By Clive Freeman Sep 2, 2009, 2:08 GMT
Essen, German - Once the centre of German heavy industry industry, Essen and the Ruhr Region, which are to be a magnet for culture lovers next year, have already undergone an extraordinary transformation.
No longer is the 'Ruhrpott' - to give it its colloquial German name - Europe's mightiest coal and steel-producing centre.
Many of its discarded coal mines and old manufacturing plants have now been converted into museums, theatres and even jazz cafes. Its slag-heaps have been turned into green hills and parks, in the past 15 years. One such site has even become an indoor ski slope.
So dramatic and swift was the change from coal and steel to culture that now Essen and the Ruhr region has been designated the '2010 European Capital of Culture.' The honour is boosting the spirits of the region's 5.4 million inhabitants.
The Ruhr region, near the Dutch and Belgian borders, is located within North Rhine Westphalia state, which, with an overall population of 18 million citizens, is Germany's most populous state.
Fritz Pleitgen, a former German television correspondent who served in Washington and Moscow between 1982 and 1988 and later became director-general of the Cologne-based public broadcaster WDR, has the job of masterminding the 'Capital of Culture' programme.
'It's a great challenge,' said 71-year-old Pleitgen during a recent German Press Agency dpa interview in Essen. 'Something very, very different to anything I've ever tackled before.'
For Pleitgen the Ruhr Region symbolizes change on a scale 'far more dramatic than in any other region of Europe.' He hopes the European Culture Capital event will help the Ruhrpott brush off its sombre 'heavy industrial' image.
'Once, the Ruhr region was the centre of German heavy industry as well as being a centre of armaments - the so-called Devil's Foundry - a fact that led to it being completely destroyed during World War II,' he says.
'When western Allied soldiers moved into the region in 1945 they were shocked at the extent of the devastation caused. But the Ruhr region recovered, and became the driving force of the post-war German economic miracle in the 1950s and '60s,' he says.
Pleitgen talks of 'parallels' in the post-reunification development of the Ruhr Region and of the nation's once-shabby capital, Berlin.
'Just as culture has offered a new force of development for Berlin, so it has for us.' he says.
'Berlin never had as much heavy industry as the Ruhr Region, but what it had it lost in the Cold War years. Now we both find ourselves busily promoting culture.
'In Essen we work mostly with public money and with donations from sponsors,' says Pleitgen. 'A problem right now is that we are organizing the Culture Capital event against the background of the world economic and financial crisis.
'We are getting some assistance from the local economy here and from the private sector, but not from the national level,' says Pleitgen, when noting that a budget of 65.5 million euros is needed to cover the cost of the Capital of Culture programme.
'It's a challenge, a big opportunity, but we have a lot of good ideas. Our idea is to create an infrastructure for a new, modern, unconventional metropolis consisting of 53 different centres - towns and cities - in the region.'
The Ruhr region, he explains, has 100 concert houses, 120 theatres, and over 200 museums and festivals.
'We aim for a spirit of cooperation, not rivalry, between the 53 participating towns and cities involved.'
One of the 2010 events spotlights the work of Hans Werner Henze, considered by some to be Germany's greatest living composer.
'We will present the results of this project to the public, not in just one place, but in all of the cities and town in the region.
'We want the region's cultural institutions to work together to create a 'know-how' infrastructure. Cooperation means one achieves more,' is his philosophy.
North Rhine Westphalia's biggest cities are Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, Duesseldorf and Duisberg, Europe's largest inland water container port.
Twenty-four of the nation's top-selling 50 companies are based in the state, among them E.ON, Metro, Deutsche BP, Rewe, ThyssenKrupp, Bayer, Bertelsmann and Evonik Industries.
Pleitgen talks of a region 'reinventing itself' in the past 15 years and turning itself into a centre of European energy, and logistics and 'new technologies.'
'By strengthening the creative economy we help provide substitute outlets for industries which are not so strong as they were in the past,' explains Pleitgen, who says some Culture Capital art projects will have strong 'social and economic components.'
The European Capital of Culture event kicks off January 9 next year at a ceremony in front of a huge refurbished Essen coal-mine industrial complex - now designated a cultural heritage site.
German president Horst Koehler will attend the opening.
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