The Border Landscape

This chapter discusses the remaking of the Alsatian landscape after 1918, and considers the establishment of the new boundary line, the redesign of the region’s towns, and the fixing of its commemorative landscape. This was achieved through practical measures, and through debates about what the landscape represented. These discussions involved voices from across Alsace, France, and further afield, and they saw some of the most overt and explicit articulations of the two ideas of the borderland that shaped debates about the return of Alsace to France; that on the one hand Alsace represented France’s limits, and on the other that Alsace was the heart of a cross-border, transnational community. These two ideas coexisted, but were not articulated simultaneously. And the tension between the two understandings lies at the heart of Alsace’s return to France.