Duisburg Off The Beaten Path

2 more images

While walking from the museum to the two ships, we discovered two interesting towers. I took pictures of them, but we didn't know what they were and why they were built so close to the river.

Doing some research at home, I found out that these towers were once connected to an old bridge. Today, you can see the huge "fake suspension bridge" (I don't know if this is the correct term in English for it), the Friedrich-Ebert-Brücke which connects the districts of Ruhrort and Homburg. This bridge was built in the 1950s, substituting an older bridge that had been destroyed in World War Two. The older bridge was built between 1904 and 1907. Before that, there had only been a ferry crossing the river at this place.
The two bridge towers were a part of this old bridge and they were used by the customs authorities. In addition, they counterbalanced the enormous weight of the bridge. They were connected to the bridge by colonnades.
All of this is long gone now, only the two towers are left!

I must admit that I find the new bridge quite ugly. It was named after Friedrich Ebert, an important German politician of the Social Democrats who was the first president of the Republic of Weimar, the German republic between the two world wars. You can see the bridge in picture 2.

Discover Duisburg, the big city in the west of the Ruhr region, the top centre on the Lower Rhine!

From the landing bridge of the white fleet you can take marvellous cruises through the biggest inland harbor of Germany