Using the example of the French-German border, which had been established in 1871 after the annexation of Alsace and parts of Lorraine, this article centres around the (methodological) argument of analysing borders and borderlands through the lens of practices. Instead of focusing on identities, my point is to ask about the ways common people moved through the borderland, and about the (spatial) rationales they followed in their everyday lives. Their agency, mobility and actions can be traced in files produced by the newly created border police, an institution charged with the surveillance, documentation, and rejection of border crossers. The border police inspectors’ practices made the border tangible for those that were considered suspicious (as non-loyal or not belonging) – an assumption often based on how people moved through the borderland. I argue that we cannot grasp the impact of the national border by solely looking at the conceptions of border regions but have to take practices and the many ways of making sense of this space seriously: The border residents’ economic, social, and religious spaces or other people’s longer trajectories followed their own logics, but then collided with the clear national separation that border police officials sought to put into practice. Therefore, it was not so much the border crossers’ motivation, but the administration, diplomacy, and press that framed events on the ground as national conflicts or clear statements of national belonging.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:85034 |
| Date | 28 April 2023 |
| Creators | Frenking, Sarah |
| Publisher | Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:conferenceObject, info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 978-3-948620-05-9, 2700-0613, urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa2-804809, qucosa:80480 |
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