As regards structural change, before 1850 the Ruhr District just had a bit of agriculture. Then came coal and steel with a force unknown until then, at “American speed”, as people said at the time. The coal, iron and steel industries, and with them the whole industrial environment, forged a mode of thinking in huge categories. However, of the 186,000 people once employed in a total of 52 mines, today only 60,000 are on the wages and salaries list of a mere 12 mines. Of the 29 coking plants on the Rhine and Ruhr rivers in the late 1970s, only one now remains at the end of the century.

At the turn of the millennium, the companies Thyssen and Krupp, REW and VEW, GEA and Metallgesellschaft, Mannesmann and Vodafone, Degussa and Hüls – pioneers of industrialization, some of them more than 100 years old – merged into new large concerns and since then have been swiftly driving the much-cited structural change. This marks a whole new era in the “Pott”, as the area is endearingly called. The fact that today, coal and steel having almost completely taken their leave, we now associate theatre, music and the fine arts with the former gas power station in Bochum, the so-called Century Hall, with the Zollern mine, the Zollverein coking plant and the gasometer in Oberhausen, is still relatively new for us too.

The buildings were not demolished, which in retrospect seems natural in view of their imposing exteriors. And there is a breathtaking magic about the fact that they have become laboratories at the heart of a European industrial landscape where Mozart, Brecht, Messiaen, and Shakespeare are tested as to their “utility value” for the 21st century, far from any ivory towers.

And much as you swiftly adjusted to the loudness of this district, you are just as swiftly immersed in the quiet again, in the broad plain of the Lower Rhine. Such contrasts between densely populated settlements and rural areas are typical of NRW.

Let me stay with art for a moment. Just follow the trail of Joseph Beuys, the man with the felt hat whose objects and actions repeatedly caused public dismay, but who at the same time was able, as a living legend, to win over hoards of supporters and admirers to his art and his ideas. Enamoured of Beuys’ gently flowing watercolours, you stand in Schloss Moyland near Kleve admiring the artist’s early works. In an idyllic landscape with common white willows. The land is flat, the sky wide ...

But in October it is loud here too. A deafening cackling fills the air. The arrival of Siberian wild geese on the Lower Rhine is a spectacular sight in nature.