User:FlautoDolce415/Freundschaftsbrücke(Deutschland-Frankreich)

The new Friendship Bridge of 1993

Position of the
Grosbliederstroff and Kleinblittersdorf municipalities

The Friendship Bridge (French: Pont de l’amitié, German: Freundschaftsbrücke) crosses the river Saar south of Saarbrücken, thus connecting the municipality Kleinblittersdorf (which nowadays belongs to Saarland) whith the lorrainian Grosbliederstroff.

The idea to connect these two places - that have belonged together for centuries - with a bridge already came up in the 1860s but wasn't carried out until the 1880s. Being destroyed at the very beginning of the Second World War, it was reconstructed in 1964. Its current form of a mere pedestrian bridge was developed in 1993.

The bridge impresses neither by its architectoral daringness nor by any possibly record-breaking measures. Its history, however, being full of changes enables the retracing of the development of the France-Germany relations from the French-German enmity to a close relationship within the European Union, especially marked by the Élysée Treaty from 1963. From time to time the bridge served as a border crossing between France and Germany, between that it temporarily shifted between being seen as an inner-german or inner-french work of construction.

The Bridge of 1964

The Friendship Bridge from 1964-1993, viewed from the German side. In the background is Saint-Innocent, Grosbliederstroff

This only changed after the German Chancellor Adenauer and French President de Gaulle signed the Élysée Treaty in 1963, which became known as the German-French Friendship Treaty. Apart from regulating foreign and domestic affairs as well as politics regarding the youth and culture, this agreement combined with the establishment of a Youth Office, facilitated a variety of transboundary initiatives on a regional and local level. Thus, Kleinblittersdorf and Grosbliederstroff did not only become sister cities very early on, but they also negotiated the construction of a new Saar bridge between the two municipalities in 1964, thus creating a new border crossing. However, it was not the first bridge to exist in this place. In fact, the main body of the bridge was built on top of the "Bridge of Sighs" (German: Kummersteg), a steel arch bridge of approximately 4 meters width, which had been located in the regional capital until the beginning of 1962 and was replaced by a new construction (Wilhelm-Heinrich-Brücke), and was brought to a new purpose. An approximately 2 meter wide part of wood and steel construction had to be added to the last section of the bridge over the river Saar, parallel to the Canal de la Sarre (German: Saarkanal) on the French side, because the original bridge was too short. In 1981, there was one more modification in the same place. The increase of the bridge's height enabled the passage of larger riverboats up to Sarreguemines past the otherwise non-navigable canal of the river Saar in this area.

However, the bridge was not given the name "Friendship Bridge" (German: Freundschaftsbrücke French: Pont de l'amitié) until 1968.

The Bridge of 1993

Given its old age, further maintenance and repair of the bridge soon turned out to be uneconomic. Laid-out as a pedestrian bridge, the Friendship Bridge only carried an urban importance initially. The necessity to facilitate the border-crossing of goods and passenger trafficking in this spot was already seen in the 1970s, as all suitable border crossings for motor traffic to France at Rilchingen-Hanweiler and Saarbrücken-Güdingen were too far away and would have required cross-town links. The solution was a road bridge (German: Abt-Fulrad-Brücke (Kleinblittersdorf)), which was built at the beginning of the 1980s, connecting the B-51 with the Route nationale 61 (or respectively the Départementale 31) connecting the distributor road to the autobahn Saarbrücken-Paris (French: Autoroute A 320) near Forbach - which parallels the B-51 on the west bank. It crosses the river Saar only a few kilometers south of Auersmacher (a district of Kleinblittersdorf). Additionally, the recently finished building project Bypass B-51 of the Kleinblittersdorf municipality crossing under the old bridge required a larger overhead clearance. These were the frame conditions for the necessary replacement construction of the pedestrian connection of both town centres. The construction works started at the end of 1992 and the inauguration followed on September 12, 1993 by the respective mayors, Günther Brettar (Kleinblittersdorf) and Jean Jung (Grosbliederstroff), as well as the environment minister of the Saarland region, Jo Leinen. The old bridge, which was only a few meters away, was not removed until after this event because it allowed around 800 pedestrians to cross over every day during the construction work.

The new three-bay bridge has a width of 3.5 m, a length of 140.2 m and consists of a river bridge and an outland bridge. The river bridge features open spans ranging between 58.8 m and 65.9 m. It has a haunched steel composite construction with a box girder cross section, whose overall height varies between 1.5 m at the abutment and 3.5 m over the river piers. The outland bridge has a span of 14.2 m and a reinforced concrete superstructure. The building costs added up to 4 Mio. DM ("German mark"). The offices responsible for the architectural planning were Andree from Dillingen and Dincher from Saarbrücken, whereas the companies Modernbau (formerly a subsidiary of Bilflinger + Berger) and Dillinger Stahlbau (English: steel construction) were responsible for the bridge's construction.

The filigree bridge is eye-catching, thanks to its burgundy painted metal railing and the historically arched lamp posts with their bell-shaped lamps . This impression is made even stronger by two silver, pointedly arched, non-structural light-metal pylons, which tower over the walkway like two Gothic archways. Between their pinnacles, additional lamps hang from a support cable, which is an added symbol of the uniting nature of the bridge. Due to building laws, the pylon stands on the "French half" of the bridge inside the balustrade whereas on the German side it is attached on the outside. The electrical power supply is provided by the French company EDF and is paid for by the municipality Grosbliederstroff.

The 40th anniversary celebration of this first post-war bridge construction was held on the 5th of May 2004 by several hundred official representatives from 77 municipalities and communal organisations which came from the greater area of Saarbrücken/East Moselle to honour the occasion: In the very middle of the bridge they signed a resolution, containing further goals of border-crossing collaboration in this "Eurodistrict" within the Euroregion SaarLorLux.

The bridge as a cultural place

In 1987, the Kleinblitterdorf municipality mounted a piece of plastic art by Wolfram Huschens, a German artist from the Saarland region, made from copper sheets on a glacial erratic at the eastern end of the roadbridge B51/N61 next to the custom clearance site which had been rendered redundant by the Schengen Agreement (1985). The statue displays two intertwining, incomplete wheel-like bodies, symbolising the historical conflict and cooperation of the French and German regions neighbouring each other. The work is titled "Border between Germany and France".

On the occasion of the anniversary of the German liberation on May 8, 2007, the first four stations of the projects of the cultural capitals called hArt an der Grenze (English: Close to the limit) were opened between Kleinblittersdorf and Grosbliederstroff, displaying artistic works on the bridge and the former border hut until the end of August 2007. The project included objects like life-sized photographs of artists wearing the uniforms of former customs officers and a performance by Bernd Wegener called "Le son du vent" (English: The sound of the wind) for which bells had been hung between the similarly shaped lamps on the bridge.

In 1982, the local Carnival society called "Grünschnäbel" (English: green beaks) declared the during low tide only 30 m² wide river Saar-islet between the two municipalities to be the "Free State Carnevalis", holding annual ceremonies there, rewarding celebrities like Willy Millowitsch, Oskar Lafontaine, Ephraim Kishon, Lilo Pulver and Wim Thoelke with the title of Doctor humoris causa. This often made it necessary for the participants of the title bestowal to wear rubber boots while the audience could watch the ceremony from the bridge, keeping their feet dry. In 2007, the event took place for the last time, due to the aging process of the "Grünschnäbel", possibly the future owners of this "free state", which was auctioned off in June and July 2007 might continue to put it to public use.