Заарбрюкен

Saarbrücken has changed countries often enough to stop keeping score — French, German, League-of-Nations mandate, French again, German by plebiscite — and turned the border fate into a temperament: the Saarland capital is Germany's most Francophile city, where the baguette is native, the bistro reflex genuine, and the Franco-German Garden states the reconciliation in flowerbeds. The deeper foundations are princely and industrial in turn: the baroque master Friedrich Joachim Stengel rebuilt the town for its little court in the eighteenth century — his Ludwigskirche, white and serene on its matching square, ranks with Dresden's Frauenkirche among Protestant baroque's masterpieces — before coal and steel made the Saar valley roar; the UNESCO-listed Völklingen Ironworks nearby preserves that colossal age complete.

Cinema honours a native son: Max Ophüls, master of the tracking shot, was born here, and the Max Ophüls Prize festival each January is the German-speaking world's premier showcase for young filmmakers, filling the city with premieres and debuts.

Music profits from the border too: the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken-Kaiserslautern broadcasts to both banks of the cultural Rhine, the Saarland State Theatre stages opera in its handsome 1930s house by the river, and the conservatory draws students from two republics. Saarbrücken's lesson, learned expensively: a frontier makes a fine address once it stops being a front.