The Wild West. What do spoil tips tell us about the Ruhr region?
by Lena Fiedler„Today, the pyramids of the industrial revolution just uselessly stand in the way, they’re a scar in the landscape. The deafening noises have been replaced by silence, but if you listen carefully they will tell you their story.“ (1)
Located at the base of the Haniel spoil tip is dense deciduous woodland. Starting on the other side is a Path of the Cross. Installed along this devotional trail that speaks of Christ’s countless afflictions are crosses next to coal barrows. High up, at the very end of the path is a plateau. It simply lies there, grey and bare. From here the view extends all the way down into the valley: the Ruhr region, laid out on display. The spoil tip is quiet. Perched on the high rim of the plateau is a row of colourful steles made of old railway sleepers as if strung on a chain of pearls: the Totems of Bottrop.
The Haniel spoil tip belongs to Prosper-Haniel, the last working coalmine in the Ruhr. It was shut down on 21 December 2018, thereby bringing a major chapter of the Ruhr region to a close. Coal as the region’s fuel is now officially a fossil that can only be viewed behind the glass of a museum vitrine. Today, in 2020, the time is ripe for a walk to the relics of this era and to the question of how this region’s ruins are being dealt with. At the end of our walk the spoil tips stand as monuments, as pyramids of the “Pott” that need to be preserved because they are more than the discarded waste of an industry that ground to a halt. A wilderness that was once the wellspring of German industrialisation.
Over the last 250 years, surely no other landscape has been dug up, hollowed out, filled in and built over as much as the Ruhr region. The slag heaps came about as a by-product of coal mining. The rock excavated down in the galleries was piled into heaps next to the pits. It was called “dead rock”, so it is indeed refuse. The excavated hollow below ground became a mountain above. Tips and galleries are conjoined: one cannot exist without the other. When the last pit closed, both the gallery and the tip became things without a purpose.
In the “thing theory” of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy objects become things when they can no longer serve their common function and are no longer at human disposal. In contrast to the mine galleries the tips are born a priori as “things”, they come into the world entirely without function. What happens to these things in a region which itself is in danger of becoming a “thing”? If we take an interest in the “thing theory” today, perhaps it should also focus on what is to become of industrial sites, with the Rust Belt in the northeast of the US, with the north of England and, indeed, with the Ruhr region. So, what exactly does the spoil tip have to tell us about how objects become things within their own surroundings?
Mountains made by mankind
Even while the collieries were still operating, waste tips were already being converted into bunkers. During World War II, for instance, an underground hospital was built in the tunnels beneath the Graf Moltke spoil tip. Today, many of the tips have been re-landscaped and renaturated: a few of them have been preserved as monuments, others embellished with Land Art, like the Tetrahedron in Bottrop. They have been turned into landmarks with works of art. The most recent example is the walk-on rollercoaster Tiger & Turtle in Angerpark on the site of the former Zinkhütten landfill in Duisburg. The term “landmark” originally came from shipping and aviation and designated an aid to navigation. Today, these monuments tower up above the landscape and pilot the country through the debate on structural change.
The large installations mounted on the re-landscaped slag heaps disguise the Ruhr basin as a “Monument Valley”, as it is called on the website halden.ruhr. The site shows a man on horseback riding into the setting sun near the Tetrahedron in Bottrop. The cowboy could be one of the slag heap enthusiasts who spend their time visiting spoil tips and meticulously mapping them. They write blogs and hobby sites, recommending the most beautiful waste tips to each other, which also happen to be precisely the ones that are least visited. The webpage ruhrgebiet-industriekultur is operated by S. Hellmann, a geographer who spends his free time charting new waste tips. On his website he documents their coordinates, posts images on Twitter and describes the history of their formation. In addition, he maintains a spoil tip ticker registering the number of newly discovered heaps. The current score: 292.
Waste heap enthusiasts could be the German equivalent of the US community of “zombie mall” watchers, people drawn to visiting the many thousands of abandoned shopping temples throughout the US. They share photos and information about the malls in a Facebook group called Dead Mall Enthusiasts. People seem fascinated by extinct sites, zealously urging others to rediscover these ruins. They make pilgrimages to abandoned amusement parks, crumbling sanatoriums, deserted shopping malls and decommissioned colliery tips. The first examples in this list clearly manifest traces of their “becoming things” – the emptiness of shops, the dilapidation of buildings, the impression of dereliction. But spoil tips have always been spoil tips, nothing else. It is only in the last few years that they have increasingly been repurposed. Waste tips have turned the Ruhr region into an alternative Monument Valley – the landscape in the Navajo reservation in Arizona made world-famous by its table mountains. Yet the cowboy in the desert of the Ruhr basin is promoting his own Monument Valley as if it were virgin territory waiting to be settled. On horseback he peers into the camera as if challenging us to accompany him on his adventures into the Wild West.
