TY - JOUR
AU - Kritter,, Sabine
AB - Abstract History museums in old industrial regions are important agents in the current debate on how we perceive work in our society. One of their key issues is how work built the region and how it changed in the context of deindustrialization. The article explores the depictions of work in the Ruhr Museum, which is the central regional history museum of the foremost region of heavy industry in Germany. It shows that with few exceptions the representations of the past in this museum include only images of standardized male industrial work, mainly in the coal and steel industries. Furthermore, it demonstrates that in the sections of the museum dedicated to the present, work has disappeared almost entirely from the representations, to be replaced with representations of culture, including industrial heritage, and lifestyles. In light of these findings the article argues that this way of presenting (and not presenting) work emphasizes the break between the past and the present. It homogenizes the historical narrative of work while making current work forms invisible and downplaying the continuing importance of the world of work. Instead, the museum tells a story of loss that requires compensation by culture. Fundamental changes in the world of work as a result of globalization, tertiarization, automation and digitization have led in recent years to work becoming a focus of attention in Germany not just in public debates and scholarly research but also in the realm of cultural production. The wide range of temporary exhibitions in museums of (cultural) history that have taken up the topic of work, including an emphasis on present-day working conditions, witnesses to this renewed interest.1 At the same time, hundreds of museums continue to address the world of work—mainly as historical—in their permanent exhibitions.2 As places with public appeal, museums that exhibit ‘work’ are important actors in the societal discourse surrounding the redefinition and reassessment of work. By selecting and interpreting what is rendered visible or left out, they are part of a process of ‘making things mean’.3 The ‘power of making things visible’4 becomes all the more central as museums lend form to ‘authorized versions of the past’ and ‘anchor in institutionalized form an official memory’ that is perceived as reality.5 In this way, museums are actively involved in the construction of social conditions, but at the same time they are also socially determined.6 Following Sharon Macdonald, we can define them as places in which ‘some of the most contested and thorny cultural and epistemological questions of the late twentieth century were fought out’.7 The numerous museums of industry and labour founded since the 1980s in the old industrial regions of Germany, most of which revolve around the historical industrial sites where they are located, have played a central role in the museumization of work. Given their focus on social history and everyday life, they also highlight the working and living conditions of ‘ordinary people’.8 The industrial museums in particular have had a difficult time, however, defining their relationship to the present and have paid little attention thus far to current changes in the world of work,9 perhaps because their view of themselves as industrial museums has led them to focus mainly on the industrial age and industrial labour. Matters are somewhat different for the museums of regional and urban history in the old industrial conurbations. One of their core topics is how work shaped the region and how the region changed in the course of deindustrialization. More than the industrial museums, they explore the interplay of work and life-worlds in the city or region and they thus have a broader focus. Looking at industrialization in the nineteenth century offers these museums the opportunity to understand the challenges of the present historically and to communicate the conditions that led to current developments. At the same time, by aspiring to become ‘sites of encounter with the problems of today and the projects of tomorrow’ and therefore narrating their (hi)stories up to the present,10 city and regional museums also directly sketch a picture of contemporary society, and not only one mediated by history. In the process, they often display a certain helplessness in overcoming outmoded notions of work and devising a museological language for the presentation of working environments beyond standard industrial labour. A cultural reinterpretation of regional history, a process currently taking place in many old industrial regions as new images and identities are promoted, is observable in many museums, however. This process finds expression in a strong narrative juxtaposition of a past in which work still made history and a present in which the role of work in shaping individual lives and structuring society is largely ignored and replaced by culture. This approach marks the waning importance of work in contemporary narratives; one could even speak of a widespread disappearance of work from portrayals of the present.11 In this article I would like to sketch how museums of (cultural) history in Germany—especially city museums—present historical work environments and the images of present-day work which they produce.12 My main focus will be on the Ruhr Museum in Essen, as the central regional museum of history in what was once Germany’s most important industrial region (see Fig. 1). Based on its permanent exhibition, I shall develop some theses as to why work is disappearing from museums’ representations of contemporary life, on the one hand, and why culture is coming to fill the resultant gap, on the other. Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: Entrance to the permanent exhibition Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: Entrance to the permanent exhibition As a regional museum, the Ruhr Museum in Essen belongs to the group of cultural (history) museums, which at more than 43 per cent represent the numerically largest type of museum in Germany.13 It is one of the best-equipped and most frequently visited museums in the region and views itself as the ‘memory of the region’, which seeks ‘to show what, where and how the Ruhr was in past and present and afford visitors a glimpse of their future that will offer them some orientation’.14 It reopened in its current form at a new site and under a new name as part of the events of European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010. It is housed in the former coal-washing plant of the Zollverein Coal Mine, which has been described as ‘probably the most impressive icon of the industrial age’.15 Because the museum’s reopening coincided with the opening of European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010, it is closely associated with the presentation of the Ruhr as a successful cultural region, since the title European Capital of Culture proved to be an instrument of ‘city boosting’ and an ‘image programme’.16 I. The Homogenization of Work in the Past The image that many exhibitions convey of labour in history is, I would contend, one essential reason for the widespread disappearance of work from museum depictions of the present. Especially for the phase of heightened industrialization in the nineteenth century, a homogenized image of past labour often serves as the ideal type of work, in which the focus is on a very specific aspect: productive, physical, standardized male industrial labour—the work of ‘grafters’ (Malocher). In the Ruhr region, this especially includes work in the steel and coal industries. Standardized industrial labour and with it the grafter are elevated to symbols of the category of work as such. They become the socially hegemonic image of labour and thus largely determine