The Vosges du Nord

This wraps up my series of posts on our visit to the Vosges du Nord and the lower country to the west. The posts included:

• An introduction to the Northern Vosges Mountains
• Exploring the city of Sarreguemines
• Visiting Sarreguemines's museums of faience
  
• Climbing to the Chateau de Schoeneck
• Visiting Meisenthal's historical sites of glassmaking
• Reliving history at the Bitche citadel
• Learning about the preparation for and aftermath of World War II in the area around the Vosges du Nord

World War II, Before and After, Below the Vosges

The rolling landscape west of the Vosges du Nord contains hard reminders of the tragedy of World War II, both from before the war and in its aftermath. As you drive the back roads, you encounter the earthen and concrete ruins of the Maginot Line, France's defensive system from the inter-war period. Some of the fortifications, like at Simserhof, are large, complex, well-preserved, and have extensive guided tours. Others are individual bunkers or pillboxes, just lying there alongside the road. Susie and stopped to explore the small set of fortifications at Macheren.

One odd part of this defensive system was the Ligne Maginot Aquatique, a complex of fortifications, dams, reservoirs, dikes and ponds designed to create floods that would bar invasion.

The Ligne Maginot Aquatique was part of the Sarre sector (as in Sarrebourg, Sarreguemines, ...); you can see it at the center of this map, numbered as sector 13, represented as an area of water. It covered the border between the well-defended areas around Metz and Lauter.


Along with the concrete structures, the remnants of the Maginot Line at Macheren include earthworks such as zig-zag ditches running between the bunkers. Macheren is at the west end of the recently designated Route de la Ligne Maginot Aquatique. The bunkers, so plainly for war, now contrast with the gentle countryside of the Moselle. At the start of World War II, though, this land was soaked in blood.

As odd as the strategy of the Ligne Maginot Aquatique seems to us now, it was precisely in the Sarre sector, 18 kilometers long, that French forces won their only battle against the German invasion. On June 14, 1940, these soldiers defeated the German army in an awful battle that ended with 700 French and 1200 Germans dead. June 14 was also the day that Paris fell to the Wehrmacht. The French resistance at the Ligne Maginot Aquatique had been successful but futile. The government of Marechal Petain signed the armistice of surrender on June 22.

The aftermath of the war I find even more sobering. French and German military cemeteries from World War I were already scattered across the countryside. The American dead of World War II from fighting in Alsace and Lorraine are buried in the Lorraine American Cemetery, just north of St-Avold. They were killed while driving German forces from Metz toward the Siegfried Line and the Rhine River. The American soldiers commemorated at the Bitche citadel would be buried here. More Americans servicemen and women lie here than even in Normandy; the final resting place for 10,489 Americans, the Lorraine American Cemetery is the largest American military cemetery of the Second World War.

The cemetery's memorial includes a ceramic mural depicting the fighting. I realized that Susie and I had visited many of the places on this map, some right around Metz, not knowing that they were battlefields.

The cemetery comforts in its serenity and calm but chills in its scope and finality. We were fortunate enough to talk with the cemetery's assistant superintendent, an American who clearly thinks deeply about the fallen with whose care he is entrusted.





The memorial, mostly quite simple, has a tall statue of Saint Avold over the door.










In the interior, you can see the maps of France and Alsace-Lorraine on the wall to the left. Toward the back wall are the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a cross on an altar. And above the altar are figures representing the eternal struggle for freedom. The central figure stands, I think, for the soldiers in the cemetery. And to his sides are religious and military heroes, of history and myth: King David, Emperor Constantine, King Arthur, George Washington.

Another aftermath of the war makes its self apparent, if more subtly, as you drive through the region's villages: abandoned synagogues. Before the war, many of the villages had substantial Jewish populations. They built synagogues, often in the Moorish style then current, and often next to or across the street from city hall. Jewish life was, I gather, a regular part of village life. After the war, these Jewish communities had been destroyed, like most of their synagogues. Many people were deported and killed during the war, and after the war the survivors moved away or died.

In some cases, Jews in Lorraine villages rebuilt their synagogues. The synagogue in Foulquemont, destroyed by the Nazis, was rebuilt in 1962 in a contemporary style. But the community died out, and the synagogue was closed in 2005. It remains abandoned and unused.

The Bitche Citadel

No matter how funny the town's name looks to Americans, Bitche holds meaning for the French as a wrenching yet noble part of their history. On its long sandstone ridge, the Citadel of Bitche stands above the town, both the emblem and the actual place of a remarkable story of French survival in the face of the Prussian army.

