Britain had ‘got a new suit in exchange for an old trouser button’.

August 25, 2017 4:35 PM

"Britain’s smallest colony, an inconvenient and notoriously discontented border island."
posted by Chrysostom (10 comments total)

Who among us, if asked, "Would you like to obliterate an island with a shit-ton explosives?" would not say, "Yes. Yes I would."?
posted by Chrysostom at 12:44 on October 1, 2014 [has favorites +] [!]
posted by cgc373 at 5:01 PM on August 25, 2017 [6 favorites]

Goddamn, I have no memory of that.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:02 PM on August 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

Note: I think this is a funny comment in this context. I'm not snarking or playing a game of gotcha. I just searched for earlier Heligoland stuff on MetaFilter and saw it.
posted by cgc373 at 5:03 PM on August 25, 2017

The article itself is fascinating stuff about a place I don't remember hearing about before. I'm glad you posted it, Chrysostom.
posted by cgc373 at 5:08 PM on August 25, 2017

I was certain this place was fictional for like 9/10ths of this article. I mean how many weird little liminal places in Europe can there be?

It seems like the setting for a satirical novel.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:54 PM on August 25, 2017 [5 favorites]

Good post. Thanks.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:46 AM on August 26, 2017

What a great piece—I always enjoy reading Neal Ascherson. A couple of excerpts:

Preoccupied as he is with diplomatic history and Anglo-German relations – on which he is an authority – Rüger gives tantalisingly little space to the islanders themselves. There were a couple of thousand of them. At first they were fishing families; later, as the holidaymakers, poets, soldiers, sailors and spies of Northern Europe came pouring off the steamers, they became part-time hoteliers, waiters, boatmen and building workers. Their language was Frisian. How long they had been on the island nobody could be sure. But what comes triumphantly through in this book is that they belonged to that luckless family of small European peoples who, when asked, ‘Who are you?’ reply: ‘Who’s asking?’ They learned early how to adapt to the taste of the current occupant, whatever the new official language or flag, asking not to be bothered unreasonably in return for nominal loyalty. A traditional song in tiny Luxemburg proclaims: ‘mir wölle bleiwe wat mir sinn’ – ‘we want to stay just as we are.’ The Heligolanders were like that. And for most but not all of the time, a saving bloody-mindedness allowed them to get away with it.

* * *

Like so many of these liminal peoples, the Heligolanders were reinvented by excitable intellectuals of the dominant power. The French – at deluded moments – told themselves that Alsatians were more essentially French than anyone else. The Germans came to assert that Grenzdeutscher, the inhabitants of far-flung Germanic enclaves in Slav lands, distilled the superiority of the Volk as no Bavarian or Prussian could. The Poles informed their minority in Upper Silesia (pragmatic mining folk who could change religion as well as language, depending on where the frontier currently ran) that they were incomparably Polish. The Heligolanders were presented by some German propagandists as fanatical sentries of the Fatherland, as irreducible as their mighty red sandstone cliffs. Others imagined them as primal innocents, an unspoiled handful of survivors from the very dawn of the Germanic race.

Random factoids: "in 1841 Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles!’ on a German-speaking island under the Union Jack," and F.W. Murnau shot Nosferatu there!
posted by languagehat at 8:35 AM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Per wikipedia, the Frisian dialect of the island seems to be hanging on, now with official status and use in education, which is pretty delightful and impressive after all that shuffling around.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:12 PM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

which is pretty delightful and impressive after all that shuffling around

Given the total population of 1,400, it's just about inconceivable. Kudos to them.
posted by oheso at 3:32 AM on August 27, 2017

Seem to recall that I saw a couple of romanticized paintings of the Danish navy's victory at the Battle of Heligoland in that country's otherwise unhappy war with Prussia and the other German states in 1863-4. That's about all I remember.
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 12:51 PM on August 27, 2017