Alan Crosby reveals how a thorny question of European politics and a glimpse through a window changed his family’s history
Let me tell you a story, which I heard from my cousin 15 years ago. The tale begins with the ‘Schleswig–Holstein Question’, one of the knottiest of the many problems in the tangled web of 19th-century European politics. As British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston is reputed to have said, “The Schleswig-Holstein Question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor, who became mad. I am the third, and I have forgotten all about it.”
In essence, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were the possessions of the Danish Crown, with a mixed German and Danish population. In Schleswig, the northern duchy, there was a Danish majority, while in Holstein the Germans predominated. Prussia, the rising power that was spearheading moves towards German unification, cast acquisitive eyes upon the two duchies. Between 1848 and 1852 Denmark and Prussia fought a scrappy war over their ownership, in which the Danes were victorious, but that did not end the increasingly bitter dispute.
During the autumn of 1863 tensions rose, as the Danes sought to formally integrate Schleswig into the kingdom of Denmark. On Christmas Eve forces from several German states invaded and occupied Holstein, and on 1 February 1864 Prussian and Austrian troops crossed the border into Schleswig. At the end of that bitterly cold month they advanced into Denmark proper, and by the middle of July the whole of Jutland, the Danish mainland, was occupied. Denmark sued for peace, and following the Treaty of Vienna on 30 October relinquished almost all of Schleswig–Holstein to Prussia. But, you might ask, what has all of this got to do with family history? Here is my cousin’s story…
In the spring of 1864, some of the Prussian troops were moving northwards through Jutland, deeper into Denmark. Although this was a real war, with battles and sieges and thousands of casualties, it was not total war. For the Danish people, ordinary daily life had to continue as much as possible. The Prussian troops came to a village and marched through, doubtless observed closely by it
