The man who remembers the ironworks

The worker statue and the black steel monolith meet you first, standing sentinel at the roundabout before the gates even open. Nothing quite prepares you for what lies behind them: 600,000 square metres of rusted silence that once roared louder than anything else in Europe.
One of the highlights of our GNTB preconvention tour was a visit to the Völklingen Ironworks, one of 55 Unesco World Heritage Sites in Germany, and the only completely preserved blast furnace complex of its kind left on Earth.
It ran for 113 years, from 1873 to 1986, before falling silent. In 1994, it became the first industrial monument ever added to Unesco’s World Heritage List - a recognition that rests, we would learn, on five distinct pillars.

Our guide for the next three hours is Franz Gonder, a man the plant seems to have been waiting for. He worked here in production, in rolled steel, in data processing - even spent time with the German army and on a joint German-Saudi project in the 1980s. None of that matters as much, though, as the fact that he is the last remaining link to the Röchling era, the family whose name built and nearly broke this place.
His voice carries easily over wind moving through empty pipework as he walks us through the blast furnace, the coking plant, the sintering hall - structures so intact it feels less like a museum and more like the workers simply stepped out for lunch and never came back. He points to the towering coal silo from 1897, and to the burden shed and water tower, early experiments in reinforced concrete once as radical as the steel itself.

“Germany’s biggest producer of iron girders. Most patents of any steel company in the world,” he says, pride audible. Then, without pause: “And forced labour. Both wars. That is also this place. I don’t hide it, and neither should you.”
That honesty is what makes the walk land differently than a typical heritage tour. Franz doesn’t romanticise the furnaces - the 1928 explosion that killed thirteen men, the decades of dust in a city once ranked the dirtiest in Europe. He talks, too, of how conditions changed slowly: helmets in the 1950s, protective clothing, drilling machines replacing hammer and chisel - proof, he says, that even a place built on brute force learned to protect the people inside it.

Dr Ralf Beil, General Director, puts it simply: “We are a living World Heritage Site. This means that we preserve the ironworks, look after it and, at the same time, make full use of it. We hold festivals and concerts here, exhibitions and much, much more.”
What was once, in his words, an industrial behemoth that poisoned the Saarland landscape has become, as he describes it, a place where the past and present, tourism and culture, converge. Our five programmatic pillars - industry, culture, history, art and nature - reflect this, as do our exhibitions.
Then Franz leads us somewhere unexpected: a garden. “We call it Paradise,” he says, gesturing at wildflowers pushing through what was once the coking plant's inferno. A picnic bench sits where molten iron once flowed.

Beyond the industrial skeleton, Völklingen has become a stage for concerts, festivals, and international art exhibitions, including the Urban Art Biennale. The Ferrodrom science centre invites visitors to test the forces that once shaped raw ore into steel, while a walkway stretching more than seven kilometres threads through machinery once reserved for workers alone.
Franz’s tour ends where the story does - the day the last blast furnace went cold, July 4, 1986, ending 105 years of pig iron production. “People think a monument is something finished,” he says, heading back toward the gates. “This one is still becoming something. I’ve just been here long enough to watch it happen.”
Photographs by Oliver Dietze, Wolfgang Klauke, Günther Bayerl, Celine Felber and Karl Heinrich Veith