our concept of work and also the representation of work in museums. Such a focus on the industrial proletariat is specific to many museums in Germany,17 while museums in other countries—such as the United States—often present a wider range of occupations and activities in their exhibitions.18 Such an orientation towards the normative model of industrial labour and thus the homogenization of work in history is also evident in the Ruhr Museum, where the historical work environment is addressed most comprehensively and most explicitly for the phase of high industrialization. This perspective is tied to a strong emphasis on the sociocultural entanglements of production and life-world and the characterization of society as ‘class society’. I turn now to take a closer look at the section ‘The World of Work and the Labour Movement’ in the ‘The Boom Years 1870–1914’ (see Fig. 2).19 Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: ‘The World of Work and the Labour Movement’ in ‘The Boom Years 1870–1914’, part of the ‘History’ section Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: ‘The World of Work and the Labour Movement’ in ‘The Boom Years 1870–1914’, part of the ‘History’ section The homogenization of labour in the past is evident here in the tasks depicted. The objects on display—largely tools, equipment and work clothing—all come from heavy industry (mining and steel production): safety lamps, pieces of pig iron, pit props to stabilize mineshafts etc. At the centre of the ensemble is a display showing the workplace of an engine man at a steam winding engine. On the textual level, too, the topic is ‘heavy industrial labour’. Separately from the rest of the ensemble, the exhibition takes up women’s work as a supplement to heavy industrial labour. Here, unlike in the rest of the ensemble, reproductive and service work are also portrayed. The area of reproduction dominates visually, illustrated by several washboards and the tiffin boxes steelworkers used to transport their food to work. The presentation of the washboards on the same level as the tools used by men sets up a visual equivalence between production and reproduction. At the same time, however, this cements clear images of male wage work versus female housework and separates the gender-specific aspects of work from the main narrative. The characterization of women’s work as ‘cooperation’—the German word Mitarbeit, used in the text, suggests a hierarchy more helpfully translated into English as ‘assistance’—also plainly hierarchizes the separation and subordinates women’s reproductive work to men’s heavy industrial labour. The characterization of mining as a male world is additionally underlined by the fact that women’s—albeit minor—involvement in the collieries goes unmentioned.20 Regina Wonisch and Roswitha Muttenthaler have aptly described this manner of presenting gender aspects in exhibitions as ‘women’s corners’, criticizing that these women’s corners include previously marginalized narratives ‘without any effect on the representation of gender differences in the museum’s overall concept’.21 When it comes to representations of work, men’s manual industrial labour remains dominant. The fact that most of the forms of work portrayed refer to standardized employment conditions is also evidence of this homogenization. Positioned centrally over the ensemble are several factory clocks that stand for industrial work cycles and the synchronized division of labour that defined work in the period of rapid industrialization. In addition, a miners’ tag board from a colliery with hundreds of numbered hooks, dozens of safety lamps and a time clock for 150 men represents a large enterprise with its mass of workers reduced to deindividualized and interchangeable numbers. The presentation of massed, identical work equipment is a particular mode of dramatization. Moreover, two pocket-watches marking twenty-five years of employment connote standardized work as steady. Objects representing the mutability and uncertainty of existence are absent, even if they are mentioned in the text. The forms of labour performed by skilled workers—with references to the Fordist model in the depiction of the plant as a site of control and standardization but also of protection from market forces—thus function visually as a template. The insecure employment situation of unskilled workers remains, however, a particular blind spot. Moreover, the deskilling of industrial labour, which plays a role in many American museums, is missing from the narrative. The focus on industrial labour means that the working conditions presented for the past are characterized almost exclusively by physical strain, harshness and danger. The particular perils of this labour are represented by, among other things, a smoke helmet, safety clothing, a sign pointing to the first-aid station and infirmary and a commemorative plaque for workers killed in a blast-furnace explosion. In this way, the image of work is linked to an ethos of extreme toughness and physical self-sacrifice, with no mention of the psychological stresses. In addition—as suggested by the title of the section, ‘The World of Work and the Labour Movement’—labour struggles arising from the poor working conditions are treated as a central component of the work environment. Based on numerous banners and postcards as well as photographs and calls for miners’ strikes, manual labour is associated with militancy and the Ruhr is connoted as a militant region. In sum, the image of work constructed here presents it as productive and manual standardized male labour performed under harsh and stressful conditions. Among the workers of the Ruhr, the aspects that receive the most visual emphasis here—productivity, men’s collective labour in heavy industry, dangerous working conditions and militancy—frequently formed the basis for their own creation of meaning, their pride and their identification with labour they experienced as brutal and inhumane. And even in the Ruhr’s present-day—strongly past-orientated—self-image, the coal and steel industries continue to be treated as a matter of course as central to the creation of identity in the region.22 Such a focus is understandable historically against the backdrop of the growth of the coal and steel industries in particular in the nineteenth-century Ruhr and its dominance into the 1960s. In Germany more generally there was also a long period in which employment in industry clearly outstripped that in the agricultural and service sectors.23 As a result, the model of industrial labour not only strongly shaped ways of life within society but also advanced to a ‘highly persistent’ normatively hegemonic model.24 What is more, industrial labour as such appears more homogeneous than other types of work since it is usually performed in large enterprises under standardized conditions with heavy machines and tools (which look impressive in exhibitions), is typically unskilled and is marked by the strict separation of home and workplace. This focus ignores, however, how heterogeneous and varied work already was during the period of rapid industrialization in the Ruhr. With regard to the collieries themselves, this diversity included the many highly skilled and simple activities above ground, for example the work of ‘metal workers, electricians, carpenters, masons and the countless persons who cleaned the shop floors and halls, loaded wagons, managed the vast quantities of wood needed for work in the mines or performed clerical tasks’.25 Moreover, as Klaus Tenfelde among others has shown, the proportion of miners among total workers had already begun to fall in the 1880s, while that of service workers was increasing.26 While the Ruhr Museum shows that work was increasingly being performed in large enterprises, it does not depict the