LMT #137: The Zollverein coal mine, Essen, Germany – Stefan Berger

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Stefan Berger
Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum

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In 2001 the Zollverein coal mine assembly complete with cokery received UNESCO world heritage status – at the time one of only a handful industrial heritage sites that had received the ultimate distinction in heritage status. For the past fifteen years it has been the jewel in the crown of an industrial heritage landscape in the Ruhr valley of Germany that seeks its match anywhere in the world. Dozens of coal mines, steel works, slagheaps, canals, working-class housing estates and other material and immaterial forms of industrial heritage provide the foundation of a memoryscape that is tied not so much to the working-class history of the region but to the region’s two dominant industries – coal and steel respectively.

Zollverein itself was established in 1847 right next to the railway line built in the same year and ensuring the smooth and easy transport of coal. A cookery was added in 1866. The colliery was continuously extended before the First World War and its production capacity reached a new height in the war with 2.5 million tons of coal produced annually. By the late 1920s 12.000 tons of coal were produced daily, and Zollverein had become one of the most modern and one of the biggest collieries in the world. Its Bauhaus design also earned it the nickname of the ‘most beautiful colliery in the world’.  Almost miraculously it survived the heavy bombing of the Ruhr in the Second World War almost undamaged, and by 1953 it was once again the most productive colliery in the Ruhr and in the entire West Germany with the production of 2.4 million tons of coal annually. The coal crisis after 1959 meant a gradual reduction in the capacity of Zollverein until it was eventually closed in 1986. The cookery survived until 1993. After it was put under preservation already in the 1980s, the place, where, in its heyday thousands of miners toiled, became a place of industrial heritage directed by the Foundation Zollverein. The Ruhr museum as major regional museum of the Ruhr area moved into the coal washery of the old mine in 2010. Today around 700.000 visitors, many from abroad, visit the museum and the territory of the old mine where they can choose between a wide variety of different guided tours.

What visitors to the Zollverein site and to hundreds of other such sites learn is above all a story of economic prowess, of technological progress, of the ingenuity of engineers and entrepreneurs, and yes, the workers who worked the mines and the forges also do get a mention, but how precisely are they represented?

The coalminers were there before the steelworkers, and their early history ranging back into the early modern period, receives a lot of attention. The history of the coal miners in the Ruhr, is one closely tied to the  Prussian state that took over the Ruhr region after the Napoleonic Wars. As Prussian state employees, they had a high status as a respected profession, enjoyed an eight-hour day, decent pay and reasonable working conditions. In return they were loyal subjects of the Prussian crown. With the privatization of the mines and the liberalization of the economy from the 1860s onwards, the miners were finding themselves thrown to the vagaries of the market and witnessed their working conditions and their pay deteriorate just as their general status in society went downhill. As their petitions to the king remained unheard, they, with some delay, sought to organize their own interests by forming trade unions. However, the coal owners of the Ruhr valley were impeccably opposed to unions and did everything possible, usually with the support of the authorities, to retain their position as ‘masters in their own house’. Hence it was only after another lost strike in 1889 that the miners’ were able to found a permanent union organization, the so-called Alter Verband. However, miners were soon divided ideologically between Social Democrats, Catholics and even a small Polish trade union organizing the many Polish-speaking miners that had moved to the Ruhr valley in pursuit of better living conditions and faced tough discrimination there. 

The story about the steel workers is slightly different: they had never enjoyed the kind of state protection that the miners enjoyed before the full onset of liberal capitalism in the 1860s and 1870s. They formed their first permanent union organization at about the same time as the miners, in 1891. After the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws in Germany in 1890, which had heavily repressed all socialist organizations, union movements generally thrived in the 1890s. Yet they, by and large, failed, especially in the coal and steel sector, to bring the employers to the negotiating table. The latter, however, not just closed ranks against unions and sought to repress them. They also sought to tie the workers’ loyalty to their respective companies by offering them a whole range of benefits and rewards, including good housing, accident and sickness insurance, company pensions, company hospitals, subsidized food stores and others more. The Krupp company in the Ruhr was one of the exemplary paternalist companies in Imperial Germany that prided itself in looking after its workers in return for the workers’ loyalty to the company.

