20, 44n3, 57 Gettysburg, Battle of, 27 Gilmore, James, 105, 166–67, 170, 185 ‘glass case’ museums, 36–37, 49–50, 105–6, 109 ‘global culture industry’, 151, 168, 171, 185 global versus national, 39–40, 43, 145, 148–49, 156–65, 180, 186–87. See also ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ globalization, 89, 162, 167–68, 171 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82, 110, 151 Goffman, Erving, 166 ‘grounded private’ perspective, 110, 115–17, 128, 181 Grundtvig, Nikolaj Frederik Severin, 18 Gulf War of 1990–91, 163 Haarder, Bertel, 162–65, 168 Habermas, Jürgen, 181 Hall, Carl Christian, 21 Handler, Richard, 9, 12, 93, 100–102, 112, 142, 175–76 hands-on communication, 34, 39–40, 108, 134, 144, 154. See also visitor practice: and bodily engagement Hannerz, Ulf, 186–87 Hansen, Hans Christian, 45n19 Hansen, Hans-Ole, 37–39, 42–43, 113 Heatherington, Tracey, 113 Heidegger, Martin, 75n5 Heimat (homestead) museums, 38 Henningsen, Bernd, 52 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 52, 74, 76n13, 170

199 Heritage Agency of Denmark (Kulturarvsstyrelsen), 168 heritage concept, 1–2, 7–8, 34–35, 77, 81, 88, 91–93, 99–102, 112, 142–43, 154, 155n4, 157–58 industry, 8–9, 35–43, 100–101, 105–10, 115–16, 121, 153, 156–57, 169–72, 184–85. (see also experience: as aspect of the heritage sector) policy, 15n3, 30–35, 101–102, 143, 162–70 ‘heritage romanticism’, 169–70, 175–77 Hewison, Robert, 107 high modernity. See ‘first’ versus ‘second’ modernity historical reenactment. See reenactment history, as concept, 7–8, 63–64, 77, 79–81, 88, 91–93, 95, 99–102, 142–43, 149, 165, 175–76 ‘historylessness’, 169 history museums. See museums: of (cultural) history Hobsbawm, Eric, 79, 102 Holstein, Duchy of, 17–22 humanitarianism, 116, 145, 160–61, 186. See also cosmopolitanism Imperial War Museum, 108 Ingemann, Bruno, 12 Ingemann, Bernhard Severin, 18 Ingold, Tim, 87, 130n8 Iraq War of 2003–11, 3, 6–7, 163–64 Jay, Martin, 50, 184 Jenkins, Richard, 2, 102n2 Jydske Vestkysten newspaper, 41 Jylland (Danish 1864 frigate), 34 Jyllands-Posten newspaper, 3, 4, 40–41, 43, 157 Kant, Immanuel, 110, 151 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 81, 105, 165–66 Kjærsgård, Pia, 133, 155n3 ‘knowledge-educational’ learning paradigm, 104, 110, 150, 155n7 Krarup, Søren, 4 ‘landscapes of regret’, 26, 30 Lægaard, Sune, 78 Lash, Scott, 8, 47, 73–74, 109–10, 129, 151–53, 166–71, 176, 181, 185 Lauenburg, Duchy of, 17–22, 44n2 Levy, Daniel, 158 ‘living history’ interpretation, 11, 107, 147, 173, 176 London Science Museum, 10 London treaty of 1852, 20–22 Louvre, 51 Lowenthal, David, 157 Lury, Celia, 151–53, 168, 170–71, 185

