World Literature at the Alsace Borderland: The Frontier Poetics of Claude Vigée and André Weckmann's Poetry

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, poets and writers from the border regions of Alsace and Lorraine occupied a precarious position in a contemporary literary canon increasingly shaped by monolcultural nationalisms. Situated on the border between France and Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, as the region was named at the time, had become the symbolic trophy of the political disputes between France and Germany, an object of power on which French and German national pride depended.1 Following the Franco-Prussian wars, songs, stories and films were created as propaganda in France in remembrance of the provinces lost to the Prussians. Yet, poets from these regions often continued to write in three languages (German, French and Alsatian) at a time when successive French and German governments tried to make the region con form to rigid linguistic and cultural policies. The literature produced in this region is characterized throughout the twentieth century by an ongoing engagement with cosmopolitan thinking beyond the Franco-German context, an openness to multilingual practices, and the mixing of literary forms and genres.2 This paper will investigate the extent to which the works of two poets from this region born in the 1920s, Claude Vigee and Andre Weckmann, constitute a critique of nationalisms' cultural politics by analysing the integration of spatial and cultural practices of the border in a selection of their works written in Alsatian, a non-standardised oral dialect. Alongside this case study, the paper will provide a framework of analysis to read "minor literatures" from borderland regions outside of the cultural framework of national identity.3 Loosely using Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of "minor literature" as texts written by cultural minorities in a dominant national language, I argue here that borderland literatures form a "minor literature" with a distinctive take on cosmopolitan relations within the dominant cosmopolitanism of "world literature" coined by Goethe (Damrosch 1). To what extent has poetry produced in the Alsace-Lorraine borderland managed to shape its own intercultural discourse within a cosmopolitanism based on inter-nation rivalries? The proposed analysis will suggest that the "frontier literature" from Alsace and Lorraine engages with translation, circulation, and general processes of transcultural communication as an integral part of its creative process. As we shall see, these works challenge the system of inclusion and exclusion characteristic of monocultural national identity constructions to favour a form of symbolic and cultural cooperation.Nationalist Discourses on the Alsace-Lorraine BorderlandSo long as Germany and France fought over Alsace in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, monocultural national frameworks over-determined Alsatian and Lorrainian literatures and political and public identity. Between the period of 1870 and 1946, when Alsace-Lorraine changed nationality five times in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War and the First and Second World Wars, the question of Alsace-Lorraine's cultural identity was caught up in the historical development of its neighbouring national borders. The narrative strategies deployed in order to represent Alsatian and Lorrainian identities during these Franco-German conflicts is important in order to contextualise the selection of Vigee and Weckmann's texts analysed here, since both poets use "autoethnographic" strategies of narration. By "autoethnographic" strategies I mean to refer to Pratt's terminology to describe works that actively "engage with representations [these two national] others have made of them" (35). The case of Weckmann and Vigee's Alsatian language poetry is all the more interesting for it acknowledges the global culture of dissent in which these authors wrote during the nineteen-seventies and eighties. This allowed them to describe not only the way they were percieved by the nations who competed for their sovereignty, but also to recognise their position as authors in a global context of social inequality beyond their immediate cultural reality. …