Language Politics and Aesthetics: André Weckmann and Robert Grossmann on Alsatian Regional Identity

Abstract

This paper looks at the deep reasons behind the intense conflict that opposed Robert Grossmann and André Weckmann, two major actors on the contemporary Alsatian political and literary scene, in the years 1990–2000. While it is a paradoxical conflict since the two figures share a lot of common ground, in the last analysis, different “Ideas of France” play a central role in the dispute. This paper suggests that aesthetics needs to be brought into the picture as a fundamental epistemological category both in order to fully understand this specific situation and in order to shed light on the nature of politics in general.

Keywords:

• Jacques Rancière
• Robert Grossmann
• André Weckmann
• Alsace
• Charte Européenne des Langues Régionales ou Minoritaires

Notes

Notes

1 The open letter is reproduced as an appendix to Main-Basse sur ma Langue (124). This translation and all subsequent translations mine.

2 Weckmann's “plaidoyer for a Franco-German bilingual zone” is thus an unacceptable plan for Grossmann because it would disrupt the aesthetic harmony of fixed political shapes. Weckmann formulated this project in 1991 as the ultimate solution to solve the question of the decline of the Alsatian dialect: reshape the European Union into a federation of Euroregions, with, in the case of the Rhine region, a bi-national entity that would encompass Alsace for the French side and Baden-Württemberg and the Palatinate for the German side, so that Alsatians, at last, have a real reason to practice their language, hence save it (agreeing with Grossmann that “die Sproch reda esch die Sproch retta”—to speak the language is to save the language).

3 As I have showed in my article “The Non-Uniformity of In-Betweenness in André Weckmann's La Roue du Paon,” postcolonial theory, especially Homi Bhabha's notion of “hybridity,” enables us to reject the criticism according to which Weckmann would be upholding stale notions of ethnicity. The reason why he strives to promote the Alsatian dialect is not because he would believe in some “pure” “Alsatian nation.” Grossmann's claims need to be therefore greatly relativized. In fact, I argue that Weckmann and Grossmann's general frameworks of thought have much more in common than what they themselves would admit.

4 The problem with this reasoning, as André Weckmann points out, is that it presupposes that parents still know enough of the dialect to teach it. Sociolinguists, like Jean Petit with his three-generation model, demonstrated that it was already too late, rendering Grossmann's argument perhaps true in a general sense, but not realistic in this specific situation. For Weckmann instead, the Charter needs to be ratified because only the Charter could make “Jacobine” France agree to generalize bilingual schooling in Alsace—the only way, according to Weckmann, to really reverse the language shift. Grossmann, incidentally, does not entirely deny the dire reality of things—even so, he prefers to accept the possibility of the death of the dialect over the constraints the Charter would impose: “Let's get ready for a memorable funeral, for dying is an art!” (20)

5 Metaphorically rendered through France's perfectly hexagonal shape.

6 Weckmann's pacifist stance developed out of his experience as a “Malgré-Nous” soldier, “incorporé de force” into the German army (see Les Nuits de Fastov).

7 Rancière is not the only theorist to highlight the connection between politics and aesthetics; see Balibar and his notion of “Forme-Nation,” or Hélène Merlin's discussion of the “Querelle du Cid” by Corneille. Merlin maintains that the pleasure provided by beautiful literature is no matter of mere entertainment, but has a profoundly political dimension in that the pleasure shared by the whole “imagined community” of all French people (that begins to be known in the seventeenth century as “le public”) is one of the aspects that led to the formation of modern nationalism. If, following Ernest Renan, common experiences do indeed create the Nation, then the feeling of the Beautiful experienced in front of literary monuments does provide such common cultural references and experiences that stand at the basis of the Nation. In other words, it is Beautiful Literature, made “national,” that forms the Beautiful Nation. Philip Schwyzer reinforced this point in his 2004 book chapter The Aesthetics of Nationhood, in which he deals both with the beauty of landscapes period and the beauty of cultural landscapes in order to answer this fundamental interrogation: “Given the many and notorious failings of nationalism on a practical level, it is questionable whether it would have survived so long as an ideology, were it not for the fact that nations—all of them—are enduringly, achingly beautiful” (100).