[LINK] "When History happens to you"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at History and Futility, my co-blogger The Oberamntman has an interesting essay up exploring the history of Alsace, a contented Franco-German battleground, through the persona of a leading Alsatian historian.

Rodolphe Reuss, one of the most important historians of early-modern Alsace, died in 1924. I ordered one of his books from the local library today, and instead of getting the one I wanted I got his basic Histoire d’Alsace. This may still be the standard work on Alsace. The first edition was published before World War One (the sixth edition was in 1912); later printings have continued at least through 1977, probably later. I happened to get one from 1934.

Reuss was very unhappy with the Franco-Prussian war. He cut off contact with German historians for at least some time. After the war he was the major figure in reorganizing and rebuilding the devastated library holdings, destroyed by German artillery. He was also extremely active in local Protestant circles.

Alsatian history today seems anachronistic. Germany and France are no longer going to war every generation or so hoping to get it back. The EU Parliament is in Strasbourg. It is doubly old-fashioned because many of Alsace’s first historians, many of them quite good, never got over the legalistic arguments over whether or not France really acquired it in the Treaty of Westphalia. Language borders, patois studies, and so forth contributed to arguments of who Alsace should belong to. With the decline of nationalism as a teleological endpoint to history, these sorts of studies vanish, in the sense that they are no longer used to prove one man’s point.

I became interested in a blog entry on him when, idling, I opened the book and saw the dedication. It obviously came with a new, postwar edition, because it was to his three sons. All three of them died in 1914-1915 fighting for France.

So what happens when history, the history we study, is important to us in our daily lives? I am not referring to what it would mean if my family came from Alsace. This is a case where a historian has made his whole life where he studies, including taking sides (France, although not to a propagandist level until after World War One) in a conflict over your homeland. He watches his scholarship and future scholarship burn in the flames of war, spends decades salvaging what can be salvaged, and then watching it happen again. The second time it happens, though, he’s more preoccupied with the deaths of his only sons to worry too much about the library.

Go, read.