Epilogue: The Maestro and his Music

Summary

At first glance, Colmar seems an unlikely place for thinking about the Middle East. Mostly spared the violence of the French Revolution, its colourful homes, cobblestone streets and picturesque shops were allegedly the basis for Disney's version of Beauty and the Beast. Similarly, its museums and attractions all speak to the local circulation that connects Colmar to the region of Alsace and places further afield in Germany – for example, the Unterlinden Museum with its evocation of the Issenheim Altarpiece, as well as stunning works by Holbein, Cranach and Schongauer. Locals also celebrate the quaint, folkloric work of the artist ‘Hansi’, Jean-Jacques Waltz, whose characterful depictions of everyday life in Alsace are another reminder, if any was needed, of the distinctly local, regional spirits that animate the city of Colmar today.

It is perhaps strange, therefore, that Colmar has also gained for itself a certain global notoriety in recent years. Consider, for instance, that the city provided the setting for a widely popular Chinese reality show called Chinese Restaurant. With over 200 million viewers, the show offered an occasion for droves of tourists to visit Colmar, bringing with it the arrival – likely for the first time in the city's history – of the bilingual French-Chinese menus that one finds in some of its restaurants today. The city also hosts the annual Colmar International Festival, a celebration of classical music that gathers performers and audiences from around the world. Rich and varied therefore are the afterlives of a one-time provincial town in a supposedly ‘global’ age, with connections to the world that owe much to digital communications, the growing ease of transport and international fashions and patterns of consumption.

On a casual walk through Colmar, one might not suspect that the city's relevance also extends to the international role that it has played as a site for incredible transformations in the writing of Middle Eastern history, in particular the history of Christianity in the Middle East. For over the past three decades, Colmar has proven a lieu de retour for Bernard Heyberger, the scholar whose writings fill the pages of this volume.