On 22 January 2023, France and Germany celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, rightly praised as a milestone in Europe’s post-war history. But the Treaty only institutionalised on governmental level a process towards reconciliation that civil society had already initiated without waiting for politics. This is the second post of a series of three personal musings about a remarkable achievement.

La Cambe is a small village on the coastline of Lower Normandy, with 546 inhabitants. Alive, that is. They cohabitate with over 21,000 German soldiers buried in the war cemetery that covers seven hectares of their land. They are part of the 155,000 killed between the landing of the Allied troops on 6 June 1944 and the end of the fighting in Normandy roughly three months later. The story of this place is an interesting case study that helps understanding why French-German reconciliation worked out the way it did.

When the department of Calvados extended the National Road 13 between Caen and Cherbourg in the mid-1990s to a four-lane highway, they needed to deviate it in some places. As a result, the war cemetery in La Cambe found itself separated from the main road by a 100-meter patch of land filled with a spoil heap from the road works.

The authorities offered these extra square metres to the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, a long-standing charity organisation tending war graves and identifying the buried all across the continent. The idea was floated to create a small information and documentation centre and a ‘Peace Garden’ made of trees sponsored by individuals or organisations, with the aim of both nicely landscaping the heap and generating revenues to be put to use in the cemeteries of Eastern Europe, which had all of a sudden become easily accessible at the beginning of the nineties.

Sponsorship for a tree was tentatively fixed at 500 D-Mark (250 Euros). Each tree would have a little green sign attached, with the date and name of the sponsor, and two lines of text. One of my second-year students from the business school in Le Havre was perfectly happy to do a summer internship on site carrying out a ‘market study’ : with her little questionnaire she simply tested the idea and the price range with the visitors. The echo was overwhelmingly positive, a lot of people wanted to be shortlisted right away. Consquently, the idea was implemented.

On 21 September 1996 the first 21 maple trees were planted during the inauguration of the peace garden. Space was available for a total of 235 trees. As of November, the garden was already completely overbooked, prompting the French authorities to grant the use of another heap hill at the new highway ramp, and while they were at it, they also offered a whole alley of trees along the small cul-de-sac road between the ramp and the cemetery. By early 1998, the garden was full with 1,127 trees. Today, the cemetery draws around 100,000 visitors each year, and since 2019 the exhibition in the small information centre has been remarkably well renewed and updated.

In the 21st century, the easygoing exchange between a German charity and French authorities does not come as a big surprise. What is more surprising is the calm toleration of all these enemy bodies in the French soil in the immediate aftermath of the war and during the post-war years. According to the archives, no incident of protest, let alone vandalism, has been noted, ever. Although there would have been some good reasons, since the cemetery not only contains the remains of kids aged 17 and 18, sent to the front in order to give their lives to the Führer, but also several hundreds of ‘Waffen-SS’ members, and a handful of truly evil war criminals, among whom the officer who had ordered the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, an emblematic landmark of cruelty.

Obviously, the Volksbund made sure to keep a low profile, while brainstorming about how to deal with this necropolis, one of five in Normandy. In an internal memo of 1949, the future design of the cemetery was discussed. ‘Thousands of crosses’, as for instance in the well-known American graveyard in Saint Laurent/Colleville – the one made famous by Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan – located 15 km to the east of La Cambe, were considered an ‘unsatisfactory solution’ with a ‘massifying’ effect and definitely to be avoided. The best option was esteemed to be groups of five symbolic crosses above the countless, but discreet flat stones in the ground bearing the names of the buried.

The creation of the Federal Republic allowed for intergovernmental talks on the issue of war cemeteries. A convention was signed by Chancellor Adenauer and Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France in 1954, jointly expressing the wish to make these cemeteries ‘permanent’ and ‘ensure the dignity of the graves’. The French authorities would support the civil society organisation designated by the German government. La Cambe, like many other sites, was handed over to the Volksbund.

As early as 1957 – six years before the Elysée Treaty was signed – it was thus possible to launch the redesign of the cemetery in carrying busloads of volunteers to the first International Youth Camp organised on site. The archives report that many local French kids dropped by for curiosity’s sake, then came back the next day with their own shovel and helped for a week or two.

The risk of an emotional backlash against such a German monument could never be fully excluded, though. The minutes of an exchange between the Volksbund and the French Ministry of Veterans and War Victims prior to an official inauguration ceremony of the fully completed landscaped cemetery in 1961 shows how the latter insists on the purely religious, low-key character of the event in order to avoid any embarrassing incident. Which did not exclude a political bilateral ceremony within the halls of the Préfecture de Caen, including representatives of civil society from both sides. And it was insisted that the good understanding between the officials should by all means be underpinned by contacts between the visitors and the local population.

‘Reconciliation over the graves’ became the motto of the Volksbund and entered the mainstream vocabulary through countless speeches and editorials. When I discussed with the Volksbund officials during the work on the La Cambe peace garden in 1995-96 how to explain that a place like this had never been the object of negative attitudes, we came up with the ‘profoundly human and universal character’ of an activity that consists of caring for graves, the low profile of the German cemeteries far from any heroic discourse, and the unwavering positivity of the ‘peace narrative’.