structure of white-collar employees needed to run heavy industrial enterprises in the late nineteenth century and the ‘scientification of production’27 or the accompanying extensive activities of engineers. The Ruhr Museum’s exhibition also neglects the precarious forms of work, although frequent unemployment, changes of workplace and job insecurity were mass phenomena at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the Ruhr.28 The figure of the male industrial worker in standardized employment circumstances was thus never as dominant historically as the exhibition suggests. Furthermore, this emphasis is calculated more to underline the distance between the present and the past than to create points of contact between history and the present. II. The Imaginative Crisis of Labour The narrowing of perspective described here is consequential to the extent that the constructed image of the grafter no longer seems plausible given the massive changes in the world of work. This creates a problem for representations of work in the present day: the disappearance of the long-hegemonic figure of the white male industrial worker leaves a gap—a gap that means that many activities are not, or cannot be, regarded as work anymore and that there is a lack of awareness about work. Michael Denning has aptly described this as an ‘imaginative crisis’ of labour, which, he points out, ‘has led many contemporary thinkers to reject the very categories of “labor” and “laborer” as inadequate’.29 Given the imaginative crisis, today’s museums face a challenge: representing the changing nature of work using the traditional means developed to deal with industrial labour. As the ‘overall proportion of the mechanical diminishes, a measure of visuality disappears along with it’.30 Thus the imaginative crisis of labour proves to be a crisis of visibility as well. In the German-speaking world, the representability of work was discussed in detail especially in the context of the founding of industrial museums in the 1980s, but the questions raised largely referred to industrial labour.31 The current debates surrounding museological strategies for finding visual means of representing changes in present-day work are very hesitant, although they are necessary in order to tackle the imaginative crisis and make better use of museums’ specific potential for redefining work. A particular challenge worth mentioning here is the fact that work today is no longer organized around material objects and sites as much as it was in the industrial age. Thus contemporary work can frequently be characterized as a visual operation. Its central elements include time, attention and repetition: ‘Waiting is working and working is waiting’, as Thomas Elsaesser trenchantly commented.32 Furthermore, intellectual labour is especially difficult to render in visual terms because there is virtually nothing to see in computerized workplaces. Tools like the computer give very little indication of what people concretely do with them. The body and corporeality, too, which were at the centre of industrial labour, have now—at least in some fields—become ‘relatively nonessential for work environments’.33 What is more, service work appears to lack the kind of unifying principle that the technical confrontation with objects in industrial labour provides. If nothing else, social services in particular are defined by the fact that they do not refer to material or immaterial objects but are notable for the aspect of interaction.34 One consequence is a societal de-thematization of labour, which can also be observed in museums to the extent that the absence of images and concepts of work leads to the ‘disappearance’ of its “inner quality”, that is its content, the form of overexertion and the effects of its exploitation’.35 In its place we find an emphasis on the pluralization and heterogeneity of work, which, while underlining an important change, does not suffice to characterize work in its social embeddedness. The heterogeneity as presented usually seems like a mere enumeration, with little to say about how work affects human beings. In what follows I will sketch these aspects using the example of the Ruhr Museum. The Ruhr Museum addresses contemporary work above all under the heading ‘Structural Change’ in the exhibition ‘The Present’—one of more than twenty ‘phenomena’ that the museum uses to unfold a panorama of the present (see Fig. 3). The main medium of communication here is photography. Figure 3: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: The ‘Structural Change’ section in ‘The Present’ Figure 3: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: The ‘Structural Change’ section in ‘The Present’ The emphasis on the heterogeneity of present-day work is evident in the diversity of work activities and workplaces, which is illustrated with the aid of photographs. We are shown workplaces in research and education, the steel and chemical industries, the logistics sector, the service sector and the building trades. Thus the exhibition covers both industrial and service work, and women are a self-evident component. Many of the photos do not allow us to draw, however, any simple conclusions about the work being done, and texts are therefore required to make the connection between image and topic. We are left with the impression of a vague and indeterminate plurality of contemporary work tasks. The newness of this work—and thus also of the reorientation of the Ruhr—is underlined by the young age of most of the people shown within the workplace and by the texts that point out that they are currently undergoing (re-)training. In addition, as Rainer Wirtz has aptly noted, the pictorial overview of work is nowadays usually ‘not easy to capture in one image’,36 as the Ruhr Museum tries to do here. I would like to explore one photo (see Fig. 4) as an example of how the content, form and effects of work remain invisible. Typical of museum portrayals of contemporary office work, the photo shows two young women sitting at a desk with two computer monitors and a stack of papers, as well as a shelf with file folders in the background.37 It is one of four pictures by the Portuguese photographer André Vieira from his series ‘Work. Ruhr’, which explicitly addresses the industrial transformation of labour. People at desks or screens as seen here are a popular motif in museums for portraying contemporary work, not least because, as a result of the digitization of work, a large proportion of people now sit at computer screens. What is significant about this representation, however, is that work at a desk or computer looks the same from the outside whether the worker is doing highly complex research, monitoring procedures, entering data or processing files. After all, knowledge-based work is increasingly abstract. The stiff poses of the women, who appear frozen, offer no suggestion of what they are actually doing. The file folders in the background and the stack of paper in the foreground lend themselves to the interpretation that they are carrying out administrative tasks, and this is confirmed by the caption: ‘Treuhandstelle GmbH: L.B., 19, and A.W., 20, real estate management trainees, department of operating costs’. Yet the conditions under which they are carrying out their work, the structures in which they are embedded or what this work has to do with their lives remains invisible. Figure 4: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: Excerpt from the ‘Structural Change’ phenomenon in ‘The Present’ Figure 4: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: Excerpt from the ‘Structural Change’ phenomenon in ‘The Present’ The emphasis on heterogeneity goes hand in hand with an individualization of forms of work, with the persons depicted usually shown alone, occasionally in twos or threes and only once—in a call centre—as part of a larger group. Work is shown as an individualized experience and not as the collective, mass phenomenon of earlier representations. The exhibition thus ignores the fact that the logistics sector, which is addressed in a single photo, is especially personnel intensive. Flexibility and precarity go unmentioned as central aspects of contemporary work; the single such reference is to a snowboarding instructor who works freelance. With regard to working conditions, it is worth noting that apart from the building trades, all the tasks depicted—including manual labour—take place in clean, orderly and apparently tranquil surroundings. There are also no indicators of other stresses or specific working conditions, nor of the effects of work on social circumstances. Working conditions also remain invisible in the only three-dimensional exhibits on the topic. Following the assumption that digitization has dematerialized work to the degree that post-industrial industry no longer provides instruments that can be used to illustrate labour, the only three-dimensional objects that the Ruhr Museum uses to portray industrial work today are products—both industrial and consumer. One display case, for example, contains a solar module, a wheel rim, a ready meal, a (cosmetic) cream and various chemicals—all products that point to the continuing importance of industry in the region (see Fig. 5). The tendency to represent the present through products while depictions of the past rely on tools and other objects in or with which people worked can currently be observed in some other German museums.38 Figure 5: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: ‘Structural Change’ in ‘The Present’ Figure 5: Open in new tabDownload slide Ruhr Museum: ‘Structural Change’ in ‘The Present’ In this form of presentation, however, the products, as finished, compactly presented results of work, offer scarcely any indication of the work processes and tasks that have given them shape. At the same time, they abstract from the conditions under which they were produced. This ultimately renders industrial labour invisible and eclipses the exhibition’s textual message that the Ruhr remains an important industrial region.39 The displacement of the tools and work clothing generally used to portray the past by products in the present is also a shift from a process to a product orientation, and with it a shift from a human-centred depiction of labour to a more economically orientated one. Although contemporary work is largely visualized here either by photos that appear as ‘surface images’40 or by its results (the products), and although the new breadth of fields of activity is underlined, the specifically new conditions of work and their effects remain invisible. Above all, what the changes in work do to people goes unaddressed. The central message instead is the juxtaposition of the homogeneity of labour in the past with the heterogeneity of work in the present. This distinction implicitly stresses the split between historical and contemporary work, a split that also suggests that work today has lost its societal and individual significance. III. Culture as a New Core Identity The virtual disappearance of work from representations of the present can be attributed to more than just the absence of current images of work and a lack of language of presentation that stems from a limited understanding of historical labour. The disappearance is also associated with a development that emphasizes the role of museums—especially city museums—in creating identity. Nowadays many city museums, including the Ruhr Museum, stress identity formation as one of their central objectives.41 The association of city and regional museums in particular with identity construction is by no means a new phenomenon. Their enlistment for the articulation of various types of identity, whether regional, national or local, has been described in detail.42 Thus, despite all the changes that city and regional history museums have undergone since their founding, the emphasis on their contribution to communicating identity may be regarded as a key continuity.43 At present, however, questions of identity are being addressed not only more offensively and self-evidently but also under altered circumstances. As Sharon Macdonald suggests, above all ‘centred, singular identity constructions are being superseded by identities predicated on cultural mixing and crossover, on intercultural traffic rather than boundary demarcation’.44 In this connection, a large proportion of city museums nowadays aspire to an open, integrative and—to varying degrees—controversial approach. The museums are guided here to a large extent by the demands of local and regional politics. On the one hand, this means it is increasingly important for museums to contribute to ‘city branding’. For, as Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael note, ‘contemporary town planning is discovering culture, the media and science as new resources for cities in upheaval’.45 The aim is to appeal to tourists, create identity for the locals and become attractive for the young ‘creatives’ who are viewed as engines of economic growth.46 In the competition between cities, localities define themselves mainly by their particularities and uniqueness. Andreas Reckwitz has referred to this trend as ‘the singularization of places’.47 Culture and cultural events play a decisive role in creating the special qualities that promise authentic experiences beyond the everyday. Culture has thus become an essential ‘location factor’.48 Particularly in old industrial regions, museums are understood as important instruments of economic, social and cultural urban renewal. They rely on the creation of distinct profiles through cultural policy, in the framework of which museums of cultural history become increasingly important players in ‘imaginative urban design’ and boosting the city’s image.49 Museums are relevant actors here because they actively help shape the narrative of the extraordinary—all the more so when, as is the case with the Ruhr Museum, they are located in spectacular and unusual structures. On the other hand, this means that museums seek to do justice to a pluralized society and to become more successful at including minorities that were long unrepresented in museums. Since the 2000s, the diversity of ethnic communities and religions and the long-neglected history of migration have been increasingly represented in German museums.50 It is striking that in museum practice social diversity is defined culturally and ethnically, corresponding to a development in which ‘“cultural diversity” has become a guiding principle of liberal social and cultural policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century’.51 Participation in the valorization of regional culture and an orientation towards cultural and ethnic diversity accompany an abandonment of social diversity. Thus since the 2000s, the narratives in many museums have been moving away from the paradigm of labour and towards a culturalization or culturalism that I understand as an ‘emphasis on the cultural over the social’. 52 This shift is also observable in the Ruhr Museum, which is clearly following a ‘cultural studies turn in the social sciences and history … [which] produces a tendency to withdraw from entire thematic areas that were previously at the centre of a “class theory” perspective. The institutions of business, work and social inequalities have disappeared from view.’53 Moreover, this reorientation at the Ruhr Museum is tied to efforts to create positive images of the region, in the course of which social dislocations, as negative aspects of urban development, relate solely to the past and retreat into the background in presentations of the present. In the Ruhr Museum, when it comes to the portrayal of contemporary work, this orientation has the effect of mainly addressing knowledge workers, that is those employed in highly qualified service professions. This places the focus on activities characterized by high identification through self-realization and particular social prestige and self-esteem. There is little mention of less skilled positions in care work or cleaning or in service and logistics, where women are over-represented and which are becoming less valued in society. This labour is performed in the shadow of other work and is meant to remain socially invisible. As the ‘work of normalization’,54 it guarantees the production of the framing conditions for production and consumption and is not supposed to disrupt the flow of ‘“actual” work’. As Friederike Bahl and Philipp Staab put it, it is accordingly ‘successful to the precise degree that its performance goes unnoticed’.55 This dismissal occurs even though, as Staab trenchantly observes, employees in these ‘simple’ service jobs have ‘inherited the historical mantle of the proletarian strata in the labour market’ and service workers ‘can be regarded as the transformed revenants of a classic figure of the industrial working worlds’.56 Instead of addressing the shift to training-intensive occupations and de-qualified service work equally, the exhibition mainly visualizes the former. This orientation is not surprising given the museum’s intense efforts to participate in redefining the Ruhr region. After all, the exhibition especially focuses on the kind of work that is calculated to create identification and develop a new, proud image of the Ruhr region. Compounding this narrowing of the focus on work, the Ruhr Museum characterizes today’s Ruhr region above all in terms of culture and leisure. The self-image conveyed remains strongly orientated on the past while stressing the region’s modernity by means of an emphasis on cultural diversity. In contrast to past labour, presented as intertwined with living conditions, present-day work appears in the Ruhr Museum as one of numerous coexisting, unconnected themes. The ‘phenomena’ which serve in the exhibition to define the present-day Ruhr range from Industrial Landscape, Built Up Areas, Spoil Tips and Mining Subsidence, Industrial Architecture, The Ruhr Expressway, Housing Estates, Ruhr and Emscher, Noises, Free Time, Smells, Language, Football, Refreshment Kiosks, Men and Animals, Sacred Buildings, Religious Life, Clichés and Cultures to An Underground World, Structural Change, Industrial Nature and the Green Ruhr. Only two of these phenomena address work. By neglecting to show the intersection of work and life-world, the exhibition suggests that the structural transformation also meant the end of ‘a model of the industrial life-world’ more generally.57 On the one hand, this panorama of the present highlights aspects that seem like outmoded cultural relics of the industrial age and the social milieus associated with them. They stand for the ‘Other’ of industrial labour—non-labour—like football, pigeon breeding, life in the former working-class housing estates or leisure time spent on the canal and the campground. The photos frequently focus on people who offer very intimate views of their lives. The photos are calculated to elicit a smug, superior smile from viewers, since they depict a way of life diametrically opposed to that of the new middle class with its orientation towards the model of successful self-realization—a way of life increasingly ‘labelled as worthless’.58 Ultimately, they stand for the ‘old’ Ruhr. On the other hand, the exhibition accentuates aspects that stress the new, the unusual and the special. There is a particular focus on the culturally repurposed remains of the industrial age, which connote the extraordinary and specific culture of the region. Their presentation as monuments and World Heritage Sites particularly increases their value. They meet the demand for what Martin Sabrow and Achim Saupe have aptly called ‘the yearning of the present for authenticity’.59 After all, the industrial sites, each with its own atmosphere, fascinate us with their qualities of singularity and authenticity—and are thus very much in keeping with city branding. The narrative of the Ruhr Museum emphasizes ‘industrial architecture’ (emphasis added). Industrial buildings are characterized here as ‘calling cards of architecture’ and described as ‘so valuable architecturally’ that they ‘were preserved and placed under monument protection’.60 They are also addressed as locations for events of high culture and festivals. The building in which the Ruhr Museum is located itself offers the ‘authentic experience’ that is so important for museums in Germany and is rendered even more valuable architecturally by the fact that the international star architect Rem Koolhaas designed its conversion. It thus belongs within the category of ‘standalone architecture’, which is becoming increasingly important for museums in the age of city branding, for such museum structures ‘act as architectural symbolic markers and can, regardless of the museum’s content, culturalize individual neighbourhoods or in extreme cases entire cities in public perception and render them identifiable as global cultural signs’.61 In this way, industrial remnants are treated as sites of industrial aesthetics, serving as symbols of a successful handling of structural transformation rather than—as Hans-Ernst Mittig, for example, has called for—‘sensitizing us to unresolved conflicts within society’.62 In the cultural setting of the present, the museum also addresses the ethnic-cultural origins of society in the Ruhr region: three sections—‘Sacred Buildings’, ‘Religious Life’ and ‘Cultures’—mark the ethnic diversity of the Ruhr as self-evident and present multiculturality as a project that creates community. It exhibits photos of women in hijabs alongside carnival processions and miners’ bands, of numerous shop windows with nationally specific displays as well as diverse religious ceremonies and rituals. All that these images have in common is their emphasis on the ethnic and cultural, in an almost folkloristic manner. The representations follow an extensive canonization of ethnic and cultural diversity as opportunity and achievement that we can observe not just in museums,63 but also, for instance, in the reasons for selecting the Ruhr as European Capital of Culture.64 Migration is culturalized here, however, to the extent that differences in social position and the unequal opportunities that arise from migration as well as political inclusion and exclusion go unaddressed. With its focus on culture, the exhibition narrative suggests that the cultural has been especially influential in shaping people’s sense of identity today. While the Ruhr region is shown as marked by many years of industrial influence, industry and industrial labour appear here primarily as cultural remainders: on the one hand as a mentality expressed in leisure behaviour and specific forms of private life salvaged from the working-class milieu and on the other in culturally repurposed and upgraded architectural remains. It is remarkable that the cultural phenomena denoted as the core of a new positive identity are presented with their economic and social logics almost completely suppressed, logics that play a key role in the presentation of the past. Thus the exhibition on ‘The Present’ almost completely ignores the social consequences of changes in working conditions. Culture is thus divorced from the economy and also from work. Neither is culture portrayed as the result of work, nor is work addressed as a prerequisite for participation in culture.65 The culturalization of today’s world in the wake of identity formation