Imaginaire de l’espace et constructions identitaires. L’espace frontalier Meuse-Rhin entre nationalisme et internationalisme chez Josef Ponten et Friedrich Markus Huebner (1920-1940)

Imaginary of space and constructs of identity. The border space Meuse-Rhine in between nationalism and internationalism in the writings of Josef Ponten en Markus Huebner (1920-1940) This article studies the imaginary of the Rhine-Maas border space in the essays and fiction of Josef Ponten (1883-1940) and Friedrich Markus Huebner (1886-1958), who were both cultural mediators between Belgium, France and Germany. After their participation in the Great War, both intellectuals also contributed to the internationalist movement of the early 1920s, only to become involved in Nazi Germany-Gleichschaltung from 1933 onwards. Their attitudes became ambivalent from then on : they kept a certain pacifist attitude, but also accepted the ideological use of their work. There was no immediate need for them to fit in with the new nationalist and ideological context, as their literary productions could be used to strengthen the new political regime. Ponten and Huebner’s discourse about the border can be better understood within the framework of Manfred Gangl and Gérard Raulet’s Austauschdiskurse, which refer to the internal contradictions present within an intellectual’s work that are characteristic of a time of crisis (in this case the period between the two World Wars). Because we are considering the diachronic impact of these texts that popularize historical and geographical knowledge by producing images and stereotypes of these cultural spheres, it is also relevant to consider some aspects of comparative imagology.