Essen Things to Do

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In the year 1934 the Zollverein had 10,400 of these coal tubs, which were in constant motion from the mines to the shaft to the processing plant and back again. To meet the goal of bringing up 12,000 tons of coal per day, each tub had to make at least one and a half round trips every day.

Down in the mines there was always a shortage of empty tubs, which was a catastrophe for the miners because they were paid by the tub-load, not the hour. A token identifying the exact point of loading was attached to each tub be means of a thin wire. These tokens were collected up in the plant by the payroll department, so they could figure out exactly how much coal had been produced by each of the 110 loading points down in the mines, and pay the men accordingly at the end of the week.

Second photo: Within the plant the coal tubs were pulled around by cables in the floor.

Third photo: A coal tub on its tracks.

Fourth photo: A tub full of coal.

Fifth photo: A text panel in German and English explaining the route of the coal tubs.

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After nearly 55 years of continuous operation, coal production at the Zollverein Shaft XII ceased on December 23, 1986. Even before this, plans were being made to preserve the entire facility and to find new uses for some of the buildings.

Not only can you take a fascinating tour of the plant, there are also concerts, lectures, readings, panel discussions and special exhibitions nearly every day of the year. The photo shows part of a modern art exhibition in hall 5, with works by the painter Herbert Bardenheuer and the sculptor Oveis Saheb Djawaher.

On December 14, 2001, the Zollverein shaft XII along with the nearby coking plant and one of the older mine shafts was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Unlike most German pre-war industrial plants, this facility is extremely well preserved. Despite its strategic importance it did not take a single direct hit by bombings during the entire Second World War. This remarkable restraint on the part of the Allied air forces no doubt has to do with the fact that the construction of the facility in the 1920s was largely financed by American capital, so it was in a sense American property, even though operations were entirely controlled by the Germans.

Second photo: Part of our tour group at the art exhibit in Hall 5.

Third photo: On my way back to Essen on my bicycle after seeing an opera in the nearby city of Gelsenkirchen, I stopped to take this photo of the Zollverein Shaft XII at night.

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Designed and built in the 1920s, this shaft and processing plant went into operation on February 1, 1932. At that time it was considered the largest, most efficient, most modern and also most beautiful coal mining facility in Europe.

The Zollverein was founded in 1847 by an industrialist named Franz Haniel (1799-1868). He gave his mine the name Zollverein in honor of the German Customs Union of 1844, which made it possible to do business in Germany without having to pay tolls every few miles at the borders of the many tiny German states.

By 1920 the Zollverein had four shafts producing 8000 tons of coal per day, but at that point they decided there was no way to modernize those old shafts and increase the daily output, so the solution was to build a new shaft for the sole purpose of bringing up 12000 tons per day in a huge multi-storey elevator.

Surrounding the new shaft they built a processing plant which by the standards of the times (recall that they had nothing resembling the computer technology we have today!) was highly automated. They were so obsessed with automation that the buildings originally didn't have any toilets, but they quickly had to add some when they realized that they still needed hundreds of workers to run the new machines, although not as many as before.

The managers proudly announced that they had eliminated 500 jobs, which then as now was a dubious achievement, since unemployment was one of the many factors that enabled the Nazis to seize power in 1933.

Second photo: Looking up at the elevator tower.

Third photo: Beneath the plants there were railroad tracks so that after the coal had been sorted and processed it could be dumped directly into coal cars and transported to the end users, like the nearby steel mills.

Fourth photo: Under one of the old conveyor belts that moved coal all around the plant they have recently built a pair of escalators to bring people up to the new visitors' center on the second floor. (Third floor to you.)

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The Grillo Theater in downtown Essen is now the city's main venue for spoken drama, but for many years it served as the opera house while city officials were agonizing over whether to build Aalto's version.

This theater was built from 1890 to 1892 with money bequeathed by a wealthy industrialist named Friedrich Grillo (1825-1888). It was in fact the first City Theater to be built in the Ruhr Valley area. (All the cities in this area are relatively new, since this was all sparsely settled farmland until the first railroads were built and coal mining started here in earnest around the middle of the nineteenth century.)

The Grillo Theater was destroyed by bombings in 1944 and was rebuilt in a simplified form after the war. In 1950 it was reopened under the name "Opera House", which is what it remained until the opening of the Aalto-Theater in 1988.

Second photo: This sign on the Grillo-Theater is entitled "Opera House".

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Right next to the Aalto-Theater there is a state-of-the-art concert hall called the Philharmonie, which is the home of the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra and also a venue for numerous visiting orchestras, chamber music ensembles and choirs.

The current building is the third concert hall on this site. The first one was a wooden building that was built in 1864, at a time when the coal mines were quite new and were starting to bring prosperity to the new city of Essen, or at least to a small upper class of wealthy mine-owners and industrialists. A second, more substantial concert hall was built on the same site in 1904, but was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.

The current concert hall was inaugurated in 1950, and still looks the same now as it did then, but only from the outside. Since 2002 they have been completely rebuilding the inside to bring it up to 21st century standards, not only for concerts, but also for conventions and conferences.

Second photo: The Philharmonie as seen from the terrace of the nearby Aalto-Theater.

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I keep reminding myself that Aalto designed these abstract wall sculptures in 1958, along with the rest of the building. I don't know if he had anything particular in mind, perhaps having curved forms that reach up towards the sky, or perhaps organ pipes.

To me, though, they look like those famous photos of the remaining girders that were left over after the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed on 9/11. But since Aalto died in 1976 he couldn't have known what would happen a quarter century later in 2001.

Second photo: The wall sculptures as seen from the third balcony.

Third photo: The three balconies of the Aalto-Theater.

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The Aalto-Theater is a quite busy opera house. In a typical week they might have up to five performances of three different operas, so whenever you go to Essen you have a good chance of seeing an opera or two.

And if that isn't enough, the adjoining city of Gelsenkirchen also has a full-scale opera house that is a mere nine kilometers away as the crow flies -- and still only fifteen kilometers if you follow the tram tracks on your bicycle like I did.

Second photo: Musicians tuning up before the performance of Rossini's Italian Girl in Algiers at the Aalto-Theater.

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In 1958 the city of Essen conducted an architects' competition to design a modern new opera house. The winner was the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976).

Of course just winning a competition is no guarantee that your design will actually be built. The German cities of Leipzig and Kassel both held architects' competitions for new opera houses in the 1950s, and neither of them actually managed to build the winning design.

For a long time it looked as though Aalto's design for Essen was going to have the same fate, but then in the 1980s they started getting their act together and began building Aalto's opera house under the artistic direction of his widow Elissa Aalto. In 1988, a mere thirty years after the original competition, the building was inaugurated with a performance of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Additional photos: People in the lobby of the Aalto-Theater.