The Local Past in a Contested Borderland: Commemoration in Strasbourg Between France, Germany and Europe

Abstract

In the summer of 1840, the city of Strasbourg celebrated the quater-centenary of the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg.² This event had a particular local significance: even though Gutenberg did not build his first working printing press until returning to his native Mainz in 1444, he first experimented with moveable type while resident in Strasbourg during the late 1430s. The 1840 celebrations were shaped by a friendly local rivalry between these two cities on the Rhine, both claiming to be the birthplace of modern printing.³ Perhaps more surprisingly, given that Strasbourg had only belonged to France since 1681, Gutenberg’s achievements were also celebrated in 1840 as local contributions to French civilisation and the French national community.⁴ However, despite occasional manifestations of local and national pride, the celebrations above all had an international atmosphere. After the unveiling of a bronze statue of Gutenberg on the place du marché-aux-herbes, subsequently renamed place Gutenberg in his honour, a local printer, Gustave Silbermann, declared that Gutenberg’s work ‘n’est plus le patrimoine d’une ville ou d’une nation; c’est le patrimoine de l’Europe, de l’humanité entière’.⁵

The author would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. for their generous support of the doctoral thesis ‘Remaking the Franco-German Borderlands: Historical Claims and Commemorative Practices in the Upper Rhine, 1940–1949’ (University of Oxford, 2010) on which this chapter is based.