Hejls is only a few kilometres from Christiansfeld, but the two places have almost nothing in common. Christiansfeld was deliberately designed in the eighteenth century as a Moravian settlement; Hejls is an older Danish village whose history is tied much more closely to farming, the church, the road to the coast and, eventually, the border between Denmark and Germany.
We came through this part of southern Jutland with the motorhome and the most interesting section of the area was towards Hejlsminde, where the landscape opens onto the water. Hejls itself is inland, while Hejlsminde sits at the narrow outlet between Hejls Nor and the Little Belt. The two settlements are close enough to belong to the same journey, but historically they developed for quite different reasons.
The oldest obvious building in Hejls is Hejls Church. The nave and chancel date from the twelfth century and are Romanesque, while the tower was added later in the Gothic period. The church contains an altarpiece showing the Crucifixion and the twelve apostles, probably donated in 1471, and a pulpit dating from around 1560. The building is therefore centuries older than nearby Christiansfeld.
There is also an unexpectedly dramatic connection with Scandinavian history. During the winter of 1658, the Swedish king Charles X Gustav and his army were advancing through Denmark during the Second Northern War. The winter was exceptionally cold and the Danish straits froze. Before the Swedish army made its famous crossing over the frozen Little Belt, the king spent the night of 29–30 January at the old Hejls rectory.
The crossing that followed was one of the most extraordinary episodes in Danish history. Thousands of soldiers, horses and artillery moved across the frozen sea from Jutland towards Funen. The manoeuvre allowed the Swedes to bypass Danish defences and eventually threaten Copenhagen itself. The present rectory at Hejls is newer — the main building dates from 1817 — but the earlier rectory on the same site was the one used by the Swedish king.
Hejls later became involved in a completely different struggle over Danish identity. After Denmark’s defeat by Prussia and Austria in 1864, the border moved north. Hejls remained Danish, but the neighbouring area immediately to the south became German.
That border ran straight through Hejlsminde.
Hejlsminde had begun expanding from around 1843 beside a narrow dam separating the bay from Hejls Nor. Grain and bricks were shipped from here, fishing provided another livelihood, and inns operated on both sides of the outlet. It was a small coastal trading settlement until the political map of Europe suddenly turned the water running through the middle of it into an international frontier.
After 1864, the northern part was in Denmark while the southern side belonged to Prussia and later the German Empire. Customs buildings and gendarme posts appeared on both sides. People who had previously been neighbours now lived across a national border.
Some of those old official buildings still survive, which makes Hejlsminde’s appearance more interesting once you know what they were. They are not grand monuments, but for more than half a century this small inlet was part of one of Europe’s politically important borders.
The division also affected education in Hejls. From the 1880s, young Danish-speaking people from Schleswig south of the border came to the local free school to study Danish history, language and literature. It was not simply ordinary schooling: maintaining Danish language and culture had become politically important for communities living under German administration.
The sea caused more immediate problems than politics. Hejlsminde’s narrow dam had existed since the sixteenth century and was repeatedly threatened by war and storms. Swedish forces damaged it during the seventeenth century, and a storm surge in 1706 broke through the barrier and allowed salt water into what had previously been a freshwater fishing area.
Much worse came in 1872, when the catastrophic Baltic storm surge struck the Danish coast. Nine houses north of the outlet and four on the southern side were destroyed at Hejlsminde, leaving 65 people without homes.
The settlement recovered, although the agricultural depression of the 1870s badly damaged the grain trade. Local industry then became more important. Businesses included brickworks, lime burning and chicory processing, and the arrival of the railway from Kolding gave the small harbour better connections with the rest of the region.
Tourism followed. Hejlsminde Badehotel was built beside the railway station, and the coastal village gradually began changing from a working harbour and border settlement into the holiday place that is much more recognisable today.
The old political division finally disappeared after the 1920 Schleswig plebiscites, when North Schleswig voted to return to Denmark. Hejlsminde was Danish on both sides again. A permanent bridge across the outlet followed in 1923, physically reconnecting a settlement that had spent more than fifty years divided by an international frontier.
That history makes the little harbour much more interesting than it looks at first. Today there are pleasure boats, a marina, summer houses, a promenade and a beach. The water is shallow and the beach has a bathing jetty, playground and other simple facilities. It is now very much a quiet recreational place rather than a frontier post.
Hejls Nor, immediately behind the coast, gives the area another character again. The narrow outlet and the sheltered water behind it create a mixture of coast, wetland and farmland, so even from a short distance the landscape looks very different from Christiansfeld.
For us, Hejls fitted well immediately after Christiansfeld because the contrast was so strong. One place was carefully planned around a religious community; the other developed gradually around an old parish, agriculture and access to the sea. Then in 1864 an international border was dropped through its coastal settlement and remained there until 1920.
Hejls itself is not a place where every street contains something to see, and Hejlsminde is now a small and fairly quiet coastal village. The interesting part is knowing what happened here. A medieval church, a Swedish king preparing to cross the frozen Little Belt, Danish students arriving from German-controlled Schleswig, customs officers standing on opposite sides of a narrow inlet, a destructive storm surge and finally reunification in 1920 all belong to this very small corner of southern Jutland.
Without that history, Hejlsminde can look like little more than a pleasant harbour and beach. With it, the narrow stretch of water through the village becomes the most interesting thing in the landscape: for 56 years, it was literally the line between Denmark and Germany.