Born into a German-French bilingual environment, the once renowned German-language author Ren Schickele (1883-1940) grew up in the Alsace region - today located in eastern France - during its annexation to the German Empire when links to French culture were frowned upon. In the aftermath of the First World War the situation was reversed when Alsace was reclaimed by the French Republic. In both these phases of its troubled history, Schickele insisted on the importance of Alsace's right to retain its double cultural heritage between the borders of its powerful rival neighbours and on its potential, as mediator between France and Germany, to promote peace in Europe. These issues are addressed in a critical discussion of a range of Schickele's works. His controversial wartime drama Hans im Schnakenloch affords a wry but penetrating insight into issues of identity in Alsace under German rule up to the war, while his socio-political essays and a novel trilogy, Das Erbe am Rhein, were written against the backdrop of the malaise alsacien and life under French rule. The historical background to the work is examined in detail as it is intimately bound up with the issues of cultural identity that Schickele explores in his writings.

A German dialect spoken in Alsace (France), has rapidly lost way to French since 1945. This book investigates language choice, language attitudes and ethnic identity in Alsace today. The Alsatian case study points out the complex interrelationship of linguistic and identity change with historical, social and psychological processes.

The Lifeline is the ground-breaking study of Salomon Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew, journalist, and socialist politician who became one of Europe’s most important refugee advocates. It examines his life in interwar France and beyond, tracing his human rights activism across the decades.

This book is the first major study in English of René Schickele's work. Hailed by his contemporaries as one of the foremost German-language novelists of the inter-war period, and celebrated for his Expressionist poetry and his controversial First World War drama Hans im Schnakenloch, Schickele also produced socio-critical essays and pioneering editorial work for the pacifist journal Die Weißen Blätter. From his literary débuts in fin-de-siècle Strasbourg to the French and German prose fiction of his anti-Nazi exile, Schickele's work reflects his bilingual, bicultural upbringing: his vision of Alsace as a symbolic broker of Franco-German peace finds its clearest expression in the trilogy of novels Das Erbe am Rhein. Schickele remains a paradoxical figure, in his own words, a 'citoyen français und deutscher Dichter' (French citizen and German poet). Through readings of all the major texts, Eric Robertson's study situates Schickele's work within its socio-political and historical context. Particular attention is paid to the personal and political implications of his adoption of German as literary idiom and his reversion to the French mother tongue during the 1930s; Schickele's copious diaries and his correspondence with fellow writers including Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann and Stefan Zweig are shown to be especially revealing. Schickele's œuvre holds a unique and hitherto underrated place in the European writing of his era.

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world "An epic work of breathtaking scope and moral power, The Long Land War offers the definitive account of the rise and fall of land rights around the world over the last 150 years."--Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered "land reform" policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until U.S.-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974. The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.

The region of Alsace, located between the hereditary enemies of France and Germany, served as a trophy of war four times between 1870-1945. With each shift, French and German officials sought to win the allegiance of the local populace. In response to these pressures, Alsatians invoked regionalism--articulated as a political language, a cultural vision, and a community of identity--not only to define and defend their own interests against the nationalist claims of France and Germany, but also to push for social change, defend religious rights, and promote the status of the region within the larger national community. Alsatian regionalism however, was neither unitary nor unifying, as Alsatians themselves were divided politically, socially, and culturally. The author shows that the Janus-faced character of Alsatian regionalism points to the ambiguous role of regional identity in both fostering and inhibiting loyalty to the nation. Finally, the author uses the case of Alsace to explore the traditional designations of French civic nationalism versus German ethnic nationalism and argues for the strong similarities between the two countries' conceptions of nationhood.