Zeche Zollverein is a decommissioned colliery situated about 20 minutes by tram from the main station in the city of Essen.  After 4 ½ hours there I left with the feeling that I only had scratched the surface of this outstanding site. UNESCO World Heritage listed, it is home to the Ruhr Museum and several other items of interest.  It has been described as "the most beautiful coal mine in the world".

Upon arrival you already get the feeling that you are in a special place.  The Shaft head frame and associated buildings are in themselves outstanding 1930s architecture.  Put simply, this is a beautiful structure and like many of its peers throughout the Ruhrgebiet worthy of preservation so that the most important icons of its industrial heritage are preserved.

The whole colliery: conveying systems, storage and sorting hoppers and other industrial plant have been left intact so that visitors to the museum walk through the old coal washing plant as they view the exhibits.  It is quite a unique museum experience.

The permanent exhibition at the museum tackles the question of “what is the Ruhr?”.  Having developed in the industrial age through the progressive winning of coal, the construction of coal related industrial plants such as steelworks and power stations, the cities and towns of the Ruhr were based on coal mines and factories.  This was a distinct departure from the traditional sites of major cities which hitherto were based on rivers, agricultural market towns and structures developed by the ruling classes, the aristocratic estates.  Traditional cities had centuries old churches which were the home of social power.  In the Ruhr the churches and other places of worship had to be built after the people arrived in large numbers to work the mines and factories.

In the earliest days of the industrial revolution, most of the cities were factory towns built by the company to house and even attract its workforce.  Due to the rapid pace of the growth through the 19th and 20th centuries the region was always home to a large immigrant population from eastern Germany and other parts of eastern and southern Europe.  As a result the Ruhr is Germany’s most diverse area: different nationalities and religions have been part of its fabric almost from its beginning.  So today this sees the Ruhr as being generally more tolerant of cultural differences amongst its people than other less ethnically diverse parts of Germany.  But that is not to say that there are not some dividing tendencies between native Germans and more recent large immigrant populations.  But generally the region is developing harmoniously as a multicultural society.

Another social attribute which defines the area is religion.  Initially Catholic and Protestant industrialists followed a practice of recruiting their workforces from immigrant populations of the same denomination.  Right through until the 1960s people identified more as being part of their religious community rather than through other social dimensions such as their political convictions.

Defining the Ruhr is that little bit elusive.  It is not a single administrative area within Germany but it is an area with particular characteristics in common, largely based on its industrial and working class history.  Areas of common interest include activities such as pigeon breeding, the keeping of goats (known as the miner’s cow) and football are so strongly part of the culture.  As the workers fought for and won decent working hours, well won leisure time, they then developed activities and sports to fill in this time together as a community. 

Since the 1920s the Ruhr area has been Germany’s leading football region.  Apart from its traditional large clubs such as BVB Dortmund, Schalke 04, VFL Bochum, MSV Duisburg, Rot-Weiß Essen and so on, football remains today the most popular sport at local level.  There are in excess of 250,000 players participating in local competitions.

There has been identified a specific dialect known as Ruhr German which features a lot of immigrant vocabulary and mining parlance, and less of a respect for grammar.  For example the traditional miner's greeting "Glück Auf" (roughly translated as "good luck" but meaning much more) has penetrated the general language of the area. 

The museum deals with the industrial heritage in all its manifestations:  housing, transportation, impact on the natural environment, social activities and even some of the myths about the area.  For example many of the green hills around the area are not natural geographic phenomena, but instead are the consequence of the rehabilitation of old tailings heaps from mining. 

Elsewhere land subsidence and sinkholes are an ongoing phenomenon as the earth settles into the gaps left by mining.  They are so numerous that they now provide panorama points from where the region can be observed – they now define the region geographically.

The area has two main rivers, the Ruhr and the Emscher.  The Ruhr remains surprisingly intact as an environmental system.  Largely free of industrial pollution, its beautiful lakes and courses have remained suitable for leisure pursuits.  In contrast the Emscher was disastrously polluted by the mining activity.  Even its natural flow was impacted by mining subsidence so that in the end it became a permanent 360 km long open sewage system controlled by pumps; a river stolen by man in pursuit of progress.  Today there is much work being put into rehabilitating the Emscher but it will take many more years before it might be once again considered a real river. 

Having grown during the industrial revolution, the area has through the last 30 years gone through an incredibly difficult period of economic change as the mines and factories have closed putting hundreds of thousands of works out of jobs.  It has not been a simple or easy transition to a services economy and every institution has been affected.  Even the churches have had to restructure into much larger parishes with 33% fewer places of worship as the population, and the practising religious community, have both declined in numbers.

Another room in the museum is devoted to the formation of coal and the geological phenomena which underpinned the area’s economic development.  There are exhibited there some outstanding fossils of tree trunks and sea creatures and other geological artefacts.

I did not even begin to scratch the surface of the other two levels of permanent and temporary exhibitions on the site, I did not go to the coking plant or have time to walk around the entire site.  This is simply a most outstanding museum, up there with the Louvre and the V&A Museum in London.  Well worth the trip on tram 107.

Notes:

1. In my own travels I was not even aware of the existence of the Emscher, even though it flows through the Westfalen Park, just south of Signal Iduna Park.
2. A plan of the entire site can be found here
3. An interesting blog describing the UNESCO World Heritate Site