A castle stood on the ridge as early as the 12th Century, but Vauban gave the citadel its present form in the 1620s. And even though much of the fortress was destroyed in 1698 when the area was restored to Lorraine, the fortress was rebuilt from 1741-54 to Vauban's original design. Here's how the fortress looked in 1794, when this scale model was built. (The history of the model is itself an interesting story, even involving Metz, but would be something of a detour for this post.)

Since then, the city of Bitche grew around the base of the citadel. The entrance still impresses. Imagine trying to force your way up that ramp to the gate, while being attacked from the walls above and behind you.




The design of the fortress shows Vauban's ingenuity. There are bastions at the east and west ends of the citadel, separated from the main fort by deep moats. This bridge crosses from the main part of the fortress to the "small head" bastion at the east end of the ridge.


The gate to the bridge is closed, but here's what it would be like if you wanted to cross.

The citadel is complex. Here's a diagram of the fortress's layout.

Indeed, the Bitche citadel, conceived by Vauban and built twice to his design, suffered through multiple attacks and sieges but never broke. The most celebrated and heroic defense came in 1870-71, when the French garrison, swelled by troops staggering to the citadel from horrific battle losses to the Prussians, and by townspeople fearing the Prussians' attack, successfully defended the citadel during a 230-day siege, attacks from the 7000 Prussian soldiers massed against it, and three periods of intense shelling.

While the citadel's ramparts, moats and underground spaces are intact, all the buildings on the top of the fortress, save the chapel, were destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War and World War II. The citadel's underground passage, tunneled into solid rock, now house a remarkable multimedia experience--a sort of feature film that takes you from room to room--that makes the siege and its defenders real.

This "cinematic tour" is brilliant. You start out in something of a traditional movie theater for the first eight minutes, then move to subsequent spaces for succeeding segments, with the screens integrated into the rooms in a number of ingenious ways. You hear the audio on the same wireless headphones that you use for visiting the whole citadel, with commentary in your own language. The movie is graphic, personal, and simply incredibly well done. It's the best introduction to the history, and best use of, a historic monument that I have ever seen. When you walk back up to the surface of the fort you feel like the fighting is still going on around you.

The movie handles transitions between rooms cleverly, too. In the first segment, at the end, the characters in the film are watching the film in the very room you're in, and when they--on screen--get up to move to another room you get the idea quickly. The movie, produced in 2005 and installed in 2006, involved nearly 700 extras, 100 technicians, and 40 principal actors. The movie includes imagined newsreel footage of historical figures such as Napoleon III and Kaiser Wilhelm that concisely explains the political and military events leading to the siege and its aftermath.

The underground part of the citadel stored a huge amount of supplies, especially flour and gunpowder. Water from rainfall ran into cisterns, and a human-powered machine drew water from a deep well. Two soldiers would walk inside the machine, something like a giant hamster wheel, causing the a full bucket to rise while an empty bucket descended.

Faced with the Prussian attack, Commander Louis-Casimir Teyssier, who had been sent to Bitche as a backwater assignment, and his soldiers rose to the occasion. Indeed, Teyssier refused to give up the fight even after France's defeat and the subsequent armistice until he received official orders. The garrison marched out of the citadel, undefeated, after the final peace treaty. Teyssier earned the Legion of Honor, among many other honors. Bitche's high school is named for him. Commander Tessier lived until 1916.

The city of Bitche also expressed its appreciate to a later group of soldiers. This plaque, placed on the walls of the citadel by the city and the U.S. 100th Infantry Division remembers the nearly 3,000 soldiers of the Division who were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the three-month battle for the Bitche region in 1944-45.

Today, the base of the Bitche citadel shelters a Garden of Peace. The citadel's looks over a city and surrounding mountains free of battle and bombardment. The ramparts still stand, and grass grows over the roofs and the slopes.

The Northern Vosges Mountains

As you drive east from Metz, you first start skirting the German border in about 35 miles, around the village of Hombourg-Haut. Continuing east for 20 miles, with the border meandering to your north, you reach Sarreguemines. And then, turning southeast, in another 12 miles you've reached the northern Vosges mountains, the wild but somewhat lower counterpart of the Vosges mountains to south, near the Route des Vins.

I've already written about Sarreguemines, so I'll write just a little about Hombourg-Haut, which lies along the road from Metz to the Vosges and, as its name suggests, perches on heights. The city used to be surmounted by a castle, built starting in 1245. You can gauge the height of the castle above the lower city from these steps, which I did not take!

