Flensburg

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 28th of October 1412, Queen Margaret I of Denmark died of the plague aboard a ship in Flensburg Harbour. The town where her ship lay is Flensburg, in the north of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. It sits at the innermost tip of the Flensburg Firth, an inlet of the Baltic Sea. Only about 7 km separate its city centre from the Danish border. After Glücksburg and Westerland, it is Germany's northernmost town, and among urban areas in its state only Kiel and Lübeck are larger.

  The place has always been defined by where it stands rather than by how big it is. Danish settlers founded it, German merchants soon joined them, and kings in Copenhagen and later in Berlin ruled it in turn. Why did a settlement on this particular shore grow rich enough to send ships toward the Caribbean? How did a border town keep two peoples living side by side for centuries? And what brought the last government of Nazi Germany to this harbour in 1945?

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• 2. Why Here

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  By the year 1200 at the latest, Danish settlers had built a town at the innermost end of the firth. German merchants arrived soon afterwards. In 1284 the town's rights were confirmed, and Flensburg quickly became one of the most important towns in the Duchy of Schleswig.

  The duchy had one feature that shaped the town's trading life. Unlike Holstein, Schleswig did not belong to the German Holy Roman Empire. Flensburg therefore never joined the Hanseatic League, though it kept close contacts with it.

  Historians presume that several advantages drew people to this spot. The water offered shelter from heavy winds. A road system known as the Hærvejen or Ochsenweg ran between Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland, and it may date back to the Bronze Age. Another route, the Angelnway, linked North Frisia with the Angeln peninsula. The fourth attraction was a good herring fishery.

  Herring, especially kippered herring, made the town bloom in the Middle Ages. Merchants sent it inland and to almost every European country.

  The town's name keeps a trace of an earlier landmark. Burg means castle, and the six-sided red tower on the town's coat of arms recalls the old castle that gave Flensburg its name.

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• 3. Mud, Fire and Livestock

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  In 1485 a great fire struck Flensburg, one of many blows that made medieval life in the town hard. In 1436 only about 3000 people lived there, and plagues repeatedly thinned the population. Bubonic plague, spread mainly by the fleas of brown rats, killed many. So did "red" dysentery and other scourges.

  Lepers were strictly isolated at the St.-Jürgen-Hospital, built before 1290 and placed far outside the town's gates. St. Jürgen Church now stands on the site. Inside the walls, the church hospital named "Zum Heiligen Geist" stood in Große Straße, which is today the town's pedestrian precinct. Around 1500 syphilis appeared as well.

  The streets themselves were a trial. The main streets were neither paved nor lit at night. When the dung-filled roads became truly impassable, citizens laid wooden pathways across them. Only a few upper-class houses had windows.

  Every household kept animals in the house and the yard. The town even employed its own cowherds and a swineherd, and storm tides threatened the harbour districts from time to time.

  By 1600 the population had doubled to about 6000, and the harbour was preparing to carry the town far beyond its own streets.

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• 4. Sugar, Whales and Rum

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  Flensburg merchants were active as far away as the Mediterranean, Greenland and the Caribbean once the Hanseatic League had fallen in the 16th century. After herring, the most valuable goods were sugar and whale oil. The whale oil came from whaling off Greenland.

  The Thirty Years' War ended that boom. During the same period the town was turning Protestant, which made it ever more German in culture and language. The surrounding countryside stayed decidedly Danish.

  In the 18th century the town found a second fortune in rum. Cane sugar arrived from the Danish West Indies, now the US Virgin Islands, and was refined in Flensburg. One of the town's natives, Johan Lorensen, born around 1640, later served as Governor-General of the Danish West Indies.

  Industrialization in the 19th century finally let rivals such as Copenhagen and Hamburg outstrip the town. From 1460 until 1864, however, Flensburg had been the second-biggest port of the Kingdom of Denmark, behind Copenhagen alone.

  The rum trade did not simply vanish. As of 1864, the West Indian trade routes moved away from the Danish West Indies toward the British colony of Jamaica. Flensburg imported rum from there, blended it, and sold it all over Europe. Only one active distillery remains in town, called A. H. Johannsen, and the year 1864 marked a larger change as well.

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• 5. Between Two Flags

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  The Battle of Flensburg was fought on the 6th of February 1864, when a small Hungarian mounted regiment chased a Danish infantry and Dragoon regiment near the city. The Second Schleswig War ended with Flensburg passing to the Kingdom of Prussia.

  The change did not turn the town German overnight. In the election for the North German Reichstag in 1867, Flensburg still had a Danish majority, and that majority lasted until around 1880. Then the balance shifted, partly because workers immigrated from other parts of Germany. Partly it was because the bureaucracy was largely replaced by Germans from the south.

  Before 1864, Danes had made up the vast majority of the population. The telephone directory still shows it, with Danish surnames such as Asmussen, Claussen, Jacobsen, Jensen and Petersen. In the old days, however, the upper classes of merchants, officials, academics and clergy were predominantly German.

  On the 1st of April 1889, Flensburg became an independent city within the Province of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1920 the League of Nations ruled that a vote would settle the German-Danish border. The voting zones were laid out so that some northern neighbourhoods went to Denmark. Flensburg as a whole voted by a large margin to stay German. As a reward for that loyalty, the government gave the town a large hall, the Deutsches Haus.

  Even a monument was caught up in the changes. The Isted Lion, a war monument unveiled in 1862, stood first in Flensburg, then in Berlin, then in Copenhagen. It is now resident in Flensburg again.

