BRIDGE FOR THE FUTURE
The project “Bridge for the Future / Pont pour l’avenir” took place from April 2024 – December 2025, and was led by the Blue House Breisach, a memorial and educational center for the history of the Jews in the Upper Rhine region,.
This Franco-German memory project emerged to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2 so that people on both sides of the Rhine could be in conversation with one another and to open up new perspectives on the past, present, and future of the Upper Rhine Region.
The Breisach Rhine bridge serves as the historic entry point for the project. At the same time, the title represents the multiple symbolic bridges: between Germany and France, between generations, between memory and present, as well as between different experiences and perspectives.
Young people in Baden and Alsace engaged with the history and present state of the Upper Rhine region and its residents. Various approaches emerged from this- from historical research and innovative biographical work to nonverbal forms of engagements through dance.
The people affected by National Socialist injustice stand at the heart of the project. Their life stories form the starting point for encounters, memory, and shared learning across borders.
The project was successfully completed in December 2025. The experiences, materials and contributions remain documented on this website, where they are publicly accessible and available for download, so that the Franco-German connections and memory spaces that emerged can be discovered anew.
News
MEMORIAL
In October 1940, more than 5,600 Jews from Baden were deported in seven trains from Freiburg over the Breisach railway bridge to the Southern French internment camp Gurs. The project MEMORIAL follows the question: How can these people be remembered? At the same time, it is concerned with other groups that suffered under the Nazi injustice, as well as the significance of memories of wartime and painful experiences in Baden and Alsace from 1870 – 1945.
Dance
DANCING TO CONNECT – BRIDGE FOR THE FUTURE was a creative dance project with students and teaching staff from France and Germany. It commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and celebrated the solidarity between the two formerly warring countries.
The Blue House invited the internationally renowned dance group Battery Dance from New York to lead teaching staff and students in workshops where history became an embodied experience.
Biographical Work
French and German school classes were invited to compile biographies of people who suffered under Nazi injustice: known and previously unknown life stories from nearby and distance surroundings. These include resistance fighters, Sinti and Roma, Jews, forced laborers, war prisoners, people in psychiatric clinics, and Alsatians that were involuntarily recruited into the Wehrmacht.
Historical Research
For this project, historians were tasked with answering open research questions: on the deportation of the Jews of Baden to Gurs and their connection with the de facto annexation of Alsace, on the expulsion of the Alsatian Jewish population, as well as on the history of the groups of people whose fates were closely connected with the railway line.
Project Partners
