On the path of the ore through the former coal wash of the Zollverein colliery: In the permanent exhibition of the Ruhr Museum, the history of the Ruhr area can be impressively experienced, from early times to the present.
The Ruhr Museum is unparalleled. For that, a Natural History and Archaeological Museum, a Historical Museum, an Architecture Museum, and perhaps also a Local Heritage Museum would have to come together. It is a "hybrid museum" that brings together nature, culture, and history. The Ruhr area is breaking away from established patterns and traditions. It is reordering itself and has an overwhelming building where the movement of search becomes the theme and offers of identity are created. The place is the first message. The cube of the Ruhr Museum dominates the ensemble of the Zollverein coal mine, designed by architects Schupp and Kremmer and designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The former coal washery is a gigantic shrine where the history of the Ruhr area develops in a circular motion from the present back through geological eras to the present. Architecture, the layout of the sorting facility, and transport routes play into the presentation and placement of the 6000 objects (including 1000 loans from 250 lenders, not including the archive of 2.3 million photographs) across 5000 square meters.
Through an orange-glowing staircase, whose railing descends like a glowing steel band, visitors go from the top level of the coal washery down to the start of the three-part path: to the chapter "Present." On the 17-meter level, visitors first walk through an impressive panorama photo series of streets, highways, heaps, and wastelands, residential communities, small shops, churches, sports fields, universities, technology centers. Boxes of Ruhr area mineral water tell about the dirt above and the purity far below; liturgical equipment speaks of closed churches; trophies represent the club culture; surfboards and wetsuits demonstrate what is possible in heaps and gas holders for leisure, aside from football. Behind a glass partition where foliage greens, supporting the thesis of biodiversity in the eco-tropic region and illustrating the alternation of environmental destruction and renaturation, dozens of tall white display cases rise. In this memory space for humans, their belongings, and their experiences, nature also finds its place. Its messages can also be read: in the petrified trail of a lightning bolt or in the annual rings of a tree. The "Present" of the region includes the plaster saint figure of Italian guest workers, the jar taken into the air raid shelter to warm baby food, or the soup plate that can only be half-filled on the dining table because mining damage has tilted the house.
The aura of things unfolds even richer on the middle, second floor: the storerooms of "Memory." The cabinets and galleries have been carved out of the former storage facilities for coal, overburden, and water. These storages create theatrical counterpoints. Precious exhibits fit into the rough atmosphere. The ancient torsos, sculptures, and busts wondrously stand out. Magnificent fossil finds, rock fragments, the billion-year-old meteorite, animal specimens, the skeleton of the mammoth, the shells of sea ammonites from the Cretaceous period, which have been arranged into a flower field, are all lowered into an abyss. Along with archeological, ethnological, and geological in-depth drilling, the process of civilization occurs. It unfolds chronologically along the epochs of pre-modernity with their regional peculiarities: from the Franks and Saxons and Romans to Christianization and medieval life, the Renaissance, Humanism, and Enlightenment, up to the Prussian state. In the Ruhr area, political currents, geohistorical status, and landscape development intertwine more strongly than almost anywhere else.
The last station, on the third floor down: the reservoir of "History" of the last 200 years, namely the extractive industry. With an overwhelming abundance of materials in the form of testimonies, everyday objects, evidence, and documents, the main strand runs along the 90-meter line of sight of the coal washery. The files "Beginnings, Breakthroughs, High Industrialization, Destruction & Reconstruction and Structural Change since 1957" are flanked by parallel tracks. Life forms and environments in change, the crises of humans and nature, political upheavals — hopeless ideology and a healing society — are on display. The statue of Alfred Krupp emerges from the shadows, and Willy Brandt's voice calls for a blue sky over the Ruhr area. As a prologue to this concluding part, that primordial element is laid out without which all this would not have been the same. On display tables — reminiscent of the conveyor belts of the coal washery — the energy carriers of the Carbon era are lined up: specimens of coal and ore, one piece from each seam. One stands in awe before the glaring, shimmering black. The collection resembles an art installation and is thus itself an expression of the structural change in the region that seeks its future in culture.
