Haut-Koenigsbourg: A Grand Illusion

Essay and Photos by Walter Cummins

If you wanted to make a movie about war, what setting with more frisson than a castle, especially one with a long history of conquest and destruction, and an ultimate – for the time being – renewal?
        For centuries castles served as symbols of power and dominance and served as fortifications to protect and control, to repel invaders and to extort tribute from those who lay vulnerable on the landscape below. Today they are relics, historical curiosities, objects d'art, tourist destinations for visitors treading the stone floors, swarming the parapets, peering through the ramparts. Now castles seem playthings, massive toys conveying the impression of a time long ago. Now they would be useless in warfare. A suicide bomber could demolish a castle in seconds, its thick walls disintegrated into a heap of rubble.

The director Jean Renoir, son of the painter, must have been conscious of the disparities between ancient and modern warfare when he chose the Alsatian castle of Haut-Koenigsbourg as a setting for a World War I German prison in his 1937 film, La grande illusion. Midway through the movie, a group of French officers, on the very day they had planned an escape from their original place of captivity, are ordered to be relocated to this castle, which serves as the unnamed stand-in for the fortress of Poméranie, an actual site of imprisonment for French soldiers.

        Even though the filming of La grande illusion just precedes the Nazi savagery of the war to come, it is anachronistic in its depiction of the polite civility between captors and captured, with hands shaken, salutes given, and rules applied. Perhaps because his first audience knew what really happened in the First World War, Renoir does not refer to the futile butchery of trench warfare, the thousands slaughtered for a few yards of land. All that remains an unstated backstory.
        These French prisoners, the viewer knows, are fortunate to be away from the battlefield, in rooms where they drink cognac shipped from Paris and dine on meals superior to those of their German captors. They receive a trunk of female fashions to dress in drag and perform a variety show backed by their own orchestra. They are on a first name basis with their guards. Given the bloody alternatives, it's not a bad life.
        Yet they want to escape, not because of unpleasant conditions, but because escape is expected of them. It's what one does when held prisoner, an assumed obligation. Neither the French nor the Germans seem aware of the causes and goals of the war, the geopolitical aspirations of those who initiated the conflict. For them it's not unlike a World Cup match. You root for your side and do what's expected of you. Nothing you inflict on your enemy is personal or an act of animosity. Even if you have to shoot and kill, you do it because you are supposed to as one of the – to use the title of another Renoir film, “rules of the game.” As officers on both sides say, “A duty is a duty.”

Interior shot from the film

Recent interior view

        That's exactly what happens when the aristocratic de Boeldieu creates a diversion by having the guards chase him as he climbs up the wooden steps to the top of the castle so that two other prisoners – the commoner, Maréchal, and the nouveau riche Jew, Rosenthal – can lower themselves down a stone wall with a makeshift rope and disappear into the countryside. When de Boeldieu refuses to stop, the German officer in charge, von Rauffenstein, de Boeldieu's well-born counterpart, must shoot a man he likes and respects, grieving at his deathbed.
        After the hardships of crossing Alpine snows, Maréchal and Rosenthal find relief in an idyllic respite with a German woman widowed by the war and her blue-eyed little girl – even constructing a Christmas crèche from scraps. But they know they “must” cross into the neutrality of Switzerland.
        Before this escape, Maréchal and the widow fall in love, he leaving reluctantly, she agreeing with his obligation, he promising to return to bring her and the child to Paris, if he lives. On the verge of crossing the Swiss border, it is Rosenthal who gives voice to the film's title when he says that once out of Germany their next goal will be to get back to their military units and into the war itself. He calls the journey of their escape an illusion, and by implication, war the reality.
        But is it? For millions between 1914 and 1918, between 1939 and 1945, and many thousands in the world today, war was and is the reality, not love between a French man and a German woman, not the joy of a child's delight, not a fine meal with excellent cognac. Yet the battlefields of European wars are now reborn with new growth, the cities rebuilt, the past bombardments subjects for History Channel documentaries. Haut-Koenigsbourg, site of a millennium of battles and bodies, revitalized as a monument, welcomes visitors, the most popular tourist destination in Alsace.

Alsace and its neighboring province of Lorraine have become symbols of a dominant reason for warfare over the centuries – the conquest and possession of territory. Placed between France and Germany, the region has endured a long history of conquest and re-conquest. Beginning in 921, it spent several hundred years as a territory of the Holy Roman Empire, but was annexed by France with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Two centuries later, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, it became part of the new German Empire. The allied victory in the First World War led to a very brief period of independence. On the same day the Armistice was signed, November 11, 1918, local citizens proclaimed the Republic of Alsace-Lorraine. But within a week French troops began occupying the main cities, and the region was officially returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles.
        With the march of the Nazi Wehrmacht at the start of World War II, Alsace and Lorriane were annexed by Germany in 1940. Residents of military age were drafted into the German military, and some even volunteered. That led to recriminations at the end of the war, when the French once again took control, along with official repression of the German dialect spoken in the region, where many of the family and place names are clearly Germanic.
        Towering over the Alsatian plain, Haut-Koenigsbourg castle has endured literal ups and downs since it was first built in the late 12th century, reduced to a ruin in the 17th century, abandoned for two hundred years, and reconstructed at the beginning of the 20th by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. Its prospect gives the castle a view of miles in many directions -- the Rhine valley, the Black Forest, and the Vosges mountains, an ideal advantage for a fortification built to control the countryside.

        The initial structure on the site was a Teutonic castle built by the Swabian Emperor Frederick of Hohenstaufen in 1114. The first destruction took place in 1462 by a force from the upper Rhine cities. The Hapsburg family assumed ownership in 1454. In 1479, the counts of Thiestein rebuilt and modernized for artillery weapons. In 1633, during the Thirty Year War when the Swedes conquered Alsace, they took the castle after a three-month siege. Haut Koenigsbourg was destroyed again, first ransacked and then burned. This time it stayed a ruin for the next two centuries, with only a few large rooms preserved. With Germany back in control of the province, in 1899 the castle was given to Emperor Wilhelm II, the much-despised (by the Allies) Kaiser of World War I.
        Though it hardly makes up for the death and destruction for which he was responsible, Wilhelm did undertake the restoration of the castle as part of his plans to re-Germanize Alsace. Under the supervision of the architect Bodo Ebhardt, a specialist in medieval fortification who was guided by archeological evidence, the project took eight years. On the second floor, the vault of the Kaiser's Hall displays the imperial eagle next to the Prussian motto, and the hall houses the Hohenzollern family coat of arms. Wilhelm was making a statement, one that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. During the Nazi occupation of Alsace during World War II, the castle became the hiding place of art treasures from museums and cathedrals in Colmar and Strasbourg.
        Between the wars, Jean Renoir used Haut-Koenigsbourg as a set. One commentator on La grande illusion notes that the director's “perennial concern is with boundaries that keep people apart and the possibility of transcending them.” It's not just people but also the boundaries between conflict and connection, between war and peace, between what is normal and what is aberration.

Now, in a time of peace throughout Europe, the historic past of Haut-Koenigsbourg seems unreal. Why would invaders want to destroy such a magnificent structure? Why would people who have no personal animus use it to imprison someone who speaks a different language and favors a different cuisine? So much of what actually happened seems like the make believe of a movie.

                                                    [copyright 2006, Walter Cummins]