Pligt, tvang og tilhørsforhold: Pligtforståelse og selvopfattelse blandt dansksindede krigsdeltagere, 1914-1918

The following article explores the collective identifications (or self-perceptions) among members of the Danish-speaking minority in the Imperial German Army during the First World War, including views on German conscription and military service. Danish historians have traditionally portrayed the minority as soldiers who only served with reluctance, hoping for German defeat in the war and a ‘reunification’ between their home-region, North Schleswig, and the State of Denmark. However, the vast majority of Danish-speakers were well integrated in the German army and served as reliable soldiers throughout the course of the war. At first glance, this seems to constitute a contradiction, but this article will illustrate how members of the Danish minority, in order to serve as loyal soldiers, on the one hand reconciled ideas of both Danish and regional affiliation, as well as ancestral loyalty and civic rights, with feelings of coercion, discrimination and German enmity on the other. Furthermore, feelings of obligation, responsibility and civic duty was also connected with German military service. It will be argued that the key to understand the sometimes-contradictory self-perceptions of the Danish minority soldiers lays in how many-sided understandings of community encased or negotiated feelings of reluctance. If the war experiences of the Danish-speaking minority are viewed in a purely national perspective, it become difficult to explain the various forms of self-perception present in the source material: For instance, German military service could be justified as a way to secure Danish interests regionally within the German state, and a way to improve civic rights for the minority group. In this way, the self-perceptions of a minority soldiers could be Danish in terms of national affiliation, but to a high degree collective ‘identity’ also had the regional community at its centre.