Core Course Week: Castles, Battlefields, and Lasagna

Core Course Week wooo!!! 

A little background on the week before I get into what we did: Every student at DIS takes a Core Course. Throughout the semester you have two weeks fully devoted to your core course, Course Course Week and the Long Study Tour. My core course is called Competing Narratives: Modern European History which looks at the way history is remembered in different places and by different people.

For Core Course week we spent two days in Copenhagen before embarking on a three-day trip to Sønderborg, Denmark and Flensburg, Germany. 

Our first day in Copenhagen consisted of a tour in the morning and movie in the afternoon. Our tour focused on the Jewish history of Copenhagen and Denmark. Our guide, Charlotte Thamay, was amazing. She guided us through some central parts of the city before taking us to The Copenhagen Synagogue. I didn’t know this prior to our tour, but the synagogue was attacked in 2015.

Charlotte told us about her family’s connection to Danish Jews fleeing Denmark during the Second World War. Her dad and grandmother went to Sweden along with thousands of other Danish Jews while her grandfather stayed behind to free his cousins. He was caught and sent to Auschwitz. He later died during the death march that the Nazis forced the remaining prisoners to do nine days before the Soviets came to liberate Auschwitz. Charlotte was also at the synagogue during the attack in 2015. Having her as our guide made the tour a lot more special.

That afternoon we watched a movie, Germans & Jews, which looks at the way both Germans and Jews have learned about the Holocaust and Nazi rule in Germany. A huge part of German remembrance actually came from an American miniseries, Holocaust which aired in 1978 and was shown in West Germany. After years of not talking about it, the younger generation then began asking questions after seeing the atrocities portrayed in the film. Germany was then forced to reconcile with its past. 

On Tuesday, we started our day by visiting Grænseforeningen. The point of this visit was to better understand the relationship between the German minority in Denmark and the Danish minority in Germany and how they have found their own cultural and national identities. Prior to taking this class I didn’t know that the border between Denmark and Germany had changed as much as it had. Most recently, it shifted following the First World War due to the Treaty of Versailles.

Later in the afternoon we visited the National Gallery/Statens Museum for Kunst and took a short tour around the Danish Golden Age collection and learn about how Danish national identity was formulated during the first half of the 19th century. The paintings helped me gain a better understanding of Denmark in the early 1800s. 

We departed for Sønderborg at 7:45 on Thursday morning. After setting our stuff down at the hostel we went to Museum of Sønderborg Slot. The museum, which is a former castle, sat right on the water. We had a guided tour which was extremely helpful because everything was written in either Danish or German so we basically stood no chance of understanding what was going on.

On Friday we went to Frøslev Internment Camp. The camp was used to hold Danish Jews and members of the Danish resistance party during the Second World War. The camp now doubles as a school. All of us found this pretty strange and after our visit we discussed these feelings as a class.

In the afternoon we made our way to Flensburg, Germany. Flensburg used to be part of Denmark until 1864 when Denmark lost 40% of its land following the Second Schleswig War. In Flensburg we visited the Maritime Museum which looked at Denmark’s role in the slave trade and the production of sugar and rum. It was very interesting to hear how the Danish slave trade is remembered since it differed a lot from the United States. In fact, until about a decade ago, Denmark’s role in the slave trade was not taught in schools. 

We decided to stay in Flensburg for the evening and went on an impromptu tour of some historic sites that existed during the Second World War. Using a 1970s map our professor led us around the hilly streets and showed us the building where Jewish people could secretly worship, the place where members/followers of the Nazi party would burn books, and where the former SS station was. 

The next day we visited the Battlefield of Dybbøl and Bildungsstätte Knivsberg Kulturhistorisches Zentrum (Knivsberg Memorial Site of German Minority). The battlefield is where the Battle of Dybbøl took place. We have talked about extensively about the battle in our analysis of the Second Schleswig War. This battle was the most defining and catastrophic for Denmark. It was really cool to see where and how the battle was fought over 150 years ago. 

We ate at the Bildungsstätte Knivsberg Kulturhistorisches Zentrum (Knivsberg Memorial Site of German Minority). They served us lasagna for lunch and everyone agreed it was probably the best meal of our trip. There’s just something about lasagna. We got a tour of the grounds and learned about how the center works as a place for the German minority in Denmark to discover and learn about their German ancestry. 

After arriving back in Copenhagen we were all exhausted. But, our trip was well worth it. To see so many of the places we’ve been learning about was really valuable and made what we’ve been discussing easier to understand and visualize. 

This post has been a bit lengthy, but I hope you all enjoyed learning about Core Course week here at DIS and if you have any questions feel free to write in!

Hej hej!