girls’ weekend at a mining museum
In the end of July, I took a girls’ trip to visit my friend Brita in her hometown of Gelsenkirchen. It was a short visit, but we had a really good time together, and it was fun for me to see small-town life in this part of Germany.
Like many men in Gelsenkirchen, Brita’s dad worked for decades as a coal miner. When the coal industry slowed, and eventually came to an end in Germany, he helped turn his mine into a museum. Now, he and some of his friends offer tours to people like me, who are interested in what it was like to work as a miner. Sadly, I didn’t get any pics from our visit to Brita’s dad’s mine. But the next day, she took me to see the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum (German Mining Museum in Bochum). Maybe not what you’d expect for a girls’ weekend, but it was fascinating!
One exhibit acknowledging hard truths: “Resources… also lead to plunder, misery and environmental damage.”
I worried at first that it might be a tribute to coal mining or a call to bring it back. It certainly was a tribute to the miners, who labored in difficult and often dangerous conditions and who were a key factor in Germany’s economic success. But it wasn’t nostalgic for mining. Actually, it acknowledged some of the hard truths about the mining industry, not only in Germany but how mining has been used to exploit countries and peoples throughout the world.
Another extremely interesting part of the museum was the mine itself. The majority of the mine is closed. But some of it was left open and is now used to show visitors different parts of the coal mining process and the evolution of mining through technological advances. If you ever find yourself in this part of Germany, I couldn’t recommend a visit to the Bergbau Museum enough.
