Deutsche Fassung → · View the series “Failing City” →
Let’s go to Ludwigshafen. Really.
There are cities you travel to, and cities you travel through, and then there is Ludwigshafen am Rhein. For decades, people quite literally drove over Ludwigshafen – on stilts, that is, on an elevated highway cut through the city centre so confidently, as if the city had decided it would rather look at itself from ten metres up and at eighty kilometres an hour. That was in the sixties, when people still believed the future was made of concrete and had an exit towards BASF. Now the future is being torn down again. In Ludwigshafen, that is a genre of its own.
“Failing City” is written at the very top of letsgotoludwigshafen.de, the website of photographer Timo Schuster. He grew up there in a working-class family, lives in Berlin today and still keeps coming back – from the direction from which one doesn’t normally come back to Ludwigshafen, except by accident, having taken the wrong bridge in Mannheim. The title sounds like a verdict, but it is really a declaration of love in the only form one would believe for a place like this: shoulders slumped, slightly embarrassed, but stubborn.
Think of the project as an archive of disappearance. There is the Walzmühle, a grain mill that at some point was converted into a shopping mall, because in Germany every cathedral of labour sooner or later becomes a place where you can buy phone cases. Today only the façade remains, as if someone had left the backdrop standing out of piety during the demolition. Much of what was behind it is gone, and what is left of the shopping centre stands empty and decays at that leisurely pace only buildings nobody fights over anymore can manage. The website has a subpage simply called “Sprengung” – demolition by explosives. That is really all you need to know about urban development in the German southwest.
And yet – this is the punchline no novelist would dare – one of the old buildings houses the Ernst Bloch Zentrum. Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, and one can only guess how much hope a child needs when it looks out every morning at a chemical plant the size of a small country. Of all people, the philosopher of “The Principle of Hope” now holds the fort in the ruin of a shopping mall, like a night watchman of utopia who has forgotten that his shift is over. Schuster exhibited there in 2018 under the title “Utopie aus Industrie – Von der Walzmühle zur Denkfabrik” (Utopia from Industry – From the Walzmühle to the Think Tank). One could say the Walzmühle has passed through all three states of matter of German post-war modernism: work, consumption, reflection. Only the customers got off at stage two.
There are Hochstraße 1 and Hochstraße 2, the two elevated roads, photographed like dinosaur skeletons in a natural history museum shortly before they are moved into storage. And there was the Rathauscenter, a combination of town hall and shopping centre that only a city could come up with that considered administration and shopping two variants of the same waiting: you took a number and hoped. The Rathauscenter no longer exists, and it has disappeared with great consistency – more thoroughly, at any rate, than it ever worked. On Schuster’s website it lives on as a subpage, which in Ludwigshafen is increasingly the form in which buildings survive. And there are the bus rides, “Busfahrt 1”, “Bus”, showing Ludwigshafen from the perspective from which most of its residents actually know it: through a smeared window, between two stops, neither of which is the destination.
Ludwigshafen, it is easy to forget, has a certain talent for famous sons who then become famous elsewhere. Helmut Kohl came from Oggersheim, which legally belongs to Ludwigshafen – something the people of Oggersheim have still not quite come to terms with. And then there is Frank Black of the Pixies, who, according to the website, wrote a song about Ludwigshafen. An American indie rocker singing about Ludwigshafen. That is roughly as if Patti Smith recorded an album about Castrop-Rauxel, and precisely for that reason it is wonderful.
Schuster photographs marginal places, empty spaces, places in transition. He works, it says there, with fragments, because contemporary life only shows itself in fragments. That is a position in art theory; in Ludwigshafen, it is also simply a description of the place. This city consists of fragments: bridgeheads, underpasses, car park ramps, façades behind which something used to be, and that particular light that appears when the sun stands over the Rhine and falls on exposed-aggregate concrete. Nobody calls it the Tuscany of the Palatinate. Perhaps someone should.
Tellingly, he has shown this work mostly where the city itself has already moved out: in a vacant shop, in the closed Hallenbad Nord swimming pool, as a projection onto the power station. So the pictures hang in the ruins of exactly the modernism whose ruins they show. There is something recursive about it, like a mirror held up to a mirror – except that at the end there is no infinite corridor, but a car park.
One could take all this for misery tourism, for that by now rather worn pleasure of giving oneself a pleasant shiver in ugly cities. But it isn’t, because nobody in these pictures looks down on anything, not even from the elevated road. It is the gaze of someone who took the bus to school here and knows that “Failing City” is not the opposite of home but often its most honest form. Other cities have old towns. Ludwigshafen has demolition sites, and sometimes they tell you more.
So: Let’s go to Ludwigshafen. Preferably soon, while something is still standing. And if not: there are photos.
Note: This text was created with the help of AI. The English version is an AI translation of the German original.