Janne Teller – blog 4:

One lion, many lions, a weekend of lions – on the photo one of them. The others were in Mozart’s die Zauberflöte which I saw yesterday; a wonderful staging of the opera in the Schiller Theater. The photographed lion is the Isted Lion (In Danish: Istedløven), which has had a long and volatile history since it was first erected by the Danes in 1862 in Flensburg, symbolizing the Danish victory over Schleswig-Holstein in the Battle of Isted in 1850. Both Schleswig-Holstein and lion were lost again to Germany already in 1864 … , thus initiating what one might call the ‘Endless Strife of the Isted Lion’, the gist of which can be read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isted_Lion . What interested me about this lion – and why it’s of relevance here – is that the return of the Lion from Denmark to the military cemetary in Flensburg in September 2011 was argued for by some Danish nationalists – including the former strategist and Member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party, Pastor Krarup (the party that recently tried to reintroduce unilateral danish border control) - as being an important national support for the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein. I wondered what Krarup would say if he saw the zink copy of the lion that I photographed at Wannsee …  Let’s hold on to EUROPE and let the nationalists battle over their monuments … So instead of looking at the lion as ’support to the Danes in Berlin’, I myself hold strongly to the lion’s peaceful and snuggly intentions: its face looks like that of a smiling flat-faced fat persian cat … And no doubt that this one lives happily as a mixed-race mongrel, proud to be guarding German multi-culturalism not far from the House of the Wannsee Conference – so as one of those hybrids myself, I scratch him behind his ears and hear the purring, see the very notion of nation state identity evaporate, and I feel very much at home …