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• 6. The Danish Minority

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  After 1945, Flensburg's town council was dominated by Danish parties for years, and the town had a Danish mayor. A strong pro-Danish movement in South Schleswig pursued what was called Eider Politics. Its goal was to unite the town, and all or most of the land north of the Eider River, with Denmark.

  That goal was never achieved, but the minority did not disappear. Estimates of how many Flensburgers belong to the Danish community range widely, with some putting it as high as 25%. The minority's party, the South Schleswig Voters' Association, usually wins 20-25% of the votes in local elections, though not all its voters are Danes.

  In 2010 Simon Faber of that party won a runoff for Lord Mayor with 54.8% of the vote. He was the first person from the Danish minority to hold the office since the Second World War. In the council election of the 14th of May 2023, the party took 24.8% of the vote and 11 seats, making it the largest group.

  The minority runs its own schools, libraries and Lutheran churches, and the German majority is not excluded from them. Its seat is Flensborghus on Norderstraße, a former orphanage. The town also hosts a Danish Consulate-General, a bilingual daily newspaper called Flensborg Avis, and a Danish gymnasium called Duborg Skolen. On the ferries, passengers use a mixed Danish-German speech called Petuh.

  To many Danes, Flensburg is mainly known for its border shops. Spirits, beer and sweets cost less there because the value-added tax is lower and some excise taxes are lower or absent. Danish firms have followed the same logic, and Danfoss, for tax reasons, has set up shop just south of the border.

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• 7. The Last Capital of the Reich

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  In 1945 Admiral Karl Dönitz fled to Flensburg with what remained of his government. Adolf Hitler had named him successor and then killed himself, which briefly made Dönitz President of Nazi Germany. His so-called Flensburg Government took power from the 1st of May, the day Hitler's death was announced.

  It lasted about a week before German troops surrendered and Allied troops occupied the town. The transmitter in Flensburg was the one through which the surrender was announced on the 8th of May 1945. On the 23rd of May, the British Army arrested Dönitz and his ministers in the district of Mürwik and held them at the Navy School there. The Berlin Declaration of the 5th of June formalized the dissolution. For a few weeks, Flensburg had been the seat of the last Third Reich government.

  The war had otherwise passed the town lightly. It was left almost unscathed by the air raids that devastated other German cities. Still, in 1943 a bombed nursery school killed 20 children. Shortly after the war ended, an explosion at a local munitions storage site claimed many victims.

  Four prisoners of war who took part in the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III were captured in the city. They were two Norwegians, one Australian and one New Zealander, and they were later murdered at another location.

  By 1950 the census counted 102,832 residents, enough to make Flensburg a Großstadt under one traditional definition. The population later sank below that line. Since German Reunification the number of soldiers stationed there has fallen to about 8,000.

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• 8. Learning and Culture

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  The Marineschule Mürwik, where the Dönitz ministers were once held, is the main educational establishment for all German Navy officers. It is only one of several schools shaped by the sea. Flensburg University of Applied Sciences traces its origins to a royal steamship machinist school established in 1886. That grew into a ship's engineers' school, and it became a Fachhochschule in 1973. In May 2016 it took its current name, and it now has more than 3,000 students.

  The University of Flensburg was founded in 1946 as a pedagogical college and became a university in 1994. It had about 6,000 students in 2019/20. Unlike the much larger University of Kiel, it does not teach theology, medicine or law, though it can confer doctorates.

  The Danish Central Library for South Schleswig holds a collection called "Slesvigsk samling". It is a vast repository of unique material on the border region's history and culture.

  The town's museums lean toward the water. A Museumshafen maintains old working boats, mainly from the Baltic, and a Museumswerft practises sail shipbuilding of bygone centuries, with a boatyard for children. A museum of rum history recalls the town's nickname as the Rum Town.

  The passenger steamer Alexandra, built in 1908, still makes small trips on the Flensburg Förde. Each year in May or June, the Rumregatta draws sailors to the firth.

  The Nordertor, a gate, is the landmark of Flensburg's Old Town. Its streets survived the Second World War largely intact, but postwar urban renewal later favoured modern redevelopment over preservation. Before the policy was abandoned in the late 1970s, numerous historic buildings in the northern and eastern parts of the Old Town were demolished. Financial constraints limited the damage, and a compact, well-preserved Old Town remains.

  The Johanniskirche, from the 12th century, is the oldest church in the town centre. The Nikolaikirche is the Gothic main church, famous for an organ design by Hinrich Ringeringk. The Kompagnietor, a harbour gate, was built in 1602, and the ruins of the Franciscan friary date from 1263. Altes Gymnasium, built in 1914, was founded in 1566 as a "Gymnasium trilingue" teaching Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

  Some losses came earlier. The Old Town Hall, from the 15th century, was demolished in 1883. The government building that served as political centre of the Duchy of Schleswig from 1850 to 1864 gave way to a department store in 1964. In the same year a seventeen-floor cube was built as the new Town Hall.

  The town has produced or hosted notable figures. Christian V, king of Denmark and Norway, was born in Flensburg in 1646. Hugo Eckener, the Zeppelin pioneer, was a native, and his parents lived at Norderstraße 8. Elvira Madigan, a Danish tightrope walker and trick rider, was born there in 1867, and her illicit affair and dramatic death inspired a 1967 Swedish film. The physician Carl Wilhelm Otto Werner gave his name to Werner syndrome, a form of progeria.

  Honorary citizenship has been granted since 1851, when it went to a minister of the Duchy of Schleswig. In 1895 it went to Otto von Bismarck. The list ends, so far, with the aviator and businesswoman Beate Uhse-Rotermund, honoured in 1999.

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