Welcome to the blog of Johannes Wilm!

No, it's not that I don't have a life and that I only write about and am concerned with issues relating to the usually very far away Danish minority in Germany and its mother country. While I have not been blogging for several months, I moved to Hackney in north eastern London with Petra (false name), who I met in Oaxaca (see posts from about a year ago) and I started MPhil/PhD studies at Goldsmiths College -- quite a radicalizing change from the University of Oslo. In October, the print edition of the Norwegian Dagbladet also had a piece on me coordinating activists from Norway and Germany to come to a demonstration for the youth house Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, while I was situated in Århus. I wrote notes in online communities such as Facebook.com and Underskog.no -- one of my Norwegian comments on the current political situation in Denmark in Norwegian was translated to Danish by Espen Stegger Ledaal -- and I supplied Katie, with whom I had been traveling in Central America, with enough data on the Danish welfare state model for a group presentation as part of her social woks master degree, that her professor said she was very lucky to have "a significant other" from Denmark... So yeah, I sure have been active, although I stopped writing here for a while.

It is actually quite easy to record patterns of behavior of those around me here, but they are anarchists and so a bit paranoid of having their stories published all over the Internet. Also there were some events in the last few months that were so close to me that I would be afraid of putting them out for everyone to see. So you will have to wait until I go somewhere else -- like Nicaragua some time this spring/summer.

Nevertheless, every now and then I find the time to scan through the Danish minority paper Flensborg Avis.


The physical border line between Denmark and Germany consists of no more than symbolical markers in 2007. Nevertheless, maintaining "Danish culture" is still important to some.

» Read More

Last year (the article should soon be online at http://www.duo.uio.no ) I pointed out that the various changes in border perception both at the Mexican/US and Danish/German border all have their economic underpinnings. National identity and ideology on either side are changing closely related to economic factors -- even though national ideologies usually hold that their particular national ideology has not changed (or currently resembles a state that it was at before it somehow was changed towards the worse). Also, it is usually held that national allegiance lies above any economic factors.
I ended my article with predicting...

» Read More

Ha! Finally I got my neighboor to speak again - at least a few sentences. The occasion this time was that I had forgotten a frozen pizza outside of our door in the hall way. "Is this yours?," she asked - thereby breaking several weeks of silence. "Ehm... yes" - I had actually been looking for it for several minutes. She gave me the "you are freaking weird"-look while handing me the pizza. But of course that was not all cause the next thing was that she was about to enter the bathroom: "If you need to shower, just remove those," I said while pointing at the five wet pink all-body suits that were hanging in the shower. Apparently that was no weirder than leaving a frozen pizza in the hall way, so she just said: "In fact, I do have to shower." And after another few words exchanges she moved into the shower, putting away those pink suits.


Johannes Wilm on his knees

Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?

» Read More