“Ten square kilometers in size. Seven to eight kilometers in length, two to three widths, depending on where you measure from.”
Kristin Leucker leads the visitors through the largest coherent chemical area in the world: BASF was founded in 1865 as “Badische Anilin und Sodafabrik” on the Palatinate side of the Rhine – because they didn’t want it in Mannheim.
Today, 39,000 employees work in the 200 production plants.
“The tour you drove, too, here in the south, through to the north harbor and then back, I walked with a colleague on foot. Sports shoes, we never stopped, it cost us about four hours . “
An industrial city full of fine scents and bad smells, dyes and fertilizers, endless pipes, tank containers, boilers, steam vapors and explosive substances. A man-made volcano with a high-security harbor and time-honored brick buildings from the Wilhelminian era, such as the water tower or today’s visitor center.
Leucker: “In some cases even a listed building. Six percent was preserved in exactly the same way after the war, actually intact, the rest was either partially destroyed or completely destroyed. So there is also a lot of emphasis on the older buildings. They are still used for Example as an office building. “
Old substance is rare in Ludwigshafen. The rest of the industrial city, which was only founded in 1853, was 80 percent destroyed in the Second World War.
“So of course the city had to reinvent itself after the war, so a lot of industry has settled there. It still has to find its own profile as a young city,” says Michael Cordier, who was born in Ludwigshafen. As head of marketing for the city, he always had to struggle with a difficult image:
“We were recently voted the ugliest city in Germany and that actually helped us a lot, because many of the people have now said, ‘Wait a minute,’ as the Palatinate says.”
Bloch saw something new in the city, free from the ballast of tradition
At the tram stop on Berliner Platz, an old man plays the song of the North Sea coast and the North German beach. It’s really not nice here, but the charm of the city lies in its contradictions: skyscrapers that remind of the past glory of Latin American metropolises in the glaring sunlight, vacant lots and steep concrete bridges, feeders for the highways, so characteristic of the post-war city that is suitable for cars.
Today, they are in danger of collapsing, with makeshift tarpaulins attached to some so that no concrete lumps fall onto the underlying road surface. In his essay LUDWIGSHAFEN – MANNHEIM, the philosopher Ernst Bloch already described his hometown in 1928 as an “ugly city”, even if, in comparison to the bourgeois residence city on the other side of the Rhine, as “more honest”, than “factory dirt that had been forced” To become a city “.
Ernst Bloch: “Places like Ludwigshafen are the first seaside towns in the country, fluctuating, relaxed, by the sea of an unstable future. The cozy Palatinate wine country, half an hour from here, the court and the National Theater, the nearby domes of Worms and Speyer are moving away for the time being .
He also saw Ludwigshafen as something particularly new, free from the ballast of tradition.
Ernst Bloch: “… where there are no beautiful houses far away, and certainly no earlier urban cultures are overwhelming the now. The Baden aniline and soda factory, the core of IG colors (moved here so that smoke and the proletariat do not blow to Mannheim), became the literal landmark of the city. “
The German philosopher and writer Ernst Bloch (undated) (dpa / picture alliance)
The Ernst Bloch center is housed in the old mill, in the factory owner’s villa. Here, in the permanent exhibition, the philosopher’s study can be viewed from above through a walk-in glass plate: armchairs, bookshelf, pipe and glasses on the desk.
The philosopher Klaus Kufeld was the founding director of the center in 1997: “Yes, Ludwigshafen is and was a city of contradictions. The beautiful Bloch saying: Aquarium on the left of the Rhine and futurum on the right of the Rhine shows this beautiful dialectic and I also think these contradictions, on the one hand wealth from a huge company BASF and on the other hand a very young city that only grew up through industry and workers. “
But Ludwigshafen has emancipated itself from the image of a pure industrial and chemical city over the years: in addition to the established cultural pillars such as the Wilhelm Hack Museum and the Theater im Pfalzbau with the Ludwigshafen Festival, there is the great summer of culture, the street theater festival and countless other cultural initiatives .
Klaus Kufeld: “And Ludwigshafeners are proud of that. I would have said 20 years ago: Ludwigshafen has no middle class. Today it has a very enlightened middle class and there are many people, including manufacturers, from all walks of life actually do the new and make the old new, as Bloch would have said. ”
“A certain ‘laissez faire’ feeling”
In recent years Ludwigshafen has turned more and more to the river bank. Modern Mediterranean-style houses have been built on the old port canal.
The head of the festival of German film, Michael Kötz, deliberately placed his three large cinema tents on the beach under the large black plane trees of the park island 15 years ago. He also accompanies a general structural change in urban development:
“The new boulevard is now not in the city, but on the bank. And that has a lot to do with a new view of the city and quality of life, the so-called work-life balance, which means that people don’t just want to work and then go to sleep, but they also want to live. The inner city is still from a time of pure functionalism and then still hopelessly overbuilt with access roads, which can only be torn down. “
Musicians play and fire-breathers burst out a meter-long flame. A street festival for the opening of an Arab bakery. Bismarckstrasse, once a prosperous pedestrian zone of the economic miracle, is now a mile for one-euro shops and cheap cell phone sales, but also for smaller shops from all continents.
Immigration has shaped the city of Ludwigshafen since it was founded, says Immacolata Amadeo. As a three-year-old she came to Ludwigshafen with her parents, Italian guest workers, and grew up here. She has been back for a year and has been running the local Ernst Bloch Center for a year.
Immacolata Amadeo: “In the meantime, I believe there are up to a hundred nations in Ludwigshafen. So the variety of origins and also the languages that these people bring with them.” That also shaped a very special attitude towards life. The biggest attraction of the city are the open and warm residents:
“Those who also approach strangers without reservations, are curious, are also very helpful. They convey a certain ‘laissez faire’ feeling and can also enjoy life, so I would say many positive qualities.”
–
