Shedding Grimy Image : Ruhr--Air, Waters Are Clean Again

They laughed when Willy Brandt promised in the 1969 election campaign to clean up the sky over the Ruhr basin.

For generations, the Ruhr, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, had meant smoking chimneys, belching blast furnaces, soot-filled skies. The sun, when it managed to appear, had to force its way through a canopy of coal dust, smoke and sulfurous emissions. Usually it failed.

But these days, the sun shines clearly in azure skies. The Ruhr has been cleaned up in what is looked on as a model of industrial transformation. The rivers and streams in the basin are as clean as in any industrial area in the world.

“You might not pour Ruhr water into your whiskey glass,” Andreas Schlieper, an official with the Ruhr Community Assn., told a recent visitor, “but you wouldn’t expire if you fell into the river, either.”

Premier’s Boast

Johannes Rau, premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany’s most populous state, said, “The Ruhr has become the cleanest and greenest industrial region in the world.”

Rau, the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for chancellor in next year’s federal elections, wants to make sure that the old stereotypes about the Ruhr are replaced by a more modern image that befits the area’s new status. He rejects the notion held by many Germans that the Ruhr is a depressing, industrial wasteland, a place that ranks low on the quality-of-life scale.

“That image was never true,” Rau said, “and today less so than ever before.”

The Ruhr is a geographical rather than a political entity, covering about 400 square miles. It runs from the west bank of the Rhine at Duisburg upriver to Hamm, a distance of 55 miles, and from the Ruhr River on the south to the Lippe River on the north.

Fields, Parks, Forests

Rau and officials like Schlieper of the community association point out that fully 70% of the Ruhr basin is open space--fields, parks and forests.

Not far from the steel mills, fat Holstein cows can be seen munching grass near streams that for perhaps the first time in this century contain fish. In the industrial city of Bottrop, 1,000 of the 100,000 citizens belong to one or the other of two fishing clubs. They take bream, barb, gudgeon, carp and eel from the streams emptying into the Ruhr, and from the Ruhr itself.

Schlieper points to a recent U.N. report that ranks the cities of the Ruhr as fifth among the world’s metropolitan areas in terms of the number and variety of museums, libraries, theaters, opera houses, concert halls, dance ensembles and the like. It is outranked only by London, New York, Paris and Tokyo.

Last year, the Ruhr’s theaters attracted more people than its soccer teams did. Schlieper pointed out that the singer Bruce Springsteen will appear twice in the Ruhr on a scheduled concert tour, in Essen and Dortmund, but only once in any other area of West Germany. The Ruhr now has five universities--in Essen, Dortmund, Bochum, Duisburg and Hagen--and all have been established in recent years.

Despite its assets, the Ruhr faces a challenge, and officials do not shrink from facing up to it. They must plant the Ruhr’s new image in the minds of people who might bring new industry into the area, and they must attract industries that can revive the area’s sagging economic fortunes.

Like “smokestack industry” areas in the United States and Britain, the Ruhr has been losing out to southern regions in its effort to attract modern high-tech plants.

As in other industrial countries, manufacturers tend to be locating in areas that will attract highly skilled workers, and polls show that Germans tend to associate the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg with a higher quality of life than the traditional industrial areas of northern Germany.

It has not always been that way. In its heyday, the Ruhr attracted workers from far and wide, particularly from eastern Germany and Poland.

The Ruhr, with its abundant coal fields and access to iron ore, its central location and network of water and rail transport, was the heartland of Germany’s industrial revolution. The steel and heavy machinery industries were established here, and together they fueled Germany’s rise as a world power in the 19th Century. Essen, home of the Krupp family’s arms plant, became known as the “Armorer of the Reich.”

After World War I, France occupied the Ruhr in an effort to reduce the economic and strategic significance of the region. Yet in World War II, the Ruhr produced the guns and tanks with which German troops swept through much of Europe.

Heavy Bombing Raids

The Ruhr was the target for heavy Allied bombing raids in World War II, and 20% of its industrial capacity was destroyed, along with about a third of its dwellings, two-thirds of its bridges and nearly all its railroads. In the years after the war, much of what remained of the Ruhr’s industry was seized as war reparations.

Then, under the Marshall Plan, the Ruhr’s industrial engine was restarted, and the area played an important role in West Germany’s “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s.

But in the 1970s, Ruhr coal and steel became less competitive; traditional industries declined and unemployment went up. Today, unemployment in the Ruhr averages around 14%, against a national average of just under 9%.

In recent years, industrial analysts say, Ruhr corporations have tried to restore the competitiveness of their traditional products by cutting costs. As one report says, there has been “hardly any attempt to adapt to a changing demand structure by developing new products in the Ruhr area.”

Schlieper, the Ruhr Community Assn. official, says the Ruhr must lure new businesses to remain economically healthy.

Microchip Train Has Left

“We’re too late to be Silicon Valley,” he said. “That’s gone south. The microchip train has already left. But where we could excel is in the field of environmental industries and new materials. We’ve got universities here now that can provide talent and research. They are new because the old Prussian government feared that universities in the Ruhr would give the working masses concentrated here some intellectual leadership that might be bad for business.

“But our experience in cleaning up the Ruhr has provided us with skills and technology in this area. German Babcock, for instance, once got most of its income from building electrical generating plants. But now they have shifted into producing industrial environmental equipment needed because of stiffer laws.”

Other industries have become proficient in new fields related to the environment, like water recycling to keep streams clean. In fact, the Ruhr leads the country in strict environmental laws.

“It’s ironic,” Schlieper said. “Last year we attracted a lot of attention when we stopped private automobile traffic for two days because of a smog alert. We have a system that when our stations report a certain level of pollutants in the air, automobiles are restricted.

“So the bad news was that cars were prohibited from driving in the Ruhr because of smog, but the good news was that our threshold is much lower than most German cities, and therefore we had probably much less smog to trigger the alert than is customary elsewhere.”

State Premier Rau is urging the area’s bankers, industrialists and trade union leaders to present a united front in attracting new industries.

Also, the Ruhr is asking the German Olympic Committee to be considered as the site of a future summer Olympic Games.

“We’ve already got the sports arena infrastructure here,” Schlieper said. “We are hoping that we might be selected in the year 2000 or 2004.”

The centers of the Ruhr’s cities have been rebuilt since the war. Many have attractive central squares and pedestrian malls that belie the old image of grimy urban sprawl.

“This is really a very livable place,” Schlieper said. “As you can see, the snow is not black. Our message is that we are not dying, we are alive, and it is profitable to come here. We don’t try to hide problems; we tackle them.

“As the oldest industrial area in Germany, we have had our problems earlier than other places. This means that we are finding solutions sooner.”