Ruhr

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ruhr, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, holds more than 5 million people as of 2017, and not one of its cities is in charge of the others. Ask where its administrative centre is and there is no answer. Each city keeps its own administration, and the closest thing to a shared body sits in Essen. By population, this is the largest urban area in Germany and the third largest in the European Union. Yet for much of the world, the name itself belongs to a river. How did a region of farms and castles turn into a continuous urban landscape with no capital? Why did English speakers only begin using its name in the twentieth century? And what happens to a place built on coal when the coal stops paying?

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• 2. A Name That Came Late

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  A standard English reference work published in 1911 gave the word Ruhr exactly one meaning, and it was a river. That river was described as an important tributary joining the lower Rhine from the right bank. The industrial region we now call the Ruhr entered English usage only after the First World War. In 1920 the International Labour Office published a report called Coal Production in the Ruhr District. By 1923 a Canadian trade journal was running an article on exports from the Ruhr district of Germany.

  In those years, the short form was not yet settled. English and American newspapers in 1924 were still writing about the Ruhr Valley or the Ruhr District. One 62-page London publication from 1923 seems to have pushed the short form into use. It was titled The Ruhr: The Report of a Deputation from the Transport and General Workers Union, and its authors were Ben Tillett, A. Creech-Jones and Samuel Warren. Even so, another report on a union delegation that spent a fortnight in the district, printed in The Economic Review that year, still said Ruhr Valley.

  Reference books were slow to catch up. The 1926 edition of that same English reference work added a second entry, describing Ruhr as the name given to a district of Westphalia. As late as 1948, an American agreement defined the word by pointing to areas listed in an annex. In 1967 the authors Lawrence K. Cecil and Philip Hauge Abelson complained that "the average person uses the term 'Ruhr' indiscriminately as the Ruhr River or the Ruhr district, two entirely different things." They added that the river is only one of about half a dozen in the district. Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary still treats Ruhr as the river, and prefers Ruhrgebiet for the region, with Ruhr Valley in second place.

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• 3. Cities Without a Centre

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  Munich grew by absorbing the villages around it, and one dominant city came to anchor the whole. The Ruhr never followed that pattern. During the Industrial Revolution its boroughs and urban districts grew quickly, side by side, each independent of the others. The result is a region that, on a map, could pass for a single city, because no visible gap separates one borough from the next.

  The line of cities runs from west to east: Duisburg, Oberhausen, Bottrop, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum, Herne, Witten, Hagen, Dortmund and Hamm. Four largely rural districts, Wesel, Recklinghausen, Unna and Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis, are counted in as well. In 2020, Dortmund counted 587,696 residents, Essen 582,415 and Duisburg 495,885. The densest of the ten largest cities is little Herne, with 3,100 people per square kilometre on just 51.41 square kilometres. Hamm sits at the other extreme, with 814 per square kilometre. Across the central Ruhr the average is about 2,100 per square kilometre, or roughly 5,400 per square mile, which is modest by German standards.

  The region is hemmed in by water. The river Ruhr marks the south, the Rhine the west and the Lippe the north, while the Bergisches Land lies to the southwest. According to the Regionalverband Ruhr, 37.6 percent of the land is built up. Another 40.7 percent is still farmed, and forests cover 17.6 percent. The four rural districts account for much of that green. Open suburbs and a few farm fields also survive between the cities, though in many places the borders have dissolved into continuous development.

  One river shows how the landscape is being repaired. The Emscher was once virtually an open sewer, and parts of it have been restored to a natural state. Along it runs the Emscher Landscape Park, built on replanted brownfield land. The park links north-south strips of parkland that regional planners laid out in the 1920s, forming a green belt that stretches east to west between the cities.

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• 4. From Hellweg to Coal

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  Along the Hellweg, a medieval trade route running from the Lower Rhine toward the mountains of the Teutoburg Forest, two towns prospered. Dortmund, a free imperial city, was the trading and cultural centre. Duisburg shared in the wealth the road brought, and both towns belonged to the Hanseatic League, the same league that gave Lufthansa its name. The surrounding land was divided among the County of Mark, the Duchy of Cleves, the State of Berg and the territories of the bishop of Münster and the archbishop of Cologne. All of it sat inside the Holy Roman Empire. Villages and castles dotted a mainly agrarian countryside, and its loess soil made it one of the richer corners of western Germany.

