The Chapel of Peace stands in the so-called no man's land, a strip of land that belongs to neither Germany nor France, between two boundary stones dating from 1830 in the open countryside between Oberperl and Merschweiller. The Chapelle de la Paix and the high plateau, from which you can reach the Château de Malbrouck in Manderen, are now a popular hiking destination. At night, there is a fantastic view of the Moselle valley.
The initiative for the Peace Chapel came from the citizens of Perl, Oberperl and Merschweiller in Lorraine themselves. They erected the remarkable building themselves - the municipalities of Perl and Merschweiller bore the material costs - as a sign of European friendship and reconciliation after times when Germans and French were supposed to regard each other as "hereditary enemies" by government decree. The chapel commemorates the war victims of both sides, some of whom were cousins and relatives who became enemies during the war. It is a memorial to peace between the European peoples who have fought each other countless times over the past centuries.
The extent to which the region has suffered from wars can be seen on one of the boundary stones, which commemorates the Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648, the Reunion Wars from 1667 to 1697, the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. This was followed by the First World War from 1914 to 1918 and the Second World War from 1939 to 1945.
The Peace Chapel was inaugurated on 8 August 1999. The municipality of Merschweiller then invited people to a festival of encounters. Since then, every year in mid-August, a multilingual service has been held in the Peace Chapel, in which visitors pray together in German, French and Luxembourgish for peace in Europe and throughout the world. Cross-border neighbourliness and friendship in the borderless border triangle is also evident here.
