When The First World War ended in 1918 with the Peace Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain, it resulted in a profound territorial reorganization in the middle of Europe. Regions like the Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein, the Saar Area, Southern Tyrol, Triest, Istria and others more were faced with new territorial „politics of belonging“ (Yuval-Davis 2011). This can even the more be considered a challenge for schooling, as the (pre)war period throughout Europe had been also one of „intellectual mobilization“ (e.g. Flasch 2000), a war of ideas that had led to intensified national imagineries in nation-state schooling. For the regions concerned as well as for both - the former and the new mother state – this posed question whom and how to include or exclude into their regional and national frameworks. Another challenge was, how a supposed democratization of the school system as it was envisioned shortly after the World War with the political changes in Europe could or should be performed in regions that are (perceived as) under foreign rule.

The presented paper is part of a habilitation writing project, which intends to look at schooling from a holistic perspective. The projects asks, if there is something like a (national) liturgy of schooling. It does so through an investigation of this period of transition in selected border regions.

The project analyses how schooling interacts with emotions to encode and enact social norms and how these are connected to the visions of the national citizen. It investigates, how nation-state citizens were produced in rituals of schooling. Every school has hundreds of procedures and routines, that, when infused with meaning, turn into a “ritual, from age-graded schooling to the taking of attendance to the exiting procedures, from timetables to specific extraordinary ceremonies with which successes are celebrated. Through such rituals, the educated citizens became addressable and distinguishable roles with specific expectations for their behavior. These roles as a student, that one could publicly refer to, were based on complex system of social categories.

For example, it has been shown in an exemplary case study of Vernoique Benei in India (Benei 2008), how rituals and passions are fused with schooling into very unique national meaning making processes around the nation, history and language, to name just one example.

In this presentation, one case study will be presented specifcally, that of the Saar area, which  - itself before 1919 not even existent as such, but parts of different German countries (former Prussian (Rhine Province) and Bavarian (Palatinate) and Oldenburg territories) – became independent under the rule of the League of Nations, with some (foremost economic) decision making granted to French authority.

The following questions will be put forth:

-       Are there liturgies of schooling, through which the respective national systems of thought are performed and brought into being?

-       How inclusive and exclusive were they, in that students, parents, teachers are included in the social imaginary of a new nation-state?  

-       But also are students, parents and teachers coming to the region from the „new“ nation-state it belonged to allowed to be included into the regional imaginaries?

-       Are existing liturgies are integrated with new ones, or are new liturgies set up as competing liturgies?

-       Are regional identities of border regions forstered?

The nation-state as dominant research framework and study subject of the past two centuries, has lately come under critique. It is not only that histories aim to think beyond the nation-state, approaches of postmodern history and new cultural history have also revived the interest in the individual subject. Within the frame of new cultural histories social norms and institutions were increasingly contextualized through cultural practices, social changes reinterpreted as processes that comprise changes of values and beliefs, and its methodological focus became to explore ways how convictions, thoughts, abilities or intentions of individuals played out within the limited possibilities framed by (collective) structures created by cultural practice. This is why the project does not aim to rewrite any national or institutional history of schooling. In departing from the question « How does an individual come to feel an enact him/herself as member of a nation-state?» I aim to make use of cultural history, but not necessarily to overcome nation-state history, but rather to investigate, how national systems of thought and with them national liturgies were produced in daily rituals and routines of schooling. This brings aspects of schooling, that might seem to be the parergonality of schooling, to the core of investigations. Furthermore, the project concentrates on specific regions that were subjected to territorial change. It argues that these national border regions are transnational “sites of interpenetration, exchange and conflict” (Boswell 2009), where the idea of the nation was constantly contested and reinforced. The Methodology combines process-focused and structural with microhistorical approaches in a cultural-historical-sociological-anthropological «bricolage» approach (Kincheloe 2011) as a multilogical epistemology and multiperspectival research. It involves transnational social history and border studies. microhistorical investigation, and a fragmented case study approach that aims for aggregated singularities. The study itself is a social constructivist approach, but one that - with the specific lens on the liturgy of schooling – can look in very detail how and where social construction is at work. It is not as abstract as many deconstructivist models. Due to this approach, a wide variety of sources will be used, ranging from official school laws, teacher professional discourses, school chronicles and conference protocols to school furniture and other artefacts to be found in the classroom and other objets trouvés (Streeck 1996) found for instance in school museums.

As Anderson and O’Dowd expressed it, political border zones are “at once gateways and barriers to the ‚’outside world’, protective and imprisoning, areas of opportunity and/or insecurity, zones of contact and/or conflict, of cooperation and/or competition, of ambivalent identities and/or the aggressive assertion of difference”(Anderson/O’Dwod 1999, 595).Although these border regions might be considered national “peripheries”, I hope to find that they can help to understand the national project inwards. It is expected that, while first investigations have shown the general structural condictions of schooling to be rather persistent, especially the microhistorical analysis will show competing national liturgies of schooling, where several traditions of schooling collide and co-exist, and that these pluralities reveal different national systems of thought. It is also expected, that through the case, the theoretical idea of a liturgy of schooling can put forth and the theory can be developped further. So far, especially characteristics like public visibility, cyclical happening, creation of meaning and formalized performance are expected as given for a liturgy of schooling. For the case specifically, inclusive and exclusive aspects of competing liturgies are expected, as a double school system existed: French schools for the children of the mining workers (Domanialschulen) were increasingly attended by German children, while other schools did not open up to the French children but enacted themselves as specifically schools of the German nation.

Anderson, James & O'Dowd, Liam (1999): Borders, border regions and territoriality: contradictory meanings, changing significance, Reg. Studies 33, 593-604. Bénéï, Véronique (2008): Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford University Press. Boswell, Laird (2009): Rethinking the Nation at the Periphery. French Politics, Culture & Society, 27. 2, (2009), pp.111-127. Flasch, Kurt (2000): Die geistige Mobilmachung. Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg. Berlin: Fest Verlag. Kincheloe, Joe L. (2011): Describing the Bricolage: Conceptualising New Rigour in Qualitative Research, in Hayes, K., Steinberg, S. R. and Tobin, K. (Eds) : Key Works in Critical Pedagogy: Joe L. Kincheloe, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, pp. 177-190, p. 180. Streeck, Jürgen (1996): How to do things with things. Objets trouves and symbolization. Human Studies 19.4, 365-384. Yuval-Davis, Nira (2011): The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London:Sage.