  Underneath that soil lay the region's real fortune. Coal-bearing layers from the upper Carboniferous period define its geology. Along the river Ruhr the seams reach the surface in a strip, then dip downward toward the north. Beneath the Lippe they lie 600 to 800 metres down, or 2,000 to 2,600 feet. Each layer is one to three metres thick, or three to ten feet.

  The push to exploit it began next door. In the late 18th century, early industry took hold in the Wupper Valley in the Bergisches Land. From 1807 to 1813 the area belonged to the kingdom of Westphalia, a client state of France whose king was Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon. By around 1820, hundreds of water-powered mills were turning out textiles, lumber, shingles and iron. In workshops in the hills, skilled workers made knives, tools, weapons and harnesses.

  Steam changed the arithmetic. As machines grew larger and switched from water to steam, locally mined coal and charcoal turned scarce and costly. The Bergische industry began ordering coal from the new mining area along the Ruhr, and expensive railways were built through the hilly Wupper region to bring it in. By 1850 almost 300 coal mines were running in and around Duisburg, Essen, Bochum and Dortmund. Coal went abroad or was baked into coke for blast furnaces that produced iron and steel. This was also the period when the name Ruhrgebiet became common.

  Mining then followed the coal. Before the deposits along the river ran out, the industry shifted north to the Emscher and finally to the Lippe, drilling ever deeper shafts. Locks on the Ruhr at Mülheim turned that town into a port. With the Cologne-Minden railway of the late 19th century came several ironworks inside what is now the city of Oberhausen.

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• 5. Newcomers and Pit Talk

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  Towns of only 2,000 to 5,000 people in the early 19th century grew, within a hundred years, to more than 100,000. By 1870 over 3 million people lived in the Ruhrgebiet, and this young coal district had become the largest industrial region in Europe. Skilled mineworkers were recruited from other regions, and unskilled labourers followed on their own. Mining firms built "miners' colonies" to house the skilled men.

  From 1860 onward, Polish speakers from Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and Posen arrived in large numbers and became known as the Ruhrpolen. They were treated as second-class citizens. In 1899, young Polish workers in Herne rose in revolt, and they later founded a Workers' Union. The wider movement, called Ostflucht or flight from the east, brought up to 500,000 Poles, Masurians and Silesians to the Ruhr during the nineteenth century. Smaller groups came from France, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and it has been claimed that people arrived from over 140 countries.

  Today almost all their descendants speak German as a first language. For various reasons they do not identify with Polish roots or traditions, and often only a Polish surname remains as a trace of the past.

  The speech of the region carries its own history. Names for the local German include Ruhrdeutsch, Ruhrpottdeutsch and Ruhrpöttisch, though no single uniform dialect really exists. It is better described as a working-class sociolect, shaped by the dialects found in the area and shifting even with a worker's profession. The mining tradition left the deepest mark. Many locals call their home the "Pott," a derivative of "Pütt," the pitmen's word for a mine, which is related to the English "pit." Others say "Revier." That word survives in the name of the football rivalry between Borussia Dortmund and FC Schalke 04, the Revierderby.

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• 6. Arms, Uprising and Occupation

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  At the Essen company F. Krupp A.G., the workforce swelled from 40,000 to 120,000 or more during four years of the First World War. The Ruhrgebiet served as Germany's central weapon factory. Its labour included women and forced labourers.

  Peace brought armed upheaval. In March 1920, nationalist and monarchist forces backed by Freikorps units tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic in the Kapp Putsch. A general strike that all but shut down Berlin ended the attempt there. In the Ruhr, however, the strike set off an armed revolt that aimed to replace the republic with a soviet-style council republic. In what became known as the Ruhr Uprising, the Ruhr Red Army took control of the industrial area. The Reichswehr, assisted by Freikorps units, put down the rebellion in early April 1920. An estimated 1,000 insurgents and 200 Reichswehr soldiers died in the fighting.

  Foreign troops arrived next. In March 1921, French and Belgian soldiers occupied Duisburg, which under the Treaty of Versailles lay in the demilitarized Rhineland. In January 1923 the occupation spread to the entire district, because Germany had failed to meet part of its reparation payments. The German government answered with passive resistance, letting workers and civil servants refuse orders from the occupiers. Production and transport came to a standstill, and the financial damage helped drive German hyperinflation.

