The Kladstrups fill their pages with memories of the wine war from both sides of the struggle, stories sometimes somber, sometimes amusing, that commemorate those "whose love of the grape and devotion to a way of life helped them survive and triumph over one of the darkest and most difficult chapters in French history."
Hereafter is a short extract of this book where our family is prominently featured.
[ TO LOVE THE VINES - PAGE 27-28 ]
In Alsace-Lorraine, an air of fatalism prevailed. "Here we go again," people thought. The disputed provinces, on France's eastern border with Germany, became French territory in the late seventeenth century. Between 1870 and 1945, however, they changed hands four times, passing from France to Germany, to France, to Germany and back to France.
Among those who witnessed each change were the Hugels of Riquewihr, a family of winegrowers in Alsace since 1639. "We are specialists in war and wine," said Johnny Hugel. "In 1939, we were just sitting down to celebrate out family's three hundredth anniversary in the wine business when something happened: war was declared." The party was canceled. The Hugel story, in many ways, is the story of Alsace. "My grandfather had to change his nationality four times," Johnny's brother André said. Grandfather Emile was born in 1869. He was born French, but two years later, in 1871,Alsace was taken over by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and he became German. The end of World War 1 in 1918 made him French again. In 1940, when Alsace was annexed, he was forced to become German. By 1950, when Emile died at the age of eighty-one, he was once again French.
The constant swing between nationalities resulted in a kind of regional schizophrenia, a feeling of being part French, part German, but most of all Alsatian. Selling wine under such conditions was often a struggle; it meant suddenly adapting to different economic situations. As Papa Jean Hugel once wrote, "It is very easy on a map to change the line of the frontier overnight ... but very often the new system was in direct contradiction to the previous one. The home market became the export market, out of reach through tariff restrictions and vice versa. Well-established connections were no longer available, and new markets had to be painstakingly won."
In the fall of 1939, it seemed inevitable that the whole agonizing process was about to repeat itself. With the declaration of war, the French government, fearing an attack, ordered that the city of Strasbourg, which sat just across the Rhine River from Germany, be evacuated. A few weeks later, when nothing had happened, many of the city's 2oo,ooo residents began trickling back, figuring it had been a false alarm.
The Hugels thought otherwise. They were convinced it was only a matter of time before the Phony War became a real war. They had seen how appeasement had failed at Munich the year before, how Hitler had played Prime Ministers Daladier and Chamberlain for fools. When Hitler signed a friendship and nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, the Hugels had little doubt war was just around the corner. They were proved right. "At that moment, we felt that the only way Germany could be stopped was if the United States joined the war," Johnny Hugel said. But those hopes were dashed when President Roosevelt, in October, reaffirmed his country's intent to remain neutral.
Throughout Alsace, there was a feeling of impending doom, a sense of foreboding as threatening as the clouds that hung over the region during that cold gray November. The following month, as the holiday season drew near, the festive spirit that usually existed was nowhere to be seen. Most of Alsace's villages, which looked as if they had popped out of a Hansel and Gretel storybook, remained dark. There were no twinkling lights, no music and laughter, none of the things that normally accompany the Christmas season.
On Christmas Eve, the Hugels gathered together in Riquewihr as they always did, but it was a somber affair. In previous years, the house had always been decorated, everyone exchanged gifts and then sat down to a sumptuous dinner that included some wonderful wines. But not this year. No one was in the mood. Everyone feared that this would be their last Christmas as French citizens, and Grandpa Emile, an old man of eighty, did not want to die a German. 'My mother cried the whole night," André recalled. With two of her sons nearly old enough to be drafted into the German army and one of her brothers living in Germany, there was no consoling her.
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