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Before the Corona crisis, Franco-German daily life worked and people lived together in the Saar. Now everything is suddenly different.
Hartmut Fey had the good idea to make everything look like a game. In mid-April, a video was released on the Internet in which Sarrento stands with a fishing rod on the Franco-German border and catches baguettes. “We have been buying bread and croissants at our bakery for decades, and now we are not allowed to walk there,” says Fey, standing at the red and white barrier that separates the German Lauterbach from the French Carling. The baker is across the border, in the Moselle department. “Hi Myriam,” Fey calls, hanging her shopping bag on the fishing line. They both laugh, baguettes and croissants roam the air across the border. But behind the joy of both of them in deceiving the new restrictions was the sad and new reality in the border region. A long time ago it had become a common European area in people’s daily lives. A room that was cut with the arrival of the corona virus.
On March 15, 2020, what had been built over decades ended: a natural German-French coexistence. 200,000 French travel to work in Saarland, German supermarkets benefit from French customers. France and Germany are not as intertwined as along the Saar.
When the German Chancellor and the President of France signed the Aachen Treaty in January 2019, this region was hailed as exemplary, an experimental laboratory of European integration. The cooperation, bilingualism and reconciliation that politicians promise in great words are experienced between Saarbrücken and Forbach. But where people had already forgotten that they were moving from one country to another, there were suddenly fences and gates. And the German border police. Germany closed.
It wasn’t long before the state decision also triggered a private rethink. Neighbors were suddenly perceived as a threat. Local media in the Grand Est region, which includes Alsace and Lorraine, reported how the French insulted and threw eggs at the Germans; French license plates were scratched in German parking lots.
Member of parliament Christophe Arend is one of the few French politicians to express loudly and clearly his discontent at controlling the German virus with barriers. Arend is a dentist and came to the National Assembly for the La République presidential party in Marche. A virus doesn’t care where one country ends and where the other begins, he says. Arend knows the Franco-German friendship from two perspectives. First, from his hometown, Forbach, from where the regional train to Saarbrücken takes ten minutes. A walk where nothing reminds you of crossing a border. Secondly, from the German-French Parliamentary Assembly. At the Paris and Berlin levels, he is not concerned with friendship between countries, Arend says. But the situation in the border region has “darkened” in a short time.
Arend shares the presidency of the German-French Parliamentary Assembly with CDU politician Andreas Jung. Together, on May 7, they wrote a statement in which they both “urge governments to withdraw their respective border measures.” The closure of the border leads to “unacceptable demands on the daily lives of citizens.” One should not “give in to the fight against the virus, but now is the time for European and cross-border solutions.”
The German-French cooperation has only passed its acid test in recent weeks in an absolutely exceptional situation. When there were no longer enough intensive care beds in Alsace, German hospitals admitted Covid’s 19 French patients.
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