August 13, 2015
Vollerup, Denmark: The shrinking land of the Danes
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I WORKED once with a Dane with a wonderfully black sense of humour.
"The history of my country," he used to say with satisfaction, "is of other people taking bits of it away." It amused him and everyone else because for centuries the story was of Danes sailing with cow horns on their helmets, grabbing other people's countries and making free with their women.
Then luck turned and Germany took all the country. It invaded so dramatically that most didn't realise they'd been occupied until they found Germans on the street over breakfast. It says something of the little Danish army that it lost only 16 at the expense of 203 for the Germans.
This all became relevant this morning because I was determined to find a house I'd heard about. It was there that a shoemaker lived, right on the border near Flensburg, and each day he'd seen more and more troops on the other side. He'd told everyone he ought to tell but they took no notice.
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I must have gone the wrong way because I didn't see it. What I did see, the last thing I saw in Germany, was an apology. It was just before I reached the green space where border controls used to be. There was a rusting memorial, put there by the Germans, to apologise for camps built along the border to lock up troublesome Danes.
After an hour or two in Denmark, there were other reminders. I rode through the grounds of what looked like an old army barracks. But a well kept and spacious barracks of low, brightly coloured huts.
I was in Padborg. Until 1920, it had been in Germany. Then the people voted to move to Denmark and the border was moved for them. Then they realised they'd forgotten the railway station, which was still over in Germany. So international negotiations started all over again to extend Denmark by the 200 metres needed to include it.
The wooden huts intrigued me and I walked into one to find out more. It turned out to be a small museum. A dark-haired woman behind a desk heaped with leaflets looked up and smiled.
"May I speak English?" I asked.
"Nein", she said.
Not a promising start but then she hadn't understood my request, had heard only "English" and, considering one foreign language as good as another, had answered in German. So much for the legend that all Danes speak wonderful English.
Equally, there has never been a legend that I speak wonderful German. Since she was in no position to book me a room with a shower and central heating and give me directions for breakfast, our mutual understanding was limited. She looked flustered and began saying "Go! Go!"
I had created an international incident.
I looked puzzled. I tried to look apologetic. I had no intention of going to war with Denmark.
"Go! Go!" she said again, although this time she was pointing in, not out.
"Go in and see for yourself," she was saying.
So I went in. The one thing I'd never have guessed was that it was a museum of the Danish civil defence. People kitted out to fight floods, deal with air crashes, cope with nuclear attacks, that sort of thing. But that didn't explain the huts. They remained a mystery until I found a leaflet in English.
"In July 1943," it said, "large numbers of Danish and German refugees had fled from Hamburg after the city had been destroyed. The Danish national health service feared the spread of contagious diseases like typhus fever and dysentry." And so it set up quarantine stations on the border, here and at Kruså. The work of delousing and housing refugees fell to the civil defence. Hence the museum. As the war ended, the camp housed 17 000 Danes and Norwegians who'd survived concentration camps. Not all at once but the calmness now hides the distress there must have been then.
"Tak", I said as I left. Nothing like bragging about how much Danish you speak, is there?
I like discoveries like that. They're what make bike-touring wonderful. In a car, you'd have to know it was there and make a deliberate journey. On a bike, you take an unmade road and come across it for yourself.
On the other hand, the battle of Dybbøl Banke was pretty well known. That was the sort of war my Danish friend had revelled in, and so today were hundreds of other Danes.
I'd turned off the excellently surfaced bike path that shadowed the main highway to take the hillier, prettier route to Sønderberg. And with the grassy clifftops falling to a dark blue sea on my right, the road changed briefly from tar to decorated cobbles.
To my left was a modern building, striking rather than attractive, with a roof that a creative chef might have made from a tomato. It was all upright and slanting slices that, like the sliced tomato, served no practical purpose but showed someone had made an effort.
A plain stone, square-edged needle with a pointed top stood across the road on the clifftop grass. The inscription, in gold capitals, gave thanks for something I couldn't understand. My grasp of Danish goes no further than tak.
On the other side of the tomato-roof building were grass hillocks and trenches. Spear-topped wooden stakes had been built into a sharp fence, the barbed wire of the day. It was the defensive position the Danes had taken when the Prussians had given them a hammering in 1864 and snaffled southern Jutland.
Other countries' histories and disasters come as a surprise. School history concentrates on your own victories, not other people's miseries. The Prussians had pushed the Danes back to Dybbøl Banke, where I stood now. Then they began bombarding the Danes and built trenches to creep up to them in safety.
The two sides began negotiating in London but couldn't agree. So the fighting started again. "The Danes discovered all too late that an attack was underway and had no time to react before the area was overrun by Prussian soldiers," said my leaflet.
Recorded noises of battle surrounded visitors behind the sharpened stakes. When the guide set off a cannon, it made such a gratifying explosion that one or two in the crowd stifled screams. A yawn of medium-blue smoke rolled across the hillside, not disturbing the grazing cows, and smoke was still drifting out of the barrel minutes later.
It wasn't until 1920 that the area was allowed to return to Denmark. It was the result of the first world war, when 30 000 locals who considered themselves Danes were forced to fight for Germany. One in six died.
"Even today," said a leaflet, "traces of the defeat in 1864 can still be found in Danish society... in the sceptical approach to Germany and the rest of Europe."
Not for nothing does Denmark not use the euro
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I'm staying tonight at the hostel in Vollerup. It's painted as bright orange as the rest of Denmark. It's a big place, on both sides of the road, with an enclosure of exotic animals. I'd wanted to go further but, frankly, I was battle-weary and just wanted to eat and sleep..
Today's ride: 69 km (43 miles)
Total: 3,780 km (2,347 miles)
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