The handling of industrial culture in the Ruhr is top in the world. After pioneering achievements in the past, the course for the future must be set
When the Scottish crime writer Val McDermid drove through the Ruhr area, she narrowly escaped a rigid jaw: McDermid, who as a child had spent a lot of time with her grandparents in a Scottish mining town, drove back to her youth here: “With us”. , she said, “don’t you see any more of the old collieries, all leveled to the ground, erased.”
Apart from the need for water management, today’s Ruhr area has even less to do with mining than Bavaria has with merry alpine dairymen and happy cows on lush alpine meadows. And yet the idea of flying briquettes and soot-smeared miners’ gear is apparently still circulating in the rest of Germany. Why else wouldn’t one hear a sentence from foreigners more often than the one that some here are already angry about: “But that’s green here in the Ruhr area!” You’re about to show your fingernails to make it clear that they don’t have any either have more black edges.
Unique selling point coal and steel
The fact that foreigners still expect smoke and soot from coke ovens may also have something to do with the industrial culture. In other words, the preservation of old factories, chimneys, blast furnaces, winding towers and colliery halls as original as possible, which amazed Val McDermid. And the illusion allows one to start mining coal again right away.
The industrial culture contributes enormously to historical awareness, to the real self-confidence of the Ruhr area. And for a long time it was what merchants call a “unique selling point”, a marketable USP. With him, the tourism marketing of the area has soared to unimagined heights – holidaymakers on heaps instead of in alpine regions, who would have thought that three decades ago! The “Industrial Culture Route”, which consists of dozens of partial and themed routes, has developed into an unexpected blockbuster – and is being copied in other regions, for example in the Rhine-Main area or as the “North Bavarian Industrial Route”. Saxony has also discovered its industrial heritage and, of course, there is now a “Berlin Center for Industrial Heritage”.
Ruhries: Once under the wheel, now on top
When it comes to dealing with its industrial heritage, however, the Ruhr area is still far ahead. It is no coincidence that experts travel from China to Chile to Oberhausen and Meiderich when they want to know how best to deal with the structural and technical legacies of the industrial age. What experiences are there? Which wrong turns to avoid, which shortcuts to take.
However, the industrial culture would not even be worth half as much if the people in the area did not make use of it themselves. Just look at all the proud, fascinated faces during the “extra shift”, the “Night of Industrial Culture”, which incidentally also proves year after year that a sensibly developed local public transport system would also be used. The Ruhr area is amazed at itself.
Ruhr area “from behind”
And the new cycle paths on the old railway lines not only open up new insights for tourists. Countless cyclists can now see the Ruhr area “from behind” where the elevated colliery and steelworks railways once ran. And that too from above. You wouldn’t believe how many allotments and backyards must have once been on the railway lines. And many people from the Ruhr area still enjoy the fact that they now have priority on the short routes that were once built for the steel steeds of industry with their two-wheelers, which have long since ceased to be “bicycles”.
When it comes to industrial heritage buildings, however, there is a big difference. When people in the Middle Ages started to build a church or even a cathedral, they did so with the certain knowledge that they would not live to see the completion of the building themselves. They were doing it for a higher purpose, perhaps thinking they could get a little closer to paradise by toiling away. Things were different with the buildings of the coal and steel industry in the area: with collieries, coking plants and gasometers it was clear that they were not works for eternity, but rather temporary buildings.
Zollern colliery castle against Zollverein colliery monster
Sometimes the mining companies still tried to impress each other, their customers and their own workforce with “model mines” – as in the case of Dortmund’s Zollern II/IV colliery, whose machine halls were erected around the turn of the century in an unclad steel frame construction. Their palatial wages hall is an exemplary architectural way of intimidating those who collect their weekly wage packets here. It was the first all-electric colliery in the district, also otherwise equipped with the latest technology, with Art Nouveau elements that were even more en vogue than the neo-Gothic decorations on some facades.
The fact that Zollern II/IV was placed under monument protection shortly before it was demolished in 1969 was a pioneering act – until then, industrial buildings had disappeared from the surface without a trace. However, in 2001 it was not the “Zechen-Schloss” in the Bövinghausen district of Dortmund that became a World Heritage Site, but rather Zollverein 12 and 1/2/8 in Essen-Katernberg. A monstrous rationality turned to stone, a high mass of symmetry and right angles. One of his reasonably profitable calculations was that the brickwork was only simple. One knew more than one suspected that the coal deposits under Zollverein would also be exhausted after about half a century. exploited.
No “cathedrals of work”, but sober functional buildings
The monstrous monument of a highly efficient overexploitation of geo-resources and human labor is therefore not only a monument, but also a memorial for the excesses of an era that bought an unprecedented level of security and prosperity for a maximum number of people with a maximum of carbon release, which means the highest danger and insecurity for future generations.
Preserving the old industrial buildings was a new idea in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The monument preservation impulse, which assumes that we cannot know what future generations will find important, beautiful and worth preserving, has so far only applied to castle chapels, keep towers and half-timbered houses. In the Ruhr area, even the venerable town halls of Essen and Dortmund (the oldest stone town hall north of the Alps) had to make way for department stores and shopping arcades. It made sense to set up industrial museums in the abandoned pits, halls and towers of coal and steel. They weren’t “cathedrals of work”, as people like to call it today, as euphemistic as it is inaccurate, as if the health-damaging, underpaid labor had been a kind of religious ritual and not bare drudgery for the benefit of a thin layer of the privileged and with no prospect of paradise. They were mostly sober, functional buildings whose size alone made them seem superhuman.
Trade fairs, fashion shows and flea markets, day-care centers and offices
The fact that the old industrial buildings were preserved was an act of sustainability long before the word became the antonym for the overexploitation and consumption culture of the industrial age. Fearing the void, when there were more than enough industrial museums, a festival like the Ruhrtriennale was crammed in. The Ruhrtriennale has served its purpose as a pioneer plant for such gigantic buildings as the Bochum Centennial Hall or the Maschinenhalle Zweckel in Gladbeck; the buildings were upgraded at a cost of millions, so that today mundane things such as trade fairs, fashion shows or flea markets can also take place there.
The buildings of industrial culture can use a lot more of these conversions, with which the “grey energy” once invested in construction is retained. There was a conversion concept for the old central heating system at the Lohberg colliery in Dinslaken, which wanted to turn it into a day-care center while preserving the already dilapidated facade in accordance with the requirements of the monument. The machine hall of the former Pattberg colliery in the north of Moers was approved for “high-quality office use” after it had been empty for 23 years. The construction company that moved in there is proud of the unique character of its new office building.
Zollverein swimming pool – and not just for the “extra shift”
Industrial culture also needs a lot more of such conversions and further uses beyond museumisation as a trademark for the district. They are a step forward in dealing with industrial architecture that is as practical as it is promising for the future. The factory swimming pool at the Zollverein World Heritage Site can symbolize this. A thorn in the side of monument preservation purists – but of great appeal and benefit not only for tourists, but also for the people in the district.
It would be a step towards industrial culture for the 21st century: sensible in terms of climate technology, useful for people and a way not only to preserve history, but to integrate it into the present in a lively way. Not just once a year on the “extra shift”, but in the permanent shifts of everyday life.
More articles from this category can be found here: 75 years of WAZ
