UNESCO has made the Volklinger Hutte a World Cultural Heritage Monument. Thus a piece of 19th-century German industrial plant is placed alongside the Pyramids of Giza, Charlemagne's cathedral in Aachen & the Taj Mahal. Something that seems to be a homogeneous series -- the World Cultural Heritage Monuments -- has acquired a new dimension with the addition of the Volklingen coal & steel conglomerate. In the field of monument protection, memory has hitherto been equated with preservation, but what preservation meant under the conditions of decay of all human works was scarcely discussed. Here the Volklinger Hutte, with its drastically abbreviated half-life period & the rapid change of all conditions brings a new dimension. The thing protected is for once not an object, but a process. It raises the question what events are under conditions of wear, & who is being remembered. The plant can stand as technological evidence of the inventive spirit of the 19th-century period of rapid industrial expansion, for the division of labour & the jobs of a generation that still has members living in Volklingen, of a war machine, or a landmark in the local Saar bend.

The political story that should be considered above all is invisible. The kitschy statement by enthusiastic school teachers that blast-furnace plants are cathedrals of work makes sense only if cathedrals are seen also as documents of collective cooperation. The spiritual surroundings of steel production are limited to the polytechnic approach: the engineer is responsible for function, the owner wants his return & no-one asks how the steel is used. It would be naive to think one was critically disposed to the belligerent policy that led to two world wars, although proximity to France could have conveyed an enlightened view of the world situation. Anyone who talks about the cathedral of work should not forget the crypt. (Lucius Burckhardt in Daidalos).