200 Macdonald, Sharon, 10, 12, 26, 34–35, 44n3, 48, 50–53, 75n2, 75n5, 76n12, 82, 101, 112, 114, 130n6, 155n6, 186 maps. See cartographic representation ‘maps-as-logo’, 95, 114 memory, collective, 4, 11, 17, 25–30, 37, 41, 61, 80–82, 91, 107, 143–44, 157–58, 171–72, 177. See also forgetting, collective ‘memoryscape’, 7, 17, 31, 91 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127–28, 130n8 Metcalf, Peter, 10 Meza, Christian de, 22 Mikkelsen, Brian, 168–69 militarism, reservations against, 148–49 ‘mimetic realism’, 99–102 Minca, Claudio, 129, 182 modernity, 2, 7–8, 47, 49–54, 71–75, 88, 104–5, 109–10, 129–30, 151–53, 166–69, 176, 181–82, 184–85. See also ‘first’ versus ‘second’ modernity; museums: and modernity museum, as concept, 48–49, 81–82, 88, 92–93, 99–102, 142–43 museums of art, 86–88, 75n3 of (cultural) history, 63, 86–88 and detachment, 48–55, 59, 62–63, 68–69, 91, 94–95, 112–14, 134, 152–53, 183, 185 (see also bird’s-eye view) and discipline, 7–8, 14, 50–51, 56, 64, 71–72, 153, 181–82, 184 of ethnography, 51, 81 as ‘metonymic’ versus ‘synecdochic’ sites, 108–9, 128 and modernity, 47, 49–54, 71–75, 75n3 (see also modernity) and national identity, 37–38, 47–52, 59, 67, 74–75, 77–103 (see also national identity) open-air, 100, 107–9, 121, 132, 173, 183, 185 and truth, 66, 82–88, 99–102 and visitor practice (see visitor practice) and visuality (see bird’s-eye view; sightseeing; tourist gaze; vision: role of; visitor practice: and seeing) Museum of National History, 34 Museum Sønderjylland, 45n15 nation, as concept, 2, 7–8, 18–20, 26, 45n18, 51–52, 74–75, 77–82, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 99–102, 131, 142–43, 149, 155, 156–57, 165 . See also ‘banal nationalism’; civic nationalism; ethnic nationalism; national identity nation, as ‘elective affinity’ (Wahlverwandtschaft), 82, 102 national identity, 2, 4–9, 18–20, 23, 25–30, 33–38, 43–44n1, 44n3, 44n4, 50–52, 59, 67, 74–75, 77–103, 131–55, 157–65, 170–78, 180–81, 184–87. See

I also memory, collective; museums: and national identity; nationalism nationalism, 2, 8, 18–20, 37–38, 40, 43, 50–52, 59, 74–75, 77–83, 88–91, 93, 102n1, 103n5, 132–35, 140, 142, 148, 154, 157–71, 186–87. See also ‘banal nationalism’; ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’; civic nationalism; ethnic nationalism Nazism, 52, 67, 76n12 neo-Romanticism, 170. See also ‘heritage romanticism’; Romanticism Nielsen, Elsebeth Gerner, 167–68, 177 9/11 attacks, 3, 168 der Nordschleswiger newspaper, 41 Oakes, Tim, 129, 182 Oehlenschläger, Adam, 18 oil paintings. See artworks Olfert Fischer (Danish 1990 warship), 163 ontology, 73–74, 110, 151–52 open-air museums. See under museums ‘ordered disorder’, 128–29, 182 Østergaard, Bjørn, 42, 49, 151, 154 Østergaard, Uffe, 15n2, 17 Ottosen, Johan, 27, 30, 132, 154, 155n2 paintings. See artworks panoramas, 53, 124–25, 130, 183. See also bird’s-eye view patriotic nationalism, 78. See also civic nationalism patriotism, 20, 78, 174. See also national identity Pemberton, John, 123 ‘the people’, 15n3, 18, 20, 29, 51–54, 74, 79, 93, 112, 129, 132–34, 157, 170, 176 Philipsen, Kresten, 41 Pine, Joseph, 105, 166–67, 170, 185 play, 34, 39, 69–71, 118, 122, 126, 129–30, 131, 135–31, 144–45, 148–54, 164–65, 175–76 ‘play’ versus ‘demonstration’, 149–53, 164–65, 172–73, 175 political nationalism, 78. See also civic nationalism Pontoppidan, Henrik, 27, 29 popular nationalism, 102n1. See also ethnic nationalism ‘postheroism’, 116, 118, 132, 158, 164, 185–86 postmodernism, 108, 130n4, 181 ‘postnational’ era, 158 Post, Robert, 160 ‘posttourism’, 145–46 primordialism, 102n1. See also ethnic nationalism Prince Heinrich, 25, 29, 83 Prophet Muhammad, 3 Prussia, 17–26, 75–76n8, 78, 95–98 Raben, Jens, 38 Ranger, Terrence, 79, 102

I Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 3, 168–69 Rasmussen, J. P., 4, 6 ‘rational distancing’. See under visitor practice Ravn, Viggo, 6–7, 159 reconciliation. See under Danish-German relationship reconstructions, 1, 8, 23, 39–42, 104, 107–8, 115, 118, 120–23, 129, 147–49, 164–65, 183 Red Cross museum plans, 160–61 reenactment, 11, 40, 93, 134, 172–76 Renan, Ernst, 26, 52, 78–80, 82 replicas, 68, 104, 107, 110, 135–40, 147–48 ‘Reunification’ of 1920. See border revision of 1920 Revolt (Erhebung) of Schleswig-Holstein. See First Schleswig War of 1848–51 Rolf Krake (Danish 1864 ironclad), 175 romantic nationalism, 102n1. See also ethnic nationalism Romanticism, 8–9, 20, 27, 37, 43, 49, 52, 59, 64, 73–75, 76n13, 79–80, 84–85, 109–10, 129, 132–34, 151, 156–57, 169–72, 182. See also ethnic nationalism; ‘heritage romanticism’ Rosenstand, Wilhelm, 27–28, 30, 34, 117 Samuel, Raphael, 107, 115, 130n3 Sankt Marie Church, 33, 159 Saxton, William, 175–76 Schiller, Friedrich, 110 Schleswig, Duchy of, 4, 17–24, 29–30, 34, 40, 45n22, 83–85, 113 Schleswig-Holstein, 19–25 Scottish identity, 171 ‘second’ modernity. See ‘first’ versus ‘second’ modernity Second Schleswig War of 1864. See also Dybbøl, Battle of commemoration of, see Dybbøl Day contemporary political mobilization of, 162–65, 168 in Danish memory culture, 25–30 (see also memory, collective) historical context for, 17–24 and national identity, 17–30, 77–103, 131–55 (see also national identity) sightseeing, 29, 72, 75n7, 92. See also ‘tourist gaze’; visitor practice: and seeing Simonsen, Niels 27–28, 60 Singer, Brian, 78 Skansen, 109 Slesvigske Musikkorps, 5 Smith, Anthony, 144 Smith, Laurajane, 81–82 Society of Danish Soldiers (De danske soldaterforeninger), 31 Sønderborg Castle Museum, 2, 7, 31, 35, 47–76, 77–103, 134, 149, 156, 181, 185. See also modernity; museums; visitor practice

201 and civic nationalism, 77, 82, 134–35, 184 (see also civic nationalism) and curatorial stances, 8, 40–43, 48–49, 55, 77, 81–89, 99–102, 134–35, 149–53 founding and history, 37–38 and holidaying, 56–57, 71–72 and national identification, 37, 77–103 (see also museums: and national identity) and visitor practice (see visitor practice) ‘war wing’ of, 57, 77, 83–84, 88–89, 96 ‘spirit of ’48’, 20 Stauning, Thorvald, 29 Steffens, Henrik, 18 storytelling, 106, 110–12, 115–17, 120, 124, 134, 135–41, 150–51. See also ‘eyewitness’ ideology Sznaider, Natan, 158 Third Reich, 29 Thom, Martin, 79–80 Three Years’ War. See First Schleswig War of 1848–51 tourism, 50. See also sightseeing; ‘tourist gaze’; visitor practice ‘tourist gaze’, 14, 36, 50–51, 72, 182–83. See also sightseeing; vision, role of; visitor practice: and seeing transnationalism, 6, 159, 177, 185. See also cosmopolitanism; globalization UNESCO, 157, 187 Urry, John, 14, 50–51, 121, 130n3 Venstre (Liberal Party of Denmark) 3, 15n4, 162 video specs method, 12–14, 183–84 vision, role of, 47, 50–56, 75n7, 106, 112–14, 116, 181–84. See also bird’s-eye view; sightseeing; tourist gaze; visitor practice: and seeing visitor numbers, 38–39, 45n20 visitor practice and bodily engagement, 54, 76n10, 120–22, 127–28, 182–84 ‘empathetic immersion’, 59–65, 67–68, 84, 99, 105, 112, 123, 128–29, 182 and experience, 8, 12, 14, 47, 50–51, 53–56, 61, 67–68, 72, 76n10, 77, 81, 87, 90, 99, 105, 114–15, 120–30, 135, 139–47, 172, 180–87 (see also ‘experience economy’) and national identification, 77–103, 131– 55 (see also museums: and national identity) ‘picturing’ tendency, 59–65, 84 ‘rational distancing’, 65–69, 84, 123–24, 177–78 and seeing, 12–14, 36, 47, 54–56, 61, 64–65, 72, 92, 116, 123–28, 181–84 (see also bird’s-eye view; sightseeing; tourist gaze; vision: role of )

202 Volk. See ‘the people’ Volksgeist, 52, 132, 134, 152 Wallace, Michael, 109 Walsh, Kevin, 107 War of 1848–51. See First Schleswig War of 1848–51 War of 1864. See Second Schleswig War of 1864 ‘war on terror’, 3, 62, 159, 163 ‘what is lost externally shall be regained internally’ proverb, 52 Wilhelm I, 22, 25 Wilson, Woodrow, 29

I ‘world as exhibition’, 53, 75n5, 75n7, 112–13, 116, 125. See also bird’s-eye view; panoramas world heritage program, 157 World War I, 26, 28, 30, 39, 57–58 World War II, 29, 57–59, 145, 162 ‘wound-fever’ from Dybbøl, 26, 163 wreath-laying, 4–5, 33, 44n9, 49, 78, 134, 158–59 Wright, Patrick, 107 Zweiströmigkeit, 32, 45n19, 82