I grew up with the character on the ten-dinar banknote. Those who spent their childhood and youth in Yugoslavia at the same time – in the 1960s and 1970s – often attribute the name of the mining champion Alija Sirotanović to this character. Memories are deceptive. The character on the banknote was not a miner. His name was Arif Heralić, he was a foundryman at the Zenica Ironworks. You could buy half a pastry shop for his smile. Later, inflation ate that smile.
I think about this as I enter the gates of the former largest black coal mine in the world. “Customs Union” is admittedly a strange name for a mine. But the customs union in the 19th century was a step towards the economic unification of the German states, so the patriots of the time immortalized it in the name of the mine.
In the vast complex I find the entrance to the Ruhr Museum, which occupies a central place in the Customs Union, where coal has no longer been mined since 1986. It is a long walk up the escalator to the platform with the entrance to the museum.
I came here, on the outskirts of Essen, to visit the exhibition "Land of a Thousand Fires". The exhibition brochure says that since the 19th century, blast furnaces, mines, coke ovens, and heavy industry with their smoke and fire have fascinated artists. They witnessed the transformation of the Ruhr area, which would become the industrial center of the world. The artists' views were different - from euphoria and intoxication with the new, through romanticizing hard work, ideological and propaganda stylization, to critical examination of the scars that man leaves on the face of the earth with such interventions.
The museum has kept the names from the mining days. They explain to me that I am on level 24, and that the exhibition is on level 12. Looking for the elevator, I pass through huge halls. Everything here is bigger than I imagined. Before I go down to the exhibition, I look at the large exhibit at the entrance.
It's a real lump of coal. I couldn't resist. I placed my palm on the rough surface. Images came to mind: neighbors shouting at each other as they threw coal into the basement. Or – the elementary school drummer, red-hot from the coal from Kreka, scorching the children's cheeks, while outside the dusk fought with the thick snow. It could have been some December.
PRIVATE COLLECTION OF LUDWIG SCHENEFELD
The exhibition would not have been possible if historian and communication scientist Ludwig Schönefeld had not spent decades collecting artistic responses to the industrial rise and fall of the Ruhr area. He collected over 1,500 paintings and objects by sometimes rescuing works of art from destruction and neglect by descendants, finding them at virtual auctions, and traveling to distant cities where the collections of deceased lovers of industrial motifs in art were being sold. He donated all of this to the Ruhr Museum. The exhibition features 240 carefully selected paintings.
The Ruhr Museum has retained a huge industrial building for coal processing and, with major investments, has transformed it into one of the most attractive exhibition spaces today.
As soon as I enter the exhibition rooms, I realize that I am spending this late December afternoon in the right place. The paintings are exhibited where industrial life once pulsated.
The first painting has a dry title: Tugboats in the Port of Duisburg. It was painted around 1950. It was signed by Otto Kreizeler, who lived in Duisburg, an industrial city on the Rhine, for several decades after World War II. I remember that city from a series of Sunday crime novels called Šimanski. That was the name of the inspector. Half of the Ruhr area has Polish surnames. They are descendants of Polish miners who began coming here a century and a half ago to earn a living.
Richard Gesner was born in southern Germany, in Augsburg in 1894, but lived in Düsseldorf until 1989. After World War II, he tried to free painting from the Nazi legacy, especially when it came to works that thematically encompassed industry.
His painting from the second decade of the last century – that is, about a hundred years ago – is simply called Port City on the Rhine. It seems that he then managed to bring a kind of melancholy into the view. As in expressionism, the chaotic and ugly, through aestheticization, becomes attractive. That is the magic of art.
Behind the painter's name are always the year of birth and the year of death. A life in brackets, from which, for me, one moment remains visible when a future of coal and steel is piling up on the great river – a future woven from progress and illness, hard work and prosperity, acquisition and poisoning.
I stop in front of a Dutchman's canvas. Herman Heijenbroek was born in Amsterdam in 1871. As a baker's son, he felt a closeness to workers all his life as a painter. He didn't pity them – he admired them. He even managed to found the Museum of Labor in 1923. Today it is the famous NEMO museum in Amsterdam.
Heinbrock entered all the major steelworks and mines of Europe. Thus, in the first decade of the 20th century, he also reached Dortmund.
Art critics say the Dutchman was not a great painter, but a valuable documentarist of industrial expansion. And one visitor said that a person could get asthma just by looking at Heijenbroek's smoke-filled paintings.
My throat also feels a little scratchy from staring at the fumes in the Heijenbroek coke oven. But I dismiss that childish thought and the discomfort disappears.
BASIN VIEW, RIGHT VIEW
Prints perhaps show the essence of industrial life even better than paintings. I stop in front of a painting showing a human head. And I don't have to read the signature – I immediately recognize a miner. The artist's name is Fritz Kec, he was born in 1903 and lived in the last century for eight decades. He began his career as an officer, because his father did not have the money to pay for his painting training. Kec served in the Imperial Army for 12 years and used his severance pay to pay for his own education. He had just started exhibiting when the Nazis came to power. This painter had problems with the authorities before and during the war. He was almost killed by Allied bombs in Stuttgart, and a good part of his early works were turned to ashes. Fortunately, he always carried some drawings and canvases with him in a suitcase, so that the police would not find scenes that would cost him his life when they searched his apartment. He lived out the war in deep underground.
In the 1950s, he went to the Ruhr area. Among other things, he left behind a woodcut called "The Miner," which bears no resemblance to the happy miner on the ten-dinar banknote. Similar motifs have been used by a number of painters in the previous century and a half – accidents in mines, hard work, poverty, heavy, sooty air in cities.
