Dortmund-Specialities E-Book

Horst Karbaum

• Herausgeber: via tolino media
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Give me five (Dollars, Pounds, Euros ...) and get your guide! This is a series of "slightly different travel guides that will be corrected and adapted to new information. This year, 2024, Dortmund will once again host a major football tournament, the UEFA European Championship but games aren't played every day. Dortmund has a lot of interesting things to see, experience and enjoy. This is where the first travel guide helps visitors.

Leseprobe

Dortmund, like the entire Ruhr region, is greatly underestimated. The times ‘when briquettes were still flying through the air’ and everything was grey and dusty are long gone. Dortmund has transformed itself from a steel, coal and beer city into an attractive, green city with a great experience character. Visitor numbers are increasing year on year.

But what has remained of the ‘dusty times’ are the people who, even if they seem dismissive at first glance, because they say what they think, are warm-hearted, quickly include everyone in their community, in short: they are good mates.

That's why I needed this travel guide!

One more thing! Dortmund is more of a football city than other cities. For three quarters of Dortmund residents, the Westfalenstadion (Signal Iduna Park) is the city centre. Dortmund showed that the world is welcome here as early as 1974 during the European Championships and especially during the summer fairytale of the 2006 World Cup.

It will be the same this year for the 2024 European Football Championships.

Impressum

Content: © 2024 Horst Karbaum Cover image and the directly integrated photos: © 2022 Horst Karbaumresponsible: Horst Karbaum, Gasenbergstr. 55, 44269 DortmundISBN: 9783759225580

The work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. Any utilisation is prohibited without the consent of the publisher and the author. This applies in particular to electronic or other reproduction, translation, distribution and making available to the public. This guide contains short video clips to illustrate the author's explanations. In some cases, they have been integrated by reference to publicly accessible clips on YouTube, Vimeo or similar. In particular, representations of websites of named organisations and institutions have also been used, linked or embedded. The same applies to the linking of directions, primarily by means of Google Maps. The author would like to expressly thank all those referenced in this way. Should there be individual requests not to be referenced in this work, the author and the publisher ask you to send a message to peter{at}horst-karbaum.de.

External links contained in the text do not constitute any responsibility on the part of the publisher, but are the sole responsibility of the respective service provider. The publisher has carefully checked the linked external sites at the time of publication of the book; no possible legal infringements were recognisable at the time of linking. There is no influence on later changes. Liability on the part of the publisher is therefore excluded.

This travel guide is constantly being updated and is therefore only available as an eBook. This means you can always take the latest news from Dortmund with you on your trip for just a fiver (5 EUROs).

Horst A. Karbaum

Dortmund-Specialities… more than just soccer

… the slightly different travel guide

Editorial

I have lived in Dortmund since 1957 and have witnessed the change. The city where the collar of your white shirt turned black on the inside in the evening has developed into a green, urban, attractive city.

No, the briquettes are no longer flying through the air.

That's long gone, but it was almost like that, to put it bluntly. Where you earn your money by mining coal and producing steel and iron, it can't be clinically clean. Cities like Dortmund ensured that there was an ‘economic miracle’ and regions like Bavaria were able to work their way up from poor federal states to rich ones. Unfortunately, the region is not always thanked for this.

Das, was war, ist nicht mehr, aber in den Köpfen externer Leute gibt es die Vorurteile nach wie vor. But Dortmund no longer has a colliery or steelworks.

Dortmund has become a modern, clean and, above all, green service city. This change was difficult and cost a lot of money. The old sources of income are gone! Even the title of second largest beer city in the world is gone.

-:-

Everything had been sacrificed to heavy industry for 150 years, because everything served prosperity. People defined themselves by their hard labour. A miner - as those who mined coal underground, sometimes 1,000 metres deep, were called - was proud of what he achieved every day and every night. This town never rested. For most of them, it was divided into three sections: early shift from six in the morning until two o'clock in the afternoon, then late shift until ten in the evening and finally night shift until six in the morning.

But a mate is also called a good friend and that's no coincidence, because coal mining and steel casting were dangerous jobs in dangerous places. Everyone had one hand for themselves and the other for their colleague, their mate.

Many people who worked in such an environment miss it today. In Dortmund, the miners' song is still sung: ’Glück auf! Good luck! ...’. That's partly because of the sense of solidarity and partly because of the deep melancholy.

