Strasbourg (or Straßburg): A German City in France?

Strasbourg, France - Petite France, 2011 (Photo: Dietmar Rabich CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Aside from its cathedral and Kronenbourg 1664 lager, Strasbourg is perhaps best known today as the seat of the European parliament. MEPs from across the continent have, for decades, converged on the city and its Quartier Europeén to make decisions of (varying) significance. But why Strasbourg?

When Geronimus Hatt founded his Kronenbourg Brewery in 1664, he did so not in the French city Strasbourg, but in the Free Imperial City of Straßburg. Strasbourg (or, indeed, Straßburg) was, in fact, German for much of its history. Nestled on the Rhine’s Western bank, the city was home to speakers of the Alsatian “Elsässerditsch” dialect of German. It was an important centre of the German reformation and remained essentially German until Louis XIV’s successful conquest of Alsace in 1681.

Since then, Strasbourg has changed hands between the two countries six times. It is no surprise, therefore, that today’s French city is of importance to Germany, its culture and its history.

Strasbourg entered the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 932 AD and gained its status as a ‘Freie Reichsstadt’ (Free Imperial City) 330 years later under King Philip of Swabia. As early as the medieval and early modern periods, the city was making important cultural contributions. Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (a Middle High German romance adaptation of the Tristan and Iseult story) appeared in the city in c.1200. Around the same time, building work began on the cathedral in Strasbourg, which, by its completion in 1439, was the tallest construction in the world.

Strasbourg Cathedral (Photo: David Iliff CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr)

Sixteenth-century Straßburg did not escape the religious upheaval which rocked Europe at that time. The city’s ecclesiastical and state authorities largely embraced Protestantism. In the 1530s and 40s, John Calvin  himself ministered in the city as a political refugee. In 1605, Early modern developments in printing technology led to the publication of Europe’s first modern newspaper in Straßburg by Johann Carolus. 

By the seventeenth century, then, Straßburg had become a city at the centre of the various historic trends seen at that time across Europe. The French invasion of 1681 would not change this. Into the eighteenth-century, the city (now Strasbourg, though still bearing many memories of its Germanness) continued to host many notable guests.

Among these guests was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who remarked on the city’s cultural hybridity as early as 1770; visiting and studying in Strasbourg, Goethe took the city’s gothic cathedral as the basis for his pamphlet ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’. Despite its conquest by France, Strasbourg and its cathedral were, to the eighteenth-century Goethe, a shining example of German cultural accomplishment. 

Through the turbulence of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Strasbourg was tied to the wider geopolitical situation in Europe. The Prussians brought Strasbourg into the new German Empire in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War; it was then taken back by the French at the Treaty of Versailles, and then again by the Germans in 1940, before finally assuming its current position as an important city in eastern France in 1945.

But why is all this history significant?

Of course, today’s Strasbourg is a French city. Its people speak French. The city is France’s seventh-largest (by population) and its second-largest river port. Strasbourg is even credited with giving France La Marseillaise. 

That being said, traces of Strasbourg’s German past persist. The cathedral is the most ostensible example; even if its gothic architecture is, in fact, of French origin, the building is a material remnant of a time when Strasbourg was German. Even after Louis XIV’s occupation, Goethe claimed Strasbourg for the Germans. The half-timbered houses of the old town could easily be German and Elsässerditsch (or, Alsatian German) survives in areas around the city.

Remnants of Strasbourg’s German past, La petite France (Photo: Francis Robert CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr)

Strasbourg is thus a celebration of Europeanness. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is, in part, the story of Franco-German conflict; Strasbourg’s constant changing-of-hands is a product of this. Strasbourg today is, however, also a product of Europe’s success; inseparable from its history, the city testifies to the success of Europe and European integration. Today, both French and German can live and work in Strasbourg. So too can its cultural richness be enjoyed by all. It belongs both to the French and to the Germans. It’s a city in many ways French, in some ways German, and in every way European. There’s perhaps no better place, therefore, to host an institution built on shared goals and cultural coexistence.