  Passive resistance was called off in late 1923. Germany then carried out a currency reform and negotiated the Dawes Plan, which led French and Belgian troops to leave the Ruhr in 1925. The episode left deeper wounds. The Weimar government's failure to resolve the crisis helped right-wing parties grow.

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• 7. Bombs and Dismantling

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  On the 7th of March 1936, Adolf Hitler sent 30,000 troops into the Rhineland in what he and other Nazis later admitted was a huge gamble. They conceded that the French army alone could have destroyed the Wehrmacht. France passed the problem to Britain, which concluded that the Germans had the right to "enter their own backyard," and no action followed. At the League of Nations, only the Soviet delegate Maxim Litvinov proposed economic sanctions. With that, all restraint on German rearmament fell away. France's eastern allies, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, drew a bleak lesson. If France would not defend its own border, it would not defend them. On the 16th of October 1936, Belgium repudiated its 1921 alliance with France and declared absolute neutrality, and in October 1937 it signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.

  The cost of that rearmament came due from the air. Bombing of the Ruhr between 1940 and 1944 destroyed 30 percent of its plant and equipment, against 15 to 20 percent for German industry as a whole. A second battle of the Ruhr began on the night of the 6th to the 7th of October 1944 with an attack on Dortmund. The raid of the 12th of March 1945 sent 1,108 aircraft against that city, made up of 748 Lancasters, 292 Halifaxes and 68 Mosquitos. It was a record for a single target in the entire war. More than 4,800 tons of bombs fell through the city centre and the south. In April 1945 the Allies also trapped several hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops in what became known as the Ruhr Pocket.

  Peace brought a different assault on the region's industry. The Ruhr fell inside the British occupation zone, where the Level of Industry plans abolished all German munitions factories and the civilian industries that could support them. Industries with military potential were severely restricted. As a condition for creating the Federal Republic of Germany, an international body called the Ruhr Authority was set up to regulate Ruhr coal and steel. By 1950, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants in the west, and steel capacity had fallen by 6.7 million tons. Dismantling ended in 1951, and in total less than 5 percent of the industrial base had been taken.

  In 1951 Germany's coal and steel were pooled into the multinational European Coal and Steel Community, which limited the growth of German control. Western planners in the Cold War expected any Red Army thrust through the Fulda Gap to make the Ruhr a primary target. Meanwhile the Saar region, home to much of Germany's remaining coal, was handed to French economic administration as a protectorate in 1947. It did not return politically to Germany until January 1957.

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• 8. After Coal

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  Growth of 9 percent a year in the 1950s and 1960s put the Ruhr at the centre of the Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle, as the boom created heavy demand for coal and steel. The good years did not last. Demand for coal had already begun to fall after 1958. When a worldwide crisis and soaring oil prices struck after 1973, German unemployment jumped from 300,000 that year to 1.1 million in 1975. The Ruhr was hit hardest. Its easy-to-reach mines were exhausted, German coal could no longer compete, and lower-cost suppliers such as Japan undercut its steel. The welfare system caught the unemployed, and many factories shed workers and turned to high-profit specialty items. The region moved from traditional heavy industry toward services and high technology, and its air and water pollution are largely a thing of the past.

  The old mines and furnaces became the setting for a new identity. The Council of the European Union chose Essen, representing the whole Ruhr, as a European Capital of Culture for 2010. The Industrial Heritage Trail, or Route der Industriekultur, links sites such as the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen, the Gasometer Oberhausen and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. The German Mining Museum stands in Bochum, and the region has more than 50 museums in all. There are three major opera houses and more than 10 theatres and stages. Each spring the Klavier-Festival Ruhr stages 50 to 80 events of classical and jazz music.

  Learning has also found a home here. With 22 universities and colleges and more than 250,000 students, the Ruhr has the highest density of further education establishments in Germany. Ruhr University Bochum, TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen formed an alliance called UA Ruhr. Students at any of the three may attend lectures and seminars at the others without paying a visiting student fee. The alliance keeps liaison offices in New York City, Moscow and São Paulo.

  Moving between all these cities is easier than their sprawl suggests. The Ruhr contains the longest tram system in the world, with tram and Stadtbahn services running from Witten to Krefeld. One of the densest motorway networks in Europe forms a grid of four east-west and seven north-south Autobahns, the first of which opened in the mid-1930s. The tram network was once larger still. It was possible to travel from Unna all the way to Bad Honnef without using a railway or a bus.

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