When I first saw Essen a few months ago, hitching a ride on a car (ride) sharing app and arriving on a rainy evening from Stuttgart, it looked like any other second-tier German city. It’s a little town in northwest Germany (in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, NR-W) close to the Netherlands; drive a few hours west and you will hit the Dutch border towns.
But what my Blah Blah car driver said a few hours earlier lingered with me. “I have to constantly answer questions about why I’m travelling from Stuttgart to Essen on work,” he had said. What he implied was that people asked him why he couldn’t find a job in the glitzy Stuttgart where employment is rife but come to its poorer cousin Essen? He had no dilemma and his situation was simplistic — he worked for a major retailer and his job involved transfers; now he’s positioned in Essen.
Nevertheless, the underlying theme presented by that question is significant to understand the city. Though standing tall as it is, as if everything is business as normal, Essen is an example of a post-industrial city and its economy is nowhere close to what it once was. Just a few hours south is Dusseldorf, the capital city of the state of NR-W, a city preening in its own charming image of a liveable city, thanks to its wealth gifted by a healthy industrial sector and the economy fuelled by a disproportionate amount of Japanese expats — the second in all of Europe, next to London.
Little coal mines
Essen mined coal tirelessly in the 1960s and powered the German economy. Add to it a once-flourishing iron and steel industry, the city was even the face of industrialisation in Germany at the height of its success.
Even as the economy soared, the success took a toll on the city’s environmental health. “It’s still possible to find little coal mines in and around Essen while you are taking a stroll,” Frank Martini, a photojournalist, told me. Martini remembers clothes left out to dry turning black and window panes gathering coal dust, while growing up in the 70s.
After the dirty coal industries that flourished and fuelled its economy left, Essen struggled to scramble to its feet. The struggle is protracted, and the effects fractured the city’s economy. Even today it has one of the highest unemployment rates in Germany. Though, the Essen of today bears almost no signs of its industrial past. I say almost because the relics of its past in coal are rusting on the outskirts of the city.
The Zollverein Industrial Complex, once a coal coking plant, is now a popular museum and a Unesco world heritage site. Many of the erstwhile miners who employed in Zollverein are now tour guides. The boiler house of the coal mine is also home to the renowned Red Dot Design museum.
Clean waters
There have been other minor achievements too — a section of the once polluted Ruhr river, called Baldeneysee, has recently been opened for public, after a team of marine biologists and aquatic ecologists certified it fit for swimming. Year 2010 saw the city named as the European Capital of Culture. In a deliciously ironic twist, the city even won a European Green Capital tag in 2017, a nod to how much its environment has been redeemed and to urban projects focused on bringing more green cover to the city.
Seated in a newly founded vegetarian café, frequented by students in central Essen, media professor and sociology expert Oliver Zöllner, remembered how Essen helped other German states like Baden Württemberg and Bavaria during its heyday.
Now fresh in the wake of their own success in automobile and electronic industries, those other states frown upon Essen as if it were a dusty little grey mouse. Not to paint too grey a picture, while coal’s economic legacy has long left Essen, the city’s environmental fortunes have successfully turned around.
On the second day of my trip, I took the dizzyingly high escalator to the Zollverein complex to the city’s museum. Much more than the industrial artefacts of the museum, what caught my eyes was the bright red couch that sat in the foyer of the museum. Part of an art project called ‘heimat.nrw,’ the red couch has travelled all around the state collecting stories from various individuals. Now, it’s seeking to do the same with museum visitors. In front of the red couch is a camera on automatic mode that clicks pictures of visitors who can leave a message or say something about themselves for the project.
I positioned myself on the couch and clicked a picture. After which, I wrote a message in the touch screen: “Thanks for greening yourself, Essen. The world needs more post-industrial cities like you, who recognise the future needs to be greener for it to be better.”
Stuttgart-based writer Prathap Nair is as happy on the road as he is tending to his houseplants, which often breed fruit flies.
