There is no landscape, just a kind of extended townscape, industrial-scape—punctuated with picturesque garden locations.

Then, barely visible through the rain, we catch a glimmering of an undertaker on one side, and on the opposite side Persil, the epitome of life. No one speaks. Each time the door opens, someone slams it shut. It’s cold. When we stop, it’s colder. We feel like pulling our feet up on to the seats, but that’s almost certainly forbidden. We have leisure to read the notices: twenty seats; no spitting. I have half a mind to.

Now we’re on the move again. And here is the beginning of the next conurbation. We reach our destination. It looks like where we began from. It’s as though there are no spatial destinations here, only temporal ones, like the certain, final and irrevocable death of the last patch of native earth.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 March 1926

 

9. Smoke Joins up the Towns

Here the whole sky is smoke. It connects all the towns. It hangs in a grey pall over the land that has made it and that continues to make more of it. The wind that might scatter it is choked and buried under it. The sun that might tunnel through it is deflected and buried in thick clouds. Like something not earthborn and ephemeral, it ascends, conquers celestial regions, acquires mass, spins substance out of nothing, bundles its shadow into a body and incessantly increases its specific weight. It draws new sustenance from massive chimneys. It rises voluminously into the air. It is sacrifice, god and priest all at once. Billions of specks of dust are exhaled by it. By the mere fact of producing it, we worship it. We create it with an industry that is more than reverence. We are filled with it.

Also filled with it is the metropolis that is made up of all the towns of the Ruhrgebiet. An unholy expanse of greater and lesser conurbations, linked by rails, wires, interests and surrounded by smoke, cut off from the rest of the country. If it was just one single, great, gruesome city, it would still be a fantastic place, but not so menacingly ghostly. A big city has centres, rows of streets joined up by the sense of a structure, it has history, and its checkable expansion is somehow calming. It has a periphery, a limit, a line where it stops and goes over into country. Here, though, are a dozen beginnings; and it ends a dozen times.