The Forgotten Story Of Independent Saarland

hello and salute it is august 2020 i'm actually filming this the day after my video about the folkling and ironworks and that means i'm back in germany and i'm back in the region of zarland a few stops further down the line now on the 3rd of october this year germany will be celebrating 30 years of reunification between east and west and why were they split in the first place well i'm sure a lot of you know it all goes back to the end of the second world war when the allies occupied the west and the soviets occupied the east and germany ended up being split into two independent parts except that's not quite true because there was also a third part that kind of gets forgotten but it had its own flag it had its own coins and it entered its own team into an olympics and a world cup so what happened to it this is the forgotten story of independent tsarland [Music] this is the bridge over the river czar in metluck and today we're going for a scenic walk along the river and then we're going to climb up to a viewpoint and i've been told it's the most beautiful view in zarland but wait tim what since when do we just go on a nice walk surely there's going to be something else to talk about on the way like a weird railway or the world's longest something or at the very least a massive territorial dispute luckily the story of zarland is a complete mess the area around the river czar was originally settled by celtic people and then it's taken over by the romans and then the franks and then the carolinians before eventually it becomes part of the medieval kingdom of germany within the holy roman empire and that's how things stay for several hundred years except for a short period at the end of the 1600s when france occupies it and then another period at the end of the 1700s when the french come back for more and i mean literally more this time they took a whole chunk of land north of here as well anyway they controlled it right up to 1815 which if you've been paying attention is napoleon's defeat at waterloo at which point it's given to prussia and then in 1871 prussia unites with various other germanic states to create the german empire right so that's the simple bit and more about that in a moment but i'm now turning off the nice flat path along the river and heading sharply upwards on this little trail which will take us up to the viewpoint and that means it's time for a zarland scenery montage [Music] [Music] [Music] this is the tsar schleifer or the tsar loop and it is pretty spectacular some people have even called it germany's answer to the horseshoe bend although one of my london mates called it germany's answer to the isle of dogs which is what i call sarcasm but either way it's definitely worth a photo or two now sure that was a nice hike and a nice view and everything but i know what you're thinking wouldn't it be so much better if there was a baum vip fat well look at that turns out they've got one of the biggest bound vip full fats in germany but there's a cue for it so while we're waiting let's go back to the story of zalat so 1871 was really the first time that all the germans got together it was the original unification of germany and the newly formed country enjoys more than 50 years of relative peace and stability but then someone shoots an austrian and world war one happens and if you live in the tsar region your nationality is about to change five times in the next 40 years so you begin world war one as a german but at the end of the war the allies take one look at the tsar valley and its rather profitable coalfields and steel industry and say right we'll just take that off your hands for the next 15 years and they create the catchily named territory of the tsar basin so you're now under the joint sovereignty of france and the uk but at the end of the 15 years you're given a three-way referendum between keeping this arrangement unifying with france or reunifying with germany and over 90 of you vote to return home to germany only problem is it's 1935. so you begin world war ii as a german but at the end of the war the french who clearly have a bit of a thing for you somehow manage to sneak you away from the rest of allied occupied germany and create the separate tsar protectorate which means you become pretty much your own independent country but with military protection from france i mean at this point france is basically acting like a sleazy guy in a nightclub you've turned him down several times and he's still cornering you saying why do you want to be with germany you could be with me i will look after you and all you want to say is what an earth is a bound vip pulp fat well it's one of these it basically translates into english as treetop walkway and you've probably seen a treetop walkway before but this one is on steroids it's over a kilometer long and at the end it becomes a spectacular observation tower a bunch of these have been springing up across central europe over the last 10 years they're all built by one german company and this is not a sponsored video so i'm not going to wang on about it but they're kind of cool right where were we with the story oh yes france was chatting up zarland in a nightclub what is this video increasingly desperate to win the affections of the tsar people france banned all pro-german political parties introduced the french franco's currency and designed zarland this beautiful new flag those three colours remind you of anything for zarland it was time to drop some increasingly unsubtle hints they issued local versions of the french franc but with the francs written in german they entered their own team at the 1952 olympics but marched into the stadium with the west german athletes right behind them putting the tsar athletes between the two flags and then there's the story of the tsar national football side they entered the qualifiers for the 1954 world cup and as luck would have it they were drawn in a three-team group with norway and west germany in their first competitive game as a nation they beat the norwegians 3-2 in oslo but after a three-nil defeat in stuttgart and a nil-nil draw at home against norway it came down to a winner-takes-all crunch against west germany in front of a full house in zarbrucken by all accounts the tsar team played brilliantly but were on the wrong end of a couple of questionable refereeing decisions and it finished 3-1 to the germans and zarland were out of the tournament afterwards zarland's star player showed just how upset he was by saying yah i wasn't unhappy with eyes a result personally i feel german i didn't want to stop them from getting to the world cup v would have had no chance for anyway and the rest is history the west german team went on to win the final against the great hungarian side of the time and cheering them on from the stands that day were several of the tsarland players in the end that was the last time a tsar team entered the world cup or indeed the olympics in 1955 france offered the people a referendum on continued independence 67 percent of voters rejected the french plan and they finally took the hint a year later in what has since become known as the klein aveda foreign or the little reunification zarland officially returned to germany and these days zarlan is pretty german but there is still a little bit of frenchness in their identity some people here still use the very french greeting salute the local radio station is even called radio salu although of course they don't spell it the french way they spell it the metal way but more importantly perhaps for my french viewers at least zarland has more michelin stars per person than any other german state in other words 65 years since you ran this place they still have the best cooking in germany and if that doesn't make you proud to be french i don't know what will if you'd like to see the beautiful tsar loop the nearest station is metluck and then it's an hour's walk along the river plus a half hour climb to the viewpoint if that sounds too much there's a bus that does the trip or you could just drive there if you've got a car i suppose entrance to the baum vip full fat is 11 euros for adults and free for under sixes and there's loads for kids to do it's very family friendly and with a maximum slope of six percent it's designed to be wheelchair and push chair friendly too anyway thank you all for watching and i will see you soon you

Channel: The Tim Traveller

Views: 669,875

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Id: RZ3vhPYex90

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020