My office was tipped by a local named Eva that the thing to see in Ostrava is the Vítkovice Iron Works… a massive former steel foundry/coal mine complex that fed the needs of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Nazis and later the Soviet Empire (the last “heat” from the blast furnaces was in 1998). With the fall of that symbiotic/parasitic organism, the giant complex was broken up, passed to various owners, and only parts of it still function (Vítkovice Heavy Machinery is one). Like Pittsburgh, Bethlehem Steel and the giant complexes in the Ruhr Valley — Essen and Bochum — this industrial dragon made the town and fucked it over at the same time.
Here’s a picture from the World Wide Web:
[Source]
This area was earlier referred to as Moravia, and the whole region was incredibly rich in mineral wealth. History was, like in those other towns, written in advance by the lucky confluence of resources — the iron was here, the coal was nearby, and there was a river to carry stuff (end products and effluvia) in and out. The Witkowitz Mines and Iron Works, as it was called, really got going in 1828… and was co-owned by the Rothschilds, who were based in Austria. Oddly, it was a Scotsman who had the initial idea to build the complex here. John Baildon started it in 1810; the Rothschilds and others came in later, having leased the business.
In the beginning, rails for future train lines were produced, enabling the expansion of the empire. By the mid-1800s the Rothschilds’ partners, the Gutmann brothers, also "supplied coal for all the railroads, for all the great factories throughout the empire, and for the cities of Vienna, Budapest, and Brünn." Here is one of the spots where the Earth gave up her riches — giving copiously so that other industries and empires could flourish. Although these areas were usually ugly and polluted, they made the glorious palaces and opera houses possible.
"In 1887, a new plant for cast steel was built and arms production was expanded", as it was in the Krupp-owned plants that dotted the German Ruhr Valley. All was not hunky dory. In the 1870s Engels and others were influenced in their revolutionary writings by the workers’ conditions here, and their strike movements. The strikes were long and widespread, and the workers movement was gaining traction. However, many of the strikes were violently suppressed, as they were in the US and elsewhere. "Interference by troops and police compelled them to end a strike that commenced in early 1882." [Source]
The ironworks became involved in the entire community.
Shortly after the construction of the works, the face of Vítkovice began to change dramatically. From the very beginning, the rapidly growing population was catered for by the construction of company housing in the immediate vicinity of the works. A plan for the construction of ‘New Vítkovice’ was drawn up and gradually implemented. The aim was to build a modern housing complex that would not only provide easy access to the works, but would also offer a high standard of architecture and civic amenities making it truly ahead of its time. The owners of the works soon realized that besides providing accommodation, the company would also benefit if it paid attention to the health, education and cultural life of its employees and their families. [Source]
From birth to death — the company owned you and “looked after” you. This “enlightened patronage” seemed to be going on at the same time as the strikes and their violent suppression… hmmm.
One of the most painful phases of this outbreak of disorder was that the rabble of Czechs, Poles, and Socialist refugees from Germany who were leading it were striving hard to turn it into an anti-Jewish crusade. Many mill and mine owners in this locality were Jews, the biggest iron and steel works at Witkowitz being the property of the Rothschilds, which made it easy to mix up the Judenhetze with the strikes. Throughout these provinces there was scarcely a town where, during the last fortnight of April, Jewish shops had not been broken open and looted, and on May Day there threatened to be a universal attack made on the Hebrew.
[What can one say about this sad turn of events that presaged later horrors? Were the Rothschilds and others distant and heartless exploiters of the local workers? I suspect so, in which case they sadly may have set themselves up as inevitable targets, who became the “cause” of every injustice and misery. That the rising of the workers, a Romantic and noble cause as we view it from 100 years later, was also linked with anti-Semitism is a great tragedy.]
[In the early 20th century] the boiler shop produced gas holders, equipment for coke cooling with dry cooling towers, high pressure Löffler boilers and boiler units for hydroelectric stations. The bridge building works realized deliveries for high-rise constructions, bridges (in 1932, the largest European bridge of that time was made, two stories tall over the Old Dnepr near Kiev, Ukraine) [who today could have imagined that Ukraine was leading the infrastructure of Europa under the Soviets!], an exhibition hall for the World Exhibition in Paris, as well as a railway station hall in Teheran.
Witkowitz was only 25 miles from the pre 1938 German/Czeck border. Marshal Göring had advised State Secretary Weizsäcker that the territory beyond Teschen, along the southeastern German Silesian frontier, should not go to Poland unless Poland agreed to support the return of Danzig to Germany... It was decided to make an effort to keep the Poles out of the industrial center of Witkowitz. While the Nazi officials were threatening and intimidating the representatives of the Czech government, the Wehrmacht had in some areas already crossed the Czech border. The Czech industrial centres of Maehrisch-Ostrau and Witkowitz, close to the Silesian and Polish borders, were occupied by German troops and SS units during the early evening of 14 March 1939. At dawn on 15 March German troops poured into Czechoslovakia from all sides.
The owner of this company was the Viennese banker Baron Louis Nathaniel Rothschild (1882-1955). After the annexation of Austria, he received a visit: The Nazis wanted Witkowitzer to sell his works. Although the Nazis held him for a year in detention, where he remained with the explanation that he could not sell, it must be reviewed by London's Rothschild family branch - Alliance Assurance Co., Ltd., a London insurance company.At the end the Germans paid the price demanded: 2 million pounds in cash and the release of Louis Nathaniel Rothschild. [Why didn’t they just take it by force and kill the Jews? That’s what we would expect in this story. What bit of information is missing that made the Nazis pay a Jew for his steel works?]
When it was time for him to be released from prison, he asked for the time. "A little after 20 clock, Mr Baron." And he replied: "So! That's too late to disturb my friends. I go tomorrow. Good night, gentlemen."
After the end of the Second World War, the Baron Witkowitz did not return. The communists were in property matters rather less flexible than the Nazis… [Source]
Materials were then produced for the Soviet Empire — fulfilling their industrial, military and infrastructure needs — and in the ’70s, materials for the nuclear power industry were produced as well… and the wealth of this area was critical in keeping yet another bloated Empire afloat.
In 2002 the entire premises were declared a site of National Cultural Heritage. In Essen many of the foundries were dismantled in the last few decades and shipped to China. In that enterprise, the Chinese sent over thousands of workers, built a temporary town for them, numbered all the parts and then took the entire factory apart — all the massive machines and buildings — and reassembled it in China. Voila! Instant steel industry! For some reason that hasn’t happened here. The Germans saved one complex from the Chinese scavengers as a reminder of their past, but here it seems everything remains. [Link to Journal from 2006]
We biked over and were given a sort of “tour” — though our “guide” didn’t speak English and had little to say beyond “You can’t go in there!” There was a little bit of a holdup getting past the gatehouse. Our escort said, “Some elements of the communist era still persist — and this guard is one of them.” We were all issued hard hats and in we went. The place is awesome in its terrible beauty — similar to the works in Essen I visited a couple of years ago. Some of the turbine parts looked like aliens or the statues of Easter Island:
Now rusted and overgrown with vegetation, the site is the ruins of our own civilization — as emotional for us to wander through and take in as viewing the ruins of Roma and Athens must have been for the Romantics of the late 19th century. How the mighty have fallen; what glorious and monstrous things they built. What strange Gods they worshipped.
Not so far away is the Ostrava haunted house — the other side of the once mighty industrial region seen as in some weird distorted mirror — and another side of life and the local mindset floats into view like a strange dream. It’s a beautiful Mike Kelley-type installation — not scary in the intended way, but frightening in lots of other ways.
Included is a trip into the belly of the “whale”:
