Alexandre Kostka

Alexandre Kostka, a Germanist and cultural historian of Europe, is Professor at the University of Strasbourg (Facul- té LSHA) and co-director of the Erasmus mundus master‘s programme “Euroculture”. He is a member of the research laboratory SAGE (Sociétés, Acteurs, Gouvernements en Europe, UMR CNRS 7363) and has been elected Marc Bloch professor at the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, 2015/16. Alumnus of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and of the Mellon Foundation, he was a guest lecturer at the universities of Berlin, Leizig and Osaka, and a research scholar at CASVA (Centre for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts, National Gallery Washington). His research focuses on Franco-German relations in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly in the fields of visual arts, cultural propaganda in the First World War, and cultural policies in Europe.

He has published over 50 articles in scientific books and magazines, and published or edited seven books, including: with Françoise Lucbert (eds.): Distanz und Aneignung 1870-1945. Kunstbeziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich. Relations artistiques entre la France et l‘Allemagne Berlin 2004; (ed.): Weimar-Paris/Paris-Weimar. Kunst und Kulturtransfer um 1900, Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 2004, (with Roland Kamzelak, Ulrich Ott and Luca Renzi, eds.): Grenzenlose Moderne: Die Begegnung der Kulturen im Tagebuch von Harry Graf Kessler, Münstler, Mentis, 2015; with Julia Drost (eds.) : Penser l’Europe à travers les arts: le comte Harry Kessler, Berlin, Deutscher Kunstverlag (collection Passagen/Passages) forthcoming, late 2015.

This research seeks to establish a trans-disciplinary dialogue between art history, cultural history, medical history, as well as military history for the crucial period when the capital of the Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen, which was recovered by France in 1918, was used as a “laboratory” by both Germany and France in order to present their aspirations for cultural hegemony to Europe, using the city space as a place to exhibit their visions of modernity. Whereas past approaches have rather insisted on the nationalist and propagandistic aspect of the cultural policies which took place under the auspices of the Museums, the University and different policies of architecture and town-planning, the present research proposal insists that the methods of investigation used up to now tend to have a performative effect, which (not always unconsciously) “constructs” the differences which they seek to establish between “German” and “French”. It is therefore important to acknowledge the specific quality of cultural heritage in Strasbourg as a disputed semantic complex (a “contested heritage”, J. Tunbridge), and to root the city as a specific “space” (a “geography of knowledge”, D.N. Livingstone, C. Jacob) in which complex negotiations between competing cultural self-definitions and projections of identity take place. Led in close cooperation with the Museums of Strasbourg which are currently preparing an exhibition about the shared history of the Alsatian capital, this project associates academics and museum curators from Strasbourg, Berlin, Paris and Munich and other cities, and seeks to enrich the city’s collection of cultural heritage by establishing links which have in many cases been severed by the historical circumstance.