If you are coming here from the south, you have already passed Düsseldorf and Duisburg. The train enters the heart of the Ruhr area. It has been a symbol of all the ups and downs of Germany over the past two centuries. As soon as I get off the train, Essen shows me its metropolitan face. The station building says “Essen – in the heart of Europe”. If so, then Europe has a heart of coal and steel. This is what has made Essen, with its surrounding cities, one of the largest urban areas on our continent.
Kätzwigerstrasse is a street leading to the center. It was closed to traffic in the 1950s. Even though it's a weekday, people are still milling around the Christmas stands in the pedestrian zone.
Essen is considered the unofficial capital of the Ruhr area. Fifteen years ago, the city had the honor of being named the European Capital of Culture on behalf of the entire region. This has shifted the focus to industrial culture and heritage. And there is more of that within a radius of about a hundred kilometers than anywhere else in Europe.
However, the city's roots lie not in work but in prayer – the settlement developed around a nunnery, built in 850 on a hill above the Rur River.
Later, weapons workshops developed in the town, and with the beginning of industrialization, mines were opened and blast furnaces were built. Essen developed the fastest in Germany at that time.
It is no coincidence that the German Emperor Wilhelm I is depicted in a victorious pose on horseback in the main square. What does that have to do with Essen? Well, it does. The unification of the German lands into the German Empire under the dominance of Prussia would not have been possible historically without the German victory in the war with France in 1871. And that victory would not have been possible without the cannons produced in Essen by the Krupp arms factory. Historians say that Krupp's steel cannons had twice the range of the French copper cannons.
That's why I wasn't surprised that a little further on, on the main square, in front of the oldest church in the city – the Marktkirche – a monument to Alfred Krupp was erected. This man, who was born and died in Essen, turned the Krupp company into the largest manufacturer of wagon wheels, but also the largest manufacturer of weapons in the world, in the 19th century. He was the first to introduce health insurance in his factories. He built apartments for workers. Essen wouldn't be what it is without the Krupp family. That's why the pedestal reads: "To Alfred Krupp, grateful hometown". Although, if we're going to push the envelope, the translation of the word "Vaterstadt" would be roughly "fatherland city".
CHURCHES IN A GODLESS CITY
This city certainly has Christian roots. But it also has a history of conflict. The population largely accepted Protestant teachings, the churches and monasteries remained Catholic for a long time. Essen Cathedral is the fourth Catholic church on the same site, where people have been praying for 12 centuries.
Although the cathedral church itself is interesting, as is the fountain, hidden by the market stalls, I was drawn to the group of sculptures in front of the old plane tree. The stone Jesus on the cross is accompanied by the crucified Dismas, a wise thief who believed in salvation, on his right, and the crucified Gestas, who mocked him, on his left.
This group of crucified figures was created by the Düsseldorf sculptor Dietrich Maynard in 1846. Ten years ago, restorers carefully cleaned and strengthened the sandstone, which had been badly damaged by spending a century and a half outdoors.
I have always had sympathy for the weaker, the marginalized, for those whom nature has not endowed, for whom fate has destined ugly roles. So my gaze stops on Gestas's face. What did he need to mock at a time when an epoch is breaking in two, because on the cross next to him is dying a man who will launch the greatest wave of faith in history? Gestas does not know how to recognize the signs of the times, and time is running out for him on Golgotha. Has anyone ever written a prayer for Gestas?
I wake up from these historical-theological reveries. There are more and more people around, the streets are decorated, Essen is striving for Christmas with all its fair decorations.
In the center, the Old Catholic Church of Peace is actually the most interesting to me. Its construction was completed in 1916, in the midst of World War I. Previously, believers of the Old Catholic community shared churches with Protestants and Catholics, but this did not improve mutual relations.
The First Vatican Council began in 1869 and was interrupted in 1870 when Italy was unified and the Papal States were reduced to the Vatican, a miniature state within Rome. However, one of the decisions of the Council would have a disastrous effect on the unity of Catholics – the dogma of papal infallibility. In a number of Western countries, parts of the Catholic Church separated and formed the Old Catholic movement. The Old Catholics are actually close to the Eastern churches in terms of their vernacular in liturgy and their rejection of celibacy.
This church building is the most important sacral building of the German Art Nouveau style. I recognize the kinship with Moscow, today's hotel, which was completed in 1908 as the Rossiya Palace and remains the only famous example of Belgrade Art Nouveau.
Another church is on my way. Or rather – a former church. In the mid-19th century, when Essen was growing rapidly, the need for a new Catholic church arose. Thus, the church of St. Gertrude of Nivelles was built, which is revered from Belgium to these parts. The saint of royal blood is the patron saint of travelers, pilgrims, gardeners, weavers, the poor, widows and – cats. This cathedral was sold last year to be turned into the Trudi cultural center, which hosts lectures by the Essen Art Academy.