Mumification through musealisation
Virtually no one (bar a few enthusiasts) is keen on preserving the barren slag heaps. Mounds of waste in themselves are unloved terrain. They should not simply “just” exist, so they are turned into objects, such as an educational mining trail, a Path of the Cross, Land Art or a local recreation area. Converted spoil tips are now prestige objects prized by planning departments and special purpose associations. They are supposed to be made “fit for the future”, offer space for new activities and perspectives which, if everything goes to plan, will become further hallmarks for idealising local identity. Something similar is happening to the collieries. In Bochum an event multiplex, the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, has been created, dedicated to coal mining. As one of its attractions, an exhibition mining shaft was excavated – purely for demonstration purposes – where visitors can try out drilling rock, learn about the occupational diseases and afflictions suffered by miners and (only for show) how miners would strip a coal seam. Many emblematic constructions like mines, miners’ housing estates and factory workers’ housing have been musealised. Miners’ lamps and pneumatic drills have mutated from mute work tools into museum exhibits. Once a “thing” has been made an “object” it is re-admitted into the semantic fabric of language. Now that it can be named again, function and use become evident. A musealised pneumatic drill has to be seen.
Hauntological Landscapes
What does “thing culture” say about those who create it? Every era has produced its own state of things, whether these are things as commodity forms, as actors, as surreal objects, as kitsch or as nostalgic items. Industrialisation created regions where time can only be experienced as broken. Exploited industrial landscapes testify to a seemingly lost future, and as such constitute a cultural logic that is typical of post-capitalist structures. In his book Specters of Marx (1), Jacques Derrida referred to this phenomenon as “hauntology” (l’hantologie). The future, he argued, was no longer perceived in terms of its virtuality, but as the failure of its possibility.
Following the decline of the coal industry, the Ruhr region has been overtaken by its pit lamps, spoil tips and mines. Since mining came to an end, these things have developed an uncanny presence due to the denial of opportunity – the “agency of the no longer”, to borrow a phrase coined by the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher. (2) This is symptomised by industrial kitsch and the widespread musealisation of workers’ culture and contemporary history as a fatal repetition. In the 18th century, when coal production took off on a large scale, Karl Marx described value chains and commodification in capitalist society. While the conditions in which miners once had to work may no longer be visible today in coal as a cultural asset, the region appears to be cursed and no effective exorcism is in sight. Only on the Haniel spoil tip in Bottrop is a totem enthroned above the wasteland, recalling those who perished.
The right of industrial sites to speak for themselves
Is this text intended as a manifesto, arguing against the use of industrial wastelands? If the spoil tip is to speak for itself, the best thing would be to forget about its historical origins. If it were not made into an object, it could be contemplated in its sheer thingness, simply as a hill. But that seems to intimidate observers, and the situation is even worse for those who live in the area whose very foundations have been thingified over the decades. It goes hand in hand with a state of uncertainty which may explain why the intimidated inhabitants of the Ruhr region constantly repeat their mantra: Bid farewell? Farewell to what? Although coal production ceased being economically viable two decades ago, meaning that the demise of this branch of industry is imminent, hardly anyone in the Ruhr region is willing to admit it. In areas like the Ruhr that are situated in the past, references can be found to hauntological processes that break with the seemingly everyday reflexiveness of the place. But if spoil tips are not to be allowed to remain simply things, then they should at least become objects with assured rights. In 2017, a court in New Zealand ruled that the Whanganui River would henceforth be treated as a living entity. (3) This means that any future repurposing or change of use in relation to this river requires court approval. Social processes determine the status of objects, which in turn determine other social processes. Its status as an object is therefore crucial for the social discourse that unfolds around it.
A spoil tip is per se filled with human content, by which I mean human discourse. If we view spoil tips as a reflection of this, we gain access to their hauntological conflicts. What does post-industrial society look like? What battles have been fought on its terrain? Who is emerging victorious from this conflict, and who is ultimately the loser?
Waste heaps also represent a way of dealing with the earth: decades of coal mining have caused large areas of ground to subside and fall below the groundwater level. And although great wealth has been generated through human labour in the natural environment, the Ruhr and large sections of its population have remained poor. After 1945, amid the total collapse of civilisation, people again scraped coal out of unsecured seams with pickaxes, just as they did in pre-industrial times. Looking at a spoil tip, one might wonder: what has all of this actually achieved?
With We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour has written a text for the Ruhr region, a text in which the problems of overlapping temporalities in modernity are outlined: “What country could not be called ‘a land of contrasts’? We have all reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again.” (4) Latour criticises modern demarcation practices that peddle an apparently sharp subject/object distinction, and regards this as a specific disadvantage of modern society compared to cultures where traditions and technology are conceived as being interconnected. These cultures share an approach to various things and objects that also takes into account their significance for social processes.
In his essay Dream Kitsch, Walter Benjamin calls surrealism and its treatment of things to account. He writes that the “topmost face on the totem pole” is kitsch; this is the mask “with which we adorn ourselves, in a dream and conversation, so as to take in the energies of an outlived world of things.” (5) The pole on the Haniel spoil tip in Bottrop is itself kitsch; brightly painted railway sleepers again merely serve as reminders of the adjoining coal mine that has closed. These sleepers – thing-world kitsch – make advances in the static warfare of structural change. The Ruhr region has never been modern. The spoil tip cowboys nevertheless climb up the heaps. When they reach the summit, they look down over the valley and see: it is green.
(1) Derrida, J. (1993). Marx’ Gespenster: der Staat der Schuld, die Trauerarbeit und die neue Internationale Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
(2) https://www.theguardian.com/wo
(3) Latour, B. (2008). Wir sind nie modern gewesen. Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. 101.
(4) Benjamin. W. (1991). Traumkitsch. In Thiedemann, R. & Schweppenhäuser. H. (Hrsg.). Ästhetische Fragmente. 620-622.
(5) Henk van Rensbergen, http://www.abandoned-places.co..., (26.06.2020)