The Family

Clervaux, for a town of 1800, is well endowed in a number of areas. Aesthetically, it is hemmed in between the Our River (if there was a local hydroelectric station, it would give new meaning to the phrase Our of Power) and the steep pine-covered Ardennes hillsides.

This stretches the town along the river making it seem bigger than it is. It also has a good number of traditional small hotels, whose dining rooms constitute the main atmospheric eateries in town, but Clervaux also has two Chinese places, a relative diversity in a town that has no identifiable Jewish population.

But the one thing that Clervaux has that no one else does is a castle that is the home of the Family of Man photographic exhibition. Commissioned in 1951 by New York's Museum of Modern Art, this collection developed by Edward Steicher, a Luxembourg-born American photographer, and seen by more than 9 million viewers during its travels, includes hundreds of images of the human condition before, during, and shortly after World War II.

Arranged in a procession of sections commemorating human existence--starting with the bonding of lovers and progressing through childhood, work, eating and playing--and then into war, religion and politics, the collection is inescapably moving.

While I found two photos most compelling--Orthodox Jewish kids in an old-style religious school on the one hand, and a German child walking with his schoolbag through a bombed out city on the other, the most powerful thing about this exhibition was its datedness.

To a certain extent, the Family of Man is a bit of time travel--incorporating the kind of images one would see in postwar editions of Life and Look magazines, the great publications which provided Americans with a visual context for world events in the days before television took hold. But to a greater extent, humans and the human condition remain remarkably unchanged in the last sixty years, and there are elements of the exhibition that demonstrate this dramatically.

The castle also is home to a cozy cafe, whose proprietor offered me a complimentary glass of red wine shortly after finishing a local beer (Diekirch Grand Cru). On figuring I was American, he gushed about President Obama, and was quite surprised that I joined in the gushing. It's a pity that the Dems weren't running a candidate for Governor of Luxembourg--Obama still has coattails here.