appears alongside the obscuring of social inequalities and conflicts. Thus the present is portrayed, in the spirit of positive identity construction, in terms of unity in diversity, and it is no surprise that trade unions or labour struggles are absent—very much in contrast to their natural inclusion in the narrative about the past. Precisely because culture is portrayed as so varied and harmonious, it can become a basis of regional pride and positive self-identification with the region and can serve as compensation for the loss of old industrial labour. IV. Conclusion The example of the Ruhr Museum shows that the waning significance of work and its replacement by culture in current exhibition practice is associated with the absence of images of present-day work and with the promotion of regional identity. The rupture between past and present articulated in the exhibition is intensified by the narration of the past and the present within completely different categories: while the past is represented using the paradigm of social history, the depiction of the present is rooted in a culturalist paradigm. Even if such a culturalization represents an expansion on the previous social history paradigm, above all with regard to the recognition of minorities and the pluralization of lifestyles, it seems to have reached its limits. Not only does work remain a central ‘regulatory element’ of society,66 but in the wake of growing social polarization, debates about social inequality, working conditions and social conflicts are on the agenda again. Thus even in Germany, class categories are regaining sociological explanatory power.67 In the Ruhr, which is considered ‘Germany’s number one problem region in the field of poverty policy’, 68 where heavy job losses represent a ‘core problem’69 and which has an especially high number of long-term unemployed, these questions are all the more pressing today. Museums which, like the Ruhr Museum, seek to build a bridge to the present face the challenge of communicating the structural transformation of work and the associated experience of loss, for the crisis of imagination and visibility around labour has become urgent. From my perspective it would thus make sense for exhibition practice to seek more points of connection between past and present and to move away from a homogenized image of labour in the past. After all, the image of hard physical labour still heavily influences our notion of work. Even if present-day work is by no means identical to conditions in the nineteenth century, certain patterns often discussed as novelties and characteristic of contemporary work were in fact present in the past—as labour historians have variously shown in recent years.70 An emphasis on these similarities would offer opportunities to connect present and past beyond the harmonizing fashioning of identity, which could contribute to a new understanding of work today. It would also make sense for permanent exhibitions to seek new languages of presentation, which could be used to render contemporary work visible again and reintegrate it into our images of society. Because of their strong emphasis on ‘authentic’ objects and orientation towards matter-of-fact and objective forms of presentation, German museums in particular seem to have a hard time experimenting with multimedia and installations. Especially in temporary exhibitions, however, one can find a number of interesting approaches. For instance, in the exhibition ‘Labour in a Single Shot’ the spatial arrangement of dozens of short films casts light on work throughout the world—a concept especially notable for one-shot videos that impressively convey processes, routines and monotony; in the Museum of Liverpool the depictions of historical and contemporary forms of work are directly linked in a film theatre, allowing for comparisons; at the Museum Arbeitswelt Steyr the current exhibition ‘Arbeit ist unsichtbar’ (Work is invisible) explicitly addresses the often unnoticed, invisible aspects of work and pursues the questions of ‘how and why and with what feelings … people work’.71 Footnotes * I am grateful to Pamela E. Selwyn for her fine translation of my German text. 1 Here are just a few of the pioneering exhibitions held in Germany in recent years: ‘Arbeit. Sinn und Sorge’, in 2009/10 at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden; ‘Hauptsache Arbeit. Wandel der Arbeitswelt nach 1945’, in 2009/10 at the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn; ‘Wo bleibt die Arbeit?’, from 2010 to 2013 at the Stadt- und Industriemuseum Rüsselsheim; ‘Wanderarbeiter. Fotografien einer neuen Arbeiterklasse’, in 2013/2014 at the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg; ‘Kohle Global’ in 2013/14 at the Ruhr Museum in Essen; ‘Wanderarbeit: Mensch—Mobilität—Migration’, in 2015 at the LWL-Industriemuseum Zeche Hannover in Bochum; ‘Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit’, in 2015 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. 2 The distinction between permanent and temporary exhibitions is relevant to the degree that exhibitions organized for shorter periods are usually more experimental in concept and design than permanent exhibitions. After all, the latter function mainly as calling cards for the museum in question and suggest the permanent validity of what they present. For that reason, they tend to be more conventional and offer more strongly canonical narratives. See B. Habsburg-Lothringen, ‘Dauerausstellungen: Erbe und Alltag’, in B. Habsburg-Lothringen (ed.), Dauerausstellungen: Schlaglichter auf ein Format (Bielefeld, 2012), pp. 9–18. 3 S. Hall, ‘The Rediscovery of Ideology: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (London and New York, 1983), pp. 56–90, here p. 64. 4 E. Sturm, ‘In Zusammenarbeit mit gangart: zur Frage der Repräsentation in Partizipations-Projekten’, IG Kultur, 9 Apr. 2001, https://igkultur.at/artikel/zusammenarbeit-mit-gangart-zur-frage-der-repraesentation-partizipations-projekten. 5 J. Baur, Musealisierung der Migration: Einwanderungsmuseen und die Inszenierung der multikulturellen Nation (Bielefeld, 2009), p. 33. 6 See S. Macdonald, ‘Introduction’, in S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford, 1996), pp. 1–20. 7 S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe, ‘Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction’, in S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (eds), A Companion to Museum Studies (Oxford, 2006), pp. 1–12, here p. 4. 8 Lutz Engelskirchen offers a successful definition and demarcation of museums of industry and labour. He describes the task of industrial museums as ‘documenting the typical working and living conditions of the industrial age on the original site, in the original architectural and urban setting. Museums of labour, in contrast, aim to direct the focus of attention in perceiving and communicating history to those who performed the work, and to show how various forms of labour shaped ways of life. They are interested in opinions, taste, everyday processes, world appropriation, conflict management in correlation to work, in awareness in the broadest sense.’ See L. Engelskirchen, ‘Der lange Abschied vom Malocher’, in M. Rasch and D. Bleidick (eds), Technikgeschichte im Ruhrgebiet—Technikgeschichte für das Ruhrgebiet (Essen, 2004), pp. 135–54, here p. 145. 9 See K. Röckner, Ausgestellte Arbeit: Industriemuseen und ihr Umgang mit dem wirtschaftlichen Strukturwandel (Stuttgart, 2009), p. 166. 10 G. Korff, ‘Die Dynamisierung des Stillgestellten: sechs Bemerkungen zu einem neuen Trend, der die Stadtmuseen erfasst hat’, in C. Gemmeke and F. Netwig (eds), Die Stadt und ihr Gedächtnis: zur Zukunft der Stadtmuseen (Bielefeld, 2011), pp. 67–80, here p. 75. 