I just realzed that I had never really written anything about Dortmund, the city in which I'm living right now. It's a pretty normal since, not famous for anything because there isn't anything famous here.
Dortmund is located in the Bundesland Nordrhein-Westfalia, in central western Germany known as the Ruhrgebiet. This area, including Essen, Bochum, Duisburg, Mülheim, Dortmund, and stretching to Düsseldorf, is a metropole of about 5 million people. Dortmund is only a small part of this area, consisting of about 600,000 citizens.
The city is most known for its breweries and its football team, Borussia Dortmund. Many large beers come from Dortmund including DAB and Dortmunder Kronen. Beer is cheap and in many cases cheaper than soda and water! The football club, Borussia Dortmund, is a one-time winner of the European Champions League in 1997 and a multi-winner of the German Bundesliga. It plays host at the newly named Signa-Iduna Park (previously Westfalenstadion), which supports up to 85,000 fans. This venue will also host several games during the 2006 World Cup in June and July.
At the end of WWII, Dortmund was about 80% destroyed by allied bombings, there really isn't much of anything old to see in the city. Hansaplatz and Rheinoldikirche are nice sites downtown, but there is no old city-center like many other cities, such as Cologne, Bremen, or Münster. Previous to national-socialism, Hitler, and the Holocost, there was a respectable Jewish population in Dortmund (about 4000). However, most of the Jews were taken out of the city and killed at concentration camps after the city's Synagogue was burned to the ground. The U-Bahn station "Stadtgarten" now sits at the same site.
Obviously Dortmund is somewhat unique, maybe not all for good reasons. It currently has an unemployment rate of nearly 18% and many citizens rely on social welfare to get by (this is much higher than the national rate of 11.5%). This high unemployment rate is due to a few different factors:
1. Dortmund, as well as this area of the Ruhrgebiet, use to be a large coal-mining area including exports out of Germany. Today, this is not the case due to imports from China, Eastern-Europe, and the United States. There exists a very small percent of the original industry.
2. Dortmund's population consists of a great number of immigrants, mostly Turkish, who either immigrated to Germany during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s as Gastarbeiter, or guestworkers. Many of these people worked in Dortmund in the industrial sector, but as jobs have been outsourced it has been harder to find work. Furthermore, it is more difficult for the Turkish immigrants to find work than a native German. The unemployment rate for these people is much higher than that of Germans, similar to the situation of immigrants in France.
Due to the immigrants living in the north and the wealthy Germans living in the south of Dortmund, one can say that the city is greatly segregated. One can enter both of these areas and see clearly that there are two different worlds in the same city. Hopefully I'll know more about this relationship in the future. It is very important regarding social stability here in Dortmund, especially after the riots in France. Something similar could very likely break out here in Dortmund, given the current situation.
That is Dortmund in a nutshell. I will try to add more later as a think of some things I have missed.
No comments:
Post a Comment