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.

Meisenthal

The Alsatian village of Meisenthal nestles in a deep valley amid the mountains of the Vosges du Nord. Meisenthal, famous for its crystal glasses and art works, served as the second part of our weekend theme of regional artisanal industries. Like Sarreguemines, Meisenthal had grown as a one-company town--in this case the Meisenthal glassworks--that had lost its industry in by the end of the 20th Century.

Meisenthal was one of the original sites of the Alsatian glass industry. As early as the 15th Century, semi-mobile glassmakers were at work here. The main glassworks was founded in 1704, producing lead crystal ware of high quality and superb craft. The workforce--glass makers, glass blowers, glass cutters, and glass painters--maintained high levels of skill from generation to generation.

In the face of competition, especially from mechanized production from Belgium and Germany, the Meisenthal glass works closed on December 31, 1969. Indeed, many other glass works in the region closed over the years--Montbronn in 1957, Lemberg in 1997, Harzviller in 2004, and Goetzenbruck in 2005.

Former Meisenthal workers lead tours of the Museum of Glass and Crystal, housed in one of the former factory buildings. The museum showcases some of the highlights of Meisenthal's work and explains, through two films, how the crystal was produced by hand, from start to finish. One of the guides, pointing to a cut-glass goblet (identical to one shown in one of the films) that retailed for $260 per glass joked that he could get us a great price if we bought a dozen.

During its apogee in the early 20th Century, the Meisenthal factory was a key center for Art Nouveau glass. Émile Gallé, one of the most famous members of the Nancy School of Art Nouveau, designed many pieces produced at Meisenthal, such as this vase.

And here's a contrasting style of vase from the same period.

A large factory building across from the museum has been repurposed as a performance space, the Halle Verrière de Meisenthal. The huge building, some 34,000 square feet, retains some of the factory's most interesting features, such as a central raised platform from which supervisors could survey the workers. The building had been abandoned with the closing of the plant at the end of 1969, and stood unused and neglected until a local artistic collective spearheaded its renovation, which was completed in 2004.

The International Center of Art Glass, housed in another, adjacent building of the old factory, seeks to preserve the memory of the Glass Country and to trace the perspectives of contemporary art glass through its roots in the glassmaking tradition. Contemporary artists come to Meisenthal to create new works at the Center. Some artists send their designs to the Center, where the Center's craftspeople produce the new pieces.

Two of the glassblowers gave a remarkable demonstration from the start to the finish of creating a contemporary art-glass piece. We could observe them working from a balcony that surrounded the studio. Here the glassblowers are transferring the partially finished vase from one pole to another, so that they can work on the vase's mouth.



The vase they created before our eyes was identical to one of the vases for sale in the Center's shop.

After the glassworkers completed the vase, they talked with us for a little while. In response to questions from Susie, the man in the white shirt explained that he became a glass blower because his father and both his grandfathers were glass blowers at Meisenthal. He said that he learned his skills as a child who spent many hours under the factory's tables while his father and fellow glassblowers worked.

Even if the glass ovens at Meisenthal are limited to demonstrations and works of art, Alsace still has some active commercial glass producers. As you travel along the roads of the Vosges du Nord, you pass numerous large glassware stores and even some factory stores.

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.