Euro-idealism thrives in Alsace, where the people, who combine Teutonic efficiency with Gallic style, regard their ”bilingual biculturalism` as an asset.
In the pretty wine villages southwest of Strasbourg, they hang flags from their flower-decked balconies and the French tricolor, I noted, is easily outnumbered by the blue-with-12-gold-stars flag of the European Community.
To this Germanic people within France`s borders, the new United Europe appears as the solution to their oldest dilemma: Where do we belong?
No other part of mainland France, not even Brittany, looks or feels so un-French. The cozy, tidy prettiness recalls southwest Germany, as do the old half-timbered houses, the Baroque woodcarvings, the Germanic names and dialect, the wooded hills, even the style of the wines: white and dry yet fruity.
After all, Alsatians are Allemanic cousins to Badeners and Swiss-Germans, their neighbors. And yet, war and invasion made them not long ago into French patriots (”Alsace is like the toilet, always occupied,” wrote the Strasbourg-born satirist Tomi Ungerer).
They hated the Kaiser`s occupation of 1870-1918, when the women`s black bat-shaped bonnets became a sign of mourning. Much more they hated Hitler`s brutal annexation, when even children faced prison for speaking French. So they acquiesced in the post-1945 policy of Frenchification, under the slogan, ”C`est chic parler francais.”
Dialect comes back
The dialect began to die out. But today it`s cultivated again as a key component of the Alsatian personality. Two people in three can speak it, and in many rural areas you hear little else. Or people talk a mix of it and French just as so many of them have hybrid names, e.g. Jean-Pierre Muller.
German tourists come in hordes to a region steeped in Germanic culture. Its greatest artwork, the Issenheim Altar in Colmar (c. 1510), is by the German artist Matthias Gruenewald. Gutenberg, from Mainz, devised his printing press in Strasbourg, where later the young Goethe came from Frankfurt as a student: The house he lived in still stands, below the soaring pink tower of the Gothic cathedral whose 328 steps he would climb as a test of willpower, to fight his vertigo.
”Our bilingual biculturalism used to be a handicap,” said one local mayor, ”for the French looked down on us as not properly French. But in today`s new Europe, it`s an asset.”
Alsatians even see a federal Europe as the best guarantor of their beloved identity and traditions. As the nation-state wanes, so the regions and mini-nations from Sicily to Scotland will wax and strengthen. That`s a common tenet of the Euro-creed, held strongly in Alsace where internationalism is surpassed only by a burning local patriotism.
Beyond sauerkraut
As any visitor can see, Alsatians cherish their traditions-choucroute festivals, wine festivals, ploughing competitions, the cult of the luck-bringing stork, folk dances in flowery costumes, and the fete of the marriage of ”L`Ami Fritz,” based on the 1864 novel by two French writers, Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain.
I was rapidly seduced by a smiling region that seems to unite the positive qualities of two contrasting races-Teutonic spruceness and efficiency with an overlay of Gallic stylishness and excitability. Plus the gregarious, hedonistic joviality so often found in wine-producing areas.
We arrived in bright sun at Strasbourg airport, then drove south along the Route du Vin through a landscape of incredible lushness-tidy light-green vineyards sloping up to meet the darker pine and beech forests of the high Vosges in a symphony of greens.
Half-ruined forts stand on many of the foothills. The biggest by far, and much restored, is Haut-Koeningsbourg, which Kaiser Wilhelm II rebuilt as a fairy tale folly to rival Mad Ludwig`s efforts in Bavaria.
The barrier of the Vosges gives the vine slopes a mild micro-climate, propitious for white wines of quality, seldom cheap and most of them exported. But we found plenty of taverns where the growers` house wines can be enjoyed at modest prices, all along the string of picture-postcard villages and townlets with their painted, timbered facades.
Tourism trappings
At Riquewihr, the prime showpiece, with its ramparts and cobbled alleys, you half expect a costumed Hansel and Gretel to emerge from a gingerbread house. The whole village is a monument.
Although ultra-touristy, Riquewihr is no mere museum but a working wine center, too, producing some of Alsace`s best Riesling. Some 3 million bottles are stocked in the ancient cellars of the sophisticated Hugel family, growers and exporters here since 1637.
All along the Wine Road we saw storks-elegant white birds with long orange legs and beaks (which they clap noisily), busily guarding their nests of vineshoots, which are set on chimneys, or on church towers, or on pillars specially built by the villagers (unlike Goethe, storks adore heights).
The stork is the mascot of Alsace, and if it doesn`t actually bring babies, it is believed to bring luck.
Alsatians` favorite dish is choucroute. We enjoyed a giant mound of it
(pickled cabbage with every kind of pork product, soused in Sylvaner wine), at the beguilingly bucolic Vieux Pressoir, an old wine-press house near Rouffach.
Alsatians are great trenchermen, and in many a pub or ferme auberge you can sit among locals to enjoy these and other local dishes. The smarter restaurants-some world-famous such as Auberge de l`Ill (Michelin three stars) in Illhaeusern-have mostly gone over to so-called nouvelle cuisine.
Emotional altarpiece
No such decadent daintiness informs the Issenheim Altar`s searing panorama of medieval passion and spirituality, housed in Colmar`s stunning Unterlinden Museum (the most visited in the French provinces). Gruenewald`s 10-panel work is alive with such raw feeling, and so shockingly imaginative-angels battling with devils, a grief-struck Mary Magdalene, a troubled St. Anthony-that it`s easy to notice the amazed emotions on the faces of the tourist groups constantly crowding round it.
From Colmar, prettiest of Alsatian towns, we drove to Kaysersberg, where Albert Schweitzer`s modest birthplace is now a tiny museum also invoking pain and spirituality in its photos of the tall, lean missionary amid his lepers at Lambarene.
Schweitzer remained strongly loyal to his homeland and often returned there. But in 1914 the French interned him in Gabon as an enemy alien, for Alsace had of course been German at the time of his birth. This was the kind of absurdity common in those days.
A fine mess of machines
In Mulhouse we visited Europe`s leading vintage car collection, the famous Schlumpf museum. Among the 500 models on display, the 126 Bugattis hold pride of place.
After the angry trade-unionists discovered the hidden hoard of cars, the Schlumpfs were prosecuted and fled to Switzerland.
North of Mulhouse is the open-air Eco-Museum, almost as remarkable. Some traditional timber-frame houses, one from the 12th Century, have been collected and reassembled here, beam by beam, to form a kind of Alsatian village.
On some days you can watch traditional crafts-clog-making, baking, blacksmiths-at work. Best of all, in the little village school, actors play out scenes of how Alsatian children were taught in class at different periods.
