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Men - Machine - Landscape
As part of the European Pathways to the Cultural landscape project, I was able to visit the Spessart project as well as a number of other German sites between Sunday 9 February and Sunday 16 February 2003.
Having worked on the Arfon project, a number of common themes became clear in the course of the week. The Spessart is a mountainous area, on the road between Frankfurt-am-Main and Nuremberg, never quite brought under the control of either the Archbishop of Mainz or of its main secular lord, the King, later the Ruling Prince, of Bavaria. Its traditional association with robbers on the post-roads established between these two towns perhaps owes more to legend than to history, but it clearly did, and does, preserve a way of life of its own, just as the landscape of Arfon owes its distinctive form to the way in which the poor resisted the pretensions of the great. The industrial archaeology of the area also struck a chord, with much material evidence for early small-scale industry located in the hills - the early nineteenth century ironworks at Hobbach, with the remains of its water-power systems, and the late eighteenth century trip-hammers for working iron at Hasloch. Both sites are distant ancestors of the modern steelworks which still functions at Lohr, where the Spessart project is based. To anyone used to industrial sites in a British context, the remarkable thing about these places was the paternalism of the industrialists themselves. At both Hobbach and Hasloch, as well as the workshop, the owners built for themselves a pleasant baroque mansion on the premises, and a very elaborate, though one suspects very crowded, half-timbered dwelling of traditional design for the workforce, as well as a school.
Iron was far from the only industry of the Spessart. Coal was mined at Biebergemünd near Jurgen Jung's Senkenberg Institute, which is housed in the former terminus station of the mine railway. Glass-production went on deep in the forest from Medieval times in kilns of a sort illustrated by Diderot and d'Alembert in the Encyclopaedie, until the industry again came to be concentrated on the edges of the region. A number of the kilns have been identified and some foundations conserved, as at Birgberghütte, but the other form of evidence for this remarkable industry is the exquisite collection of local glassware in the Lohr museum.
There are, in a sense, several different layers of cultural landscape in the Spessart - the landscape of the patricians, lay rulers or prelates, who ruled the area, hunted in it, and administered it according to their own lights, the industrialists and their workers who developed it economically, and the farmers who earned a living from the long strips of land that extend from their roadside houses up the mountainsides, and who laid out the distinctive meadowland irrigation systems. Perhaps this diversity is appropriate in what has been in some ways always a marginal landscape, once on the very edge of Romanitas (the river Main formed the limes of the Roman empire).
Lordship of a different sort underlay our longer visits. One was to the UNESCO site, the Völklinger Hütte, a Saarland steelworks now a European Centre of Art and Industrial Culture and to the `Leonardo da Vinci-Machine Mankind' exhibition. This was at the centre of the strategically vital area controlled by French troops after 1918. On the Saturday we made our way to Nuremburg, and to the brilliantly-conceived Third Reich Museum in the Luitpold-arena. Nuremberg was both the spirital begining and end of the Nazi movement; many of the beautiful old houses were destoryed by American bombing towards the end of the war, and the court-house where the Nazi leaders were tried is now open to the public. From the horrors of war, the toy museum and the Deutsches Reichsbahn museum were a much-needed relief, though nothing could have prepared me for the baroque splendours of Bamberg, a World Heritage Site, on the way back to Lohr that evening, nor for the local specialities we sampled in a local restaurant in the old town. A pint of Marston's mild will never, sadly, match up to the smoked beer of Bamberg.
It difficult singling out a highlight. Perhaps it was seeing paper made in the eighteenth century fashion at the Homburg paper mill … if only I'd managed to see one of the Wolpertinger...
Thanks to all for a fascinating trip.
David Gwyn
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