Wuppertal

• 1. Introduction

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  Wuppertal sits in a steep river valley in western Germany, and it moves in a way no other city does. Since 1901, a suspended monorail has glided over rooftops and above the River Wupper, carrying passengers eight meters above the streets and twelve meters above the water below. That single engineering choice says something fundamental about this place: when the terrain refuses to cooperate, Wuppertal goes overhead.

  The city did not exist until 1929, when five separate communities merged into one. Its population has swelled past 355,000, yet two-thirds of its municipal area remains green space, making it the greenest city in Germany. Aspirin was patented here. Friedrich Engels was born here. A choreographer named Pina Bausch built one of the world's most celebrated dance companies here. How did a narrow industrial valley produce all of this, and what held those separate towns together long enough to become one city? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Valley Built for Industry

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  Before the Ruhr became the industrial heartland of Germany, the Wupper Valley claimed that title. Textile mills and blacksmith shops lined the river, and their hunger for coal was so intense that it actively encouraged the expansion of the coal mines to the north. The Wupper Valley, along with the Ore Mountains, was among the first regions anywhere in Germany to industrialize at scale.

  The two main towns, Elberfeld and Barmen, had fused into a single continuous urban area by 1850, even though they remained legally separate cities for decades more. Elberfeld served as the historic commercial center; Barmen leaned more industrial. Together they formed what the source describes as the dominant industrial agglomeration of northwestern Germany. During the 20th century, cities with more favorable topography, chiefly Cologne, Dusseldorf, and the Ruhr area, overtook Wuppertal in scale. The steep hillsides that once concentrated industry along a single river corridor became a structural limit on growth.

  One consequence of that topography was the suspended monorail, built precisely because the valley walls left no room for a conventional rail line at ground level. The same physical constraint that capped the city's industrial ceiling also gave it its most distinctive landmark.

• 3. Merger and a New Name

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  On paper, Wuppertal was born in 1929. The merger folded Barmen and Elberfeld together with the communities of Vohwinkel, Ronsdorf, Cronenberg, Langerfeld, and Beyenburg into a single administrative unit. The population more than doubled overnight as a result. The initial name, Barmen-Elberfeld, was replaced in a 1930 referendum with Wuppertal, which translates plainly as Wupper Valley. The new city was administered as part of Prussia's Rhine Province.

  The city's shape is unusual enough that urban planners have a term for it. Running in a long line along the river rather than spreading outward from a central hub, Wuppertal is a linear city, a form dictated entirely by the steep hillsides on either side of the Wupper. Its highest point, the Lichtscheid hill, reaches 351 meters above sea level. The total municipal area covers 168.41 square kilometers, with elevations in the river valleys starting at around 100 meters and climbing past 350 meters in the surrounding uplands.

  The two distinct communities have never fully dissolved into one another. Even today, the western sections near Vohwinkel speak Bergish varieties of the Limburgish language, a dialect the locals call Platt, while the eastern communities speak Southern varieties of Westphalian. In those eastern areas, locals call the city not Wuppertal but Wupperdaal.

• 4. War and Its Remains

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  From the 5th of July 1933 to the 19th of January 1934, the Kemna concentration camp operated inside a former factory on the Wupper in the Barmen district. It was among the earliest camps the Nazi Party established to imprison political opponents after coming to power. That same year, 1934, Protestant Christians opposed to the so-called German Christians met in Wuppertal and adopted the Barmen Declaration.

  By order of the 10th of October 1938, the 1st Light Division of the German Army was formed in Wuppertal. That division took part in the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the event that began World War II. During the war, the city housed a Nazi prison and two forced labor subcamps connected to the prison in Remscheid-Luttringhausen. An SS construction brigade also operated in the city; its prisoners were Poles, Russians, French, Czechs, Romanians, Hungarians, and Greeks.