Yours

Fly high!

If you want to get a complete overview of Dortmund, you should of course head for sightseeing points at high altitude. And there are plenty of them in Dortmund. Let's start with the one that is the highest and offers a complete overview thanks to its position right in the centre.

The „Floriantower“

The ‘Florian’ was already ready for the first Federal Garden Show in 1959. As far as I know, it was not called ‘Florian’ at that time, but only after the second horticultural show, Euroflor 1969.

It is a television tower, in which, among other things, there are rooms for Deutsche Telekom at the top under a restaurant, from which a number of telecommunications services are provided (television, FM radio, DAB radio, etc.). The tower is 159 metres tall (with or without antenna, depending on how you look at it). The restaurant, which is quite small and accessible to visitors, is at 150 metres and above that there are two more floors in the open air where you can see 360° Dortmund.

gleicher Stelle im Westfalenpark.

The Dortmund „U“

The entire building was actually a storage facility for materials, silos and tanks of the ‘Dortmunder Union Brauerei’, whose brands are now co-produced a few kilometres further north on the site of the ‘DAB - Dortmunder Aktien Brauerei’. All around was the factory site of the Union Brewery, which had relocated to Dortmund-Lütgendortmund in the old millennium.

The site stood unused for a long time and was a wasteland until one day a Dortmund mayor, who himself had previously managed a museum in Dortmund, pushed through his favourite idea. The entire site was remodelled and adapted to new standards. The ‘U’ tower building was gutted and completely redesigned inside to accommodate a museum and other cultural institutions that had previously been located on Dortmund's Ostwall, which is why it is still called ‘Museum Ostwall’ even though it is two kilometres away.

The project was planned to cost 46 million euros, but turned out to be more than twice as expensive. After the first few years of operation, it was criticised again as the operating costs unexpectedly exceeded the one million euro mark per year.

Despite the high costs, there is one thing about the ‘U’ that no Dortmund resident would question: the ‘flying pictures’ (see page 16) designed by filmmaker Adolf Winkelmann, which now display images, slogans or simply graphics, photos and video clips that move across the frames at the top, which look like window niches. What the ‘Alter Peter’ is for the people of Munich - Karl Valentin said when asked why the Alter Peter has two clocks on each of its four sides, one above the other, ‘so that several Munich residents can look at the clock at the same time’. It is similar with the ‘Flying Pictures’, which can be seen on four sides around the top of the U-shaped building from all directions.

You can also ‘fly high’ there because the ‘U’ is 70 metres high and has a viewing platform at the top, under the ‘flying pictures’, which is accessible to visitors.

The „cake slice“

… is part of the Harenberg City Centre at Königswall 21, just a few metres from the ‘U’ in the direction of the main railway station. It used to house a small theatre hall and several other event rooms. It was originally the office building of the Harenberg publishing house run by Bodo Harenberg, which unfortunately went bankrupt a few years ago and the building passed into other hands. If it is still freely accessible today, you should simply try it out.

It is an experience to take the glass lifts up to 70 metres and see the main station from above, like a toy train.

Reinoldikirche

You can climb 60 metres up the tower of Dortmund's main church, St. Reinoldi, right in the city centre. Access is possible during regular guided tours of the church. During Advent, brass musicians play Advent music from up there, which can be heard over the large Christmas market.

Furnace and Skywalk

The Phoenix Lake is honoured elsewhere and also that it should actually be called Hermann Lake after Herman Piepenstock, who founded the Hermannshütte on its site. In the west of the former independent district town of Hörde lies the actual Phoenix plant, which is now called Phoenix-West.

While iron was turned into steel and steel products at the Hermannshütte, iron was produced from iron ore in blast furnaces at the Phoenix plant. One of these blast furnaces has not been completely demolished, but can still be visited.

There are also guided tours that lead over a disused blast furnace gas pipeline on the so-called Skywalk to and on the blast furnace.

Flying high in the terrain

Wie schon an anderer Stelle beschrieben, liegen im Süden von Dortmund die nördlichen Ausläufer des Ardeygebirges, weshalb es dort zu natürlichen Aussichtspunkten kommt.

