People from Alsace-Lorraine

Hugo Becker (born Jean Otto Eric Hugo Becker, 13 February 1863, died 30 July 1941) was a prominent German cellist, cello teacher, and composer. He studied at a young age with Alfredo Piatti, and later Friedrich Grützmacher in Dresden.

Paul Alverdes (6 May 1897, Strasbourg - 28 February 1979, Munich) was a German novelist and poet.
The son of an officer and member of the German Youth Movement, he volunteered for duty in World War I and received a severe injury to the throat. After 1922 he was a freelance author in Munich, and from 1934 to 1944, along with Karl Benno von Mechow, he edited and published the journal Das innere Reich. Alverdes's work was influenced by the youth movement and by the World War I front experience, whose purifying and "transforming" power he praised. Nonetheless, he was only moderately popular with National Socialists because he lacked an "activist-dynamic attitude". After 1945 he mainly wrote stories for children.

Jean-Jérôme Adam (8 June 1904 – 11 July 1981) was the French Roman Catholic archbishop of Libreville, Gabon, and an accomplished linguist who studied several of the languages of Gabon.
He was born at Wittenheim in Alsace and educated in the seminaries of the Holy Ghost Fathers. He arrived in Gabon on 29 September 1929, and spent the next 18 years as a missionary in the Haut-Ogooué Province. During that time he prepared grammars for the Mbédé, Ndumu, and Duma languages.
In 1947, Adam was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Libreville and bishop of the titular see of Rhinocorura; he became bishop of Libreville when it was elevated to a diocese in 1955, and he was made archbishop of the see in 1958. He retired in 1969 and moved to Franceville, where he died in 1981.

René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (December 30, 1887 – December 7, 1961), born René Adolphe Schwaller in Alsace-Lorraine, was a French Egyptologist and mystic who popularized the idea of sacred geometry in ancient Egypt during his study of the art and architecture of the Temple of Luxor in Egypt, and his subsequent book The Temple In Man.

Marianne Oswald (January 9, 1901 – February 25, 1985) was the stage name of Sarah Alice Bloch, a French singer and actress born in Sarreguemines in Alsace-Lorraine. She took this stage name from a character she much admired, the unhappy Oswald in the Ibsen play Ghosts. She was noted for her hoarse voice, heavy half-Lorraine, half-German accent, and for singing about unrequited love, despair, sadness, and death. She sang the songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. She was friends with Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, François Mauriac, and Albert Camus. In fact, the text for one of her album covers was written by Camus. She was an inspiration for the composers Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger.

Jean-Jacques Waltz (23 February 1873, Colmar – 10 June 1951), also known as "Oncle Hansi", or simply "Hansi" ("little John") was a French artist of Alsatian origin. He was a staunch pro-French activist, and is famous for his quaint drawings, some of which contain harsh critiques of the Germans of the time. He was also a French hero of both the First and the Second World Wars.

Hans von Benda (22 November 1888, in Strasbourg – 13 August 1972, in Berlin) was a German conductor.
A direct descendant of the eighteenth-century composer Franz Benda, he operated in the shadow of better-known German maestri of his generation, notably Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, and Hans Knappertsbusch. After serving as musical director of Berlin Radio from 1926 to 1934, Benda became (1935) artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, during Furtwängler's tenure as chief conductor. He held this post until 1939. Meanwhile, he conducted the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, which he had founded in 1932, and with which he toured Australia, South America and Asia as well as Europe. He was married to Karin Rosander, a Finnish violinist.
Unlike Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch (or Klemperer, who had fled Germany shortly after Hitler gained power), Benda joined the Nazi Party [1], possibly through fear that the regime would regard his Czech lineage as insufficiently Aryan. That his party card brought a certain amount of foreign obloquy on his head is indicated by the fact that (according to John L. Holmes' Conductors on Record) a pre-war recording Benda conducted of music by Gluck was issued in America without his name on the label. After World War II, Benda gave evidence during Furtwängler's denazification proceedings, avowing that Furtwängler had protected Jews from official persecution.[2] Having worked in Spain from 1948 to 1952, Benda was subsequently employed at Radio Free Berlin (1954–1958).
Benda had a long recording career, lasting from the 1930s until 1968. Composers in his large discography include Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Mozart père and fils, Schubert, Dvořák, Respighi, C. P. E. Bach, Frederick the Great, Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Joachim Quantz, Carl Heinrich Graun, and his own collateral ancestor Georg Benda. His conducting on disc tended towards a hefty, straightforward style wholly at odds with Furtwängler's and Knappertsbusch's improvisational unpredictability.