Excavating Nations sheds light on the history of archaeology and museums in the German-Danish borderlands of Schleswig Holstein and Sønderjylland from the nineteenth century to the post-1945 era. With a specific focus on the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and the Museum for National Antiquities in Kiel, the study traces cross-border negotiations between German and Danish archaeologists, their investigation of Nordic prehistory, and their appropriation of this history for their respective nationalist identity politics. Because of their overlapping geographical and cultural topographies, borderlands offer a privileged perspective on the processes of creating and shaping nations. The German-Danish borderlands are home to archaeological sites rich in prehistorical artefacts (including the walls of the Danevirke, the Viking village Haithabu, and bog bodies such as the Rendswühren Man). Since, according to the author, there are no decisive cultural, ethnic, religious, or racial differences between Danes and Germans, the processes of creating and constructing national identities through excavating the past are particularly pertinent: “The German-Danish borderlands are unique because they witnessed protracted attempts to delineate boundaries with no entrenched ethnic, religious, or racial criteria separating the groups” (5). The book is intended to go beyond a regional case study to draw universal conclusions about how archaeology can shape memory discourses, identity politics, and nation-building.
By investigating the empirical material of correspondence, site reports, and documents from universities, state archives, museums, and researchers, the study shows how Danish and German archaeologists negotiated their involvement with national history while, at the same time, being members of a transnational academic community. The book begins with a fascinating journey into nineteenth-century antiquarianism, when Danish and German collectors, history enthusiasts, intellectuals, and Romantics began to discover Nordic prehistory as a field of knowledge and source of identity. Though often guided by patriotic sentiments during this period, the antiquarian collectors worked within a context of close and fruitful cross-border exchanges of archaeological knowledge. In this context, Hare's discussion of the discovery and rediscovery of the Viking city Haithabu and the work of the archaeologist Johanna Mestorf is of particular interest. Still entrenched in the antiquarian tradition, Mestorf did not divide the academic community into two national camps, but instead maintained local, regional, provincial traditions in her research and museum politics. Her work thus reflected hybrid and transnational archaeological practices in the border region.
This amorphous, antiquarianist practice changed radically with the emergence of modern professional archaeology. Because of political contests during the Danish-German wars of 1848–1851 and 1852–1864, prehistoric archaeology in the borderlands developed into political myth-making activity that claimed ownership and copyright over Nordic prehistory. The Danish archaeologist Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae's critique of the German Brothers Grimm's work on mythology stirred and polarized debate about how to utilize Nordic mythology, thus playing a decisive role in this process. The tendency to nationalize prehistorical archaeology became even more acute during the two world wars. Through discussion of the work of German archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, Hare offers impressive insight into how the Nazi regime used Nordic antiquity for political propaganda, and into how the borderland became a key geopolitical and ideological issue during the German occupation of Denmark.
Reconstructing the different phases of prehistoric archeology, the book delivers a persuasive account of how the Nordic past was used for nationalist self-conception, identity politics, and German imperialism. Hare refers to current scholarship on nation, but might have said more about the study's theoretical positioning with respect to recent discussion of transnationalism. In the introduction, Hare raises the question of whether nations are organic, or best understood as constructed entities. He emphasizes the unique symbolic power of memory structures, as well as the singularity of the local and material realities of remembrance, yet the narrative of the book suggests a teleological view of the rise of modern archaeology from antiquarianism to a professionalized (politicized) scholarly discourse. It would have been interesting if the author had expanded more on the hybridity, asynchronicity, and nonlinearity of the transnational knowledge community, as demonstrated in Mestorf's work. In this context, Hare's references to cultural history occasionally come across as cursory: they might have been used less in an illustrative fashion, and more as decisive tools showing the complex and, at times, contradictory nature of transnational scholarly intertwinement. Hare discusses Worsaae and others, but could also have said more about the often nationalistic Danish appropriations of Nordic prehistory during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These criticisms are not meant to detract from the excellent scholarship of this book, which is a must-read for anybody interested in German-Danish borderland archaeology and the struggles to excavate the area's ancient past.
