Strasbourg

South, Up the Rhine, to Alsace

We took a quick detour from our initial list of cities to travel a bit up the Rhine river valley and visit Strasbourg.

Our interest was threefold:

A quick touch in Alsace as the source of Alfred Dreyfus,
- There is a Memorial de l'Alsace Moselle the description for which states:
  When you visit the Alsace-Moselle Memorial, you journey to the heart of contemporary European history. It presents the stages in the history of the people of Alsace and Moselle, who changed nationality 4 times between 1870 and 1945, with a special focus on the years between 1939 and 1945.
- Dreyfus was born in 1859, in Mulhouse, a day's travel (by foot, or cart, a few hours by car) further North on the Ill river from Strasbourg. He was eleven years old when the first of these nationality changes took place. This background explains some of the accusation of his disloyalty to France.
A hint of things to come in the story of printing,
- There's a street, a "Place" and an island named for Gutenberg.
- For some reason there was still a brochure"Les Museés de Strasbourg" circulating about an exhibit from 25 September 2003 - 31 August 2004 about writing and printing:
  Des signes et des mots; L'écriture, des origines au Moyen Âges
An exploration of chocolate.

And, as far as Jewish Strasbourg is concerned, there's plenty more to explore and learn.

The Wikipedia article on Strasbourg states (about the Musée historique, which is closed until June 2007) that it displays
"the Grüselhorn, the medieval horn that was blown every evening at 10 to order the Jews out of the city."
Some gruesome information about the Black Death