Visit: 11 June 2023
After an evening in the charming Romano-German city of Trier we set off alongside the Moselle before heading up into the pretty but parched countryside of Rhineland-Palatinate. An hour or so later we crossed the regional border into Saarland, the smallest German state (excepting the city-states of Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg). A heavily industrialised area centred on the Saar river, the Saarland has long been contested by France and Germany. Mostly Germany has had the upper hand but between 1920 and 1935 it was occupied by France and Britain according to the Treaty of Versailles. It was because of sites exactly like Völklingen that the victors sought to keep the region out of German control, for this was the age of steel and steel was imperative for the production of guns, shells and tanks.
Built in the late 19th century – a period of rapid innovation in industrial metallurgy – Völklingen was a monster of an ironworks. It had six blast furnaces, making it larger than any plant operating in Europe today (a blast furnace is the most expensive and most critical part of an iron / steel mill; Germany’s largest mill today, operated by ThyssenKrupp in Duisburg has four; Britain’s largest, the Port Talbot site currently being shut down by owners Tata Steel, has two). When production ceased in 1986 it was decided to preserve Völklingen as a museum, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1994.
Völklingen is a unique monument to turn-of-the-20th-century iron production since it was a) not significantly modified or upgraded after the 1930s, and b) not torn down for development after its closure.
The site is a cathedral to that important but often overlooked period of European history, the Industrial Revolution. Since iron ore was first smelted with coke at Ironbridge in 1705, scientists and industrialists iterated improvements to the process and sought scale benefits by building ever larger and more efficient production sites. The heart of the plant was its fleet of blast furnaces, which took in vast quantities of iron ore and smelted to produce pig iron. This would then be converted via the Bessemer or Siemens-Martin process to purge it of impurities and turn it into steel.
The efforts of the Versaille-imposed occupation ultimately amounted to little when a revanchist Germany set its eyes on reunification in the 1930s. Hitler encouraged a plebiscite, the people of the Saar voted overwhelmingly in favour and the return was rubber stamped by the League of Nations in 1935. It was poignant walking about the derelict site to think that this was once (more accurately twice) the heart of the German war machine, churning out materials being used to subjugate Europe. In WW2 prisoners were forced to labour here and there is an eerie memorial to them in the Blower hall.
The town of Völklingen is watched over by two massive slag heaps that almost blend into the landscape as nature patiently works to reclaim them. Nearby too is a modern steel mill making wire rod for tyre cord and suspension springs, but instead of getting its pig iron from the shuttered ironworks it receives molten iron by rail from a plant 15 miles away. The area is still pretty industrialised, located in what Eurocrats refer to as the SaarLorLux region of Saarland, Luxembourg and Lorraine.
For us the site was reminiscent of Zollverein, a former coal mine and industrial complex in Essen and a fellow WHS. From a visitor’s standpoint Völklingen gives you more freedom to roam almost wherever you like, with most of the cavernous buildings having multiple accessible levels. The only restriction is that you need to don a hard hat to explore some of the upper levels of the blast furnaces. There were times when we felt like the only people visiting and indeed we got lost for quite a while underneath the Burden Shed, struggling to work out how it connected up with the rest of the plant!
At the end of a blisteringly hot summer’s day when finally we found our way back to the visitor centre there was a chance to cool off with an alkoholfrei beer before continuing on the final leg of our road trip toward the hills of the Vosges.
Tom Livesey's World Heritage Site blog 