Dortmund: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

In the bowels of Dortmund station I look at a map of the city and try to get a sense of this place I’ve arrived in for the first time. The orientation points are limited by a lack of natural landmarks, like a river or a coastline, and my own ignorance. There’s a harbour, a river port through which much of the coal and steel that made this city once moved. There’s a ring road where the city walls once stood, surrounding what the historic old town that was very much destroyed by the bombing raids of the Second World War. And there is the Westfalenstadion, now named for a financial services company, home to a football club who have taken the name of Dortmund around the world and whose stickers in distinctive black and yellow occupy every lamppost, bus shelter and abandoned shop front in the city.

Our hotel is in the Nordstadt, divided from the city centre by the railway lines that function in the way that rivers do in other cities. Instead of bridges, there are long and dark tunnels underneath the tracks, giving each side a distinct feeling of being over here compared to over there. I am in the city for a panel discussion on the subject of borders at the Dortmunder U, an impressive arts space that occupies the giant brick building that was once a brewery. It is on the other side of the tracks from the hotel, and it feels fitting somehow that we have to cross beneath the tunnel to reach it, the lonely walk beneath the tracks as a reminder that borders and boundaries can take different forms in different places.

But we have some time before we need to make that journey, and so we walk out from the hotel in search of the harbour. From the docks at Dortmund it is a 269-kilometre journey along the Dortmund-Ems Canal to reach the North Sea. Unlike many canals, obsolete soon after they were built thanks to the coming of the railway, the Dortmund-Ems waterway was dug out of the western German soil in the 1890s precisely to alleviate the demand on the railway network, such was the freight transportation needs of the industrial city and the surrounding area. It helped turn the Port of Dortmund into one of the largest inland ports in Europe, with eleven kilometres of piers and one which, despite a decline since a peak in the 1970s, continues to move some three million tonnes of goods a year.

As we follow streets between the docks, past abandoned warehouses and coach parks for vehicles with number plates from Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, it reminds me of Liverpool and Rostock, of Gdansk and Belfast, with that similar feel of port areas that still have enough cranes and shipping containers to suggest that work is being done but a distinct lack of people. And in the spaces where once they might have worked, other businesses have moved in. A bicycle parts wholesalers. A club venue with a view over the water and no neighbours to disturb. A portacabin and patch of wasteland behind a high fence, a place to park your caravan or camper van over the winter. Cranes move, high above on the other side of the street at the Container Terminal. The port functions. 

From beside the Container Terminal the road rises up, past the ornate old harbour administration building, to lead us back towards the Nordstadt and our hotel. From the bridge we can see across the port and over towards the city centre, the huge U atop the former brewery clearly visible. We have started to find our orientation points. 

The next morning, we move once more beneath the railway tracks to walk through the pedestrian area of the city centre, almost entirely rebuilt during the West German economic miracle to replace the medieval core that had been blown to pieces during the bombing raids. With its mix of mid- to late-twentieth century shop fronts it reminds me not only of other city centres I’ve passed through in this part of the world, but also those of my childhood, of parts of Manchester or Liverpool visited on Saturday afternoon shopping trips. Can you choose twin cities based on a feeling? Despite a light drizzle, the streets are busy, with shoppers and those who, judging by their hats, scarves and shirts that peak out from beneath heavy winter jackets, are getting ready for tonight’s game. I can’t help but feel that the fans of Liverpool FC and the two Manchester clubs who, in recent years, have come to Dortmund to support their team, would also have also found much to remind them of home. 

Back at the Dortmunder U we take an elevator to the very top floor and step out onto a roof terrace beneath the giant letter that is visible from across the city and look down on the ring road and the city centre and its collection of glass and steel office blocks that speak to the new industries that have replaced the old. There’s no interest here in managed decline. I can see the television tower and the railway tracks, and the cranes of the harbour. Over there, in the gloom, the groundskeeper will be putting the final touches to his Champions League stage set. I have been in the city for less than twenty-four hours, and I’m still ignorant of Dortmund, of what the city is and what it means to the people that live here. But I also know that when I return to the station and look at the map, I’ll already have a better sense of what I’m looking at than I did yesterday.

It’s a start. 

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Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).