Ruhr area.
The photo exhibition “Myth and Modernity” aims to depict Ruhr area football as a mirror of the region. “A special relationship.”
Nobody can get past Libuda, not even two museum directors. The picture of the player in front of his lottery shop instantly turns the two into football fans. Ernst Kuzorra also ran the shop, they agree on that. But Ruediger Abramczik? Heinz van Haaren? It goes back and forth a bit and then roughly in the direction of who was the best footballer from the Ruhr area. OK, this might take a while.
But then they think about it, they are here on business: Theo Grütter, director of the Ruhr Museum in Essen, and Manuel Neukirchner, director of the German Football Museum in Dortmund. They want to talk about something else, about a joint photo exhibition. “Myth and Modernity. Soccer in the Ruhr area” is its name and is, you can’t believe it, the first comprehensive photo exhibition on the entire Ruhr area football.
450 rarely or never shown photos from around 100 years
450 photos from almost 100 years, rarely or never shown before, divided into, of course, eleven themes. Only a small group of exhibits join them. Jürgen Klopp’s Pöhler cap. Helmut Rahn’s 1954 final jersey or the “Kurze Fuffzehn” miner’s figure from Rot-weiß Essen. Otherwise, visitors can only get an idea from photos.
“Historically and to this day, the Ruhr area and football have a special relationship,” says Grütter. 80 percent of the clubs were founded or supported from mines, as is otherwise only the case in England. Mines provide pitches and groundskeepers, footballers are miners and steelworkers. The result: the land of 1000 derbies. There is magic in every push.
Foundation of the Bundesliga roughly coincides with the decline
With mining, football in the Ruhr region grew – and then smaller again. After four championship titles in the 1950s, “the founding of the Bundesliga in 1963 roughly coincided with the decline,” says Neukirchner. The legendary Oberliga West, in which a dozen colliery and workers’ clubs had played, disappears; the heyday of clubs like SV Sodingen or Sportfreunde Katernberg is over.
A VfL Hörde (district league) still lists as the highlight of its club chronicle that in 1931 it was the first Dortmund club to defeat Schalke in a championship game in the Glückauf Arena. Long ago. Important survivors in the Ruhr area? Just a handful. But they still play a major role in attitude towards life and identity. Nowhere else are there so many traditional clubs that have many spectators even in the lower leagues, says Neukirchner. The VfL Hörde stadium is the third largest in Dortmund.
“We have a very large treasure trove of football motifs”
Grütter and Neukirchner had always thought about a joint project over the years: combining regional competence and football competence. Originally they wanted to show the black and white photography of the myth in Essen and the colored modernity in Dortmund. But “that would have torn the exhibition apart,” says Neukirchner: “Showing the pictures here at the Zollverein gives them a special depth.”
“Employees noticed that we have a very large treasure trove of football motifs,” says Grütter. It should be 60,000 for football culture in the Ruhr area. And that’s mostly not the sports and star photography of the younger decades, but reportage and social photography from deep in the 20th century. Where football just pops up randomly, but constantly. Typical example: soccer players or children playing football in front of an overwhelming industrial backdrop.
The first official event in the run-up to the 2024 European Football Championship
Of course, there is always a large part in the word myth: It wasn’t like that at all. “A lot is glorified in memory, we also serve that,” says Heinrich Theodor Grütter, “but we also show the whole profanity on ashes”. Neukirchner: “Football in the Ruhr area is always a journey into one’s own memory, into one’s own self.”
“Myth and Modernity” is the first official event in the run-up to the 2024 European Football Championship. It will be played in Germany, including in Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund. The exhibition in Essen is “attunement and not accompaniment”, and it will be over again on February 5, 2024, long before the European Championships. It is open to visitors from Monday, May 8, 2023 at 10 a.m. Since Neukirchner and Grütter have long since agreed who was the best ever. Nobody can get past Libuda.
More articles from this category can be found here: Rhine and Ruhr
