Celestial Landscapes: the Supranational Imagination in Luxembourg’s Pre-World War I Press

This study examines the metaphorical means through which political independence was translated into national identity in Luxembourgish literature between 1900 and 1940. It shows how industrialisation provided an aesthetic canvas for literary modernism and how the writer and journalist Batty Weber and his contemporaries sought to modernise a dominant ideological attachment to the soil by instituting the sky as the embodiment of ideational change. While, for them, the smoky industrial skies symbolised democratic interactions between societies, celestial landscapes also met other ideological purposes in the contemporary Luxembourgish literary imagination, serving as a useful metaphor for spatial and intellectual development.