In front of the hoe everything is black and behind it all the same. In the German mining industry have always been buddies and have worked together from many Nations. However, with the Integration in the pit was not initially smooth.
In mining, it doesn’t matter where you come from, what colour skin you have or to pray what God says in the case of the miners in the Ruhr area. Several hundred meters deep in the shaft, where it is up to the faint light of the pit lamps in darkness is where the all-covering of coal dust makes everyone look the same, there is no place for Ego Trips. Here, you must be able to rely on each other. A mate makes a mistake, can the for a other fatal. “If you had of you with the Hammer on the thumb – bad. But if you’re not careful otherwise, your buddy is affected beside you, or others,” says the former mining shift supervisor Wolfgang Hill DW. “You have to hold it together at work. The consultation is in the mining industry.”
Also, because of this solidarity among the earth, the Integration of people from different countries is managed easier, what works on the surface, Germany’s slow -. So the Ruhr area with its approximately five million inhabitants, is a melting pot of cultures. The integration of primarily Polish and Turkish workers caused a social change that extends far beyond the Metropolitan area in the so-called Kohlenpotts.
The dude need to leave days of each other
The history of Integration of the German mining industry, it was written in the coal Mines of Essen, Dortmund, Bochum, Duisburg, Bottrop, or Gelsenkirchen. And it is also the result of mistakes from which you learned, albeit hesitantly.
A Polish parallel society
The story begins in the 1870s with the first Phase of the immigration of foreign workers. After the founding of the German Empire, the economy is spurred on by big dreams is making a rapid recovery. The hunger for energy in the booming heavy industry must be saturated. The Ruhr area with its seemingly inexhaustible coal is for the young, ambitious Nation is of vital importance. New, large mines and smelting works are being built; more labor is required, as the German labour market has to offer: “human material’ for the mine barons.
Fill the gap, especially Polish-speaking immigrants from the Prussian Eastern provinces and the present-day Poland. Until the First world war there are around 450,000. Their share of the workforce is in some cases more than 60 percent. In some cities, as a rule, arise the rights of Polish-speaking colonies.
“The Polish workers and the Polish-speaking migrants had their own club structures, their own newspaper, their own Union, your own Bank,” says the historian Christoph Seidel of the Foundation history of the Ruhr area in the DW-interview. “This was a relatively strong degree in the Milieu.”
In part, this is due to the fact that the immigrants to the new environment have to get used to. In addition, entrepreneurs and politicians have no integration strategy; what is also likely to be wanted. The majority of the formation of parallel societies “was also a response to the increasingly anti-Polish policy of the government,” explains Seidel. In addition, the German mountain people look at the Polish-speaking immigrants. In some places in the Ruhr region it comes to cultural and religious conflicts between the majority of Protestant German inhabitants, and conservative-Catholic immigrants.
Return home
After the end of the First world war, the majority of Polish-speaking immigrants in the newly created Polish nation-state, or in other European coalfields. Only about a third of them remains in the 1920s, in the Ruhr area. “These people had a high level of Adaptability, where there was also a relatively high pressure to adapt,” says the historian Seidel. These so-called “Ruhr poles” assimilate stronger than before. You will be an integral part of the Ruhrpotts, which is increasingly characterised by Migration.
In the 1950s, the next big migration phase starts. Germany reinvents itself after the end of the Second world war with the help of the Western allies. From the world war II ruins rise – the German “economic miracle of the economic recovery”. Again, the Ruhr area labour force is looking for. 1955 Germany begins with the recruitment of the so-called “guest workers”. Agreements with Italy, Spain, and in 1961 to be concluded with Turkey. Quickly the Turks to the strongest group of migrants to develop.
Here to stay
“It was assumed that these workers are migrant workers who come for half a year or a year in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the mining industry and then back into Turkey,” explains Christoph Seidel of the Foundation history of the Ruhr area. Therefore, integration measures that go beyond the workplace were missing. “The guest worker has been working in the 1960s,” concluded Seidel.
Exhausted PAL after the end of the shift: the guest-workers from Turkey from the mine-New-monopoly in Bergkamen
The only changes in the 1970s, to no longer be overlooked where the Obvious is: The supposed migrant workers are here to stay. Meanwhile, Germany’s businessmen and politicians have learned from the mistakes of the past and to think. It comes to family reunification, permanent residence, and naturalization of guest workers. The newly-established Ruhrkohle AG offers its foreign employees, which have developed to carriers, essential power, language courses, legal advice and training programmes. There are Turkish-language operating Newspapers, football clubs are important factors for Integration.
Integration with housing policy
A new housing policy to prevent the formation of ghettos, as with the previous Polish-speaking workers. “The mining industry had a large number of factory apartments,” says Seidel. As the Turkish miners nachholten their families, “couldn’t they live in Single-homes, but they needed family housing. And so it has integrated the Turkish miners ‘ families in the factory housing settlements.” In the allocation of the apartments, the operators ensure a mix of German and Turkish tenants.
Moroccan guest workers to wear in 1963 on a Essen colliery a bright protective ointment, which you must wear in coal mining
For the Turkish miners are there for the first time, the long-term prospects. Your children, as a rule, a training centre in the Ruhr coal AG – how to the local employees who leave the mining industry, however, increasingly, because they see in the crisis-ridden industry. The Ruhr region is transforming itself now completely to the melting pot of cultures, with its own language – a mixture of German dialects and foreign words. “We were always a very mixed bunch,” says the former Steiger Wolfgang Hill. “That’s why this mountain is a worker-Slang, with special terms emerged, such as the bottom of the sole, the ceiling is the roof.”
The change today is in the education felt. If historians Seidel for his Lectures at the Ruhr-Universität on the subject of mining Employees, “then sit there are often the granddaughters and the grandson of the former Turkish miners, a cross-generational educational advancement have experienced.”
However, the coal industry is not an island of the Blessed: “The tensions in society to the issue of Migration since the 1970s and 1980s have been reflected also in the mining industry down,” says Seidel. Basically, you could say, “that it – is concerned, at least, what is the operational Integration of Turkish workers in the mining industry is much better run than in other areas.”