POINT OF INTEREST

Dänisches General-Konsulat

Nordergraben 19, 24937 Flensburg

The Danish Consulate was opened in Flensburg just a few months after the plebiscite in 1920. Now a consulate general, it plays an important role in safeguarding and improving the rights of the Danish minority in the northern part of Schleswig-Holstein and is also a significant point of contact for the German “majority”.

The Danish Consulate General is a branch office of the Danish embassy and is located in the former Villa “Burg Schöneck” at Nordergraben 19, which was built in 1883/84.[1] The current consul general is Kim Andersen, the successor to Henrik Becker-Christensen (1998-2017). The then consulate was a child of the redrawing of the border in 1920. After the plebiscite, the Danish prime minister Niels Neergaard, speaking on 11 July 1920 on the Dybbøl Banke (Dybbøl elevation), where the Danes were defeated by Prussia and Austria in 1864, said: “They shall not be forgotten.” He was referring to Danes and Danish-minded people south of the new border. Nine days later, an office was opened in Rathausstrasse and on 7 October the Danish High Court attorney Neergaard-Møller started work as the Danish consul. By royal decree of 1 January 1987, it was granted the status of a consulate general. Its goal is to steadily improve the relationship between the minority and majority groups in the border region and Schleswig-Holstein by working with the German municipalities and towns and the Schleswig-Holstein government. The consulate provides services to the Danish citizens and supports the Danish minority consisting of about 50,000 persons in Schleswig-Flensburg and Nordfriesland as well as in the northern part of Rendsburg-Eckernförde. In 2010, the former consul general Becker-Christensen, writing in the Flensborg Avis, stated that the announced reduction in funding for Danish schools in Schleswig-Holstein by the state government was the biggest border-related political problem since the Bonn Copenhagen Declarations of 1955[2]. In the end, funding was not cut.