But La Cambe is also a relevant case study for the conditions under which such a reconciliation is possible in the first place. It is enabled by an unambiguous recognition of wrongdoing on one side and a willingness to believe in its sincerity on the other side. It is facilitated by an overwhelming tiredness and a shared understanding that the ‘never again!’ principle needs concrete realisations to be meaningful. And it is greatly helped by the consistency between bottom-up field work and governmental orientation. There is a link between the Schuman Declaration and the acceptance of soldiers buried in Norman soil.

This being said, as one of my American students wrote in an essay after a day trip to the Normandy beaches, French-German reconciliation, even before the Elysée Treaty of 1963, ‘is nothing short of a miracle’. Needless to say, she got an excellent grade.

On 22 January 2023, France and Germany celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, rightly praised as a milestone in Europe’s post-war history. But the Treaty only institutionalised on governmental level a process towards reconciliation that civil society had already initiated without waiting for politics. This is the first post of a series of three personal musings about a remarkable achievement.

When I take a run around where I live, I have quite a few nice options. I can follow the little ‘Chemin de la Libération’ down to the bridge across the river Maine, just before it flows into the Loire. The bridge, quite coherently, is called ‘Pont de la Libération’. For anyone who might ask ‘liberation from what?’, several memorial plaques and monuments refresh the memory, recalling how resistance fighter Louis Bordier guided General Patton’s troops in August 1944 towards the liberation of the city of Angers, and how 108 American soldiers lost their lives in this assault.

But I can also opt for a 6 mile-loop around the lovely Saint Nicolas Lake close to ESSCA’s main campus. Which will require me to cross Avenue Patton, passing the historical milestone of ‘Liberty Road’, and the Beaussier quarter, where everything, from the main Boulevard and the brand new tram station to the brasserie, the health centre and the supermarket, is named after Victor Beaussier, executed by the Nazis in October 1942 at the age of 31, for having distributed resistance pamphlets and sabotaged vehicles and telephone lines.

And following the lakeshore, I will necessarily pass by the ‘Monument aux Fusillés’, commemorating the shooting of a total of 46 resistance fighters between 1942 and 1946.

I could go on like this for quite some time, mentioning the postal address of the Angers City Hall on ‘Boulevard de la Résistance et de la Déportation’, or the plaque at Angers train station, reminding me, whenever I pick up a visitor, that 824 Jewish men, women and children left for Auschwitz from here on 20 July 1942.

For anyone living in a French town, it is impossible to escape the presence of memory in everyday life. And for someone whose father occupied a French town in 1940 in a uniform he had been forced into right after leaving school, the fact that the French managed to hold out a hand to the Germans in the immediate post-war years remains a mystery.

How did you do it?

How did you do it? How did you live with all the cemeteries the Germans left on your soil and still overcome the grief and resentment? How did you reach a mindset in which, without forgetting the unforgettable and without needing to forgive the unforgivable, you were ready to give the permission to civil society actors and political entrepreneurs to imagine a common future in a different Europe? How did you collectively decide it was time to break a seemingly unbreakable vicious circle?

Were you simply exhausted, so tired of repetitive war, mutual hatred, and mandatory revanchism that the old patterns of thinking simply did not make sense anymore?

Was your perception of the Germans mitigated by your own bad conscience for having collaborated with the occupier across vast swathes of the population, and for having felt how vulnerable to fascism you had been yourself?

Or were you just lucky to have the right people in charge? Lucky to have not only Charles de Gaulle, who rather than cultivating cheap Germanophobia gave priority to saving your honour and to rebuilding a destroyed country before slamming the door, disgusted with the nitty gritty politics of post-war recovery. But lucky also to have the lesser known caretakers of the Fourth Republic, who were considerably more efficient than their commonplace reputation of ‘governmental instability’ suggests.

It’s true you had some visionary intellectuals, like Joseph Rovan, who in October 1945, only a few months after having been liberated from the Dachau concentration camp, wrote a courageous article in the influential monthly Esprit, in which he explained why in the short and medium term, France would have ‘The Germany We Deserve’.

You had some good friends abroad, like Winston Churchill, who famously declared, in his Zurich speech in September 1946, ‘a partnership between France and Germany’ a prerequisite for a future of the ‘European family’. In 1946! Or George Marshall, whose recovery plan was to be implemented by the newly created Organisation for European Economic Co-operation obliged you as of 1948 to sit at the same table as the West Germans, who did not even have their Republic yet.

And you had some pretty pragmatist promotors of peace like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. For the latter, the question of how to build trust between the French and German despite an emotionally polluted past, was a central guiding line for political action, as shown throughout Klaus Schwabe’s biography of 2016, the first one in German. The Monnet memorandum dated 3 May 1950 states the need to ‘undertake a dynamic action which will transform the German situation and lift up German spirits’. That’s how you speak about an ally, not an enemy. And the Schuman Declaration, six days later, announces that ‘France accomplishes the first decisive act of building Europe, in association with Germany’.

