More than a century later, it is easy for us to retrace the facts, the battles, the characters which revolve around the First World War. We have many testimonies from soldiers, but the Alsatian people, anonymous, at the time in German territory, how did they experience this war, from day to day?
The editions of the Blue Cloud publish “Weltkrieg”, the illustrated chronicle of Eugène Birsinger. His granddaughter Claire Lebailly-Birsinger, German associate and doctorate in literature, worked for 20 years on 4 notebooks of 1,000 pages found in the attic, filled with texts and drawings by her grandfather, who traces this erschte Waltkreij murderer on the scale of a small Alsatian village, Neuwiller in the Sundgau. 800 pages, including 400 color drawings: a satirical book ahead of its time, composed like a graphic novel. After an apprenticeship as a typographer, Eugène Birsinger (born in 1871 – died in 1947), following the death of his father, was forced to take over the family farm in Neuwiller, a village 5 km from Basel.
A peasant “in spite of himself”, a pacifist with a keen gaze, an inveterate Francophile (although he only speaks Alsatian and German), he chronicles the life of his village for four years. These are his 400 drawings and 800 handwritten pages, written in Gothic German, which are here reproduced and translated in full. Its satirical chronicle reveals without taboo the zealous compromises or the acts of resistance of the villagers, the lack of bravery and the fatuity of the soldiers of the rear, sometimes Baden and sometimes Prussian, who confined to the village. The difficulties of everyday life worsened over the years – requisitions, shortages, famine, Spanish flu – and warlike and nationalist propaganda punctuated village life. The illustrated chronicle of an Alsatian village at the time of the 1914-1918 world war.