Under these conditions it is not surprising to learn that the Social Democrats could not become the dominant political force in the Ruhr region. Social Catholicism and National Liberalism were both more influential, the former especially among Catholic workers of the region. Furthermore, the extraordinary economic success of Imperial Germany did not leave the German workers unaffected who began to feel strongly German in the new nation state, so much so that, after the outbreak of the First World War, the overwhelming majority of them felt unable to oppose the war. Even the Social Democrats voted unanimously in support of the war in the German Reichstag in September 1914.

Especially in the Ruhr museum, the visitors learn a lot about the political developments linked to working-class history. Thus, they learn that Social Democrats have long before 1914 been divided about the political path to be pursued – reformist and gradualist or revolutionary. The war soon exacerbated these divisions which ultimately led the party to split. In the Ruhr both the reformist Majority Social Democrats and the more revolutionary Independent Social Democrats has their strongholds in different cities of the region. When the German revolution of 1918 brought an end to the defeated Imperial Germany, both parties formed a unity government which did, however, not last. When the left of the Independent Socialists together with other radical minority groups formed the Communist Party of Germany in January 1919, it had hardly any support among the workers in the Ruhr, but this would change rapidly.

If the Communist rising in early 1919 centred on Berlin, where it was also defeated, the Ruhr took centre-stage in revolutionary developments in Germany in 1920. In the aftermath of the right-wing Kapp putsch against the young Weimar Republic, a Red Ruhr Army formed in the Ruhr region, as workers armed themselves and sought not only to defend the republic against the right but also to push the republic more in the direction of a social republic, as many of them were disappointed by the limited gains brought about by republican Germany. However, disunity within the ranks of the Red Ruhr Army and the brutal repression of the workers on the hands by right-wing paramilitaries in the service of the newly established republic, left the Red Ruhr and the so-called ‘Ruhr struggle’ an episode in the early history of the Weimar Republic, albeit one that we again certainly learn about in places like the Ruhr museum.

However, the main story soon returns to Germany’s economic fortunes and the role of the mining and steel industries of the Ruhr in furthering them. With the stabilization of the republic between 1924 and 1928, it looked as though Germany would recover fast from the catastrophic First World War. Zollverein was modernized to become one of the biggest and most modern coalmines in the world. It signalled to the world that Germany was back as one of the foremost economies of the world. Its patriotic name –  the German customs’ union (Zollverein) was widely seen as a precursor to German unification in 1871 – seemed ideal to represent this rise from the ashes. However, the Great Depression put an end to these hopes, as German workers in the Ruhr and elsewhere in Germany bore the brunt of the mass unemployment that accompanied the worst recession in twentieth-century global history. 

The rise of the National Socialists in Germany is not ignored by the industrial heritage landscape of the Ruhr. Visitors learn that it cannot be reduced to being a result of the economic crisis, but the latter surely was a contributing factor. However, the Nazis knew that many workers were not convinced by their new regime. The Social Democratic and Catholic milieus had been among the most resistant to the overtures by the Nazis. The German Communist Party had developed into the strongest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. All of this is why the National Socialists in government started a deliberate charm offensive towards workers, especially in regions of industry such as the Ruhr and in distinctly ‘red’ cities like Berlin. Although this charm offensive, characterized by racialized welfare, and various advantages promised to workers, from motorization to cheap holidays, was right from the start accompanied by terror against all those who resisted the Nazis, there is considerable evidence that the Volksgemeinschaft ideal proved attractive to many workers, including those of the Ruhr.

After another lost world war, with the Nazis gone, the Ruhr region was again central in allowing the economic rise of Germany to become a central motor for a European success story, thus the central message of the industrial heritage narrative at Zollverein and the Ruhr more generally. The Ruhr region was also the reason for the formation of the European coal and steel community, the origins of today’s European Union. Hence, an important story that the heritage landscape of the Ruhr tells is that of a triumph: without the Ruhr no rise of Germany to become the strongest economy in Europe just before the First World War; without the Ruhr no phoenix-like rise from the ashes of both the First and the Second World Wars and without the Ruhr no European Union. Regional pride combines with national pride in this storyline.

