Land wants to resume, poor, smoke-pregnant land, but along comes a wire and says: not here you don’t. Great cubes of brick ­factory advance unceremoniously, stand there, more firmly set than mountains or hills, more naturally decreed than woods. Every small town has its focus, its edges, its development. But since they are all to be united by smoke to a single city, the separate forms and histories lose credibility, certainly function. Why? Why? Why is Essen here? Why are Duisburg, Hamborn, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Elberfeld, Barmen there? Why so many names, why so many mayors, so many officials for a single town? And as if all that weren’t enough, a provincial border runs through the middle of things. The inhabitants have the delusion of being Westphalians on the right, Rhinelanders on the left. But what are they really? Inhabitants of the smokeland, smoke worshippers, smoke makers, children of smoke.

It’s as though the inhabitants of the cities were outdistanced by the wisdom and the aspirations of the cities themselves. Things have a better feeling for the future than people do. People feel historically, i.e. retrospectively. Walls, streets, wires, chimneys feel prospectively. People get in the way of progress. They hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time. Each one wants his own church tower. In the meantime chimneys grow over the heads of church towers. The smoke eats up the sound of bells. It swaddles them in its black wool, so that they cannot be heard, much less told apart. Each city has its theatres, its monuments, its museum, its history. But none of these things has any lasting resonance. For historical or so-called cultural things live off the echo that sustains them. Here though is no room for echo and resonance. The sounds of bells live from echo, and they all fight each other, until the smoke comes along and chokes them.

Some of the smaller towns here have their old gabled romantic parts. These are referred to as idyllic. Time drones all round them. Busy wires enmesh them. All the trembling airwaves are full of the radio-borne words of the present. What is the point of these slumbering nooks, these dreamy beauties? While there was a blue sky over them they were in their element, but now grey smoke hangs over them. They are buried under billions of dust and carbon particles. They will never experience a resurrection. Never will a pure naked sunbeam gild them.