Fatherland by Burkhard Bilger

Author:Burkhard Bilger [Bilger, Burkhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

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When I was a boy, my family lived for a year in Karlsruhe, across the river from Alsace. Sometimes in the evening, my mother stood by the open window of our second-floor apartment and listened for the bells of the Strasbourg Cathedral, fifty miles away. It was a magnificent building, she told me, with sandstone walls and a soaring, filigreed tower—once the tallest structure in the world. The city around it, laced with canals and footbridges, was nearly as beautiful. Once a day, at half past noon, when the sun was at its apex, the great astronomical clock in the cathedral creaked into motion. A mechanical cock crowed, and a procession of wooden apostles passed before Jesus, who gave them his blessing. On the track below, a child trundled by, then an adolescent, a soldier, and an old dotard with a cane, while death rang his bell again and again—a cycle as relentless as the city’s political history.

Strasbourg was like a child of divorced parents, my mother said. For centuries, the French and Germans took turns lavishing the city with gifts whenever they had custody of it—museums, churches, libraries, grand public squares—and shielding its monuments from the worst of the bombing when they were at war. Each side wanted to prove that it was the more generous, more loving parent. And with each occupation, the new leaders were more unshakably convinced that Strasbourg was theirs alone. That it was only natural for Alsatians to change their names and learn a new language and salute a new flag. For they would always and forever belong to only one country—the one that happened to be in power that day.

“This war has put us in a strange position,” Philippe Husser, a schoolteacher from Colmar, wrote in his diary in 1914. “It induces in the Alsatian a moral and physical suffering. He loves Germany and cannot hate France. He feels like a child who adores both his parents and suffers to see that they don’t get along; not only that, they beat each other and decide to separate. The father, a severe, regal, authoritarian man, is given custody. The son takes him as a role model and does very well. He loves and respects his father, but can’t forget his pretty mother, that charming woman. The father knows that she’s making every effort to get her son back. So he scrutinizes her every maneuver, and his son’s every gesture, with suspicion and jealousy. When she manages to obtain a visit, and her son greets her with all-too-obvious joy, the father punishes him severely.”

After the First World War, when the French reclaimed Alsace, they were welcomed as liberators. The Prussian army had treated Alsatians like enemy agents rather than fellow Germans, executing suspected collaborators and setting a village on fire when some soldiers were shot there. (The shooters were later said to be drunk German soldiers.) Alsatians were sick of war and sick of the Prussians and more than willing to wave a flag for those who had chased them away.

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