Berghofen

The suburb of Berghofen is so named because it lies high above Dortmund on a hill. For example, if you walk along the southern shore of Lake Phoenix in an easterly direction to behind the bridge over the B236 and then take the next path to the right, you can cross Schüruferstraße after a few metres and climb up behind the noise barriers of the B236 to points in Berghofen from where you have a good view, for example by continuing up Gansmannshof street and looking back towards Lake Phoenix and the city at the end. If you cross Ehmsenstreet and walk across the meadow there, you will come across one of Dortmund's fin tracks. These are running tracks where the circular path is filled with wood chips that are easy on the joints.

From the slightly lower Gasenbergstraße, you can see across a field to the Westfalenstadion at one point. This place is an insider tip on New Year's Eve, because then you can see that especially the financially weaker districts of Dortmund in the north have money to spare for fireworks (see book cover).

Sports in Dortmund

There is hardly any other city that is associated with its football club in the first Bundesliga like Dortmund. This is why we are focussing on BvB 09, which is not only an image factor but also an economic factor for Dortmund.

Ballspielverein Borussia Dortmund 1909

… means „Borussia Dortmund 1909 football club“, where Jürgen Klopp was coach before he went to Liverpool.

In Dortmund, many people have very close emotional ties to BvB 09. This is noticeable when you walk through the city and you come across many people wearing clothes, scarves or jerseys in the colours yellow and black.

In my opinion, there are three main reasons for this close connection.

1. the history of football in the Ruhr region has created a more or less close bond in almost every city there. Many small people had their jobs in the densely populated area with the cities of Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum and Dortmund and nothing else.

There was a rivalry between the cities from the beginning of industrialisation, because the large number of small people there was the same everywhere and these small people who worked in mines, steelworks and other basic and heavy industry needed a glorious point of reference that defined their own identity in comparison to the small people of the neighbouring cities.

2. in the case of BvB, this club is and was particularly successful. For decades, the BvB team in the first Bundesliga has been regarded as the only team capable of challenging other particularly successful clubs for the German championship.

3. the BvB has many fans outside the city of Dortmund in the whole of Germany because many football fans hope that the next championship will not be won by the dominant club in Munich. Thus, BvB is always the main hope.

There was a time when BvB played in the second Bundesliga. It always played at the top and had many fans, but success returned when it was able to use its new venue in Dortmund, the Westfalenstadion, which had been built for the 1974 World Cup. At that time, it had a capacity of 54,000 seats and standing room. Today there are 30,00 more

At that time, it was a speciality to build a pure football stadium without running tracks all around. This meant that the spectators were right next to the pitch and felt involved. You only realise this once you have experienced a match in today's Signal Iduna Park.

The tough fans have their place in the south stand and what they organise is unique. People talk about the fearsome yellow wall that makes it difficult for every opponent.

The Signal-Iduna-Park, as the Westfalenstadion is to be called following a long-term sponsorship agreement with the Signal-Iduna insurance group, will be the venue for some of the matches in the 2024 European Championship.

Stadium „Rote Erde“

[The term] ‘Red Earth’ became a synonym for the Westphalian landscape, especially in romantic literature.(Source Wikipedia)

As Dortmund is located in Westphalia, ‘Rote Erde’ was the right name for the stadium, also in reference to the city's strong social democratic leanings. It was a stadium like many in Germany, with a red cinder pitch and red cinder tracks that served as a venue for athletics and, above all, football matches. Before the Westfalenstadion was built, BvB played its Oberliga (upper league) and later Bundesliga matches here, as did eternal rivals FC Schalke 04 in the similarly simple Glückaufkampfbahn in the heart of the Schalke suburb of Gelsenkirchen.

If you look at these stadiums today, you wonder how it could have worked in the past. Rote Erde had a capacity of 3,000 covered seats and 7,000 standing places. It is located right next to the Westfalenstadion and on the other side is an athletics hall.

Helmut-Körnig-( athletics) hall

It is the Olympic training centre for athletics in Westphalia with a 200 m running track, a 60 m sprint track, jumping and impact facilities.

Ice hockey

The Westfalen Ice Sports Centre is also located on the other side of Strobelallee in the ensemble of sports facilities. However, the Eisadler Dortmund club based there only plays in the Regionalliga West. Nevertheless, they have many die-hard fans who don't care much for football.

The Westfalenhallen

For a long time, Dortmund's Westfalenhalle I was THE hall in Europe where major sporting events (and other events) took place.

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