Neuf Brisach and Colmar

We made a spontaneous visit to Colmar this afternoon. The Badische Zeitung has been plugging Colmar's Weihnachtsmarkt in assorted articles of late--we suspect Colmar's newspaper is likewise plugging Freiburg's market, all in the spirit of promoting international commerce--so we thought we'd go check it out and pass through Neuf Brisach on the way.

Cross the Rhine in Breisach and continue west a few more kilometers, and you reach Neuf Brisach. As the names suggest, France's Neuf Brisach is much younger than Germany's Alt Breisach. In 1648, France took Breisach from Austria; Louis XIV had the military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, strengthen the town's fortifications. A 1697 treaty returned Breisach to the Habsburgers, so Louis gave Vauban the task of building a new fortress to defend the French border. Thus was born Neuf Brisach, surrounded by an octagonal defensive system of walls and gates that remains remarkably well-preserved today.

Neuf Brisach is probably right swell, but we couldn't find much to recommend it today. From the vast expanse of concrete that comprises the center square, to the piped-in organ music in the austere 18th-century Church of St. Louis, to the alcoholic in the Santa hat getting soused on a lonely park bench on a gray Sunday afternoon, Neuf Brisach offered one depressing view after another. Our ADAC guide to Elsass says the best way to see Neuf-Brisach is from a bird's-eye view, and we're convinced that's true.

We continued on to Colmar, where we drove around for half an hour with hundreds of other cars looking for a place to park. The Colmar Weihnachtsmarkt was clearly the place to be. Of course, it was the only place to be for miles around for those wanting to celebrate capitalism, since pretty much every regular store in Europe is closed on Sunday afternoons.

We barely dipped our toes into the market before deciding it was time to retreat. Whereas Freiburg's market offers an abundance of handmade crafts, Colmar's offers an abundance of factory-made seasonal kitsch. Whereas Freiburg's features real live buskers, Colmar's offers cloying pre-recorded Christmas music pumped through tinny speakers. And whereas Freiburg's offers a coordinated display of Christmas lights demonstrating German precision and restraint, Colmar's offers a multicolored array of blinking bulbs demonstrating a somewhat dizzying enthusiasm for the season.

Thankfully, Colmar also offers the stunning Unterlinden Museum, housed in an old abbey, where we withdrew for a glorious foray through 14th and 15th-century art. We especially enjoyed seeing how the gilded paintings and carved statues told us as much about Biblical stories as about 15th-century sensibilities. From one depiction to the next, Mary had long, wavy red-gold hair and pale white skin. The infant Jesus was always a miniature adult. Backdrops occasionally included European castles perched upon hilltops. In one panel, a unicorn resting in Mary's lap proved her virginity.

The crowning jewel of the collection is the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. Originally designed as a set of overlapping panels with wings that folded open to reveal multiple scenes, the altar has been disassembled so that museum visitors can view all of the layers in succession. The details are vivid, and the images are simultaneously beautiful and grotesque.

Later in the evening, we had the good fortune of stepping into the Église des Dominicains, where the exquisite, radiant altarpiece "Maria im Rosenhag" (Mary in the Rose Garden) took our breath away. Painted by Colmar's own Martin Schongauer (ca. 1450-91), the central panel is surrounded by gold-leaf filigreed wings. It is one of the most stunning paintings I've ever seen.