68 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 22nd 2020
21mimicked their back and forth on the page:
among the most joyful passages in his
memoir, “South to a Very Old Place” (1971),
is his perfect orchestration of a barbershop
chat about race relations that he overheard
during a return visit to Mobile.
This late start meant that Murray’s voice
emerged fully formed. It is learned and di-
dactic, yet playful and nuanced—and
above all, highly attuned to multiplicity,
and suspicious of generalisation. He re-
jected the claim, common among white
southerners during segregation, that black
and white Americans had two separate cul-tures. “American culture,” he wrote in “The
Omni-Americans”, “even in its most rigidly
segregated precincts, is patently and irrev-
ocably composite...the so-called black and
so-called white people of the United States
resemble nobody else in the world so much
as they resemble each other.”
Murray had an aversion to social scien-
tists who portrayed black Americans as
uniformly downtrodden. In his view, “the
background experience of usNegroes in-
cludes all of the negative things that go
with racism and segregation; but it also in-
cludes all of the challenging circumstancesthat make for ambition, integrity and tran-
scendent achievement.” For him, the liber-
al tendency to find black people pitiable
was a moral and aesthetic failing, which of-
ten stopped whites seeing African-Ameri-
can life in its full splendour and variety.
Similarly, he had little patience for
black separatism, which he viewed as shal-
low escapism: “So far as white people are
concerned, the most revolutionary, radical
and devastating action any usNegro can
engage in is to compete with other Ameri-
cans for status, employment, total social
equality and basic political power.” He re-Johnson Moral minorities
How a contested region became a model for multilingual coexistenceD
iffering namesfor a historical
event can be an ominous sign of
competing, zero-sum national memo-
ries. Not so in the case of what Germans
refer to as “the plebiscite of 1920”. That
round of votes, which cost Germany the
territory of north Schleswig, led to what
Danes call the “reunification” of their
country, the centenary of which they
recently celebrated. It also began a pro-
cess that has turned a bloody European
frontier into one of the world’s most
successfully integrated and multilingual
border regions.
Territory controlled by Denmark once
extended deep into what is now the
German state of Schleswig-Holstein. But
successive defeats, especially to Prussia
in 1864, saw the border pushed up the
Jutland peninsula. After the first world
war much of Germany (and Austria-
Hungary) was hacked out to create new
states or to reward winners, which left
many new minorities stranded in the
“wrong” country. Denmark had sat out
the war, but managed to get the victors to
support a plebiscite in Schleswig.
A northern zone voted convincingly
to join Denmark, and a southern one to
stay in Germany. The border was re-
drawn. But Danes remained in Germany
and Germans in Denmark, fomenting
bad blood. The Nazis occupied Denmark
during the second world war.
The true settlement came in 1955. To
join nato, West Germany had to agree to
make nice with Denmark. The Bonn and
Copenhagen declarations gave generous
support to both minorities: German-
speakers in Denmark could go to private
schools teaching in German, with the
state picking up the tab; the same went
for Danes in Germany. The momentum
continued when Denmark joined the
European Economic Community (nowthe very top of German politics at the
next election: he could be chancellor if a
coalition emerges with two other left-
wing parties.
For a leader to show such deep ties to
another country would be unthinkable
in many places. Germany, of course,
eschewed overt nationalism after 1945.
That has led to warm neighbourly rela-
tions; there was no question of Danish
triumphalism when “reunification” was
marked. When a leader of the populist-
nationalist Danish People’s Party sug-
gested a few years ago that he would like
to see the border moved down to the
Eider river, he soon clarified that he had
commented with “a twinkle in my eye”
and that “we have the best border co-
operation anyone could hope for.”
The region is not properly bilingual.
Most Germans, in particular, do not learn
much Danish. Flemming Meyer, head of
the ethnic Danish party in the state of
Schleswig-Holstein, would like more
people to take up the generous opportu-
nities to study and practice the other
tongue; he envisions a campaign under
the banner “Speak our neighbours’ lan-
guage!” But it can be hard to convince
Germans to focus on a language with just
5.5m or so speakers. On the other side of
the border the Danes, who once had
fairly good German, now prefer English.
The lingua franca is both a boon (being
neutral) and a drawback (removing the
incentives to learn an alternative).
But Mr Meyer sees relations continu-
ing to warm. Once, Germans near the
border spoke derisively of Dänenschulen,
schools for Danes. Then, in a subtle shift,
they became dänische Schulen, the ad-
jective replacing the essentialising noun.
Now he hears unsere dänischen Schulen,
the local majority speaking proudly of
“our Danish schools”.Union) in 1973, and when the border in
effect disappeared entirely with the advent
of the passport-free Schengen zone.
Schools are at the core of what became a
remarkable success. A typical German
school in Sonderborg in Denmark, not far
from the city’s German Museum, displays
the German, Danish and European flags,
with the motto “Two languages, two cul-
tures” in Danish and German. The minor-
ity-language schools are much sought
after, not only by members of the minority.
Parents who do not speak the schools’
language choose them for reasons of quali-
ty, says Martin Klatt, a historian at the
University of Southern Denmark and a
German who sent his children to a Danish-
medium school in Flensburg.
Another parent who did likewise is
Robert Habeck, co-leader of Germany’s
Green party. He grew up in Schleswig-
Holstein and picked up Danish as a stu-
dent. Later he sent his four sons to Danish
schools, from which they brought home
customs—such as flying the Danish flag on
birthdays—that he now happily adopts. Mr
Habeck has a small chance of making it to