On Thursday 7 July, after a brief visit to the Deutsches Panzer Museum at Munster, I set out for Dortmund. The museum holds a wonderful collection of tanks, reconnaissance vehicles and self-propelled artillery and is well worth a visit for military enthusiasts. The motorways in the Cologne area were very busy, with frequent roadworks. While overtaking a lorry along the narrow lanes of one such section, I misjudged the amount of space I had to my left and heard a sudden, loud impact: I had lost the left-hand wing mirror! This was very inconvenient as it was the ‘overtaking mirror’ while driving on the continent. Now I would be reliant on the main rear-view mirror and exaggerated glances over my shoulder whenever I overtook anything or entered a motorway from a slip road.
By early evening I was in Dortmund at the home of my friend Pascal Frai. Pascal and I had met in Hólmavík last August and we remained in contact via Facebook. I had expected to stay for just one night, but Pascal enthusiastically explained to me that there was plenty to see in the Ruhr and insisted that I stay for as long as I wished. Plenty to see in Ruhr? I was surprised; I had expected it to be rather grey and uninteresting, an industrial area in decline. Thanks to Pascal’s enormous hospitality, I was really able to make myself at home. The following day (Friday 9 July), we both had work to do, so I worked on translations with my laptop at the kitchen table while he was away at his work as a journalist.
At about five thirty in the afternoon he returned, beaming with pleasure: he had been able to get tickets for an event called ‘Die Lange Nacht der Industriekultur’. This sounded pretty intriguing and Pascal promised that it would be quite a magical experience. Having finished work, we drove to a waterside complex of bars and restaurants at the Neue Mitte (New Centre) in Oberhausen where I got my first taste of what has been made of the industrial Ruhr since its decline some decades ago. Some of the old, canal-side features had been preserved, such as cranes, brick-built warehouses and items of machinery, but otherwise it was a bright and bustling centre of leisure activity. It was a warm, sunny evening and we took a table right next to the water for our meal of steak and chips. Ducks and turtles swam in the clear water just to my right while to my left, local people strolled in a relaxed manner, enjoying the beginning of the weekend.
Having finished our meal, we drove to the North Duisburg Landscape Park to take photographs as the sun gradually sank in the west. The park is actually an industrial landscape consisting of the huge and dinosaurian remains of a blast furnace complex. Having no commercia lpurpose now, it has been preserved for the purpose of leisure; because it has all been made (relatively) safe, the public can wander at will among the gargantuan relics as nature rapidly takes over these man-made works. The brick canyons where coal was once stored have been turned into climbing walls, and there are even diving facilities somewhere in the park although I did not see them. I was reminded of Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’.
After sunset, the walkways, towers and gantries were illuminated by functional spotlights and artistic lighting in red, green and blue, and it was then that one could feel the ghosts of the past and imagine the roar and clangour of the iron making processes in the past.
The next evening, we returned to take more photos and to witness a spectacular firework display as part of the ‘Long Night of Industrial Culture’, then moved on to Oberhausen for a guided tour of Magische Orte (Magical Places) at Oberhausen. Even more amazing, perhaps, than the landscape park, an old, cylindrical gasometer has been converted into an exhibition centre for art and culture. It is breathtakingly vast and over 100 metres high. The floors are mainly of concrete and the ceilings on each floor are still adorned with pipework as another example of ‘industry as art’, but the exhibition was about the magical places of the world. Our tour guide led us from one giant photograph to another, speaking about the creation stories of world mythology and the essential similarity between all of them. The account was in German and was able to understand clearly at first; as the guide warmed to his subject, however, he spoke ever more rapidly and I lost the thread. I was pleased to see that some of the photos in the exhibition were of places I had visited in Iceland.
On the second floor, rising high overhead was a life-size model of a rainforest tree. It reminded me of Yggdrasil. Try as I might, to get a photo that conveyed its majesty, this proved impossible; it was simply too big. Nevertheless, it was to appear much smaller as we ascended to the roof of the gasometer in a glass elevator. We passed the bole and then the crown until we finally saw it far below us.
Outside on the roof, 104 metres above the ground, we were able to view the entire Ruhrgebiet by night, culminating in another spectacular display of fireworks.
It was marvellous to see the way that the ugliness of heavy industry had been imaginatively turned into an expression of art after its demise. On the following day, by way of contrast, Pascal took me to his birthplace in the green, rolling hills of the Sauerland. Here I saw another piece of history – the Sorpe Dam. This was one of the three dams subjected to bombardment by ‘bouncing bombs’ in the famous Dambusters raid of 1944. Unlike the Ede and Moehne dams, the Sorpe dam was damaged but not destroyed, being of more solid construction. We decided to walk the perimeter of the reservoir, a hike of about 10 miles (16 km). It was a warm day and we were quite glad of the rain showers to cool us as we walked among the beech and oak trees surrounding the lake. By the time we returned to the car, we were hot, sweaty and tired, having kept up a pretty rapid pace, but it was good to get the exercise.
That was my last day in the area as I had to leave for Saarbruecken the next morning. Pascal is a good friend and a generous host, and I look forward to welcoming him to my home one day – wherever that happens to be!