Magazine

Emschertal Jana Kerima Stolzer

A2 NS IX A40 – The Emscher Valley

by Jana Kerima Stolzer

I am in the lowest part of the valley on the northern side and pick the last grapes from the vine by a rusty fence. I look down the path that ends less than twenty metres away. Most of the grapes have already turned brown; I find a couple of edible ones, stand there and look around. It’s a late autumn afternoon in a cul-de-sac, a narrow country lane; the sun has disappeared behind the horizon already. I am surrounded by the motorway (bridge), main roads and railway tracks – both abandoned and in use – on multiple levels and a couple of allotments. Stopping, I eat one grape after another. At the gate of a garden, two faded koalas smile at me. There’s a rushing sound. The surroundings are making a rushing sound; the specific acoustics of a place. The cul-de-sac leads to an impenetrable hill, several dozen metres high and very steep. It’s overgrown with brambles, ivy and thorn bushes. Right up at the top, the bridge spans the dip of the valley and regains flat ground. From down here, I can only see the noise barrier cast in an orange-red light by the last rays of sunshine. I can almost hear the passing cars in that constant rushing sound. I miss seeing into the distance and think I hear a conversation from somewhere, maybe a garden shed. Distances are hard to judge in the valley; the acoustics change as soon as I’m in the shadow of the bridge, echoing and muffled at the same time. The motorway cuts through the landscape, cuts through living spaces and casts things below it into shade.

A single road leads to the valley; the Hahnenmühlenweg. I need to cross some railway tracks. A narrow passageway reveals a housing estate behind it with almost 60 flats. Three streets built almost exactly 100 years ago. This is a former mining estate built with new materials at the beginning of the 20th century due to the housing shortage. It was only designed to last ten years. I researched online; people actually call it the Negro Village. There’s no evidence why it’s called that. The neighbouring coal mine Tremonia had long offered washing facilities for the workers, so they did not, as one might reasonably assume, return home with coal-black faces. Another possible origin of the name is the estate’s U-shaped structure which is reminiscent of an African tribe settlement.

The elongated estate extends along the Emscher, a narrow river into which human and machine waste was dumped as the region was industrialised, but that is gradually finding its natural form again after the nearby coal mines closed down. Alternating between sand colours and washed out yellow, the flats appear uniform; behind them there is a garden, next to them a parking space and after the last house in the street, a small sports ground. There is only one access road by car – there are some parked on the side of the road, but I don’t meet anybody.

I follow the main path leading into the estate; on my right is the Emscher and on my left the entrances to the houses, each one like the next. A lion made from imitation marble occasionally smiles at me from the steps leading up to the front door; a couple of doors down, wind chimes move in the soft breath of wind, making me stop and listen for a second. After a few hundred metres, I get to a small river crossing and the adjoining sports ground, behind which is fallow land. On the other side of the river, an allotment association has taken up residence on the hill. Wet foliage covers the individually designed allotments, all of which are in the shadow of the afternoon sun by now. I walk along the fallow land until the bridge structure rises up before me.

The area seems abandoned, wild. I think I see the traces of former properties on the ground; the fallen, decayed remains of a fence lie nearby. Sometimes I step on building materials, bricks, and brambles encircle piles of rubble. This is where the path ends – this is where the Emscher, the railway tracks and the motorway bridge meet. A rushing sound comes from above me.

It’s cold under here in the shadow of the massive bridge; the grass on the ground is covered by soft white frost. I have to think of the novel Betoninsel (Concrete Island) (James Graham Ballard, 1974); driving too fast, a man veers off the carriageway in his car, crashes through the guardrail and ends up on a traffic island below the motorway. When he comes to, he realises he’s in a place that has always been forgotten, surrounded by traffic, some of which is ten metres above, some cordoned off by noise barriers and some indirectly visible. His first attempts to rejoin civilisation fail due to the speed of the traffic surrounding him. He always finds himself back on the island, where – apart from his will to survive – only his own pace exists. Surrounded by traces of past accidents, car wrecks and nature, he slowly starts to make the place his own.

I’m looking back on the fallow land behind me. Some years ago, people still lived here in small houses built decades earlier; everyone had their own garden, their small field and a house number. Buildings were erected on about 30 allotments, officially on green space. According to the town, the residents never got permission to build on the so-called garden land. People lived here. Twelve years ago, there was a court order to remove the buildings and the area has been lying fallow for almost five years now. What remains are the ownerless gates to the gardens and houses that speak of a time gone by.

The seemingly indestructible motorway bridge crossing the valley – called the Schnettkerbrücke – was constructed shortly after the First World War to spare travellers the journey through the valley and has only existed in its current form for about six years. It wasn’t nearly as massive before that. The newly built bridge is now 41.6 metres wide and every day 100 000 vehicles travel over it. The average driver may not even notice that it’s a bridge due to the high noise barriers on either side of the motorway. Their gaze is always directed forwards.

Below the gigantic steel and concrete construction, a railway embankment runs along the housing estate on the eastern side. Further back, the thorn bushes grow denser and the Emscher disappears under a sunken passageway, crossing the abandoned railway track. Any attempt to find a way through here fails. The only thing that connects the two sides of the valley is a narrow, unassuming foot path on the other side of the river.

Life seems to have withdrawn from this place, as if the shadow of the bridge made a piece of history disappear; weren’t the Emscher meadows a popular destination a hundred years ago? The boat tour to the Schnettkerbrücke was playfully called “the journey to America”. The estate lay idyllically in the meadows near the river; on the one side the coal mine, on the other the river, fields and nature. East and West connected by one road. Small paths along the Emscher and the railroad tracks made the valley accessible.

Five years ago, the bypass connecting the two motorways was built – the Dorstfelder Allee connects the A40 that runs over the Schnettkerbrücke with the A2 and surrounds the Emscher valley with a metre-high noise protection wall on the western side. This turned the wide valley into a small island amidst the pace of daily life and the thousands of people that cross it by car.

I cross under the bridge on the narrow pathway; it leads me closely along the built-up concrete. There are now countless vehicles above me. Behind it, I find the next allotment association; a path leads me to the next cul-de-sac before the bridge. The gardens seem abandoned in the winter season. Up above the rushing of the traffic. To the left, the garden gate; on it, two koala bears on wood. The vine by the fence has a few more grapes on it. I pick them and listen to the rushing sound.

Irrlichter tour in Steele

On a Saturday morning, under the heatwave called El Niño, I went on a walk in Essen-Steele with seven people and visited public artworks created specifically for places you wouldn't normally enter ...

Beyond the imaginable

Eva Koťátková in conversation with Britta Peters about the exhibition My Body Is Not An Island

Loss of Control Is the Necessary Condition for Sleep

To what extent do working conditions influence our sleep behaviour? In the post-industrial era, do we sleep better or do digitalisation and the unboundedness of working conditions deprive us of sleep?