According to an Alsatian, a German does not have a clue how to make good sauerkraut.
Still, this northeast corner of France, snuggled up to the Rhine and the German border, reeks of Germanic cultural influence. Its local patois is distinctly Deutsch, its gabled and timbered 17th-Century houses–crooked affairs fit for Hansel and Gretel–can also be found in nearby Baden, and breweries belch along the foot of the Vosges, the mountain range that is the Alsace`s spine.
But to call an Alsatian a German is an insult slightly softened by calling him French. An Alsatian in customs officer`s parlance is an
”other”–distinct and aloof.
That sense of remove has much to do with Alsace being Europe`s battle-zone during two world wars. Twice occupied by Germany (from 1870-1914 and again in World War II), it still bears scars of conflict, like the Maginot Line–France`s magnificently failed wall of artillery against German encroachment. The German forces passed blithely north, en route to Paris.
”An Alsatian is, above all, independent,” insists a most elegant example of the breed, Baron Christian Watteville-Berckheim, a banker who renounced high finance to farm his family`s estate here. ”The worst thing you can do is treat an Alsatian like a German. The Germans behave like returning conquerors, and we hate that.”
Three civilizations
The French hold the region dear, as a plucky little soldier of resistance. (”He speaks in German but fights in French,” boasted Napoleon of the Alsatian general, Jean-Baptiste Kleber.) The neighboring Swiss claim the local sense of civic pride as their own–flower boxes bloom beneath well-washed windows. And among them the Alsatians move, bemusedly noting their presumptions.
”We`re difficult to understand because we`re a mix of three civilizations–the Gallic, the Celtic and the German,” explains Count Roland d`Andlau-Hombourg, whose family roots predate the Romans.
”This is middle Europa. Even climatically we`re on the border.”
That borderline identity has become of late a symbol of European harmony. Strasbourg, Alsace`s gentle, storybook-quaint capital, where weeping willows trail in the Rhine, has become the home of the European Parliament.
Strasbourg is the birthplace of the brasserie, and the good cheer of a Black Forest beer hall abounds in the wine bars that dot the town, serving sauerkraut and the culinary treat of Alsace: pungent Muenster cheese sprinkled with caraway seeds. And still the bequest of the Empress Eugenie to the pregnant women of Alsace–10,000 stone benches to rest upon–remain in place, several wars later.
But unlike other folkloric beauty spots in France, Alsace does not draw clutches of worldly Parisians out to savor the local rustic life, though there is plenty of it. Along with eating hearty and well, Alsatians produce some of the best, gutsiest white wines in Europe–dry, fragrant and fruity.
”It`s a place for Christmas,” coos Countess Jacqueline de Ribes of the local flair for festivity. (Her father, Jean de Beaumont, maintains a splendid shooting lodge here.) Indeed, for tannenbaum, every village is festooned with lights, in the best southwest German tradition. But at heart, Alsace is a Protestant place–a bastion of fastidious watchmakers and work ethics for Latins to take pleasure in.
Rich but low profile
Alsace is known as the land of the bourgeosie profonde–industrious, well-educated, prosperous people who keep deliberately low profiles. And like people in most Protestant communities in France, Alsatians tend to be quietly rich. ”It`s because making money is not a sin in their religion,” explains a Catholic.
Names that signify industrial clout (Schlumberger, de Turckheim and de Dietrich) or aristocratic authority (d`Andlau-Hombourg) form the axis upon which the Alsatian society very discreetly spins.
”We`re all cousins,” says d`Andlau, a more flamboyant Catholic among them, throwing up his hands at the maze of intermarriages that join their coats of arms. But more than bloodlines, a profound love of the land links Alsatians. It is most often expressed in the hunt.
”The point is not whether someone is a good shot. It`s to make the forest come alive,” says the distinguished Count Francois de Pourtales, who claims to be a misanthrope. High to the north on his 5,000 lonely acres of forest, the Domaine de la Verrerie, he adores company, in fact, and charms with mock sternness. ”The one thing I can`t stand is someone who is ruder than I am,” he says, snow-white eyebrows pinched.
Pourtales, an impressively tall ex-military man, is typical of the Alsatian whose sense of well-being is linked to terra firma–his forest. Split down the middle by the Maginot Line, and badly mined in the war, it has been painstakingly nurtured back to profitability.
