Industrial culture with a lot of passion

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Although we come from the city and have absolutely no connection to the steel industry in terms of our family history, we are always impressed by the industrial wastelands every time we travel to the south of our country. We are even fascinated by the Völklingen Ironworks in neighbouring Saarland, a cathedral of steel and iron that was rightly declared a World Heritage Site in the mid-1990s, but that's not what we want to talk about here.

What we actually want to say: We should be proud of our blast furnaces and our industrial heritage. The corresponding stories of our country's transformation from a poor agricultural country to a rich industrialised nation should not be dismissed as the nostalgic blah-blah of a few social romantics, but as an important part of our history, without which we would not be as rich as we seem to be today.

We may no longer be an industrialised nation, although Arbed, sorry, ArcelorMittal is still active, but industrial history continues to shape our country. Witnesses to this labour-intensive past still largely define the image of the Minett region, and the Metzeschmelz on the site of the former steelworks in Esch-Schifflange is also part of this industrial landscape.

The non-profit organisation FerroForum, which was founded in 2019 with the aim of "preserving and promoting the cultural, industrial and craft heritage as well as the know-how surrounding the production of iron and steel", is based here, in the former central workshop to be precise, as we read somewhere on the internet.