'Everyone has their own Alsace' is a podcast from the 'In Between?' 2022 series, created by an international group of European students that took part in workshops and study visit in the French-German borderland region in July 2022. The participants of the project spent one week next to the bucolic town Niederbronn-les-Bains 40 km north of Strasbourg. The authors of the podcast were visiting historic sites and interviewing local partners about their identity living in a region on the French-German borderland of very special and traumatic experiences in 20th century history. Learn more about their own reflection about borderland identity, historic memory and the role of local language and culture. Produced by: Gabriel Marisole Basso-Moro, Amanda Baxová, Aline Deprez, Leonie Koll, Carol Viciano Martorell, Elene Shapatava, Gabriel Zvîncă and Annemarie Franke (ENRS) with the support of John Beauchamp, FreeRange Productions. With the contribution of Antoine Deprez, Anne Guillier, Lise Pommois, Annelise Wendling and Paul. Special thanks to Joelle Winter from the Centre International Albert Schweitzer. The series of study visits 'In Between?', initiated in April 2016 by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, draws on from the methodology of oral history. So far, more than 130 young people (under 26 years of age) have participated in seven editions of the project and visited a total of 22 multicultural regions of Europe. Project 'In Between?' 2022 is co-funded by the European Union. Read more: https://enrs.eu/inbetween
[Sound of crickets]
00:05 Leonie: ...trying to melt down Alsace in five minutes?How should we do it?Actually, I think we can only go wrong!
[Laughs]
[Sound of crickets]
00:29 Leonie: Sometimes I feel it is not necessary to talk about identity at all...
00:35 Leonie: This region is just a place for the people to live,
Leonie: ….and it has been done in the past so many times to be like "Oh, this culture is this", and then it was used to oppress people.
[Human voices]
00:56 Marisole: Everyone has their own Alsace
John: A podcast from the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. "In Between?" 2022.
[Bells ringing]
[Voices talking in French]
01:20 Annelise Wendling/Marisole: I grew up in two cultures: the Germanic culture and the French culture. Isn't that wonderful?
[Sound of the street]
[A man talking in French]
Antoine/John: What dialect you speak is in fact a family, individual and political choice.
Paul/John: Each village has a different accent, so you know where they come from.
Aline: I don't think that is possible to explain what Alsace is in five days, and I don't think that's also possible in one life. Alsace is not only about Alsatian. Of course, it is a part of the culture, but I don't speak Alsatian and I am fully Alsatian.
Aline: From what I got from this experience, I would say is that I opened my mind and got that memory and culture is not only about borders, but also about what we feel connected to.
[Sound of the street]
Carole: We all have a place where we feel at home and that is our Heimat...
Elene: I think that borderlands have some kind of different anxieties, that are connected with their past and they are always in between something. It was really present in our experience, I think. And it helps to understand other borderlands, not only this one. They have some kind of common theme.
Amanda: But at the same time, I really feel that this is a specific area. It was not just about the border between Germany and France, but it was more about the history. About what happened here.
[Music playing]
03:44 Gabriel: The idea of the lieux de mémoire is the fact that each region has these kind of things regarding how cultures interfere with one another; how borders, and especially regions with a border between a nation and another, and one culture and another. It is very important, because you see how these things overlap.
Carol: I understood as a "black spot" this kind of bad past that we all have. Not necessary a bad past, but some kind of tragic past that we cannot avoid. This past serves us to shape our personality and our future, and it is always inside of us. I think that it is something that you can feel more in the borderland places.
Marisole: I think that the “black spot” is the metaphor for people's places regions coming to terms with their past. What I get to know about Alsace and myself is that we are changing. So there is something about the past that we will preserve and there is something that we will lose eventually, and something that we will gain in the future.
Carol: Yeah, I think that is some kind of how to deal with the past to construct our future.
[Anneliese Wending singing]
[Running water]
05:32 Aline: I think it is important not just to know history but also to know the way the memory is transmitted and the way the memory is used to instrumentalize a nation.
Amanda: I was always thinking: “What is the purpose? What are we trying to find out?” We prepared two questions and the first one is: “What is Alsace for you?”
I think it is an unanswerable question in some way. It is really interesting to me, that we are trying to find out something more about this region by these small cultural things, but I do not think it is possible.
[Sound of steps on a path]
[Lise Pommoistalking in French]
Annemarie: People leaving here in this region always have to justify themselves towards French nation or France. Like in this answer: "When I leave the Alsace, I am going to France", yes? There is a specific identity also because these states, especially Germany, tried to build up their state identity through the integration of these lands and people, into their state concept.
Carol: There are some borders where you for sure have your own identity and you are connected with the other culture, but you do not necessarily have to have this culture. So it is like, okay, you have more than one identity...
[Mayor of Niederbronn-les-Bains's greeting in French]
Mayor Anne Guillier: We have to defend our German-French identity, because I am French, but I have a Germanic culture. Je suis Française de culture germanique.
Annelise Wendling: This is no longer the Alsatian culture, these are no longer Alsatians, because there are many others and we have to take them in, and we want to take them in, and not say they are not Alsatians, because they don't speak Alsatian...
[Annelise Wendling talking in German]
Annelise Wendling: The future is no longer the Alsace that once was...
[Orchestra playing]
Gabriel: If we think about the regions where we come from, we kind of also have these melting pots and cultures that have been resolved and after this interconnection and interrelations between nations and cultures and identities...
Marisole: So in this experience we get to know completely that the more we are trying to find something different in our region, the more we find similarities.
John: Same but different...
[Laughs]
John: "Everyone has their own Alsace" from the In Between? 2022 series. Podcast by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.
It was produced by:
Amanda Baxová
Aline Deprez
Basso-Moro Marisole
Gabriel Zvîncă
Elene Shapatava
Leonie Koll
Carol Viciano Martorelli
Annemarie Franke from ENRS
John: Participants of the "In Between?" project with the support of John Beauchamp from Free Range Productions.
Special thanks to Joelle Winter and the Centre International Albert Schweitzer in Niederbronn-les-Bains, as well as Lise Pommois, Annelise Wendling, Anne Guillier, Antoine Deprez and Paul.
[people clapping]
ENRS is funded by the Ministries of Culture of Poland, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. The project "In Between?" 2022 is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.