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A concert with friends in northern France

For Timo Eigen, the day trip to northern France was a complete success.

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A concert with friends in northern France

For Timo Eigen, the day trip to northern France was a complete success. "I found it exciting to give a concert in our partner city," said the 23-year-old student and hobby cellist on the return journey. On January 22, the "Junge Symphonie Kaarst" gave a two and a half hour concert in La Madeleine near Lille, with German, English and French songs from various musicals. At the end, the French hosts called out “encore-encore” for an encore from the 35 musicians and four singers. "Music connects," praised Kaarst Mayor Ursula Baum in La Madeleine. "That was shown again today."

The Kaarst delegation drove the 300-kilometer route by bus over partly snow-covered autobahns to celebrate the town twinning, which had existed since the late 1980s. And exactly on January 22, 60 years after the signing of the Élysée Treaty, which was intended to seal the Franco-German reconciliation after several bloody wars.

"The Élysée Treaty was the engine that started the Franco-German engine," said Europe Minister Nathanael Liminski on Monday evening at a ceremony in the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. The CDU politician, together with the French Consul General Etienne Sur, had invited representatives from society, politics, business, municipalities, culture and science.

Liminsky emphasized that the cruel war of aggression waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin against Ukraine shows every day how fragile peace in Europe is. "Right now we have to stand together and act together - great feelings must turn into great deeds." The countries and regions of Europe must "grow even closer together and defend their common values", the minister appealed.

Liminski recalled that even before the signing of the Élysée Treaty, Herne and Hénin-Beaumont had already signed the first town twinning with a North Rhine-Westphalian municipality in the post-war period. Since then, the friendship has continued to grow.

There are now more than 260 town twinnings in NRW, including Cologne/Lille, Münster/Orléans, Dortmund/Amiens, Duisburg/Calais and Aachen/Reims. There are also school partnerships, exchange trips, music projects, sports competitions and cultural events. “The signing of the Élysée Treaty was bold, revolutionary and visionary. Today we have to rekindle this enthusiasm from back then,” said Liminski. If there is a problem at national level, regional cooperation must and can help "to keep the European engine running".

Since 2004, NRW has maintained a bilateral partnership with the Hauts-de-France region, in which La Madeleine is also located. There are French cultural institutes in Aachen, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Essen and Cologne. In addition, there are now numerous integrated German-French courses in which the universities of Aachen, Bochum, Bielefeld, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Münster as well as the universities of applied sciences in Aachen, Dortmund and Münster are involved. Around 20,000 French people live in North Rhine-Westphalia. This means that every seventh Frenchman living in Germany is at home in NRW.

One problem for mutual relations, however, is the waning enthusiasm for the language of the neighbors: In Germany, fewer and fewer students are learning French as a foreign language. According to the Federal Statistical Office, in the school year 2021/22 there were 1.29 million of the total of 8.44 million pupils at general schools. In NRW, at 11.5 percent, only about a ninth of the students took French as a foreign language in 2021/22. According to the Ministry of Education in Düsseldorf, a total of 222,444 pupils from all types of school had French as a subject in the 2021/22 school year, but the total number was slightly higher than in the previous school year.

At the same time, according to the Ministry of Education, there is no other country with a comparable network of school and town partnerships. On request, 492 contacts with France were maintained through schools alone. "It is important to continue to intensively cultivate the partnership between our two countries in the current crisis-ridden times," said School Minister Dorothee Feller (CDU). Schools could use this to strengthen contacts between young people. And the French lessons are “of central importance in order to arouse interest in the language and culture of our neighboring country in our children and young people”. As a result of these measures and offers, French is the most frequently chosen foreign language in NRW after English, which is compulsory.

Interest in German as a foreign language is also declining in France. In the end, only about 15 percent of a year group opted for German as a second foreign language; in the mid-1990s, the proportion was still around 23 percent. German is considered to be particularly difficult and sometimes elitist, three quarters of schoolchildren in France now choose Spanish, which is considered to be easier.

How important at least basic knowledge is for mutual understanding was also shown last Sunday in La Madeleine. There, the actor and theater educator Leon Bluhm, who comes from Kaarst, acted as a kind of compere in French, leading the audience through the plays, which came from the musicals “Notre Dame de Paris” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” in an extremely entertaining way. "I first took French at the Realschule, then later at the Gymnasium in Kaarst," says Bluhm, who now lives in Münster. For the concert he refreshed his knowledge again. "We then wanted to do it right."

"It was a really great performance," said 39-year-old French Céline, who had German lessons at school for five years. "This partnership is enriching for both cities." Mayor Sébastien Leprêtre also emphasized this in La Madeleine. Unfortunately, the exchange suffered somewhat from the corona pandemic. A group of French schoolchildren visited Kaarst in the autumn. On a larger scale, however, both sides last met almost three years ago, when the 30th anniversary of the town twinning was celebrated. Now it is important to revive the contacts, explained Mayor Leprêtre. "And the fact that we have now met again on the 60th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty is an encouraging sign."

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