Perhaps this figure somehow reminds me of the monument to the miners who died in the Husinska Buna, which was erected in Tuzla in 1955 – the author is Ivan Sabolić – and I saw it almost every day as a Tuzla high school student in the second half of the seventies.
Erich Mackler was on the other side of historical reality compared to Kec. On the eve of World War I, he became the German speed skating champion. He enrolled in the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Munich, but increasingly focused on painting. His works from the industrial milieu made him famous. In May 1933, he became a member of the Nazi Party. While famous names in painting at the time, such as Max Ernst or Käthe Kollwitz, fell under the term "degenerate" or "degenerate" art in the Nazi ideological aesthetics, he received awards and created paintings for high-ranking officials.
His 1938 "Evening at the Blast Furnace" has a romantic tone that appealed to Nazi cultural officials. However, if you don't know the context in which this work was created, you might find the painting appealing.
The most striking example of the pact with the Nazi ideological imperative is the painting of Fritz Gertner. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, but lived for several years in the magnificent villa of a German industrialist in the Ruhr area. When he was only 30 years old, in 1912, he exhibited for the first time the painting "The Bright Hour", in which the powerful industrial plants on the Rhine are presented in a romantic light. Gertner himself, as early as the 1920s, advocated "the unity of agriculture and industry in the service of the fatherland". He could therefore be called one of the founders of Nazi aesthetics. Therefore, after the Nazis came to power, he did not have to change either his ideas or his expression.
Almost two decades later, around 1940, the painting "Bread and Iron" was created. France and Poland were occupied, the Third Reich was at the height of its power. And Gertner gave that time its own color. He exhibited three times at the Great German Exhibition, which until 1944 was held in Munich once a year to present everything that belonged to the ruling Nazi taste.
FACTORIES TO MUSEUMS
Different aesthetic and ideological attitudes were certainly dominant after World War II. The worker was no longer sought after as a national hero. Avant-garde painting techniques that the Nazis had forced out of public space were also making a comeback.
I pause for a moment at a painting by Rudolf Kulman. He actually enrolled in medical school in Vienna, and at the same time studied art. Painting predominated. He lived in Cologne after the war. His colors and forms do not hide their affinity with the pictorial universe of the Russian avant-garde.
The painting that interested me was called in the manner of Gertner – Steel and Iron. But there is no trace of ideologically pumped-up pathos and blatant symbolism. The influences of expressionism and cubism are clear. The painting was created in 1959. West German painters are bringing back to the big stage artistic movements brutally suppressed during Hitlerism.
German reality is changing. Economic miracle. Uncomfortable questions asked by the 1968ers. Oil crisis. German coal, but also the steel that is tied to it by political will, is becoming too expensive.
Since the 1980s, many metallurgical plants have been closing. And yet, it is artists who preserve the dramatic moments for the workers for posterity.
The painting by Wilfried Tillmann, a man who lived his life in the post-war Ruhr area – he passed away last year – is captivating with its expressiveness. It has two titles: "Majderich Ironworks" and immediately after that, in brackets, "Bad Talks About the End".
Majderich is a district in the north of Dortmund where the steelworks fed many mouths. The blast furnaces started operating in 1903. The painting was created in 1982. The artist's doubts about the success of the talks to save the steelworks came true three years later. The last shift closed its doors for good in April 1985. Now, on this vast area, among the defunct blast furnaces, there is a park with entertainment facilities.
MINING ELEGY
The lyrics from Duško Trifunović's song "Čisti zrak" (Pure Air) kept running through my head. Of course, accompanied by the musical accompaniment of the band Teška industrija:
My brother gets up at five to five every day and goes to work –
He coughs along the way, smokes along the way, breathes clean air along the way.
The lyrics from 1966 later became a rock thing. Duško intuitively inserted duality into his metalhead brother. He is both a likable hero and a loser and a martyr and a good guy. How far is that from "Maljčik", and yet, they too have an undisguised duality in the band's hit Idoli - mockery of socialist realism and Soviet-style Russophilia are intertwined beyond recognition.
Later, Vlada Divljan will humorously deconstruct the theme by singing: "She works in a mine and her life is not easy, and that's why she doesn't like, she doesn't like music, she likes a strong rhythm."
Đorđe Balašević was at least ambiguous:
So, make another one for the eternal culprits, for the balancers
Don't be afraid, I have quite a bit of booze.
Pour another one for the tired castes, for the proletarians
Tonight, the third shift is paying off someone else's debt.
It was a chaste and strange time when we loved the heroes of heavy industry from Yugoslav banknotes. I think that I probably wouldn't have come to this exhibition if it weren't for my childhood in socialism and my high school musical taste.
As I descend the endless escalators into the December night, I see that the sky has cleared and the moon has risen above the abandoned mine. If there are no more miners here, it's good that there is at least a place where art bears witness to how a huge human anthill once existed here. And that every ant had their own dream of a better life.
Finally, I remember here, in the Ruhr area, the smiling Arif. Neither he nor the country that put him on a banknote is gone. The photojournalist Borbe, probably with a German like, snapped the picture in December 1954. The first banknote with the smiling face left the Topčider printing house in 1955. Only 16 years later, in June 1971, Arif died a poor alcoholic. But that picture never made it to the newspaper, let alone the banknote.
In a way, this exhibition speaks of the insurmountable difference between the ideological, aesthetic, or engaged view of heavy industry and the very lives of those who have invested their health in it.
Bonus video:
