magazine 2010/3 - Mercedes-Benz UK

36 Destinations Omnibus 3·2010
The region’s standing was boosted by the
establishment of a Duchy in the Werden district
– nowadays a suburb of Essen. Werden was a
male-dominated realm, and one of the
features of its Ducal Abbey was the “Musica
enchiriades” – the oldest surviving written
documentation of polyphonic music in Europe.
It formed the basis for all subsequent developments
in polyphonic music.
A cultural groundbreaker
The process of change in Essen has not been
underway merely for the last 30 years. In 1892,
industrialist Friedrich Grillo donated to the
city of Essen the first municipal theatre in
Germany. And in the early years of the last century
there were a number of quite revolu -
tionary developments in the city. The
Folkwang School was established for example,
featuring the dance class of Kurt Jooss who, in
conjunction with Merry Wigman, invented and
established modern expressive dance. It is a
form considered to be the origin of dance
theatre. In the 1920s Essen saw the creation of
a centre for modern art, funded primarily by
industrialists. In Hagen, Karl Ernst Osthaus
founded the famous Folkwang collection – the
first museum of contemporary art in Germany.
His philosophy was that art should not be
elitist; in fact, that that would be contrary to its
true function. He believed that art had to be
present wherever hard physical labour was
being done – as a counterweight, or balance,
so to speak.
After Osthaus’s death, the city of Hagen put
his collection up for sale, and the wealthy Essen
immediately took its chance. That wealth was
founded on the contributions of a large number
of local industrialists who established an art
society. Its members included Alfred Krupp
and Friedrich Grillo. It was the latter benefactor
who funded the construction of the Grillo
Theatre – today one of the oldest theatres in
the Ruhr region. The Hagen purchase greatly
expanded the collection of Essen‘s existing Art
Museum. On a visit to what was now known
as the Folkwang Museum in 1932, Paul Sachs,
co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, described it as “the finest museum
in the world”.
Sadly, the Nazis had little time for what they
called “degenerate” art. When the new regime
came to power, some 1,400 pieces from the
Folkwang collection were either destroyed or
sold off. Some of those pieces are on temporary
show in Essen this year. Large numbers of
museums from all over the world have loaned
art works which they acquired at the time of
the sell-off. Today the museum’s administration
is supervised by 96-year-old Bertold Beitz,
chairman of the Alfred Krupp von Bohlen und
Halbach Foundation, who donated the Museum
– worth some 55 million euro – to the city of
Essen.
Another major sightseeing recommendation
is the Ruhr Museum at the Zollverein site. It
is built-in to the former coal-washing plant –
a machine in which the coal is separated from
the rock by being transported from top to
bottom by conveyor belts. Today’s visitors to
the museum undergo the same journey as the
coal back then. That they come out cleaner at
the bottom is just a rumour.
A further highlight is the Aalto Theatre. The
opera house, opened in 1988, was voted in a
poll of 50 independent critics as the best opera
house in the German-speaking world, and in
2008 was elected “Opera House of the Year”.
Just down the road from Essen: the Gasometer
in Oberhausen, constructed in the late 1920s,
is a reminder of the region’s heavy industrial past.