Clausen line

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Course of the Clausen and Tiedje lines
Voting area in Schleswig
Emergency note from 1920, which represents the two possible limits

The Clausen Line was a border line between Germany and Denmark proposed by the Danish historian Hans Victor Clausen in 1891 . For the referendum in 1920 it formed the border between the 1st and 2nd voting zone and thus the upcoming state border as it still exists today (→ border between Denmark and Germany ).

As a revision of the Clausen line, the German side proposed the Tiedje line . This should run more northerly, including the German-minded area around Tondern as well as smaller areas north of the Flensburg Fjord and thus create numerically equally large minorities on both sides of the border.

With his proposed limit, Clausen supposedly wanted to take historical and economic considerations into account, but above all to linguistic conditions. In doing so, however, he divided the historical districts of Tondern and Flensburg and robbed both economic centers of their respective hinterland. Above all, the dividing line did not agree with the circumstances, neither linguistically nor in terms of attitude - as the results of the two votes subsequently showed. In an original proposal, Clausen had assessed the Tondern district as German-minded.

In his book Folkesproget i Sønderjylland , Clausen described how he assessed the linguistic situation: His assessment was based on the language surveys of the Flensburg government council JGC Adler - but interpreted them in a rather one-sided way, by referring to the numerous multilingual households in central Schleswig, i.e. families, in which Sønderjysk was spoken in addition to German and Low German , declared as a Danish-speaking area. This area was partly congruent with the strip proposed for correction by the German historian Johannes Tiedje after the votes in 1920 based on the actual results , the so-called Tiedje line .

The fact that the Clausen line ended approx. 7 km northwest of Flensburg was seen as a waiver by many nationally minded Danes, which in the light of the clear outcome of the election in the city could no longer be interpreted as such. Rather, the motivation could be not to risk an uncertain outcome for the entire Zone 1 because of the result of the populous city of Flensburg, even if the city still had a significant Danish-minded minority at that time.

As the result of the first referendum showed, there was a partially clear German majority in the area directly north of the Clausen Line, but since the voting was en bloc , i.e. the overall result of the first voting zone was decisive, these areas also came to Denmark and it was created north the border a German minority about twice as large as the Danish minority south of the border.

Due to the political situation immediately after the First World War , however, there was neither the choice of the Tiedje Line, which would have created similarly large minorities on both sides of the border, nor a compromise that would only have included the areas of the district of Tønder, but it remained the unfavorable border drawing for Germany.

Division of Schleswig

The Clausen line now divided the Duchy of Schleswig into a Danish North Schleswig and a German South Schleswig . North Schleswig with 5794 km² is somewhat larger than South Schleswig with 5300 km². At the end of the First World War, Hans Peter Hanssen called, among other things, at the Reichstag session on October 22, 1918, for a referendum in the country. After the revolution, the new German government agreed to this in a letter from State Secretary Wilhelm Solf to the Foreign Ministry. The Danish government under Carl Theodor Zahle brought the demand for a vote to the Allied Armistice Commission with success. Hanssen was accepted into the Danish government as Minister for North Schleswig Affairs in June 1919 and since then has led the Danish negotiations on the mode of the referendum that should be included in the Versailles Treaty , although Denmark was not a belligerent state during the First World War . If both states had agreed bilaterally on the language border as the state border, North Schleswig would only have been 4418 km². The area between the two lines of 1376 km² is practically the "war gain" of non-warring Denmark. Denmark annexed and incorporated Northern Schleswig as Sønderjylland . In 1997, the European region Sønderjylland-Schleswig was founded, which is about the size of the Duchy of Schleswig.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Werner Koops: German or Danish - The referendums of 1920 . In Gerhard Paul , Uwe Danker, Peter Wulf: Geschichtsumschlungen: social and cultural history reading book: Schleswig Holstein, 1848-1948 , Berlin 1996; ISBN 3-8012-0237-2 .
  2. ^ Karl Strupp : Dictionary of international law and diplomacy , 3 vol., 1924–1929, p. 118

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