The Bundeseisenbahnvermögen (BEV), aka the German Federal Railway Authority, is offering an exciting if ominous real estate opportunity: half of the ruins of the Ludendorff Bridge are for sale, price negotiable. The two looming, blackened, massive masonry towers in the town of Erpel on the east bank of the Rhine and their twins on the west side are all that remains of the railway bridge built during World War I to aid in the movement of troops and supplies to the Western Front.

It was barely completed when the war ended and the Allies occupied the strategic site. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties, the German military was excluded from the entire territory, and specifically from controlling any access points on both sides of the Rhine. It wasn’t until 1936 with the Remilitarization of the Rhineland under Hitler that the Ludendorff Bridge returned to German control.

Germany would enjoy that control for less than a decade. On March 7th, 1945, the U.S. Army’s 9th Armored Division took the bridge. It had been damaged by Allied bombing and German attempts to demolish it before the Allied troops could use it. The underpowered demolition charges had failed to destroy the bridge, giving the Americans the opportunity to move six divisions, 50,000 troops, over it, establish a bridgehead on the east bank and build a pontoon bridge to move the rest of the US forces. On March 17th, the bridge collapsed, killing 28 U.S. Army Engineers who were attempting its repair.

Here is period color film of the bridge before and after it collapsed. The focus is on the spans of the steel bridge itself which is, after all, the key part of any bridge, but the towers on both banks are also in high relief.

The bridge was never rebuilt, and over the years the towers were used for different purposes. Most recently, the east bank towers were used by the Erpel cultural association as galleries, but as of now, they are hardly fit for human habitation, no matter how temporary. From the BEV’s sale listing:

Heating: No
Water supply: None
Windows: Weathered until 6 years ago. Then installation of shipbuilding foil on wooden frame to protect against invading water and small animals. Partially wall-mounted parapets, some bricked windows. […]

It is in need of major refurbishment and due to the danger of falling facade parts, the duty of care must be observed: pedestrians, cyclists and car traffic runs in the immediate vicinity. No residential object.

Notwithstanding its challenges, the bridge has interested buyers, or so says the BEV spokesman. Adding to its dark allure may be the 1969 film The Bridge at Remagen, starring George Segal, Ben Gazzara and Robert Vaughn, which tells a highly dramatized version of the bridge’s role in World War II. It’s not remotely historically accurate, of course, but war movies are adroit mythmakers. It has also been featured in several video games, most recently Call of Duty: Finest Hour.

The towers in Remagen on the west bank of the Rhine are not for sale. They currently host a museum dedicated to the bridge’s history in wartime. Anybody who wants an unheated, waterless, crumbling, lawsuit-waiting-to-happen insurance nightmare that is legally enjoined from being used as housing but comes with a darn cool military history has until May 18th to submit a bid.

British Film Institute researchers have discovered a rare cache of Technicolor silent film fragments, including flapper icon Louise Brooks dancing from her first credited movie role in The American Venus (1926). The film is lost, with only the trailer still known to be extant. This short clip of Louise Brooks is not a fragment from the movie itself. The footage appears to be a screen test of some kind, possibly a costume test.

Conservation Specialist Jane Fernandes found the fragments in the BFI National Archive in a reel of The Black Pirate (1926) that had been donated to the BFI by The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1959. A swashbuckling adventure written by and starring Douglas Fairbanks, The Black Pirate was the third feature-length film to be shot entirely in the early two-tone Technicolor technology. It is a milestone of color feature film and one of Fairbanks’ greatest performances.

The BFI restored its copy of The Black Pirate in 1970 at the behest of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., but technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since then. Fernandes was examining the original reels for a new restoration project focusing on early Technicolor when she noticed that the celluloid lead on the reel was edited together pieces of film from other movies. Louise Brooks dancing for The American Venus was accompanied by clips from The Far Cry, The Fire Brigade and Dance Madness, all from 1926.

In the same print of Black Pirate, there is also a test shot for historical drama Mona Lisa (1926) starring Hedda Hopper, the ‘Queen of the Quickies’ and legendary acerbic Hollywood gossip columnist for the LA Times, whose biting wit was recently portrayed by Judy Davis in award-winning TV series Feud. The fragment shows Hedda Hopper as Mona Lisa in repose, one assumes, about to be painted by Leonardo da Vinci. No other material from Mona Lisa is currently held by any film archive.

Other extracts from a number of early Technicolor musicals were discovered in a batch of 1950s cinema ads for a local television shop in Chingford, North East London that were donated to the BFI National Archive last year. All dating from 1929 these fragments comprise footage from Sally, which only exists in black and white, a previously lost section of Gold Diggers of Broadway, as well as short clips from Show of Shows and a trailer for On With The Show! In addition a short extract donated by one of the BFI’s curators in 2007, has now been identified as Paris (1929). […]

Potentially coming from test shots, trailers, alternative takes and outtakes these short sequences may not have appeared in the final complete films or have been used for promotional use.

The BFI has compiled the snippets in a single video and uploaded it to their YouTube channel. In a voiceover, BFI curator Bryony Dixon explains the background of the film, why it survived and its significance today. You can see Louise Brooks looking like an Erte’ figurine come to life at the 1:14 mark.

The 19th century ship’s hull that washed up on Florida’s Ponte Vedra Beach on March 28th continues to prove how unusual it is. Environmental archaeologist Lee Newsom took samples of the hull and examined them under the microscope, the first laboratory analysis of the shipwreck’s wood. Her examination found that it is predominantly American Beech (Fagus grandifolia), a tree native to the Eastern and Southern United States.

“I rarely ever see that,” she said. “So it was a surprise to see that instead of oak.”

She said oak is what ships are usually made of.

“So maybe the usual oak was not available for one reason or another. So whoever constructed this ship shifted to beech,” Newsom said.

The wood is also cut from the tree trunk in different ways, which leads her to ask, “Were the larger trees no longer available? So you shift to this? It means timber was in short supply.”

Newsom said the wood is in fantastic condition, so it’s revealing even more.

“That’s telling me, this whole section has been buried under the sediment since it wrecked probably,” Newsom noted.

Except for the weeks it spent on the beach getting cooked by the Florida sun. Archaeologists were concerned about the condition of the wood before it was removed from its exposed position, so it’s great news that they managed to keep it wet enough to preserve it on a cellular level for analysis.

Preliminary visual examination noted the presence of both hardwood and softwood. Ships are typically made of hardwoods for durability, and the combination suggested it may have been constructed by a small shipwright in the South where softwood is more abundant and less expensive. Beech is a hardwood, but it is found in South and the type of cuts indicate cost was a factor, so the hypothesis still stands.

Possible origins of the wood include Georgia, the Carolinas and the Gulf Coast. Additional analysis will have be done to make a more precise determination, and it may never be narrowed down to a single location, nevermind to where the ship was built. Newsom will continue her research and, as a granddaughter of a shipwright, hopes against hope that she’ll be able to identify the builder. It’s not very likely, however.