The Count shares his nature-locked life with his English wife, Joan (nee Wilmot-Sitwell, a niece of the poet Edith Sitwell), who gardens against the odds in this unfavorable climate, raises dachshunds and works at restoring the family`s massive house, which is built on the foundations of a 19th-Century glass factory. ”The Aga stove is the family`s best friend,” she says of the couple`s voluntary isolation, which is broken once a year by the annual hunt. They host it for about 30 of their children`s friends, an international bunch that includes Englishman David Campbell, young Jean-Baptiste de Turckheim, Italians, Germans and the odd Yank.
Nature lovers
Indeed, rugged individualists are the charm and backbone of Alsace. The taciturn Alsatian Gilbert de Turckheim is renowned for being a keen naturalist, one of France`s best shots and the visionary who successfully created a nature park for endangered macaques on top of the Haut Koenigsburg mountain, where Kaiser Wilhelm lived. ”Everybody said he was mad,” says a fan.
Like his cousin Watteville-Berckheim, lanky baron of the Chateau de Schoppenwihr, d`Andlau gave up his financial career to plow himself into Alsace-based passions–wine cultivation and sculpture. Another of his cousins, 27-year-old Swiss Baron Nicola de Sonnenberg, possesses a most startling case of Alsace-itus. Blond, brawny and eminently eligible, he farms by day and presides by night over a medieval fortress of a chateau, d`Osthouse, where he lives alone with his Labrador retrievers and is tended by four domestics.
A sweet young man whose only vice seems to be liking vodka poured over his sherbet dessert (he tends the sick at Lourdes each year with the Knights of Malta), Sonnenberg spends many evenings playing solitaire, and he takes his farming seriously. ”It is the only metier for me. I could never live in a city. Nothing about it is easy. You have to work twice as hard than the year before to keep up,” he says of the 100 hectares of farmland and 170 of forest he manages. ”Others have to work all their lives to own a house. I have to work all my life to keep what I have,” he says. The massive inheritance of the chateau and property became his with the recent death of his uncle.
With an emporium of furniture–from the Middle Ages to Victoriana, including suits of armor and boar heads–the chateau is the rare Alsatian property to survive with every bibelot intact. ”My family could receive the Germans as neutral Swiss,” he explains, pointing out inscriptions marking Kaiser Wilhelm`s visits.
Sonnenberg waterskis on the Rhine. In true Swiss fashion he likes the region. ”It`s clean. In summer the villages have flower competitions. That, to me, is Alsace.”
Consummate hunters
The Alsatian views himself as friend to flora and fauna. The region is blessed with a plethora of animals, including storks. ”The ecological movement in Germany is felt here,” says Berkheim. And the local zeal for shooting is accompanied by a real knowledge of beasts.
”I`m an old chasseur (hunter),” confesses Count d`Andlau, from under his hunting-badge-decorated Tyrolean hat–part of the Alsatian uniform. He lives here in a shooting lodge adorned with the trophies of his exotic exploits–horns of African buffalo and stuffed Brazilian birds made into lamps, and he has turned his family`s estate, the Chateau d`Ittenwiller, into a nature park with a menagerie of buck deer and a white Spanish goat named Blanchette.
”Hunters, in fact, protect animals,” he argues. ”We know more about them than anyone else, and we preserve their habitat.”
His brother`s history of the family earned an Academie Francaise award and charts their role in Alsace from the time ”people could read and write.” Ever since, they have been deeply involved in the traumas of every local bistro owner`s life in the village of Andlau–a picture-perfect town possessing the region`s most exquisite Roman church.
Above it, the family`s medieval chateau, also named Andlau, reigns in majestic ruin, its twin turrets surveying the plain below–and usually crawling with tourists lacking what d`Andlau describes as ”civic sense.” He tools up the mountainside on a crisp autumn afternoon in his German Jeep to be greeted by the hordes. ”Look up the chimney,” he suggests to a guest, offering a view of the sky–and the two sneakered feet of a boy who has crawled up the shaft.
D`Andlau shrugs good-humoredly as he bemoans the destruction tourists cause. He turns his attention instead to a funnel once used to pour boiling oil on one`s enemies. ”I`d love to give a party up here one night with everyone around a spitfire roast,” he says.
”I had thought of making this a park for bears. But do you know how much a bear eats?” he asks, coming back, in the Alsatian twilight, to his Germanic senses. —
