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Rainer Hudemann (translation: Andrea Caspari, Princeton)Saar-Lor-Lux: Linkages in a European Core RegionContents
3. Structure of the publication3.1 A map of memoryThe present publication attempts to put together, by way of examples, an inventory of buildings of the Greater Region, insofar as they represent sites of cross-border memory. Included are places of memory dating from 1800 until the present day, which have changed because they, and the memory embedded in them, were altered for the purposes of the nation state, whether through new construction, conversion, demolition or change of use. Thus we are seeking to design a concept which, though geographically modest, is complex in terms of its contents – that is, a map of memory of this multilingual border region which has had several nation states and constitutions over the course of 200 years. Although we have made suggestions as to the structuring of scientific terminology, we wish to avoid prejudging the content, and at the same time wish to suggest a second level of interpretation. Therefore we undertook to present a thematic layout of the buildings according to functional criteria and the buildings’ socio-economic position in the topographical landscape. The following are portrayed in nine chapters: • Political culture and the culture of workers and associations • Commercial and industrial architecture • Infrastructure and transportation architecture • Cultural and leisure architecture • Military and border architecture In a few cases, objects were included under several rubrics at the same time, for example the Église Sainte-Barbe in Crusnes which can be counted both as a religious building and as an impressive specimen of industrial architecture. Added to this are articles with background information which refer to individual or different sites of memory. These can be found directly through their own designated menu point. The selection also includes contemporary buildings, which are oriented to the future under the rubric of German-French friendship, and which symbolize or help create a European future. The processing of wartime experiences in the Saar-Lor-Lux area is, on the one hand, expressed in sites of commemoration, but has also, above all, led to a constructive reinterpretation. The European Academy at Otzenhausen or the European Monument at Berus are examples of this new orientation after 1945, as is, most recently, the Saarbrücken-Forbach Eurozone, a European pilot project which is the Continent’s first cross-border commercial zone. Taking the period of about 1800 to today does not, of course, mean that only those architectural objects which have lasted throughout this time frame will be considered. Buildings will be presented which already existed or were constructed during this time, and which underwent one or several modifications, changes of use or demolition. The period under observation varied in the different articles, tending more often to encompass earlier periods, without going into these in as much detail. The buildings themselves were selected only on the basis of their relevance for cross-border relations. Questions about respective builders played a secondary role. The objects are public buildings as well as, albeit to a lesser degree, private ones. The objects reflect both deliberate and unintentional processes. Under the heading of deliberate processes, which we find in identical or similar form in other European regions, we include the decisions by the state, the military or entreprises to play a role – In their own or other countries – which had a cross-border dimension or which could influence the relationship with the other country. As a rule, these are characterized by serialisation, strict functionality and standardisation of architectural details, found in a high degree in the barracks and bunkers and to a lesser extent in the train stations of the Reichsland period in Alsace Lorraine, and in the different types of public workers’ housing estates. These were often associated with industrial production methods and standardisation of individual building components, as for example in the National Socialist reconstruction plan in the “Westmark”. In many of the objects presented, deliberate and unintentional processes were frequently intermeshed in a variety of ways. Cases that were, first of all, considered relevant for this publication were ones where the construction of a building was a direct precondition for and/or a result of cross-border action, for example the case of the Saar Coal Canal, which came into existence because of cross-border agreements between France and Prussia and also had cross-border trade on the waterways as its goal. Certain kinds of damages as well as the demolition of buildings also fall under the heading of transformations buildings have been subjected to. Despite original intentions, an important domain had to be excluded from this project as there is not at present sufficient research on this topic: the destruction of synagogues and other Jewish cultural buildings perpetrated by Germans between 1940–1944 in Lorraine and Luxemburg could not be included here. One of the desiderata of cross-border research is to evaluate these buildings, damage to them, or their complete destruction, and their possible rebuilding as places of recollection. Special attention was paid to buildings which underwent a change of use, temporarily or permanently, due to institutions or citizens of the neighbouring country. In such cases of what was sometimes a history of multiple changes of use, the aim was to determine the symbolic meaning of such transformations. There are several impressive examples of this in Metz, as well as the former Prussian mining headquarters in Saarbrücken. Large scale changes in the landscape, which also encompassed numerous individual buildings, were equally included in our study. This is why the fortification systems of the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line are featured in the chapter on military and border architecture, alongside train, bridge, street and canal constructions in the chapter on infrastructure. The incorporation of a group of objects such as railroads and station buildings in the chapter on infrastructure is based on the primary economic importance of these buildings and not on their military function, which is also important, but not determining. The owners and administrators of buildings often changed in the course of a few decades because of the shifting of borders. This raises the question about the reciprocal influences of these buildings with successive owners and administrators in a single location; this dimension in turn leads to the consideration of whole ensembles and symbolic urban or rural landscapes, for example in the cases of Spicheren, Metz, Luxembourg, Bitche or Saarlouis. The term ensemble as used here does not derive from concepts of historical preservation, but refers in a wider sense to a group of buildings of different ages in a single location or in the immediate vicinity, from the perspective of their respective historical function and their relationship to each other. The ensembles can also include buildings in different locations as long as these demonstrate a corresponding internal relationship to each other. Such an ensemble can be found in the article about Michel Ney in the Saarland; this text considers buildings in Saarlouis, Ensdorf and Saarbrücken to demonstrate the changing interpretations of memory by way of the example of this Saar-French general of the Napoleonic era. Such ensembles, which transcend time and borders, bring into a relationship several buildings that were built at different times and which had a different function to each other, and which would not necessarily be regarded as part of ensembles in terms of the concepts of historical preservation.
