– How is your German, Holger?
That’s how it sounded on the small stage in the big tent at Sunday’s citizens day at the Fehmarnbelt Days festival.
It was former climate, energy and gender equality minister Lykke Friis, current director of the Think Tank Europe, who asked the question to Lolland Municipality’s mayor Holger Schou Rasmussen. He also signed off with excellent German answers to the accusation.
Rammstein for the mayor
– I have used Rammstein a lot since I became mayor ten years ago, revealed Holger Schou Rasmussen.
Lasse Svan Hansen, one of Denmark’s most successful handball players of all time, also sat on stage as one of the Danish-German cultural ambassadors at Sunday’s Fehmarnbelt Days. The former national team player should also help to focus on Danish and German differences and similarities, which we across the Fehmarn Belt must prepare for in order to build good neighbourliness.
Only 54 wants German
So did Mirco Reimer-Elster, who is a German-born political commentator.
– There are approximately 16,000 who could choose to learn German every year at the universities. But a survey a few years ago showed that only 54 applied to study German. So it’s maybe 20 who graduate a year. Und das geht nicht, said Mirko Reimer-Elster with dual citizenship.
Growing up, he had been part of the Danish minority in South Schleswig, where he had attended exclusively Danish institutions, even though his German parents did not speak Danish.
Prejudices turned and twisted
Precisely language skills and prejudices between Danes and Germans were turned and twisted on stage. And Mirko Reimer-Elster’s experience of starting at the University of Copenhagen back in 2009 as a young history student made an impression.
– I was asked by a fellow student at the very first Friday bar: Aren’t you ashamed to be German? And I said: No, why? Because of what your people have done, it was heard from Mirko Reimer-Elster, who just managed to find out that the fellow student in question and he never got to have a particularly close relationship.
The history takes up quite a bit
He could also add that after having lived in Denmark for 15 years, he registered that it still “filled a lot” with the history that unfolded way back in 1930s and 1940s Germany.
That is why it was perhaps very good to have a Danish-German folk festival, where there was also free play to hand in one’s prejudices in a set up mailbox, so that the Danish-German relationship can only get better and better. It is not long before the world’s largest submerged tunnel connects the two countries even closer.