11 According to Dagmar Kift, this waning significance of work is not limited to representations of the present but is a general trend in museums: ‘In the more recent museums, labour seems to have lost the leading position in presentation and interpretation it had in the 1980s.’ See D. Kift, ‘Heritage and History: Germany’s Industrial Museums and the (Re)presentation of Labour’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 17, 4 (2011), pp. 380–9, here p. 381. 12 The remarks here are based on analyses of exhibitions in the framework of a doctoral project at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum which examines representations of labour in historical museums in the old industrial regions of Germany and the United States based on case studies. 13 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Institut für Museumsforschung (ed.), Statistische Gesamterhebung an den Museen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für das Jahr 2015 (Materialien aus dem Institut für Museumsforschung, 70; Berlin, 2016), http://www.smb.museum/fileadmin/website/Institute/Institut_fuer_Museumsforschung/Publikationen/Materialien/mat70.pdf. 14 U. Borsdorf and H. T. Grütter (eds), Ruhr Museum: Natur. Kultur. Geschichte (Essen, 2010), p. 18. 15 G. Spörl, Groß Denken—Groß Handeln: Wandel, Bruch, Umbruch. Wie das Ruhrgebiet sich neu erfindet (Munich, Berlin and Zurich, 2017), p. 8. 16 J. Mittag, ‘Einleitung: die Kulturhauptstadt Europas’, in J. Mittag (ed.), Die Idee der Kulturhauptstadt Europas: Anfänge, Ausgestaltung und Auswirkungen europäischer Kulturpolitik (Essen, 2008), pp. 9–18, here p. 16. 17 Among the city museums, see for instance the permanent exhibitions of the Stadt- und Industriemuseum Rüsselsheim and the Historisches Museum Bielefeld as well as the exhibition ‘Hundert und sieben Sachen. Bochumer Geschichte in Objekten und Archivalien’ in the Stadtarchiv/Bochumer Zentrum für Stadtgeschichte. 18 The fact that in the United States, for example, museums tend to present individual occupations rather than a proletarian working class can be attributed not least to the lesser prominence that the history of the labour movement enjoys in the United States. Moreover, the iconic industrial worker was called into question far earlier in the United States, in the debate about the new dominance of the service sector which began in the 1990s. 19 In brief, the exhibition is structured as follows: it is organized into three independent, thematically discrete sections, each taking up one storey of the building, with a clear sequence in which they should be visited. The exhibition begins with ‘The Present’. The next level, the ‘Memory’ section, is dedicated to the preindustrial era. On the third and final floor, the ‘History’ section deals chronologically with industrialization in the Ruhr from the beginnings to the present. The segment discussed here, ‘The World of Work and the Labour Movement’, is by no means the only one in the ‘History’ section to address ‘labour’. It is highlighted here because this is the only time that the exhibition explicitly mentions the ‘world of work’ in the title, and in other segments the labour factor is discussed more in terms of economic development. 20 The LWL Industrial Museum Zeche Zollern, in contrast, addresses women’s work on the coal-sorting assembly line quite explicitly in a large-format photo that even shows a pregnant woman among the numerous female workers. 21 On the issue of ‘women’s corners’ in exhibitions, see R. Muttenthaler and R. Wonisch, Gesten des Zeigens: zur Repräsentation von Gender und Race in Ausstellungen (Bielefeld, 2007), p. 20. 22 See K. Tenfelde, ‘Bergbau und Stadtentwicklung im Ruhrgebiet im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, Westfälische Forschung, 47 (1997), pp. 118–19. One example of this strong self-image is evident in the Duisburg initiative to redesign pedestrian traffic lights, where the figures were dressed as coal miners to recall the local mining tradition. See Theresa Langwald, ‘Weltweit erste “Bergmanns-Ampel” in Duisburg eingeweiht’, WAZ, 11 Oct. 2018, https://www.waz.de/staedte/duisburg/weltweit-erste-bergmanns-ampel-in-duisburg-eingeweiht-id215540329.html. 23 According to Göran Therborn, this predominance of industrial work spanned the period from 1907 to 1975, with a peak in 1970, when nearly 50% of workers were employed in the industrial sector. See G. Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000 (London, 1995), p. 69. 24 M. Baethge, ‘Abschied vom Industrialismus: Konturen einer neuen gesellschaftlichen Ordnung der Arbeit’, in M. Baethge and I. Wilkens (eds), Die große Hoffnung für das 21. Jahrhundert? Perspektiven und Strategien für die Entwicklung der Dienstleistungsgesellschaft (Opladen, 2011), p. 37. 25 F.-J. Brüggemeier, Grubengold: das Zeitalter der Kohle von 1750 bis heute (Munich, 2018), p. 104. Given the changing view of labour in the nineteenth century, it is remarkable that Brüggemeier’s 1983 book on mining in the Ruhr did not yet consider the tasks mentioned here; see F.-J. Brüggemeier, Leben vor Ort: Ruhrbergleute und Ruhrbergbau, 1889–1919 (Munich, 1983). 26 At this time service work already made up more than 18% of all employment. See K. Tenfelde, ‘Strukturwandel des Ruhrgebiets: historische Aspekte’, Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte, 39 (1988), pp. 129–41, here p. 139. 27 W. Abelshauser, ‘Von der Industriellen Revolution zur Neuen Wirtschaft’, in J. Osterhammel, D. Langewiesche and P. Nolte (eds), Wege der Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 201–18, here p. 216. 28 Franz-Josef Brüggemeier has shown that in the period of rapid industrialization very few workers were employed all year round, and even skilled workers were frequently unemployed. Moreover, after the age of forty most workers were physically worn out and had a difficult time finding work but were still too young for an old-age pension. See Brüggemeier, Leben vor Ort, p. 163. 29 M. Denning, ‘Representing Global Labor’, Social Text, 25, 3 (92) (2007), pp. 125–45, here p. 127. 30 R. Wirtz, ‘Vorwort: Arbeit “verschwindet”—das Bild von Arbeit auch?’, in T. Rautert, Arbeiten (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 8–9, here p. 8. 31 For these discussions, see the following anthologies in particular: O. Bockhorn, H. Eberhart and W. Zupfer (eds), Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Kultur: Arbeiterkultur zwischen Museum und Realität (Vienna, 1989); U. Deymann and U. Liebelt (eds), Welt der Arbeit im Museum (Marburg, 1983); and B. Faulenbach and F.-J. Jelich (eds), Geschichte der Arbeit im Museum (Recklinghausen, 1987). 32 Thomas Elsaesser in a lecture at the conference to accompany the exhibition ‘Labour in a Single Shot’ on 26 Feb. 2015 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. 33 A. Rabinbach, The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor (New York, 2018), p. 170. 34 Wirtz, ‘Vorwort’, p. 8. 35 S. Nies and D. Sauer, ‘Arbeit—mehr als Beschäftigung? Zur arbeitssoziologischen Kapitalismuskritik’, in K. Dörre, D. Sauer and V. Wittke (eds), Kapitalismustheorie und Arbeit: neue Ansätze soziologischer Kritik (Frankfurt/Main and New York, 2012), pp. 34–62, here p. 35. 36 Wirtz, ‘Vorwort’, p. 8. 37 Photographs with similar subjects can be found for example in the exhibition ‘Hauptsache Arbeit’ at the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, as well as the photo exhibition ‘Arbeitswelten—Einblicke in einen nichtöffentlichen Raum’. The latter, however, presents several photographs for each area of work addressed, which therefore provide a far more memorable image of the tasks performed and the working conditions. 