With regard to the fortunes of the German workers, the new forging of industrial relations meant the establishment of a corporatism that gave the trade unions an important say in the running of companies. The works councils became powerful institutions in the companies with strong representation of unionists on company boards. Workplace democracy was to accompany the political democracy of the Federal Republic, and a spirit of social partnership was to result in a conflict partnership between capital and labour that benefited both. Thus, the story goes, Germany had found the formula which allowed its national economy to become one of the most successful ones in the world with workers getting their share of the accompanying prosperity.

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Nowhere was that industrial democracy stronger than in the Ruhr region, where the British occupying authorities had already established equal representation of workers and management on management boards in the coal and steel industries of the region in 1947. 

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Although there has been concern for some years now about more and more employers voting with their feet to leave the social partnership and codetermination model and although unions have no doubt become weaker, they remain powerful organizations in German society with strong influence over both the Social and Christian Democrats. With regard to the story about the workers told at sites such as Zollverein, what is stressed is that in the Ruhr, unions, together with employers and the state, were successful in coordinating a transition out of coal and steel that was not only ecologically sustainable but also socially just. The Ruhr is one of the poorest regions of Germany today, but it has not turned into a German rust belt. By comparison with other regions in the global north, dependent on coal and steel, it has been relatively successful in reinventing itself, diversifying its industrial base and moving towards a service-sector economy. Hence, we encounter in this narrative another triumph – this time one of successfully handling deindustrialization which did not leave workers behind but protected them from the vagaries of the free market.

I have here provided in a nutshell the main narrative that visitors encounter about the workers of the Ruhr, when they visit the Zollverein site, especially the excellent Ruhr museum housed in the coal washery of the Zollverein site, and at many other industrial heritage sites in the Ruhr. It can be summed up as a double narrative of success – successful industrialization and successful deindustrialization. However, this memory narrative has been unsuccessful in stopping right-wing populism from gaining substantial support among the white working class of the Ruhr. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has one of its strongholds in the Ruhr region. In Gelsenkirchen, it even became the strongest party in the recent general elections of the country in February 2025, for the first time overtaking the Social Democrats who had held majorities in this city ever since the end of the Second World War.

The success of the AfD signals that large sections of German workers in the Ruhr today and not only in the Ruhr find the double triumph narrative not convincing. Rather, they feel that their hard-gained successes achieved in the old Federal Republic are under threat and that their social position is slipping. And in this situation the triumphalist industrial heritage narrative sounds hollow and meaningless. Hence, politically progressive forces in the Ruhr will have to think how to reframe their main story about the past in order to be more convincing in the present and regain the future. The alternative would be dreadful – the rise of a new völkisch right in Germany almost one hundred years after the success of the National Socialists.

^{Ruhr Museum at Zollverein today. Image: Zollverein Foundation.}

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To learn more:

• Stefan Berger, ‘Industrial Heritage and the Ambiguities of Nostalgia for an Industrial Past in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’, Labor: Studies in Working Class History 16:1 (2019), pp. 37 – 64.
• Stefan Berger, Christian Wicke Um imaginário pós-industrial? A popularização do patrimônio industrial no Ruhr e a representação de sua identidade regional, Estudos Históricos, vol. 7, n. 24, 2014.
• Stiftung Zollverein (ed.), The Zollverein World Heritage Site: the Past and Present History of the Zollverein Mining Complex and Coking Plant. Essen: Klartext, 2008.
• Bart Zwegers, ‘Zeche Zollverein: from Eyescore to Eyecatcher‘, in: idem, Cultural Heritage in Transition: a Multi-Level Perspective on World Heritage in Germany and the United Kingdom, 1970 – 2000, Cham: Springer, 2022, pp. 131 – 156.
• https://www.zollverein.de/zollverein-unesco-world-heritage-site/ https://www.route-industriekultur.ruhr/en/

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Crédito da imagem de capa: Miner with mining hammer in the 1950s Rights: © Photo: Zeche Zollverein e.V.

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