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Triggerwarning: Racial violence

The Port of Dortmund and the company Orenstein und Koppel

With 11 kilometres of shoreline and ten harbour basins, Dortmund Harbour is today the largest canal harbour in Europe. When you get off at the Hafen underground station, you have the harbour office in front of your eyes. On the bridge next to the A45, it is illuminated by spotlights in the evening, which makes this place seem somehow romantic. At the moment, the site, which is located in Dortmund’s Nordstadt, is undergoing reconstruction. In the course of the conversion work, the Hafenamt is to become a city landmark again and the harbour is to blossom into a new centre for the Nordstadt. The surrounding area is to provide space for cafés, bars and creative industries. A promenade is to turn the harbour into a modern meeting place for the metropolitan region. How did the construction of the harbour come about and what does this place tell us in the context of German colonial history? We take you on a short tour through the history of the harbour.

In the middle of the 19th century, there were the first ideas for an artificial waterway that would lead to Dortmund and turn the small industrial city into a trading centre. The expansion of the Ems Canal was commissioned by the city to connect the eastern Ruhr area with the North Sea. The new access to the sea was intended to lift the geographically disadvantaged position of the eastern Ruhr region and strategically link the German Empire with areas outside Europe. Although the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I did not enter the European colonial business until 1884, there were already loud voices in Dortmund’s political discourse advocating colonisation before then.

As early as 1879, in the annual report of the Dortmund Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the Chamber of Commerce – a regionally organised association of companies – criticised the untapped opportunities for colonial possessions. Trading colonies were lucrative and strategically necessary. Colonies are as important for security and economic advancement as a „powerful fleet“ or a „defensible war army“. With its disadvantaged geographic location, Germany is not competitive and would have to catch up with other European nations due to its low coastal development, the report says. With a supra-regional waterway to the sea, Germany could also reduce the tariffs that had arisen from trade with Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. And thus become more independent, bigger, more powerful. In the annual reports of the following years – until the seizure of the territories on the African continent and in Asia around 1884, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce argues vehemently on behalf of economic actors for the entry into the colonial business of Europe. Before and with the acquisition of the German colonies, pro-colonial movements formed in the city, including the Dortmund branch of the German Colonial Society, founded in 1888. This was the most important organisation of the German colonial movement and it existed until 1941. The Chamber of Commerce mainly represented the large companies in the region. And almost all the companies represented in the Chamber of Commerce were also members of the German Colonial Society.

Emperor Wilhelm II, who was elected the new emperor in 1888, wanted to promote the idea of the German „place in the sun“. He wanted to establish the German Empire as a world power. The argumentation of economic and civil society groups thus coincided with the ideas of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was now behind the interests of the industrial players who wanted to create competition with the sea link in Rotterdam with the construction of the canal and thus trade independently of the Netherlands.

There were also voices against the implementation of the project. For example, there were frequent conflicts in the Prussian House of Representatives. The biggest opponents were East German industrialists and large landowners. They were concerned that imports would bring them competition with the grain trade and therefore increase the rural exodus. These voices were ignored, however, because national interests could be linked to the canal project.

In 1899, the expansion of the Ems Canal and the construction of the harbour were completed. 

The opening caused great enthusiasm in Dortmund, because now Dortmund had gone from being a city without a connection to the sea to a port city. On 11 August 1899 Kaiser Wilhelm II travelled from Berlin to inaugurate the harbour with a speech. The so-called Kaiserzimmer (Emperor’s Room), located upstairs in the harbour office, is dedicated to him. A reference to his great commitment to realising the construction. This also increased Dortmund’s importance as a business location.

This kind of infrastructure development stands for German colonial interests and for an assertion of national interests beyond the borders of the country and Europe. The construction of the harbour is not only relevant for Dortmund’s infrastructure, but part of the colonial visions. Economic interests played an essential role in this. Colonial goods such as tea, coffee, tobacco or palm oil were to be imported and accordingly cultivated in large quantities in the colonies. But the import of consumer goods did not find the high demand that the Dortmund companies had hoped for. The focus of colonial trade by Dortmund’s industry therefore concentrated instead on the import of iron and copper ore and the export of finished iron goods. Among other things, iron and copper ore was imported from the German colonies, such as present-day Namibia and Togo, and railway material was exported.  

If you take the S4 in the direction of Lütgendortmund, you can see large excavator shovels and other machine parts on the right-hand side between the Dorstfeld and Marten Süd stops. Until the middle of 2021, the Caterpillar factory was located there, a plant that represents a long tradition of mechanical engineering. The factory was founded in 1893 by Alfred Koppel and Benno Orenstein. The Orenstein & Koppel company used the Caterpillar site to manufacture wagons, points and other materials for railways, which were then also exported via the port of Dortmund. Incidentally, Orenstein & Koppel was founded with capital from Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.

From 1903 to 1906, Orenstein & Koppel was involved in the construction of the Otavi Railway in what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia, alongside the Otavi Mining and Iron Company and the shipbuilding company Woermann Shipping Lines. The Otavi Railway, with a distance of 600km, was the longest light railway line in the world at the time. It was built for the purpose of transporting copper ore from the deposits across the country. To exploit the resources, the German companies mentioned above and other British industrialists joined together to form the South West Africa Company. In 1892, they were granted extensive land and mining rights by the German government, which authorised them to acquire land and property and to further develop the area.

Since the illegal seizure of the land in 1904 and the systematic looting that followed, there have been several uprisings and actions by local groups such as the Herero and the Nama against the oppression and human rights violations of the German occupiers. In 1906, a Herero uprising managed to disrupt the construction of the railway. The Herero raided trading posts and other colonial facilities, besieged military stations and blocked railway lines. The colonialists violently put down the uprisings. In May 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, already known for his particularly brutal approach, took command. He received orders from Kaiser Wilhelm II personally to put down the uprising by any means necessary. Von Trotha ordered the total annihilation of the Herero in October 1904 and of the Nama in April 1905. It is estimated that up to 100,000 people were murdered by German troops on the ground, forced into the desert or died in concentration camps set up by the German Reich.

Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero and Nama and other groups. Both the three companies involved in the construction and the German government were sued by the Herero in US civil courts for slave labour. Orenstein & Koppel maintained a camp with 1,300 forced labourers for the construction of the railway. However, the lawsuit had to be withdrawn because Germany threatened to go to the International Court of Justice. 

The impact of colonial history on German places of residence is great. The colonial images that have been passed on to the present day shape our everyday places just as much as the urban structures that remain today. In the case of the harbour in Dortmund’s Nordstadt, these colonial structures can also be traced. For example, as a migrant neighbourhood, the Nordstadt is repeatedly made into a place of crime and disorder. Media refer to the neighbourhood as a „no-go area. The Lüchow-Danneberg syndrome describes that in places that have an increased police presence, the statistically recorded crimes also increase. The Nordstadt is such a place. A place that is estimated to be more criminal just because of the mere presence and focus of the police. 

The history of the port can thus be linked to colonial history in various ways within the structures in which it is embedded. The port is thus a symbol of German politics and capital interests. In order to gain economic advantages, infrastructures were created that made it possible to access raw materials in non-European areas. The harbour office with the Kaiserzimmer was chosen as the city’s landmark at the end of the 19th century. Today it is to be revived as just that. Such an overwriting of central colonial infrastructure is also taking place, for example, with Hamburg’s Hafen City and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.