How the exact details unfolded varies, but the core of the story is verified, even if it sounds like a beautiful legend: In the harsh post-war winter of 1946/47 – all of demoralized rubble Germany is starving and freezing – a few representatives from the Hamburg stages make their way southward to the Ruhr area because they have no fuel left to heat their theaters. Traveling in two wood gas-powered trucks, so the story goes, they want to "organize" coal, which is being extracted under high pressure in the Ruhr area. This coal is supposed to go abroad in long trains as reparations.
But the Hamburgers do not want to engage in fringsen (this is what is called stealing small amounts of coal from a wagon, after the Cologne Cardinal Joseph Frings expressed understanding for it), but need larger quantities. So, with full chutzpah, they head straight to the first coal mine they see with wheels turning from the north. According to several sources, this is the shaft facility König Ludwig 4/5 in Recklinghausen-Suderwich. The miners there surprisingly prove to be helpful and load the trucks full – whatever they can be convinced with, actors who could perform something pretty are definitely not present. Several times the coal carts are filled until the British military police stop the illegal activities.
The retaliatory strike takes place in the following summer of 1947. Whether again by wood gas truck is unknown; in any case, almost the entire artists' community from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, the Thalia Theater, and the Hamburg State Opera arrives to hold guest performances in the Recklinghausen auditorium. Because the general mood – long before the Cold War – cries out for a kind of socialist renewal, the call for workers' festivals instead of those in Salzburg seems plausible. The First Mayor of Hamburg, Max Brauer, who traveled to the Ruhr, and Otto Burmeister from the Deutsches Schauspielhaus spread the idea of a theater festival "in the midst of hard work." Even the first chairman of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, Hans Böckler, is said to have been spontaneously enthusiastic. Perhaps the slogan of the Hamburg guest performance, "Art against Coal," further inspired everyone. Didn’t the word taste like the brotherhood of mind and hand already dreamed of in the reform movements at the turn of the century?
Be that as it may, already in the following year 1948, the DGB and the city of Recklinghausen established a festival company (in 1949, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia joined as a third), which immediately organized the first festival. Every year, punctually starting on May 1, it was to be continued. Karl Pempelfort was appointed as the first artistic director of the Ruhr Festival, followed by Otto Burmeister. But it is not Brecht who is the author of the first workers' festival self-production in 1949, but Goethe with "Faust I." Even in the following years, bourgeois classics and popular operas dominate the program, the Ruhr Festival follows the restoration tendencies of the 1950s and even gives the stage to the Nazi-compromised actor Werner Krauß (as King Lear). However, the ticket prices are low, and in the early years, there are numerous initiatives to attract exactly the people who made its existence possible: the workers of the Ruhr.
