The French-German border region that is generally known as Alsace-Lorraine or Elsaß-Lothringen has a long history as a contested territory. In early history, it consisted of small French and German speaking kingdoms, most of them belonging to the Holy Roman Empire. Since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, most of the territory was in French hands. After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71, it became part of the newly formed German Empire. Since then it changed hands again three times, now belonging to France again. The period under consideration in this paper is 1871-1918, when Elsaß-Lothringen was a so-called semi-autonomous ‘imperial territory’ (Reichsland) of the German Empire. This meant among others that it had its own legislature and administration. Furthermore, it meant that it had a railway administration under direct supervision of the German imperial government: the Reichsamt für die Verwaltung der Reichseisenbahnen in Elsaβ-Lothringen, seated in Strasbourg.
The central question in my paper will be what role the imperial railway administration played in the project of creating a German national identification in Elsaß-Lothringen. I discern three processes: germanization, expansion, and internationalization. Under the Treaty of Frankfurt, which ended the Franco-Prussian war, the railways of the newly acquired German territory were transferred from the French Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l’Est to the newly formed German Empire. What followed was the creation of a German network, by changing railway officials to German speakers, changing station names, replacing rolling-stock, etcetera. This I call the germanization of the railway network. Second, there was a rapid expansion of the railway network. A dense and modern network was built, tripling the total length of the railways in Elsaβ-Lothringen by 1918. This was part of the development of Elsaβ-Lothringen as an industrial center of Germany, and of Central-Europe more generally. Not only was the area rich of natural resources, it was also a geographical intersection between France, Germany, Switzerland and Luxemburg (and across the Rhineland also to Belgium and the Netherlands). The state and Imperial Railway Administration attempted to exploit these features by making Elsaβ-Lothringen a ‘hinge’ in the central European infrastructure network. Connections where made to the North Sea through Belgium and the Netherlands, and to France by a breakthrough through the Vosges mountains. The Imperial Railway Administration also collaborated in the construction of the St. Gotthard Tunnel as a passage to Italy, and as a Switzer-German counterpart to the French-Italian Mt. Cenis tunnel. This I call the internationalization of the railway network.