In the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Hombourg-Haut was spared from the region's endemic wars and developed into a prosperous village with beautiful religious buildings. But in the Thirty Years War, the French occupied the village and in 1634, under the direction of Richelieu, dismantled the castle. Little of the castle remains, save the base of a remarkably stout tower and some vestiges of the walls that now line an elegant way along the side of the hill.

Looking southwest from the the site of the castle, you can see the church and some of the houses of the upper city, part of the lower city, more houses on the hills across the way, and the forested hills that characterize this part of the Moselle. Indeed, the city of Hombourg owns one of the largest communal forests in the department.

The most rugged part of the Moselle lies within the boundaries of the Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord. It's not a national park or national monument in the American sense, but rather an area that includes mountains, villages, forests, cultural sites. It's also a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Within the park lie castles ruined and restored.

The park has hotels and inns scattered across the mountainscapes. I think that it would be relatively easy to put together a series of forest hikes from inn to inn. The park also contains urban areas. Bitche, is both large and spectacular. Niederbronn-les-Bains, the "pearl of the Vosges du Nord," is a more elegant spa city, a mountain getaway for health and recreation. Niederbronn had a beautiful synagogue in the Moorish style; the building is now a hall for the local Catholic parish.

The forested mountains of the Vosges du Nord remind me of Oregon's lower Cascades, the older, densely wooded slopes above the McKenzie and Willamette rivers.

The views from the edges of the Vosges compel me the most. Here the landscape consists of hills covered with fields. A country road winds back toward the mountains, linking the bright sprays of cherry blossoms with the mountains' slopes, distant and dark.

The Faience Museums in Sarreguemines

Sarreguemines offers a Circuit de la Faience, a series of points of interest exploring the history of the faience pottery industry in the city on the French-German border. The circuit includes the last remaining "bee-hive" kiln in Europe and, of particular interest, two museums. The first museum, the Moulin de la Blies, is housed in part of one of the old factories and presents the story of the how the factories produced faience. Most of the factory is in ruins, now part of an interesting garden where the buildings serve as, for example, a "maze."

This factory was built on the banks of Blies, which here is the border between France and Germany. The river provided power to operate the machinery, at first through paddle wheels and later through turbines. Looking through a factory window across the river, you can see how close Germany is.

An intact factory building houses the museum. The ground floor had space and machinery for preparing the materials and molding the clay into pottery. Here's the crusher--two enormous stone wheels, powered by the river's flow, that transformed big chunks into small chunks.

The rest of the ground floor contained other preparation machines, presses, molds, dryers, and kilns.

The upper floor was where the pottery was decorated--by hand--and fired. Stations where workers painted the faience designs stand as if the workers had gone to lunch and just never returned. The clash of the humanity of the workspace and the finality of the interruption struck me as poignant. We actually have some beautiful pieces of Sarreguemines pottery at home, and it's sad to realize so completely that no more will ever be produced.

Sarreguemines primarily produced dishes for everyday use--popular products in a great range of styles. Some special pieces, such as tiled murals or elaborate sculptures, were also produced as works of art.

Materials and finished products were transported within the factory on small carts, something like mine cars. In the ruins, you can see the tracks for these carts.

Raw materials coming into the factory were, I think, transported by railroad. The museum has two small locomotives that served the factory. I was able to climb into the cab to look at the locomotive's controls.

Back in the center of Sarreguemines, we also visited the Jardin d'Hiver de Paul Geiger, which is the city's museum of faience. The museum occupies a house that was the residence of Paul Geiger, whose family owned multiple factories in the region and who himself directed the Sarreguemines works from about 1880 until his death in 1913. The museum contains a beautiful collection of Sarreguemines faience, ranging from early pieces of dinnerware, to popular humorous mugs with molded human faces, to one-off works of art.

The museum's name of Jardin d'Hiver comes from its most splendid room, the large, luminous and richly ornamented winter garden. If this room is perhaps overdecorated for contemporary tastes, it nevertheless impresses. Some of the decorations include large tiled murals, of Sarreguemines faience, of course that reflect the style of the turn of the 20th Century.

Some of the murals, particularly those inspired by Asian art, are more timeless. The galleries of the museum display some engaging large murals, along these lines, that continue to delight visitors.

Sarreguemines

The city of Sarreguemines, which borders Germany at the confluence of the Sarre and the Blies, once ranked as the second-largest city in the Moselle, after Metz. Like Metz, Sarreguemines was part of the German annexation between 1871 and 1918, and then again between 1940 and 1945. Every single person we met in Sarreguemines--including our city bus driver--was warm and welcoming. Often people would want to know about the U.S.

