Grand mother (F. S.) showed me one day a piece of rocket deeply hammered in her bedroom wardrobe. I was 5, and it was the first time I heard about our neighbors the Germans. She grew up alone with her sister during WW1. Their father, Joseph Schultz, owned a restaurant in the Wilde Man Strasse. In 1914, after the war declaration, even if Alsace was already German for 54 years, and Joseph being almost unable to speak French, he put a sign at the restaurant's entrance: "die eintritt des deutschen ist verboten": "Germans are not allowed to go in". He had to leave at once, and the German soldiers kept questioning the two sisters during 4 years. This is why my grandmother hated Germans and never went to Germany all her life. From my mother's side, there are two other events about the wars. My mother showed me one day a monument made for WW1 soldiers in which the peace allegory, a woman with a graceful attitude, is her own mother, who was the sculptor's model. Her father lost one arm during WW1. As a kid he played with a friend with an unexploded rocket felled in a field. The friend died and he had his arm torn off. He became a forced left-hander, and later, a one-handed architect. He wore all his life a prothesis, with a wooden hand covered by a shiny black leather skin. When he didn't like someone, he simply half-detached the fake arm, stretched it, so that the guy became responsible of this second tearing off. I was writing poems at the age of ten, and showed them to my grandmother. She spoke with the priest and got them published in the parish bulletin. The same year, I played a piano competition in which my set was recorded on vinyl. It was engraved only on one side; the other one was completely black and smooth. 1976 was my first publication in poetry and my first ever recorded music, two art directions I'm still involved in. My father spoke Alsatian with his mother and sister. During the family gatherings, I remember my not being able to understand anything. I was like a foreigner in my own house. I never made a single effort to understand, apart the curses (arschloch = asshole), since it sounded horrible to my ears, greasy, sticky, rough, guttural and vulgar. But I know that there is a long tradition of Alsatian literature, especially in poetry. <<<