  Allied bombing destroyed roughly 40 percent of the city's buildings. Yet much survived. The Olberg district, Germany's largest original working-class district and now a protected historic monument, kept its name from the 1920s when it continued burning oil lamps while surrounding bourgeois neighborhoods had already switched to electricity. The Brill district preserves some of Germany's largest concentrations of Grunderzeit villas, the mansions built by industrial entrepreneurs during the second half of the 19th century. On the 16th of April 1945, the US 78th Infantry Division under Major General Edwin P. Parker Jr. captured Wuppertal against what the source describes as scant resistance. The city passed into the British Zone of Occupation and then into the new state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

• 5. The Schwebebahn

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  In 1950, a circus brought a young elephant named Tuffi aboard the Wuppertal Schwebebahn as a promotional stunt for the Althoff Circus. The swinging motion of the monorail unsettled the animal. She trumpeted, charged, and plunged forty feet into the River Wupper below. Tuffi survived with minor injuries and lived until 1989.

  That story, absurd and vivid, has followed the Schwebebahn ever since. The suspended monorail had been operating since 1901, running on tracks eight meters above the streets and twelve meters above the river. In 1999 it experienced its only fatal accident to that point. New cars were introduced beginning in December 2016. CNN named the Schwebebahn as a reason to visit Wuppertal, listing the city among twenty places worldwide to see in 2020, alongside the architectural diversity and the Nordbahntrasse, a 22-kilometer cycle route across the city.

  The railway's global uniqueness earned it an international counterpart. Since 2018, the Wuppertal Suspension Railway has been twinned with the Shonan Monorail in Japan's Kanagawa prefecture, which connects Kamakura and Fujisawa. Both railways ran a joint campaign to mark the twinning that year.

• 6. Aspirin, Engels, and Invention

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  Felix Hoffmann was working at a Bayer facility in Wuppertal when he synthesized aspirin. Bayer patented the compound in 1897, and the drug that would become one of the most widely used in human history carried the stamp of this valley city. Friedrich Bayer himself, who had founded the paint factory that became Bayer AG, was born in 1825 and died in 1880; the company that bears his name grew up here.

  Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen in 1820. The city preserves his memory at the Engels-Haus, an 18th-century building architecturally typical of the region, which holds a permanent display connected to the co-author of The Communist Manifesto. Engels lived until 1895.

  The Vorwerk Kobold vacuum cleaner also originates from Wuppertal. The Von der Heydt Museum, one of the city's major art galleries with works spanning from the 17th century to the present, holds a particular distinction: the first of Pablo Picasso's works ever shown publicly was displayed there. Sculptor Tony Cragg founded the Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, a sculpture park with an exhibition hall, in the city. Hans Peter Luhn, born in 1896 and died in 1964, was a computer scientist from Wuppertal; so was Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher of science born in 1891.

• 7. Dance, Sport, and Culture

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  Pina Bausch was born in 1940 and died in Wuppertal in 2009. The choreographer built the Tanztheater Wuppertal into what the source describes as a world-famous center of modern dance. Her company's presence drew international attention to the city for decades, and the 2011 film Pina placed the dance sequences in and around Wuppertal, using the elevated tram itself as both setting and backdrop.

  In football, Wuppertaler SV reached the Bundesliga after promotion in 1972 and in their first top-flight season finished fourth, qualifying for the UEFA Cup. Their European run ended with a first-round defeat by Polish side Ruch Chorzow. The club spent seven seasons total in the top flight before dropping away. The women's basketball team of Barmer TV was even more decorated, winning eleven German championships and twelve German Cup titles, with ten consecutive doubles between 1993 and 2002. In 1996, they became the first and so far only German side to win the European Cup, beating Italy's SFT Como in the final.

  In roller hockey, RSC Cronenberg's men have collected 13 German championships and nine cups; the women won ten championships and nine cups. Wuppertal hosted the World Championship in roller hockey in 1997 for men and 2004 for women. The city also co-hosted the 1998 FIBA World Championship for Women as one of seven host cities across Germany.

  In film, director Tom Tykwer, born in 1965, shot his 2000 movie The Princess and the Warrior in Wuppertal. The city also appears in Wim Wenders' 1974 film Alice in the Cities, and the play Die Wupper by Else Lasker-Schuler, born in 1869, is set in Elberfeld. In 2031, Wuppertal will host the Federal Horticultural Show.