Des écrivains et leur rapport à la Première Guerre mondiale : traces littéraires de la Grande Guerre dans la littérature produite en Alsace (allemand, parler dialectal alsacien) entre 1914 et 1939

In Alsace, the end of the First World War brought a great sense of relief to the population, as it did everywhere else; yet, it also brought about a major political change to the former ‘Empire land’ (Reichsland) which became part of France (again). This affected the daily lives of each individual, in their professional, linguistic, cultural or social dimensions. Did the war and its aftermaths manifest themselves in literature, especially at a thematic level? To answer this question, we shall focus neither on the most famous writers, nor on those who left Alsace after 1918, since their work has already been examined under that angle, but on writers whose reputation remained regional or local, in particular on those writers who turned to the Alsatian dialect as means of expression. Indeed, in this literature, the war was rarely addressed and its socio-political upheavals even more rarely so. The ‘trace’ left by that conflict is of an emotional nature; it takes the form of an identity statement. Such writers found refuge in an emotionally charged Alsace, which functions as a matrix of their identity.