The Changing Ruhr

In books, paintings and plays of social protest, the Ruhr Valley was long pictured as a brutally black furnace of heavy industry, as ugly as the coalpits on which it is built. It has also been presented as a land populated by gaunt miners and ruled ruthlessly by a wealthy elite of powerful iron and war mongers. At various times the Ruhr indeed may have fitted these descriptions, but things have changed. "That is the legend of the Ruhr," says Gerhard Kienbaum, economics minister of West Germany's state of North Rhine-Westphalia. "Today it corresponds to reality about as well as the Nibelungenlied does."

The reality of the Ruhr has just been made plain in a startling request advanced in Brussels by the region's political leaders. They asked the Common Market for economic aid. The world's greatest industrial workshop now seeks help because it is fighting to change, modernize and revitalize its whole economy.

Lifting Its Face. Tucked into an area the size of Delaware, with 25 cities larger than Gary, Ind., and a population of 8,000,000, the Ruhr until recently turned out 85% of Germany's iron and steel and practically all of its hard coal. But competition from cheaper imports has leveled off its steel production, and the general switchover from coal to oil has cut its coal output 10% and cost the jobs of 100,000 Ruhr miners in the last five years. Population and per capita income have grown more slowly in the Ruhr than in the rest of the country.

The Ruhr's industrialists were slow to diversify, but lately they have begun to do so with zeal. In the most sweeping change, they have created a new oil industry to replace coal as a major source of power. Astride the groping arms of two major pipelines, refineries were built by several German companies and such international firms as Shell and British Petroleum. Where coal-based chemical plants once belched out dark and noisome fumes, modern petrochemical factories now cleanly crack oil into hundreds of new chemicals. A company called Chemische Werke Huels has built the Ruhr's biggest synthetic rubber plant, and Mulheim's Chemist Karl Ziegler last year won a Nobel Prize for developing methods to produce plastics from oil.

Steel is still the Ruhr's Siegfried Line, but the modern emphasis is less on producing it than using it. Dozens of smokeless, smartly designed plants turn out machine tools, chemical equipment and truck bodies; General Motors' Opel subsidiary 18 months ago opened a $500 million factory for its new Kadett small cars at Bochum--symbolically built over an abandoned coal mine. At Essen and Dortmund, Krupp, Siemens and AEG have put up new plants to manufacture everything from turbogenerators to X-ray apparatus. Also sprouting are plants for electronics parts, TV sets, plate glass and clothing, as well as factories that turn out a cheap furniture; in honor of its city of origin, Germans have dubbed the furniture "Gelsenkirchner Baroque." Though the Ruhr gained fame for its contributions to the arsenals of war in times past, today it has no armaments industry to speak of.

Lifting Its Chin. Acting much like a developing country, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has begun to offer tax breaks, low-cost land and long-term 4% loans to new enterprises. Tempted as well by cheap river transportation and by West Germany's biggest floating labor pool (due largely to the mine layoffs), more than 100 foreign firms have settled in the Ruhr since 1961, including 63 Japanese companies and a battery manufacturer from Israel.

The changing Ruhr has become a prettier, more pleasant place in which to live. Pressured by labor representatives on company boards, the Ruhr's prosperous industrialists have built colorful high-rise apartments and cozy bungalows that rank with the best workers' housing anywhere. Krupp has steam-cleaned many of its buildings, August Thyssen has spent $10 million to control the smoke from its stacks, and the grimy company towns of yesteryear have turned into handsome cities. The rural aspects of the region, so long crushed by fumes and neglect, can once again exert their charm. And in many of the plants devoted to the new technology, the most notable sounds nowadays are made by slipping slide rules and scratching drawing pens. The Ruhr is still not a paradise, but it is no longer synonymous with purgatory.

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