The article uses the concept of border temporalities to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of an old letter containing a request from a cross-border female migrant from Luxembourg to access French welfare benefits. In doing so, it systematically unravels the way in which time was lived and experienced differently by borderland residents as opposed to French lawmakers. The alternative temporality characterizing the third space of the Luxembourgian–German–French borderlands clashed with the spatio-temporal hierarchy imposed by France in the period after the First World War to exclude the majority of people living abroad from access to social provision. The article concludes its hermeneutic circle with a reflection on how historical research on borders and borderlands is conditioned by the temporality of archives and the temporality of research funding.
Keywords: Luxembourg; France; Germany; hermeneutics; welfare; veterans; First World War.
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