May 8, 2020 was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II. To mark this occasion, the new special exhibition at the Historical Museum of the Palatinate explores rapprochement and friendship between France and Germany.
Both countries repeatedly faced each other as enemies up until 1945. The French army arrived in the Palatinate at the end of World War II as a victor over and a liberator from Nazism. Even though the French armed forces in the Palatinate formed a closed community until their ultimate withdrawal in 1999, there were manifold points of contact between the French armed forces, civilian personnel and locals.
Town twinnings that improved Franco-German relations started being entered in the mid-1950s. Over eighty cities and towns in the Palatinate alone still maintain partnerships with French municipalities. Dialogue between German and French citizens ultimately produced lifelong friendships, romances and marriages, constituting the most tangible feature of peaceful cultural contact.
The exhibition displays photographic documents and objects of cultural memory from German and French private and public collections.
