Altona freedom

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"Altona Skal være dansk" - sign of the Altona freedom

Altonaer Freiheit - away from Hamburg! is a non-party initiative that emerged in the second half of the 1980s , with the aim of making Altona / Elbe an independent city again, as it was until 1938 .

She advocates the Bremen model with two municipal independent cities in one federal state and has therefore intervened in the current discussion about Hamburg's district administration reform. As a first step, she demands the return of the holdings of the Altona City Archives that were brought to the Hamburg State Archives after the Second World War ; All district assembly groups adopted this demand in a unanimous decision in the mid-1990s. In addition, Altona's borders, in particular with St. Pauli and the Eimsbüttel district , are to be restored.

The secessionist initiative has become known beyond Hamburg's borders. a. through an appeal to the Danish Queen Margrethe II under the motto "Altona must go back to Denmark" ( Altona Skal være dansk ) as well as campaigns such as the offer to the Football Association of the Faroe Islands , bearing in mind the shared Danish history of its European Championship qualifying home games in Altona (on the Adolf-Jäger-Kampfbahn or in the Volksparkstadion ) (1990). The district office officially accepted this invitation . In addition, she has managed to get Altona's town hall to flag its own flag alongside the Hamburg city flag on important occasions. In 1996, the district assembly awarded the Danish Elisabeth Iversen, who lives there, the active honorary award for Altona for her commitment to the Altonaer Freiheit .

Until 2012, Olaf Wuttke was the initiative's spokesman for almost 25 years; Wuttke was a member and group chairman of the Green Alternative List and of Regenbogen in the Altona district assembly . The electoral association Hamborg out of Altøna (HaraAlt), founded at the end of 2014, takes up many of the Altonaer Freiheit's ideas, but is not linked to it in terms of personnel or organization.

public perception

In 1991 the Danish educational magazine Folkeskolen presented the activities and goals of Altonaer Freiheit to its readership. Da Lifesytle magazine TEMPO dealt with this initiative a year later, which, compared with other secessionists, did not classify it as “reactionaries in the homeland madness”, but as “anarcho “Camp located. In his crime novel "Snow White's Coffin" (2007) satirizes the author Robert Brack it under the name of Danish Liberation Front . The Stadtspiele-Verlag in Dresden dedicates a longer section to the initiative in its “Stadtverführer Hamburg” on the map about the Altona town hall . In the official commemorative publication on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the granting of city rights and in a scientific publication (both published in 2014), Altona freedom is placed in the context of the culture of remembrance .

literature

Individual references, footnotes

  1. ↑ The motto refers to the fact that the Danish king was also sovereign of Holstein - to which Altona belonged until 1938 - until 1864 . Holstein was never part of Denmark.
  2. ↑ taz.de , March 4, 2008, and Hamburger Abendblatt , October 27, 2012.
  3. ↑ “Altona back to Denmark!” In Folkeskolen (ed.): Sprogforlagets Lytte- og Læsetekster til den nye Prøveform i Tysk. No. 3, Copenhagen 1991, pp. 25/26.
  4. ↑ Article “We want to make the state” in Tempo, March 1992, quotations on p. 27 and 33 respectively.
  5. ↑ see this map ( memento of August 26, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) on stadtspiele-verlag.de
  6. ^ Klaus Sieg: Altona Rotweiss. In: District Office Altona (ed.): 350 years of Altona. Festschrift 350 years of city rights. Hamburg 2014, pp. 18-20.
  7. ↑ Janina Fuge / Rainer Hering / Harald Schmid (eds.): Memory spaces: images of history and cultures of memory in Northern Germany (= forms of memory. Volume 56). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8471-0243-4 , p. 139.