Field Trip to Zeche Zollern

This was the field trip to the coal mine in Dortmund. The Zeche Zollern coal plant was the first that ended up powered by electricity. The weather was beginning to warm up, and the tour guide spoke only German (our original English-language tour guide fell ill), but it was a fun time.

We rode the bus through Dortmund for an hour, which helped inform my view of regular life in that western German city.

"Zeche" is a German term that means 'colliery' or 'mine,' and "Zollern" refers to a German royal family, a noble family, the Hohenzellern, that dates back to the 1200s-ish.

Anyway, the whole area was modeled after a noble courtyard:

But, of course, the central building housed the mine officer's offices, which had a panopticon effect.

Inside some of the buildings, which were modeled after cathedrals, the stained glass windows were adorned with images of labor:

The workers were all assigned a chain basket within which they would store their clothes for the day. They would, using the chain, pull down their basket, change clothes, and pull it back up to the rafters:

This is one of the main coal working centers. The diagonal lines were for pulling elevator chords, elevators for both people and for coal. 

It was said that if you were not at roll call in the mine at 6 am, you wouldn't get paid for the day. The best way to make sure you were at roll call, was to take the Men's Elevator. If you slept in, or otherwise missed the Men's Elevator, you'd have to take the last coal elevator before roll call. The Men's Elevator went at a respectable 40 kph (about 11 mph), but the coal elevator rocketed down at 70 kph (nearly 20 mph).

There was a large transformer room, with cool gears and capacitors and all kinds of cool electro-mechanical stuff.

I tried imagining the sound and the action of the place in full working order. 

But then it's hard to ignore the Allied-forces pummeling Dortmund took as a center for coal industry and munition factories. It's almost surprising any of the old infrastructure still exists.

Dortmund was picked as the location for the IPW in parts because of a quote from Gravity's Rainbow: "Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet," that, and a university's faculty that loves and teaches multiple classes in Pynchon's works.

Besides a snafu on the way home, this was a great little trip, and to see the inner workings of an energy industry that's now a museum. It was said that it had to lay dormant from the postwar period until the 1990s before they figured they could turn it into a place for learning, or before they learned how to do that, and once the realized that people would come to learn.

On the day of this field trip I had Corrie's phone. She had mine to take back to the SIM card people to make it sure it would work. Hers worked, and for that day we switched. She got mine working, and we switched back, but not before I took a handful of pictures that took a while to get access to. 

Germany! Trying to come to terms with their own monstrous shadow in real time.