ESSEN, Germany – Can a world region pull off a metamorphosis? If you think there’s no hope for regions like America’s own Detroit, just check the audacious transformation of Germany’s Ruhr area.
Once the Ruhr was a crucible of massive coal and steel production – Germany’s weapons forge for the tanks, cannons, planes and rifles of Hitler’s demonic Third Reich. From the mid-1800s onward, the Ruhr ravaged its natural landscape for ever-greater levels of production. Firms like Krupp made fortunes. But the mining and metal-making left a bitter harvest of massive smoke from blast furnaces, deep dust, slag heaps and filthy waters.
Yet today this same Ruhr area is breathing fresh with high culture and popular art. Amazingly, it won coveted recognition by the European Parliament and Council of Ministers as a “European Capital of Culture” for 2010.
Indeed, where blast furnaces did their polluting work and molten iron once flowed, a stunning array of artists of all genres has been performing this year. Many of their stages have been the massive settings of the very mining and steel plants of yesteryear, a juxtaposition of today’s human talent with yesterday’s towering gaunt forms of raw industrial power.
The “convincing motif” that won the Europewide recognition was “change through culture, and culture through change,” says Fritz Pleitgen. A veteran and well-known foreign correspondent, and a former president of the European Broadcasting Union, Pleitgen agreed to head up Ruhr.2010, the key organizing committee, on the condition that he’d not tolerate an iota of political interference.
And why? Almost as great a miracle as the cultural breakthrough, he notes, was the agreement of the Ruhr’s 53 separate cities and towns – “closely and historically united by rivalry, disaffection and envy” – to let Essen, the largest Ruhr municipality, take the lead to apply for the cultural capital title in the name of all.
And what a celebration it’s been. Consider the scene last January when Ruhr.2010 opened its headquarters with a music and dance show at the Zollverein – a UNESCO-recognized World Heritage site, known for its dramatic central tower and conscious design to be the world’s most advanced coal mine and processing plant. A snowstorm made the opening all the more dramatic.
In May, about 400 yellow balloons with great long ribbon tails, rising up to 80 meters, were lit up by night. Hovering over the region’s former coal mine shafts where thousands of workers once toiled in filth and ever-present danger, the balloons symbolized the new efforts to restore a landscape that industry had deformed.
Thousands of residents took part in a “!SING” day of song, “LOVEparade 2010” and, most spectacularly, a summer day when a busy motorway running through the Ruhr was closed for a day of singing, dancing, theatrics, and 3 million people sitting down to eat on a 60-mile line of picnic tables.
The shared celebrations – the new brush with culture for working-class people trying painting or singing or sculpting for the first time ever – are likely to have a long impact on a blue-collar region that didn’t have a university until the 1960s.
But no one pretends all this has solved core Ruhr problems: While the region strives for a new future in advanced energy techniques and related fields, it has high numbers of elderly and retired, an unemployment rate of 12 percent to 13 percent, and a growing immigration population (Turks and others) that were hardly recognized in the year of culture celebrations.
Will 2010’s big influxes of curious European tourists continue? Will the 57 cities and towns that united behind Ruhr.2010 return to their quarrelsome old ways? Will the federal government in Berlin make sufficient steps to open opportunities for this massive urban region (5.4 million people), which it’s historically left split among three of its lander (states)?
Continued cash outlays will be necessary, for example, to finish the clean-up of the River Emscher, for years a “no-go” area clogged with industrial and human waste since the mining and steel production era. A heroic start’s been made, a huge pipe system begun to let the river run fresh, tied to new trailway systems. But money must also be found to pump water to prevent the collapse of land over old mine sites.
Still, a return to the Ruhr’s exploitive, smoke-clogged yesterday seems highly unlikely. Just one example: Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to experience sites like the 117-meter high Gasometer, once a gas storage plant for surrounding blast furnaces. Enter today and you’re in a breathtaking space for solar, theater and art exhibitions. The new Ruhr is like that. As one of the judges for the Capital of Culture competition put it: “The Ruhr no longer breathes dust, but the future.”
Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
