Back to search
The crowd was jubilant when Strasbourg was liberated in November 1944. Will the tomorrows be full of joy? How to erase five years of annexation? How can we rebuild Alsace and Moselle and silence the pain of this devastated region? In the presence of Hubert Schilling, co-director. To recount this second return to France, after that of 1918, we must recall the too brutal Nazi annexation which devastated everything in its path and the drama of those forcibly incorporated into the Wehrmacht, the ambiguous purge, the massacre of Oradour -sur-Glane and the Bordeaux trial in 1953. Upon liberation, a policy of “denazification” and “de-Germanization” was put in place. The dialect, too close to German, the hereditary enemy, is struck with indignity, and French becomes “chic”, upsetting the relationship of Alsatians and Mosellans to their identity, their culture and their language. Only satirical cabaret and European construction gradually succeed in helping residents to reconcile with themselves. Through the stories of great witnesses, including the designer Tomi Ungerer, and numerous archives, rare or unpublished.
