If Colmar’s railroad station may look not as small-town France as you might expect, there’s both a surprising and not-so-surprising reason. The not-surprise is that it doesn’t look French because it was built by the Imperial German Railways in 1905-6, while Alsace and Lorraine were still under German rule.
The more surprising reason is that it wasn’t exactly modeled on German stations of the period, either. It almost perfectly re-creates the look of the station in Gdansk, Poland, built a few years before by the same German railroad architect in a style that was intended to blend a revived Polish medieval style with modern spaces.
But the outside is not the only surprising bit in Colmar; it has something Gdansk doesn’t: cartoon-style painted scenes on its big glass windows. The controversial—because unusual—1991 glass paintings are by Jean LeGac, who used themes from early movies and ‘railway novels’ to show two young women in danger and, in one panel, tied to the tracks awaiting rescue.
The original windows, destroyed in 1944 by an ammunition train explosion, were fairly conventional colored stained glass.
