Mundat Forest

The Upper Mundat Forest is an area of roughly that stretches north and west from the Alsatian town Wissembourg. Its highest point, at , is the Hohe Derst near the hamlet of Reisdorf. The area includes the remains of Guttenberg Castle, c. 1150. It is part of the cross-border UNESCO biosphere reserve Pfälzerwald–Vosges du Nord. The Lower Mundat Forest is an area of roughly , east of Wissembourg in the plain formed by the Rhine rift. Geographically it is part of the Bienwald. Its highest elevation is . The Upper and Lower Mundat Forests together make up the still-forested part of the Mundat, the former possessions of the 7th–16th century monastery and principality at Wissembourg. To distinguish it from the similar but unrelated Mundat at Rouffach further south, it is also known as the Wissembourg Mundat or, confusingly, the Lower Mundat – the Rouffach Mundat being the Upper Mundat. ==History of the Wissembourg Mundat==

Wissembourg was initially a monastery (Weissenburg Abbey), founded around 630–660 and part of the Benedictine order from the 8th century. In 760, Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short granted immunity from services to the monastery and its possessions in field and forest. These possessions, the Mundat, had dimensions of about and included the villages of Altenstadt, Schleithal, Oberseebach, Steinseltz, Oberhoffen, Cleebourg, Rott, Weiler, The Mundat Forest was known in Carolingian times as the Sylva immunita. In 974 the monastery, along with the Mundat, obtained the independent status of an Imperial abbey headed by a prince-abbot. In 1524 the monastery was heavily encumbered, so Pope Clement VII transformed it into a collegiate church, and from 1546 it stood under the authority of Speyer. ==After secularization==

The forested areas remained the property of the church until they were secularized after the French Revolution. After Napoleon, the border between France and the Palatinate (then under Bavarian rule) was fixed by the Treaty of Paris in 1815. With the exception of Wissembourg, all the French territories north of the river Lauter fell to the Kingdom of Bavaria. Since then the border has remained unchanged in this area, except for Alsace twice being German, between 1871 and 1919 and again de facto between 1941 and 1944. There was, however, an anomaly concerning land ownership. As a result of the treaty the town of Wissembourg had of forest on the German side of the border, in co-ownership with the Bavarian state. It also owned on the French side, jointly with the French state. This situation was rectified through land exchanges in the 1930s, in part through a treaty signed in 1959 that became effective retroactively as of 1938. ==Anomaly after World War II==

In 1946, the administration of the French zone of occupied Germany made an area of in the German part of the Upper Mundat Forest administratively a part of France, in order to guarantee the water catchment area for Wissembourg. but a correction in 1949 ensured that only uninhabited land was affected. A formal annexation, transferring also the territorial sovereignty to France, seems to have been planned originally, but it was never executed. In 1984 the final agreement was reached, essentially trading administrative sovereignty against private ownership of the same area. In an exchange of diplomatic notes, the French government agreed to repeal the relevant clause of Order 212. In return, the West German government committed itself to transfer to France the land ownership over the public land in the area. France also obtained perpetual wood, hunting and water rights for the area as well as compensatory land for the castle, which it did not get. Once France, the United States and the United Kingdom had agreed, the Bundestag was able to repeal the clause, which it did effective in February 1986. The transfer of land ownership to France according to the German regulations was completed in 1990. While the attempts to normalize the situation were ongoing, there was vocal protest by a number of West German citizens who rejected any solution that acknowledged the French claim. In the 1960s one objector pressed criminal charges, a retired appellate court president drew public comparisons to the Soviet occupation zone, and a law journal published criticism. In 1988 a retired notary requested that a local court appoint him to represent the interests of the German Reich against the Federal Republic of Germany. He argued that since the area in question was under French administration when the West German state was founded in 1949, the Weimar constitution was still in force in it. ==Notes and references==