A city once fought over by Protestants and Catholics, today has more than half the population not affiliated with either of these Christian communities. What would Gertrude say to that?
FAIR AND THEATRE
Regardless of religious issues, all the residents of Essen clearly enjoy spending time at the Christmas market, which has taken over the entire pedestrian zone and the main squares in the city. I have no intention of lingering, there is so much to see in this city.
I decided to come back tonight, after I'd finished my planned visit. I came across a beautiful building almost in the city center. I approached it and realized it was a theater.
In front of him is a sculpture of Uranus, four meters high. It was created about ten years ago, by the famous German sculptor Markus Lipperz. Uranus is a symbol of the celestial. And the sculpture is supposed to symbolize the city's farewell to underground coal mining. The explanation is simple, although a bit far-fetched: After the shift, the miners were looking forward to going to the surface of the earth, to once again have a free view of the sky. And now there is no more going underground, now Uranus has taken over.
The theater building was built thanks to the generous financial support of the wealthy widow Wilhelmina Grillo. Her husband Fritz was one of the most powerful manufacturers in the Ruhr area. He promised his hometown a theater. He did not live up to his promise - half a year after the city council meeting at which Fritz promised generous support, he died. But his widow kept his promise, and in 1890 a neo-baroque building was built, without which Essen would no longer be what it is.
Above the stage are engraved Goethe's words from Faust: "Only he deserves freedom for life who has to conquer it every day."
IN SEARCH OF OLD ESSEN
I headed towards the train station.
Essen's location in the center of an industrial zone, steel, weapons factories, all brought bad luck to the city in World War II. Allied bombs leveled both the city center and the industrial zones. Some of it was rebuilt after the war. But mostly new, modern, functional buildings were erected. Old Essen became a ghost, living in the memories of the survivors.
One area of the city, about twenty minutes by rail from the center, has remained untouched. There, perhaps, one can get a sense of what some of the city's neighborhoods were like before the war.
I got on the city train and after a short ride I found myself in Ketwig, a former town and now a southern district of Essen, right on the banks of the Ruhr.
Since the surrounding area was a developed textile industry, Allied bombs rarely fell here. The town was independent until it was administratively absorbed by nearby Essen – only in 1979.
It is clear that life here was slower. The houses, with their combination of wooden frames and stone roof tiles, are similar to those in the hill towns between the Ruhr and the Rhine. At first glance, this place reminded me of Bensberg near Cologne or Linz on the Rhine.
I read in the local chronicles that the citizens fought in vain against administrative annexation to Essen with a referendum. The majority of the inhabitants here have supported the Protestant church since the 17th century.
At the entrance to the town, an old bridge stretches across the "Mlinarski Kanal". It offers a view of the canal covered with toadstools and the picturesque houses on the shore.
A small street leads uphill, lined with houses that, unlike human faces, we perceive as beautiful because they are old. Painted, but a bit rickety.
Late autumn is full of fond nostalgia when, like now, the sun peeks out from behind the gray blanket and caresses the old streets. It's a working day, the locals go about their business at a leisurely pace. The restaurants in the alleys are still closed. Behind them must be a successful weekend, because people from the big city certainly flock here for a picnic. After a walk along the promenade along the Ruhr, they wander around the old town and sit down somewhere to refresh themselves.
I am glad to have seen this face of Essen. The administrative buildings and factory chimneys have long formed the general image of the Ruhr area. And Kätwig tells me that life outside the main urban arteries sometimes develops in a capillary way and – if the place is lucky, like this one, to be bypassed by the disasters of war – it inadvertently becomes a kind of time machine. Here I can imagine centuries stacked on top of each other like leaves in a herbarium.
I'm heading back towards Essen. The sunlight is already slanting. The days are getting shorter, I need to hurry to the last stop of my journey today.
I take the tram through the suburbs to the north. At the Zollverein station – which translates to Customs Association – I get off to visit “The most beautiful black coal mine in the world.” The complex is now protected as an exceptional object of industrial culture and is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This was once the largest black coal mine in the world. It operated from 1851 to 1986. I count. When I was celebrating my graduation in Sarajevo, the miners passed through this gate for the last time. Gritting their teeth and swallowing dumplings. I don't think they were thinking of Uranus, the god of the sky in Greek mythology. But that sculptor in the center of Essen attributed to them a satisfied look into the sky – because they would never have to go underground again.
The gate with the guardhouse, which is now empty, leads to a well-maintained complex with several museums. I will go inside to spend a few hours there.
When I left the huge building complex, it was already dark. I will tell you what I saw inside another time. I return to the center, thoughtful. Through the tram window, I look at the almost barracks-like rows of two-story buildings. Miners' dormitories. No miners. I promised myself this morning that I would walk through the Essen Christmas market again and that I would try the wild boar sausage that I saw at a stand. At the City Hall, I exit the subway as if from a shaft and dive into a sea of light.
Bonus video:
