Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past

Inventing Industrial Culture in Essen / Kathleen James-Chakraborty

116 Inventing Industrial Culture in Essen Kathleen James-Chakraborty Discussions of memory in relation to the German cityscape typically focus on buildings with obvious connections either to the Nazis or to their victims .1 Limiting our consideration of memory to such sites, however, ignores the multiplicity of ways in which the Third Reich permeated daily life and in which amnesia about the past continues to color German urban planning and preservation decisions. Since World War II, political, economic , and intellectual elites in Germany have embraced modern architecture and design, which they have equated with industrial modernity, as a means of distancing themselves from the Third Reich.2 The recent elevation of the pithead of a defunct coal mine in the industrial city of Essen into the surrounding region’s leading symbol of industrial culture exposes the inherent tensions between this idealization of form and the realities of its original production.3 How did the Zeche Zollverein Pithead XII (‹g. 1)—designed and built during the Weimar Republic but embraced after 1933 as a model for both the artistry and the modernity of National Socialist industrial architecture—come to be the centerpiece of the Ruhrgebiet’s ongoing effort to reinterpret its industrial heritage as politically and socially progressive art? The answers tell us a great deal about who manufactures memory and why in Germany today. The story of the of‹cial commemoration of the Third Reich in Essen in the years after 1945 offers few surprises. The changing fate of the city’s enormous synagogue, dedicated in 1913 and located on the edge of Essen’s medieval core, has served as a barometer of public willingness to memorialize a once vibrant Jewish community.4 In Essen, as in other German cities, the focus during the 1950s was on repairing the city’s physical fabric and acknowledging the suffering of ordinary Germans. By the 1980s, this trend had given way to the efforts of local activists to ensure that neither Fig. 1. Zeche Zollverein Pithead XII, designed by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, Essen, 1932. (Photo: Gerdy Troost, ed., Das Bauen im neuen Reich, vol. 2 [Bayreuth, 1943], 109.) the Nazis’ crimes nor their victims would be forgotten.5 Torched on Kristallnacht in 1938, the synagogue was abandoned for more than two decades before its shell was converted into a hall for industrial design exhibitions and then the German poster museum. Following a second ‹re in 1979, it was reconstructed as a museum honoring the city’s Jewish community and documenting the Nazi terror. By 1991, a series of historical markers throughout the city drew further attention to sites associated with the deportation of Jews, political and religious resistance, and slave labor.6 In the 1990s, however, the task of rehabilitating the region’s industrial heritage eventually began to overshadow remembering the horrors of the Third Reich. Hopes for a more prosperous future pushed aside a full accounting of the past. Of‹cial memory in Essen always had clear limits. The particular form it has taken has often been speci‹c to the Ruhrgebiet, where opinion makInventing Industrial Culture in Essen 117 118 Beyond Berlin ers have preferred to remember the radical politics of its workers rather than the tacit support that many industrialists offered the Third Reich. Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the heir to the steelworks that sparked Essen’s transformation from a modest eighteenth-century town into a bustling industrial center, was sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials in 1948 to prison for twelve years for his ‹rm’s use of slave labor, but he served only three years before being pardoned.7 No markers mention him or stand in front of the factories and mining installations that were central to rearmament and the Nazi war effort. Instead, the city’s industrial relics—most prominently the Zeche Zollverein —have been interpreted as symbols of technological and cultural innovation. Reinvented as high art, the Zeche Zollverein pithead tower was a prominent component of Essen’s successful entry for becoming the cultural capital of Europe for the year 2010.8 On December 15, 2001, the inhabitants of the Ruhrgebeit, western Germany’s rust belt, awoke to ‹nd the front page of the local newspaper announcing proudly that this imposing structure had been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The headlines equated the “Eiffel Tower of the Ruhr” with some of the most famous structures already on the list...