38 In Germany, the focus on products is evident in the exhibitions of the city museums in Hamburg and Rüsselsheim that explore present-day life. 39 This industrial prominence especially concerns the metalworking, electronics and steel industries as well as the production of household consumer goods. In 2015, nearly 30% of workers were still employed in industry. See the regional statistics on the Ruhr from 2015: https://www.metropoleruhr.de/fileadmin/user_upload/metropoleruhr.de/Bilder/Daten___Fakten/Regionalstatistik_PDF/Erwerbstaetigkeit/svb_branchen_2015.pdf (accessed 24 June 2018). 40 R. Misik, C. Schörkhuber and H. Welzer (eds), Arbeit ist unsichtbar: die bisher nicht erzählte Geschichte, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Arbeit (Vienna, 2018), p. 195. 41 Thus ‘knowledge, clarification [and] identity’ function as ‘categorial objectives’ of the museum. See Borsdorf and Grütter, Ruhr Museum, p. 21. Moreover, Museum director Heinrich Theodor Grütter speaks in the catalogue of the ‘positive image of the Ruhr region’s regional identity’ as a ‘new quality … that needs to be harnessed in order to handle future tasks and structural problems’. See ibid., p. 153. Elsewhere he notes, ‘The Ruhr has its own museum of local history which strengthens and promotes its identity.’ See H. T. Grütter, ‘Museen und Wandel im Ruhrgebiet’, Standbein/Spielbein 90 (2011), pp. 8–10, here p. 10. 42 See S. J. Macdonald, ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’, Museum and Society, 1, 1 (2003), pp. 1–16. 43 A. Schöne, Alltagskultur im Museum: zwischen Anspruch und Realität (Münster, 1998), p. 105. 44 Macdonald, Museums, p. 6. 45 A. Doering-Manteuffel and L. Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen, 2008), p. 123. 46 A strong point of reference here is remarks by the US economist Richard Florida, which he has, however, since relativized. With regard to the meaning of culture, for example, he wrote in 2015: ‘Arts and cultures aren’t magic bullets, but they are strongly correlated with strong local economies’, R. Florida, ‘Preface’, in G. D. Lord, and N. Blankenberg (eds), Cities, Museums and Soft Power (Washington DC, 2015), pp. 1–2, here p. 2. 47 A. Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten: zum Strukturwandel der Moderne (Berlin, 2017), p. 323. 48 A. Prossek, ‘Bilder (k)einer Metropole: zur Inszenierung des Ruhrgebiets als Kulturhauptstadt Europas’, in R. Bohn and H. Wilharm (eds), Inszenierung der Stadt: Urbanität als Ereignis (Bielefeld, 2012), pp. 35–50, here p. 35. 49 See W. Kaschuba, ‘Wem gehört die Stadt? Für eine Re-Politisierung der Stadtgeschichte’, in Gemmeke and Netwig, Die Stadt, pp. 17–25. 50 This trend is evident in the fact that a large proportion of the temporary exhibitions mounted in the Ruhr in recent years address migration. Thus, for example, during European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010 an exhibition series on migration was presented in numerous museums and city archives as part of the Ruhr-wide cooperative project ‘Fremd(e) im Revier!?’ (Foreign(ers) in the Ruhr!?). 51 Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, p. 10. 52 W. Fuchs-Heinritz, ‘Kulturalismus’, in W. Fuchs-Heinritz et al. (eds), Lexikon zur Soziologie (Opladen, 1994), p. 381. 53 T. Welskopp, ‘Der Wandel der Arbeitsgesellschaft als Thema der Kulturwissenschaften—Klassen, Professionen, Eliten’, in F. Jaeger and J. Rüsen (eds), Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2004), p. 232. 54 P. Bahl and F. Staab, ‘Das Dienstleistungsproletariat: Theorie auf kaltem Entzug’, Mittelweg 36, 19, 6 (2010), pp. 66–93, here pp. 82–3. 55 Ibid. 56 P. Staab, ‘“Einfache Dienstleistungen” in der Wertschöpfungskette’, Gegenblende 29 (2014), http://gegenblende.dgb.de/29–2014/++co++141956d4-3f32-11e4-8f9e-52540066f352. 57 Doering-Manteuffel and Raphael, Nach dem Boom, p. 33. 58 Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, p. 355. 59 M. Sabrow and A. Saupe, ‘Die Aura des Authentischen in historischer Perspektive’, in M. Sabrow and A. Saupe (eds), Historische Authentizität (Göttingen, 2016), p. 43. 60 The German quotations from the exhibition text have been translated literally here since the English exhibition text does not express this deliberate emphasis. 61 A. Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (Berlin, 2012), p. 303. 62 H.-E. Mittig, ‘Was bleibt faszinierend an der Museumskultur?’, in H. John and I. Mazzoni (eds), Industrie- und Technikmuseen im Wandel: Perspektiven und Standortbestimmungen (Bielefeld, 2005), pp. 19–31, here p. 29. 63 See also, for example, the nationwide campaign ‘Vielfalt als Chance’ (Diversity as Opportunity), whose aim is to raise awareness ‘that ethnic and cultural diversity is an outstanding economic resource and a success factor’. See ‘Die “Charta der Vielfalt” der Unternehmen in Deutschland’, Die Bundesregierung, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/suche/die-charta-der-vielfalt-der-unternehmen-in-deutschland-455496 (accessed 27 May 2019). 64 Thus Matthias Buth, Ministerialrat (department head) at the Federal Ministry of Culture, has written, ‘when the European Commission finally pronounced Essen and the Ruhr European Cultural Capital for 2010 after protracted competition among numerous German cities, one of the key reasons was that c. 150 ethnic groups live together in this region of the Federal Republic, and that scarcely any country in the world has as many musicians, choirs, orchestras, bands and groups playing popular and classical music than the region between the Rhine and the Ruhr. This location advantage also benefited Essen’, M. Buth, ‘Kulturelle Identität und Museen: der Nationale Integrationsplan der Bundesregierung’, in Deutscher Museumsbund (eds), Museumskunde, 75, 1 (2010), pp. 7–11, here p. 7. 65 Andreas Wirsching has aptly pointed out that paid employment ‘still [represents] the gateway to cultural participation’. See A. Wirsching, ‘Konsum statt Arbeit? Zum Wandel von Individualität in der modernen Massengesellschaft’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2 (2009), pp. 171–99, here p. 198. 66 J. Kocka, ‘Mehr Last als Lust: Arbeit und Arbeitsgesellschaft in der europäischen Geschichte’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2 (2005), pp. 185–206. 67 K. Dörre, ‘Arbeitssoziologie und Industriegesellschaft: der Göttinger Ansatz im Rück- und Ausblick’, in M. Schumann (ed.), Das Jahrhundert der Industriearbeit: soziologische Erkenntnisse und Ausblicke (Weinheim, 2013), pp. 163–94, here p. 192. 68 See ‘Paritätischer Gesamtverband veröffentlicht Armutsbericht 2016’, Der Paritätische, Berlin, 23 Feb. 2016, https://www.paritaet-berlin.de/themen-a-z/themen-a-z-detailansicht/article/paritaetischer-gesamtverband-veroeffentlicht-armutsbericht-2016.html. 69 R. G. Heinze, Wandel wider Willen: Deutschland auf der Suche nach neuer Prosperität (Wiesbaden, 2006), p. 128. 70 See J. Kocka and C. Offe (eds), Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit (Frankfurt/Main and New York, 2000); M. van der Linden, ‘How Normal is the “Normal” Employment Relationship?’, in Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 197–203; J. Osterhammel and N. P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich, 2012); W. Süß and D. Süß, ‘Zeitgeschichte der Arbeit: Beobachtungen und Perspektiven’, in K. Andresen, U. Bitzegeio and J. Mittag (eds), ‘Nach dem Strukturbruch’? Kontinuitäten und Wandel von Arbeitsbeziehungen und Arbeitswelt(en) seit den 1970er-Jahren (Bonn, 2011), pp. 345–65. 71 See the announcement of the exhibition at https://museum-steyr.at/ausstellung-2/arbeit_ist_unsichtbar/ (accessed 31 Oct. 2018). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Exhibiting Work in Germany—From Industrial Labour to (Industrial) Culture
JF - German History
DO - 10.1093/gerhis/ghz044
DA - 2019-09-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/exhibiting-work-in-germany-from-industrial-labour-to-industrial-mZBbemtSts
SP - 375
VL - 37
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -