Into the Heart of the Ruhrgebiet: Cora’s Adventures at the 2024 Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel, Part 1: The Trip Out and City Views (original) (raw)

I had a big translation job to finish (unfortunately, I do have to earn a living), so I still haven’t gotten around to writing up my adventures at the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, and the 2024 Eurocon in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Though I have been active elsewhere and so you can listen to Brian Collins, David Agranoff and me discuss the 1943 science fiction story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore at the Postcards from the Dying World podcast. I was also at Galactic Journey again, talking about Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard and Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore as well as a wide-reaching criminal law reform in West Germany in 1969, which decriminalised gay relationships between consenting adult men. With bonus 1969 campaign posters.

However, the 2024 con season isn’t over yet and so I was on the road again this Sunday, headed for Toyplosion, a vintage toy convention in the town of Castrop-Rauxel in the Ruhrgebiet. This was only the second ever Toyplosion. I was considering attending the first one last year, but my Dad was already in hospital at the time, so I didn’t go.

After my epic roadtrip to the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention in Neuss in May and the equally epic roadtrip to Eurocon in Rotterdam last month, I wasn’t overly worried about whether I could make the trip all alone, because I knew I could. Besides, the trip to Castrop-Rauxel is shorter than the one to Neuss, let alone Rotterdam.

The 2024 Toyplosion was a two day convention. I initially wanted to go on Saturday, but the pre-sale tickets were already sold out, so I decided to go on Sunday instead. This turned out to be a good decision, because there was less traffic on Sundays than on Saturdays, at least on the trip outwards.

The Trip Out

Using the trip to the Los Amigos convention in Neuss as a model, I got up at half past five AM on Sunday morning and set out at approx. a quarter past six. Unlike the trip to Neuss, it was still dark outside when I left. The sun currently rises at seven AM and sets at half past seven PM.

I headed to Groß Mackenstedt and drove onto highway A1. Because of the early hour and because trucks are not allowed to drive on German roads on Sundays – with exceptions for perishable cargo and other emergencies, there was very little traffic, as little as I’ve ever seen on the normally extremely busy A1. And so I made good time, as I drove through misty fields. I passed Wildeshausen and even the 33 kilometers monster construction zone between the exits Lohne Dinklage (yes, the town is named like the actor, though no one knows, if there’s any connection) and Bramsche was less torturous than usual, because there was so little traffic.

This time around, I bypassed service station Dammer Berge, because I’ve seen the bridge restaurant now and I wasn’t in the mood for soapy coffee and gloopy cake. Instead, I planned to head to one of the many Autohöfe (basically truck stops just off the highway, whereas service stations are directly on the highway) along the A1 for coffee and breakfast. Because they’re not directly on the highway, Autohöfe are generally cheaper and the food quality is better as well.

Once I’d driven past Osnabrück and crossed the Teutoburg Forest into the Münsterland, I started looking for Autohöfe. Alas, the next two I passed, Ladbergen and Hamm-Bockum, only had Burger King and McDonald’s on offer and I was in the mood for neither. In fact, I hate it that German highway service stations and truck stops are increasingly dominated by fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Nordsee rather the more individual greasy spoons of yore.

Turn Right at Kamener Kreuz

By now it was around eight o’clock and the road signs announced that the Kamener Kreuz, a cloverleaf junction that is one of the oldest and busiest in Germany, was right ahead. The Kamener Kreuz also marks the beginning of the Ruhrgebiet. Okay, in theory Hamm is the northernmost city of the Ruhrgebiet, but Hamm is just a highway exit and not nearly as iconic as the Kamener Kreuz.

So I’d made it to the northern edge of the Ruhrgebiet in a little under two hours, i.e. in record time. However, the con didn’t open until ten AM, which meant I had plenty of time for a leisurely breakfast,. During my trip back from the Los Amigos con in Neuss, I’d stopped for coffee and cake at a really nice bakery café in the shopping park directly at the Kamener Kreuz, so I decided to have breakfast there. There was only one problem. The shopping park and the bakery were behind the junction. And unlike the previous trip, I had to change onto highway A2 at Kamener Kreuz. I literally had to “turn right at the Kamener Kreuz”, which immediately caused the song “Polonäse Blankenese” to get stuck in my head.

“Polonäse Blankenese” is a novelty song by one Gottlieb Wendehals (literally Gottlieb Turncoat, in truth German jazz musician Werner Böhm, who deserves so much better than to be remembered for a stupid novelty song), which came out in 1981 and was a massive hit, that was played at parties for decades to come. In Germany, a polonaise is a kind of party dance similar to a conga line, where people march around the dancefloor in a long line. And whenever a polonaise starts at a German party, chances are the song that’s playing will be “Polonäse Blankenese”, so everybody knows that bloody song and the lyrics. You can see a video of a live performance of the song on the German TV show Hitparade here – complete with conga line.

The lyrics describe a gigantic conga line stretching all the way from the Blankenese neighbourhood in Hamburg to Wuppertal in the Ruhrgebiet and include the line “Turn right at the Kamener Kreuz” as well as an infamous line about one Erwin sexually harassing a woman called Heidi by groping her from behind. But until today, it never really occurred to me that the conga line basically follows highway A1 – though they would have to start on highway A7, because the A1 does not pass Blankenese. The directions are also wrong, because Wuppertal is behind the Kamener Kreuz, so turning right at the Kamener Kreuz won’t actually take you to Wuppertal.

But since I wasn’t going to Wuppertal, I did turn right at the Kamener Kreuz and passed very close by the striking ADAC monument, which is dedicated to the German road rescue service ADAC, but looks as if six angels are about to sacrifice a captured rescue helicopter to a volcano god. It’s a very weird monument and I would love to take a photo of it, but I still haven’t figured out how to actually get close enough to the monument to take a picture or if that’s even possible.

The reason the Kamener Kreuz is so famously busy is because this is the intersection between highway A1, one of the main North South routes for all the Europe (the other is highway A7, which intersects with highway A2 in Hannover) and highway A2, which is one of the main East West routes for all of Europe. Highway A2 goes from Oberhausen in the Ruhrgebiet to Berlin. But while I’m quite familiar with the Hannover to Magdeburg leg, because we always took it, when visiting from Great-Aunt Metel in East Germany, I’m not very familiar with the Oberhausen-Hannover leg at all, because there is no reason for me to take it – if I want to go to Hannover, I take highway A27.

On the A2, I passed by Dortmund and then I had to change again onto highway A45. I was still on the lookout for a place to have breakfast. However, after Dortmund the next exit was junction Castrop-Rauxel, which meant that I had arrived, though I had to change onto yet another highway (A42) for the last few kilometers. By now it was half past eight, one and a half hours before the con was due to open. Turns out that the trip I has expected to take between two and a half and three hours only took a little more than two.

The Ruhrgebiet of My Mind

Because I had one and a half hour to kill until the con, I decided to follow my original plan and have breakfast. There was only one problem. I was in a city I didn’t know, though I was pretty sure there would be a bakery to be found somewhere in Castrop-Rauxel. So I drove past the convention center (the address for which I’d set my GPS) and followed road signs saying “city center” and “old town”, all the while wondering whether Castrop-Rauxel even had a such a thing as a historic town center, because I knew nothing about the city.

Turns that the Castrop part of Castrop-Rauxel has been inhabited since Roman times and served a supply/rest spot and storage depot during the time of Charlesmagne, which is also where it got its name. However, for most of its existence Castrop was just a village. It has only been a city since 1926, when it was combined with the neighbouring village of Rauxel. And yes, I had to look all that up.

For I have to admit that even though I’ve known about the Ruhrgebiet since childhood, I actually know very little about the individual cities that make up the Ruhrgebiet. When I was a kid, the Ruhrgebiet was a place we drove through on our way to somewhere else, never one where we stopped. So in my mind, the Ruhrgebiet is a massive blob of cities bleeding into each other, inhabited by good-hearted and two-fisted working class people, a mess of coal mines and steelworks and highways that are all called A-fortysomething for maximum confusion.

This Ruhrgebiet of my mind is a combination of media images and things learned in school, because some idiot thought it was very important for fourth graders to learn all about coal-mining in Germany, even if said fourth graders didn’t even live in a mining area and the mines were dying at the time anyway. My image of the Ruhrgebiet comes from news footage of striking miners protesting mine closures in the early 1980s, whom I resented because the impending loss of their jobs got so much more media attention than the North German shipyards that were dying at the same time (though the great mine dying actually started much earlier in the late 1950s). It comes from the Schimanski Tatort crime dramas of the 1980s, where a working class cop with Polish roots (implied to be queer in the early episodes, though they had to change that) fought criminals amidst the dying coal mines and steelworks. Many of the Schimanski Tatort episodes may be watched here BTW, in beautifully restored HD, so the grimy Ruhrgebiet looks as sharp as never before. Also check out Schimanski’s first episode, “Duisburg Ruhrort”, because it’s fucking brilliant and manages to tell you everything you need to know about Horst Schimanski in three minutes with barely any words.

The Ruhrgebiet of my mind obviously bears only little resemblance to the real thing, especially since the coal mines, which are the thing I and everybody else most associate with the Ruhrgebiet, are all gone now. The last one closed in 2018. The steelworks and chemical industry still exist, though much diminished. As for Horst Schimanski, Götz George, the actor who played him, died in 2016, and Eberhard Feik who played his partner Tanner, died much too young in 1994. The Ruhrgebiet of my mind, if it ever existed, is gone. And I was about to explore the real thing.

BTW, one of the campaign flyers for the 1969 West German general election that I dug up for my latest Galactic Journey article features Johanna Lammers, miner’s wife from Castrop-Rauxel who praises social-democratic secretary of the economy Karl Schiller for saving thousands of mining job. Johanna and her husband had another fourteen years until the last coal mine in Castrop-Rauxel would close in 1983. But more about that later.

Breakfast in Castrop-Rauxel

I found a place to park my car and ventured into the city center of Castrop-Rauxel or what passes for it. Though I first stumbled upon the Jewish cemetery of Castrop-Rauxel, established in 1743 and in use until 1939. The cemetery is a historical monument now, though the gates are kept locked to keep anti-semitic vandals out and you have to go to the townhall to get the key.

The entrance to the Jewish cemetery in Castrop-Rauxel.

A look through the gates of the Jewish cemetery of Castrop-Rauxel. Many of the headstones were destroyed by the Nazis, though 56 remain.

Right next to the Jewish cemetery, I also came upon this delightful piece of public art called the “Taubenvatta” (Pigeon Daddy), which celebrates the popularity of keeping and racing homing pigeons in the Ruhrgebiet. Indeed, homing pigeons used to be called “the race horses of the working class” in the Ruhrgebiet. Though the association of pigeon racing with working class culture isn’t just a thing in Germany, but in the UK as well. If you’ve seen the 1984 nuclear war drama Threads, the character of Jimmy, a young working class man, keeps homing pigeons and his little brother Michael is graphically incinerated by a nuclear bomb while huddling in the cote with the pigeons. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

The “Taubenvatta” (pigeon daddy) statue in Castrop-Rauxel was erected in 1986 to commemorate the popularity of pigeon racing among the working class people of the Ruhrgebiet.

As I ventured further into the city center, I had to stop at a pedestrian crossing where the pedestrian traffic light symbol was not the regular stick figure, but a little miner with a lantern. Apparently, this is a thing in the Ruhrgebiet. Coal mining may be dead, but the miners are still around, immortalised as “Ampelmännchen”. In many ways, this is very illustrative of how the Ruhrgebiet has turned its industrial history into a tourist attraction.

A little miner with helmet and lantern serves as an “Ampelmännchen” in Castrop-Rauxel.

Barbie’s Art Noveau dreamhouse, Castrop-Rauxel edition.

The city center of Castrop-Rauxel isn’t anything to write home about. The Ruhrgebiet was heavily bombed in WWII due to its status as an industrial powerhouse, so you basically have a pedestrian zone with lots of drab postwar buildings. Since it was Sunday, the shops were closed anyway and most of them were the same chains you’ll find in any city center or mall anywhere in Germany anyway. And of course there was the obligatory husk of a former Karstadt department store (or maybe it was a Kaufhof/Horten or Hertie, though the architecture suggests Karstadt) occupied by some smaller stores that in no way fill the giant building. Personally, I think the death of the department store is one of the great tragedies of our age, but then the department stores are to blame for their own demise, because they removed all the stuff that provided a reason to go there, the toy departments, household good departments, stationery departments, fabric and craft departments, media and music departments, and basically became giant fashion stores offering overpiced clothing that you could easily get elsewhere. A lot of the surviving so-called department stores wouldn’t even qualify as department stores anymore by my personal definition, since they only have clothing and maybe shoes.

One thing that struck me as odd was that I saw several closed food stalls in the city center. Now food stalls aren’t that uncommon in pedestrian zones, but there were a lot of them and they offered not just classic standbys like currywurst and roast chicken, but typical fairground food like cotton candy and candied almonds. I later learned that Castrop-Rauxel’s annual autun fair actually took place that very same weekend. But since I was so early in the morning, it of course wasn’t open yet. Here is a video from last year’s fair.

The Catholic St. Lambertus Church in Castrop-Rauxel. There has been a church on this spot since the times of Charlesmagne, but when the city crew in the 19th century, the medieval church was expanded and partially demolished for this one, which dates from 1889.

I also found a bakery and it turned out to be a branch of Bakery Grobe, a Dortmund based chain with branches all over the Ruhrgebiet. During my trip to Neuss, I’d stopped at another branch of the same chain, so I knew they were good. I settled down and ordered a coffee and something called a Dortmund market omelette, which turned out to be a cheese and tomato omelette. It tasted very good, but then I really like omelette, though I’m not good at making it myself.

Dortmund market omelette, courtesy of Bakery Grobe in Castrop-Rauxel.

Once I’d finished breakfast, it was half past nine. So I strolled back to my car and headed to the con, which will be covered in part 2. For the trip back home and more views of the Ruhrgebiet, see part 3.