Catherine Tatiana Dunlop - Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland

Every spring, the people of Alsace can look up at the sky and spot flocks of elegant, long-legged white storks returning home from their migration to the coasts of North Africa. Soaring above the landlocked region in the heart of Europe, the birds see the landscape below them as a burst of different colors: bright blue, golden yellow, and deep green. To the east, they see the fabled Rhine River, having recently emerged from Lake Constance, lazily snaking its way north toward Germanys Rhineland. On the left bank of the river, they catch sight of Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, marked by its distinctive, single cathedral spire, which reaches piercingly into the sky. To the west of Strasbourg, the storks pass over the Alsatian Plain, dotted with picturesque wine-growing villages, each radiating around a tiny church tower. Villagers welcome the birds arrival as a sign of good luck, erecting landing spots on the roofs of their half-timbered houses so the storks can build nests for their eggs. The birds that fly still further to the west approach the French interior, where the topography rises steeply in elevation, becoming the Vosges Mountains. An old, dying mountain chain, the Vosges crests resemble waves rolling across the horizon, obscured in parts by the clouds and fog trapped between them.

The storks that have migrated to Alsace every year, for the last several hundred years, would have been unaware that the region they have chosen as their seasonal home was the locus of a long-standing border conflict between two powerful human societies. An inland territory with abundant natural resources and a central location at the crossroads of states, languages, religions, and commercial networks, Alsace became a place for Europeans of different backgrounds to exchange goods and ideas. But its strategically vital position between the Rhine and the Vosges, and French and German-speaking civilizations, led powerful leaders in Paris and Berlin to view Alsace, and parts of its neighboring region, Lorraine, as territorial objects to be conquered, possessed, and fiercely defended. Over the course of their history, Alsace and Lorraines geographic location has been both a blessing and a burden for their people, existing alternately as a site of mediation and contestation between two of Europes most powerful states.

Figure Intro.1 Map of Europe with current political borders. Drawn by Michele Mayor Angel.

While the conflict over the French-German borderland dates to Roman times, the modern territorial dispute first exploded with the guns of war in 1648. In that year, Frances Sun King, Louis XIV, captured parts of Alsace from the German Holy Roman Empire, binding his new territory to the rest of the French kingdom with an iron curtain of star-shaped fortresses along the Rhine frontier. Lorraine entered into the French realm more peacefully, through diplomatic negotiations in 1766. Over a century later, in 1871, the newly unified German Empire, led by Emperor Wilhelm I, recaptured Alsace and part of Lorraine from the French, establishing a new border whose architecture consisted of fifty-five hundred stone markers that lined the crests of the Vosges. In the twentieth century, war determined the borders fate once again, this time by the overwhelming force of the two world wars. In 1918, 1940, and 1945, the French-German borderthe most militarized in Europemoved hundreds of kilometers back and forth between the shores of the Rhine and the mountaintops of the Vosges, as sovereignty over Alsace and Lorraine passed from German to French hands.

Figure Intro.2 Map of Alsace-Lorraine. Drawn by Michele Mayor Angel.

The shifting borders between modern France and Germany would not have been visible on the sweeping landscape that the regions migrating storks observe from hundreds of meters above the ground. From an aerial perspective, the territories that we now call France, Lorraine, Alsace, and Germany flow together into a continuous geological canvas. The man-made borders that have cut through the interlocking territories were conceived in the halls of European palaces, where French and German leaders met behind closed doors to decide the fate of a distant piece of land on the fringes of their realms. But over time, the French-German border came to represent much more than the sovereign limit between two increasingly powerful states; it transformed into a symbolic divide between two national cultures. In both France and Germany, citizens fixated on Alsace and Lorraine as coveted pieces of land without which their national territories felt incomplete and unfulfilled. But looking at the disputed terrain through the eyes of its migrating storks reminds us that seeing borders does not come naturally. It requires a socially constructed understanding of space. To train themselves to see the limits of their states, nations, regions, and homelands in the landscape of Alsace and Lorraine, Europeans needed a visual tool capable of combining a birds sweeping view of land with the power of the human imagination. They needed maps.

It is no coincidence that the age of European nationalism, which gave rise to the violent border conflict between modern France and Germany, was also the age of a passionate and widespread cartophilia. At a time of dramatic territorial reconfiguration, when Europeans were intent on discovering, demarcating, and legitimizing new forms of modern national boundaries, the map emerged as an enormously influential medium. The desire, indeed the impulse, to make maps was not restricted to a privileged few. While cartography had once been the domain of a powerful ruling elite, the period between the French Revolution and the Second World War saw an unprecedented proliferation of mapmaking across different ranks of society. This book is about the diverse and innovative approaches to mapping boundaries that arose from this era of popular cartography. It is the story of how cartophilia spread from the gilded map rooms of royal palaces and the gated headquarters of army general staffs, to middle class geographic and historical societies, to humble one-room schoolhouses, transforming how ordinary Europeans viewed the lands around them.