Rainer Hudemann3.2 How to use this presentationThis internet guide presents an overview of the cross-border region and does not claim to be an exhaustive guide, even though it contains numerous historical details about the objects cited. In particular, this is not an art history guide – there are exemplary other publications in that domain, from the “Dehio” to the Dumont guidebooks. By contrast, the main object is to find those details which can help us to discover and understand the interplay of cross-border influences and interactions in the 19th and 20th centuries. The focus of our work is that information which is significant in this respect. For further in-depth information, also with different frames of reference, there are suggestions for further reading – necessarily limited in number given the nature of the medium – in the individual contributions or in the introductory passages; most of the works cited themselves have links to other, more specialized publications. This presentation likewise does not claim to be exhaustive as regards the selected objects. They are far too numerous. This would also have been impossible with the limited means at our disposal. The guiding principle was to consider a wide spectrum of traces of cross-border memory in all their variety and to highlight characteristic examples, in order to sensitize the reader to these connections in the approximately 800 objects discussed in about 200 contributions. The authors hope that this will enable the readers to independently deepen their understanding by way of further examples. There are references to other objects which could not be described here in greater detail. 3.3 The teamParticular thanks go to all the authors for their contributions to this project, which were made under difficult working conditions – not least due to the structure of the European Union’s Interreg II Programme – and, for the first edition of this publication in 2002, often to tight deadlines. For all concerned, the work entailed an adjustment to new problematics as well as to unfamiliar ways of presenting material, oriented to the specific forms of an internet presentation. Ultimately each author chose his or her own style, despite general guidelines for all contributions. The editor and editorial staff did not try to iron out these differences in personal emphasis, although they made efforts to ensure that certain basic information was provided. Corrections, changes and additions by the editorial staff were agreed with the respective writers. Responsibility for the content of the individual contributions and sections as well as how they are evaluated remains with the respective authors. Much in the contributions stems from the individual research of the authors or the team. However, we also owe much to the work of others. At this point we would like to give particular thanks to those researchers who, through their earlier work mentioned here, largely made this present undertaking possible. Some of them, as well as key institutions of the cross-border region, helped the Interreg team directly with materials and suggestions. Others will find traces of their work here indirectly in the works cited. It would have been impossible for the Saarbrücken team, working with limited means and under time pressure, to develop such a “guide to traces and tracks”, had it not been able to build on this earlier research. The project was originally based on a larger research project which until 1997 was sponsored primarily by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) at the University of Saarland’s Historical Institute – research on urban history in the German/French/Luxemburg border region in the 19th and 20th century, undertaken under the direction of the editor-in-chief, Rainer Hudemann. Professor Dr. Christoph Cornelissen, Dr. Stefan Leiner †, Annette Maas M.A. and Dr. Rolf Wittenbrock, research colleagues at the University of Saarland at the time, were particularly involved in this project; traces of joint discussions and conclusions can be found in diverse forms throughout the present publication. The project is also based on a regular teaching and research collaboration, which has been progressively built up since the middle of the 1980s, between the chairs of the departments of recent and contemporary history at the University of Metz (Prof. Dr. Alfred Wahl and, since 1999, Prof. Dr. Sylvain Schirmann), the University of Nancy II (Prof. Dr. François Roth), the Centre Universitaire of Luxemburg (Prof. Dr. Jean-Paul Lehners) and the University of Saarland (Prof. Dr. Rainer Hudemann). These chairs joined forces in 1996 in an Interreg II application for a project on “Historical Interconnections and Cultural Identity in the Saar-Lor-Lux Region. City and Urban Culture in the 19th and 20th Century” (“Historische Vernetzung und kulturelle Identität des Saar-Lor-Lux-Raumes. Stadt und städtische Kultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert – Liens historiques et identité culturelle dans l’espace Saar-Lor-Lux. Villes et culture urbaine aux XIXe et XXe siècles”). The present project is one of the results of this Interreg II work. In Interreg II, it was anticipated that there would be collaboration between Saarland and Lorraine, but not between Saarland and Luxemburg. Nevertheless, we carried out the work with all four of these universities, and actively defended this decision in relation to the relevant institutions. In 1999, for Interreg III, this Saarland/Luxemburg cooperation was officially accepted, not least due to the previous work carried out together. Apparently memory really can create the future… The Interreg Project had interconnection (“Vernetzung”, “Interconnexion”) as its goal, in two senses of the word. On the one hand, its aim was to establish and extend contacts between future multipliers of cross-border work in the Saar-Lor-Lux region. For this purpose, regular one or two-day joint colloquia with 30–40 participants each were held. The foundations Elisabeth Selbert Akademie, affiliated with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Union Stiftung in Saarbrücken, as well as the Parliament of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg supported us especially for a session in the Münsbach Castle, where the idea of this survey of sites of cross-border memory was conceived. One part of this collaborative work is manifest in publications, for example a volume on the associations of Lorraine in 2000, as well as, in 2001, a volume of a sample of students’ qualifying papers, taken from the joint colloquia, on the theme of “Lorraine and Saar since 1871 – Cross-border Perspectives” (“Lorraine et Sarre depuis 1871 – Perspectives transfrontalières. Lothringen und Saarland seit 1871 – Grenzüberschreitende Perspektiven”). This internet survey of sites of cross-border memory, the last part of the project, was undertaken in the spring of 2000 and largely completed in its first version in the early summer of 2001. The work of moving from the conceptual framework to the selection of individual objects to be presented was undertaken throughout 2000 primarily by Gerhild Krebs, the principal full-time research associate, building on preparatory work by Anne Hahn. Gerhild Krebs also wrote a substantial part of articles, either as a draft or final text, especially the parts pertaining to the Saarland. The compilation of objects and majority of writing for Luxemburg was undertaken by Roger Seimetz, to whom thanks are due. Picture research for Luxemburg was largely the work of Karin Maaß; for Saarland Wilfried Busemann and Gerhild Krebs made significant contributions. Raimund Zimmermann photographed the majority of objects – working on the content with Gerhild Krebs and Karin Maaß – as well as being responsible for the reproduction of older prints and working on graphic design for the computerisation with Marcus Hahn, Heike Kempf and Alexander König. Rainer Hudemann completed the photographs for the three regions. Martina Müller (now: Martina Saar) helped to produce the manuscript. Marcus Hahn, research associate, designed and implemented the production of the project on the internet. Together with editor-in-chief Rainer Hudemann and with student assistant Heike Kempf, he took on the extensive work of coordination and final editing. As the Interreg Programme could not be extended beyond 31 December 2000, the completion of the work was made possible by the University of Saarland and through a contribution of the Saarland Landtag for the exploration of French sources regarding the cross-border questions. Marcus Hahn also took on the incorporation of map materials and route suggestions for the 2004 second edition of the online publication. In 2008/2009 the electronic presentation of the data was completely revised and adapted to take into account the new possibilities in information technology. Johannes Großmann was particularly responsible for the overall technical concept, the layout, the implementation of the new menu structure and the internal links between individual contributions. There was an editorial revision at the same time. The emphasis was on adjusting the typography and standardising the bibliographic references. The contents of the contributions were only reworked where there was outdated data or where there were clear errors. Working with Johannes Großmann, student assistant Michael Hackbarth took over the editorial task of ensuring coherence and transferring the texts into HTML and PDF formats. We thank those European Union bodies which are responsible for the Interreg, especially Interreg II Programme's Interregional Monitoring Committee, for supporting the entire project “Cultural Interconnections in the Saar-Lor-Lux Region in the 19th and 20th Century”. The EU provided half the funding, with the Lorraine region and the Saarland, as well as the Universities of Saarland, Metz and Nancy II providing the other half. Our special thanks go to Dr. Gregor Halmes, “spiritual guide” at that time at the Saarland Ministry of Economic Affairs, who always sought to resolve problems with appropriate solutions in what were often administratively complex situations. We need to express our deep gratitude to numerous people and institutions, whom we will we name separately – insofar as they have not already been thanked by the individual authors – for their valuable direct support in the form of advice, written and picture materials, and photo reproduction rights. The Saarland Regional Archives and the Saar Historical Museum helped us with particularly extensive materials from their picture archives. The copyrights to the images are cited individually in the respective texts. Unfortunately, the financial means at the disposal of the Interreg II Programme were not sufficient to be able to present the project in the two languages, as had originally been planned. Therefore, the articles have been published in their authors’ native language. Roger Seimetz chose to publish his articles in German. The paragraph devoted to Luxemburg (1.2) is based on an article by Rainer Hudemann, The Intersection of Cultures. Urban Development and the Creation of the Nation State of Luxemburg in the 19th and early 20th Century, in: Kurt-Ulrich Jäschke (dir.), Grenzen erkennen – Begrenzungen überwinden, Sigmaringen 1999, p. 385–397. >> Further reading
Contents
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Nilvange et la Société Aumetz
1. Foundations