Nennig

• 1. Introduction

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  Nennig is a village in the Saarland, in western Germany. It belongs to the municipality of Perl and sits on the river Moselle. Directly across the water lies Remich, which is in Luxembourg. A village on a river border like this tends to attract attention from more than one direction. Nennig is no exception. Why is a place this small known beyond its region? Who held authority over its streets and fields before it became part of modern Germany? And what happened when the largest war of the 20th century reached the Moselle?

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• 2. Roman Mosaics

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  Nennig is known for a Roman villa, and the reason is the floor. The villa contains mosaics that have survived in remarkably good condition. They were excavated in the 19th century, which means the village's best-known treasure was brought back into daylight only a little over a hundred years before our own time. The source does not say who the villa's occupants were or how large the estate grew. What it does make clear is that the mosaics are the reason the name Nennig appears in accounts of Roman remains on the Moselle. Long after Rome, the village would have to answer to rulers of a very different kind.

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• 3. Shared Rule

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  For a period, Nennig had not one lord but three. The village was a condominium, a place governed jointly by several authorities. Those authorities were the bishopric of Trier, the duchy of Lorraine and the territory of Luxembourg. Lorraine's share changed hands along the way, and from 1766 it belonged to the Kingdom of France. Such an arrangement meant that no single power could treat the village as entirely its own. The arrangement ended in 1794, when Revolutionary France annexed Nennig. By then the old shared system had run out, and the village was absorbed into a new political order.

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• 4. War Damage

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  In late-1944 and early-1945, Nennig became a place that armies fought over. During the Second World War the village changed hands several times in those months. Each change meant a new round of fighting in and around its buildings. The result was devastating. Nennig was almost completely destroyed. The villa's mosaics had been dug out of the ground generations earlier, but the houses of the living village had no such protection. That winter of repeated seizures was the last of the many shifts of control that marked the village's long history on the Moselle.

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