Sarreguemines grew as an industrial town, in textiles and, especially, faience pottery, which started there at the end of the 18th Century. By the early 20th Century, factories producing faience ware filled the city's center. Sarreguemines was prosperous, and the workers benefited from a socially aware, if paternalistic, approach to employment. Today, the factories are shuttered, gone, or repurposed. The banks of the Blies are now less industrial and more bucolic.

Downtown Sarreguemines has some interesting streets, including pedestrian areas. Near the marché square, locals sat outside for drinks in the afternoon sunshine. At night, the city rolls up the sidewalks awfully early, although a few scattered restaurants cater to guests seeking dinner.

A steep walk up takes you to the heights overlooking the city center. A castle once stood here. But the railroad tunnel runs under this hill, and when the local railway bought the hill in the 19th Century they tore the castle down. The Place du Chateau still has great views, though, looking across the main part of the city and across the Sarre.

Sarreguemines's faience industry, which was famous across Europe, began to decline following the Second World War. By 1979, competition from mechanized factories led Sarreguemines to abandon pottery to focus on tiles. By 2002, the thousands of workers had been reduced to 29. Despite the efforts of employee-owners, the last factory shut down in 2007.

The river once served as the artery of commerce and industry. The faience factories, in particular, needed water and water-power. But the river also supported--and still supports--city life. The "casino"--built not for gambling but for faience workers' recreation--still stands, with its striking style reflecting in the ripples on the Sarre.


The Sarre's banks also now play home to people playing petanque.


The home of a former owner of the faience factories provides a glimpse of the wealth of Sarreguemines in its heyday. This building, now the city museum of faience, includes a second-floor winter garden that showcased Sarreguemines's artistry in faience.

Our time in the region of Sarreguemines and northern Vosges mountains turned into something of an industrial-history weekend. Further posts over the next several days will cover the Faience museums in Sarreguemines, the crystalware museum in Meisenthal, the villages and landscapes of the northern Vosges, the ruined chateau of Schoeneck, the citadel at Bitche, and the Maginot Line and the American military cemetery in St. Avold.

Textures

Sarreguemines

Nature Walks

The Metz metropolitan area publishes a terrific guide, map included, of 20 nature walks, with suggestions for additional walks. The walks all have little markers along their respective routes, although that didn't keep us from getting off track when we tried one of the walks on Sunday.

I invited students from my classes to come with Susie and me on a hike from the village of Lessy onto the western slopes of Mount St-Quentin, which is on the other side of the Moselle River from downtown Metz. Six students met us at the Georgia Tech - Lorraine parking lot; we caravaned to Lessy and parked in the center of the village. Lessy turned out to be interesting in itself; sights included steep narrow streets, Renaissance washing basins, and a fortified church.

Our hike, which was "Ballade 4: Les Secrets du Mont Saint-Quentin," was complicated by the unanticipated fact that a massive public hike in exactly this area had been organized for Sunday. So we arrived in Lessy to find dozens of hikers all going in our direction. Luckily, it turned out that these hikers had a different route from ours; unluckily, we didn't figure that out fully until they had led us off course somewhat. But whatever the route, we enjoyed walking through the forests and along the fields.

Our half-guided, half-impromptu walk took us through forested slopes on the west side of Mount St-Quentin, over small roads and up dirt trails. We eventually emerged to find a wide grassy area above the forest, and we walked along the side of this huge field for a while.

These upper slopes gave us great views of the Moselle and its surrounding hills.

On the way back down we descended through alleys of flowering trees.

And along the road winding its way back to Lessy we passed an organic vineyard. A sign indicated that they controlled pests with, among other things, nettle tea.

To end the walk, which took about an hour and 15 minutes, Joe, Hari, Gong, Sylvain, Susie, Auriane, Marshall and I climbed back up the streets of Lessy to reach our cars.

After Susie and I dropped off students at GTL, we capitalized on our enthusiasm by, after a quick lunch, trying another walk from the book. We drove south of GTL to reach the village of Augny, the starting point for our walk, "Ballade 17: La Croix de Vignes." Early in this walk we passed another great field, amazing for its intense color of spring green.

The area once supported a great wine-growing activity. Until the end of the 19th Century villagers tended 163 acres of vines, but this ended following the devastation wrought by phylloxera. On the hillsides now stand scruffy orchards, whose blossoms framed our view of the valley below.

After reaching the Croix des Vignes, an ancient religious monument for the grape-growers, we followed the trail as it plunged into a forest. The forest floor drew our attention with its carpet of flowers.

These excursions can have an element of serendipity. We'd left the car parked at Augny's sport and events building. We came back to find that the village's artists and quilters had a show there, so we had a fun time looking at what the villagers had painted and sewn.