History of the Zollern Colliery
Castle of Work, Familycolliery and icon of industrial culture
The name of the mine in western Dortmund is reminiscent of the Hohenzollern royal family. This family produced the Prussian kings and German emperors. Patriotic mine names were not uncommon in the Ruhr region, especially at the time of the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Examples include ‘Friedrich der Große’ (Frederick the Great) in Herne and ‘Unser Fritz’ (Our Fritz) in Wanne-Eickel, ‘Graf Bismarck’ (Count Bismarck) in Gelsenkirchen and ‘Deutscher Kaiser’ (German Emperor) in Duisburg.
The beginnings
The first Zollern colliery began coal mining in Kirchlinde, west of Dortmund, as early as 1873. Today's Zollern II/IV colliery owes its existence to the so-called ‘Westfeld’ section of the Kirchlinde mine. Due to a geological fault, development from the existing Zollern I shaft would have been difficult to accomplish. Therefore, in 1897, Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG (GBAG) decided to sink a second shaft near the village of Bövinghausen and purchased the necessary building land.
Due to unexpectedly rich coal deposits, not only was another shaft built in 1898, but a completely new colliery with all the necessary facilities: another shaft for ventilation (Zollern IV), its own administration building with a pay hall and washhouse, a magazine and colliery workshops, a coking plant and an ammonia factory. Coal production began on a modest scale in 1902 and at full capacity in 1903. By 1904, the above-ground operational buildings were also largely complete. A year later, a printed travel guide praised the ‘majestic structure’ of the Zollern II/IV colliery, ‘which resembles a feudal castle courtyard more than an industrial site, as well as the machine hall, whose size and beauty surpasses that of most state rooms’.
Model colliery
Following a rapid economic boom, Germany was experiencing an industrial boom at the time. In the 1890s alone, more than 70 new mines were built in the Ruhr region. Competing with each other, the large mining companies wanted to underline their claim to leadership by building particularly high-quality model mines that would serve as examples for others to follow. Many of these new mines were designed as total works of art, as architectural ensembles from a single mould. The individual buildings were carefully arranged in relation to each other, with harmoniously designed and elaborately decorated façades.
Zollern II/IV was built as a model colliery for what was then Germany's largest mining company. In the run-up to the decisive planning phase, GBAG hired Paul Knobbe, a renowned architect. He adorned the mine's facades with magnificent neo-Gothic stepped gables. In the case of the administration building, the headquarters of the mine management, this ‘impressive architecture’ was intended to underline the mining company's need for representation in national and international business contexts, and in the case of the monumental wage hall, the mine management's claim to authority over its workforce.
In April 1902, Knobbe also submitted a design for the machine hall of the new Zollern colliery. He decorated the exterior walls with brick friezes, decorative gables and battlements that were much more elaborate than was customary for such halls at the time. In this way, he clearly wanted to emphasise the central importance of the building for a modern, high-performance colliery operation.
Art Nouveau
The expectation of a short construction period probably played an important role in the decision to build a steel truss machine hall, as GBAG was obliged to start regular production within a few months. However, the mining company then fell behind its own schedule by requesting a particularly elaborate design for the machine hall. An initial, simple design by GHH had to be revised several times. Bruno Möhring, an architect from Berlin who was brought in later, focused primarily on the representative transept, which he decorated with colourful stained glass windows with mosaic strips and an ornate Art Nouveau portal. There is no other industrial building in Europe with a portal like this!
Inside, the central line of sight from this magnificent portal leads directly to the marble electrical switchboard, which stands on a multi-level platform in front of the opposite transept wall, dominated by a beautifully designed Art Nouveau clock. The entire technical operation of the colliery was controlled from here. This arrangement glorifies electrical energy, as Zollern II/IV was the first fully electrified colliery in the Ruhr mining industry. During the technical planning stage, GBAG gradually converted all the machinery to be procured from steam power to electricity. This modernisation was expected to significantly reduce operating costs.
Machine hall
Machine halls, i.e. central halls for several machines with different functions, were built in the Ruhr mining industry mainly between 1895 and 1914. Previously, the individual steam engines of a mine had been placed in their own engine house near the corresponding shaft. Especially in the new model collieries, these machines, which now also included steam-powered fans for ventilating the underground areas and compressors for generating compressed air, were grouped together in one central location wherever possible. This made maintenance and supervision easier and allowed for short steam pipes, which greatly reduced energy loss.
More than 80 machine halls were built in the collieries of the Ruhr area at that time. However, the equipment was by no means uniform. At Zollern II/IV, there were originally three types of machinery in the hall: two steam engines with connected generators for electricity production in the eastern nave, two compressors for compressed air production in the central transept, and two hoisting machines in the western nave. Today, the two hoisting machines and one compressor from 1902 are still in their original form.
Knobbes' draft plan, which envisaged a structure made of solid brickwork, was not realised. Instead, GBAG opted for a modern hall made of exposed steel trusses. The model for this was the exhibition pavilion of the Gutehoffnungshütte (GHH) at the Düsseldorf Industrial Exhibition in 1902 – a building that caused a sensation at the time. The innovative steel truss architecture of the pavilion was intended to draw attention to the steel company's products, which were presented inside. Even more than coal, steel was considered a hallmark of industrial progress at the time. Thanks to new production processes, German steel production expanded from 2 to 17 million tonnes per year between 1880 and 1913. In connection with its Düsseldorf model, the Zollern Hall can also be interpreted as a symbol of the successful coal and steel industry in the Ruhr region.
Electric hoisting machine
Special attention was paid to the hoisting machine from 1902. This was the first electrically powered main shaft hoisting machine in European mining.
Small electric hoisting machines had already been in use in isolated cases in smaller blind shafts in the 1890s. In main shafts, where weights weighing several tonnes had to be accelerated in a short time, electrically powered hoisting was considered too risky at the time compared to steam engines. The enormous amount of energy required to start up would have regularly led to the collapse of the low-capacity colliery power grids.
With the commissioning of the hoisting machine at Zollern II shaft, this problem was considered solved shortly after the beginning of the 20th century. The technical solution consisted of a combination of a circuit patented by the American Harry Ward (1861–1915) in 1891 and the flywheel converter developed by Karl Ilgner (1862–1921). This reduced voltage fluctuations to a tolerable level.
From mine to museum
Zollern II/IV was not one of the large mines in the area, but developed into a classic family mine. The number of employees usually fluctuated between 1,500 and 2,500.
The history of the mine was unspectacular. During daily operations, a number of technical planning flaws soon became apparent, which ran counter to the claim that it was a model mine. In 1930, GBAG decided to concentrate coal production from several mining fields in the west of Dortmund in a new central shaft, Germania, which was to be sunk.
Zollern II/IV was to be run down until this shaft became operational. A large-scale modernisation, which would have led to considerable changes to the building structure, was no longer planned for the Bövinghaus mine. Thanks to this decision, the model colliery remained largely intact in its original form until the end of mining operations in 1955. Nevertheless, there were several interventions in the building fabric. For example, the coking plant was decommissioned in 1918 and demolished shortly afterwards. The dismantling of the headframe above Shaft IV in 1940 noticeably disrupted the symmetrical panorama of the colliery.
Its rescue was achieved thanks to the persistent commitment of a small number of individuals who were enthusiastic about the exemplary quality of the facility and refused to be deterred. Particular mention should be made here of Hans Paul Koellmann, a university lecturer and architect from Dortmund, and the photographer couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. The decisive breakthrough in saving the endangered machine hall came when Karl Ruhrberg and Jürgen Harten from the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf sent an urgent letter to Heinz Kühn, the Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia, on 30 October 1969. On 30 December 1969, Westphalian State Conservator Hermann Busen officially informed the Zollern II/IV owner association that the Minister President had asked him to place the machine hall and the 1902 winding engine under monument protection and to refuse permission for the planned demolition.
As a direct result of this rescue operation, the regional associations of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL) and Rhineland (LVR) created their own departments for technical monument preservation in their state monument offices in 1973 and 1974, respectively. Compared to the other German federal states, this was a pioneering achievement.
The Westphalian Monument Authority developed the idea of using selected industrial buildings as ‘museums of work’. In 1979, the Westphalian Industrial Museum was founded (since 2023: LWL Museums of Industrial Culture). In 1984, the Rhineland Regional Council followed suit with the founding of the LVR Industrial Museum. The central task of the museums is to research the history of work and present it at the original site, in the historic industrial building and adjacent workers' houses. After extensive restoration work, the Zollern Colliery was opened to the public as a museum in 1999.