Author: Ariel Sophia Bardi / Source: Atlas Obscura
All images: Ariel Sophia Bardi
Surrounded by the Belgian border and the low-lying Vosges mountains, Meuse served as the multi-year front line between French and German armed forces during World War I, with the Voie Sacrée, an arterial route dubbed the Sacred Way, ferrying troops and supplies to the trenches.
In this battle-scarred region of northeastern France, the Great War has given rise to a cultural landscape marked by mourning. Now a full 100 years after the end of the war, the hushed, still sparsely populated department in Lorraine—equally famous for its namesake quiche—boasts monuments, memorials, and museums in dizzying numbers.
There are booming multimedia installations that mime the furor of battle, with shells whistling across projection screens and pixelated bursts of artillery, and gleaming, American-built neoclassical landmarks in which the losses of war are glossed with a veneer of patriotism.
The multi-floor, relic-packed museum, which doubles as a sandwich bar, is hidden inside a barn in the tiny village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. Despite its unassuming location, it receives about 20,000 visitors a year, according to founder Jean Paul de Vries, among them several thousand regulars, including veterans.
Once inside, visitors will find a dimly lit trove of half-eroded artifacts, sprawled floor-to-ceiling in immersive tableaux and dilapidated mises-en-scène. In one corner, a beat-up wooden table has been laid with rusted, dust-covered dishes, and piteously fancied up with a few candle nubs. In another, prosthetic limbs and medical miscellany surround two battered stretchers. The effect of the cavernous installations is of something time-eaten but very much intact, like the mossy, ghostly remains of a shipwreck.
Originally from the Netherlands, de Vries, now 49, started collecting battle memorabilia as early as age six, when he and his family began visiting the Meuse region on annual camping trips. He scoured the countryside for relics, a lifelong fixation he likens to the “gold fever” experienced by prospectors during a gold rush. Romagne 14-18 serves as a surreal repository for the fruits of a lifetime spent scavenging, a practice that is generally discouraged for both reasons of safety and the integrity of the archaeological record.
The 12-year-old war museum is really more of an anti-war anti-museum. In lieu of explanatory panels or contextualizing information—mainstays of the modern museum—the exhibit offers an unvarnished jumble, a purposefully unannotated and anarchic mess. Unlike most other institutions, visitors are encouraged to touch and even rearrange the objects on display.
“Things are not cleaned so you can still see they survived—they really lived,” says de Vries. “I mark nothing. Because I want people to let their own imagination work.”
The wreckage of the First World War is difficult to fathom, a litany of mind-boggling statistics: over 20 million soldiers and civilians dead and just as many wounded. This region of rural France was among the hardest hit, and its low population density is ongoing evidence of the forced depopulations that occurred as a result of war. Beneath a layer of bucolic charm—mustard-yellow rapeseed fields, turreted fairytale castles—lie deep battle scars.
Trenches zigzag through the regrown forests. Battlefields have morphed into lunar-like…
The post Reflecting on the Cost of Conflict at France’s Interactive WWI Museum appeared first on FeedBox.