When Schuman and Monnet held out their hand to Germany, less than six years had gone by since the liberation of the little bridge a few steps from where I live now. If this is not a historical achievement, what is?

Would it have been possible if the public mood had remained grief-stricken, bitter, resentful? I doubt it. Of course, there was no outright, massive enthusiasm about new ties with Germany. But there was a kind of tacit willingness to be taken along by the voices mentioned above. Unlike the chronology proposed by Churchill – reconciliation first, as building block for a future Europe – research suggests that French-German rapprochement and the first steps towards European integration took each other along. May 1950 appears almost like a tipping point in terms of engagement, a can opener for civil society actors only waiting for a ‘bold act’, to quote Schuman again.

The following two posts will try to explore this post-war turn further in two different case studies: first, the history of the German war cemetery in La Cambe, located on the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Then, the birth of the town twinnings, thanks to the courage of a handful of mayors.

On 22 January 2023, France and Germany celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, rightly praised as a milestone in Europe’s post-war history. But the Treaty only institutionalised on governmental level a process towards reconciliation that civil society had already initiated without waiting for politics. This is the third post of a series of three personal musings about a remarkable achievement.

Is there a better illustration of the bottom-up dynamic of post-war French-German reconciliation than the story of the town twinnings?

As I write, 2317 French cities, towns and villages are twinned with a German municipality of similar size. That’s a total of 4634 places big and small with friends across the border. Unimaginable? Unbelievable? Mind-boggling? Feel free to choose your adjective.

Of course, not all of these ‘partnerships’ as they are called by the Germans are filled with the same intensity. In smaller municipalities, much depends on tireless individuals, as well as demography. And language skills, which have declined over recent decades in both countries outside the border regions. Still, the number of the twins has never decreased. It actually keeps growing, albeit, obviously, at a very moderate pace nowadays.

Once again, like we already observed in the two previous posts (here and here), civil society preceded or paved the way for political institutionalisation. At the same time civil society initiative was also facilitated and legitimised by major political acts like the Schuman Declaration or the Elysée Treaty.

Knowing that 130 French municipalities were already engaged in friendly exchange with German counterparts necessarily was a reassuring piece of intelligence for Charles de Gaulle, when he scheduled his first state visit to Germany in September 1962, following the solemn ceremony in Reims Cathedral with Chancellor Adenauer in July. The triumphant welcome he received in the German cities he visited revealed both the public’s gratitude for these symbolic acts and a longing for further bilateral steps of reconciliation, in addition to and beyond the economic cooperation embodied in the Treaties of Rome.

Before taking off in France, the post-war twinnings were an English idea at first. As early as 1947, Bonn and Oxford, Düsseldorf and Reading, Hanover and Bristol engaged in official contacts.

The French were in need of just a bit more time, and a good mediator. The latter was found in a group of Swiss intellectuals, namely the writers’ association of Berne. In 1948 they invited some French and German mayors to what today would no doubt be called a ‘kick-off meeting’ at Mount Pèlerin on Lake Geneva. As leading historian Corine Defrance points out, French civil society was nudged ‘from abroad (Switzerland) and from above (intellectuals)’.

The third such meeting was the breakthrough. In June 1950 – note: right after the Schuman Declaration – Stuttgart welcomed thirty mayors from each country, many of whom were former resistance fighters, possessing a high level of legitimacy.

The main driver of the twinning idea was Lucien Tharradin, a former prisoner of war, deported to Buchenwald, now mayor of Montbéliard, in Eastern France. He persuaded his counterpart from Ludwigsburg (Baden-Württemberg) to launch an informal partnership, based on the pretext of historical affinities dating back several centuries.

Tharradin was well aware of the remaining difficulties to obtain the backing of a majority of citizens. In a report on the Stuttgart meeting, he conceded that ‘naturally, the wounds of this horrible war are not healed yet. Too many bad memories remain in our hearts. The road is long and steep.’ But this did not stop his confidence in the initiative. ‘The Germans I met (…) ask us to help them consolidate their democracy. I am absolutely convinced of their goodwill.’

Montbéliard and Ludwigsburg were the first ones in what has become a very long list. But they were not massively imitated right away. Many French mayors preferred to wait prudently before asking their municipal council for the permission to engage contacts in view of a twinning. It is only in the years 1957 to 1963 – between the Treaties of Rome and the Elysée – that the idea really took off. And the creation of the Franco-German Youth Office in the summer of ‘63 provided additional drive, grafting an increasing number of school exchanges on existing twinnings or helping to create them where no twin town was available yet.

It’s a remarkable success story, the secret of which is very fortunate timing, and the presence of a critical number of French actors stubborn enough to convince their fellow citizens that a humanist, confident approach towards their neighbours was worth while trying out. The Germans contributed their part. As so often in post-war history, the citizens of the young Federal Republic were offered an unexpected (some would say: undeserved) opportunity and managed to seize it for their benefit.

Sound bilateral relations on an intergovernmental level are a good thing. But the underpinning of French-German cooperation in Europe by a dense, lively network of people, keeping a general atmosphere of good neighbourhood alive and tangible, is more than that: it’s one of Europe’s jewels, precious and unique.

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