Luxembourg's painful farewell to the "Schmelz"

On 6 November 1977, several thousand people marched through the streets of Dudelange. Based on the national motto of "Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn", local demonstrators wanted "Dudelange to remain Dudelange".

Driven by the mayor of Dudelange at the time, Nicolas Birtz, the municipality even provided banners for those who marched. Zoé Konsbruck, a doctoral student at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), tells the Lëtzebuerger Journal. Nicolas Arendt, also a doctoral student at the University of Luxembourg, also took part in the interview. In recent years, the two of them have been examining Luxembourg's deindustrialisation and its effects from the 1970s to the 2000s from two different perspectives.

The action in Dudelange was directed against Arbed's decision to close the blast furnaces of the Dudelange steelworks during the first peak of the steel crisis – and yet it was more than that. Slogans such as "Honnert Joer geschafft fir d'Land an den Aktionnär" (a hundred years of work for the country and the shareholder) summarised a self-image that many in Luxembourg shared: that the country's prosperity would have been inconceivable without the steel industry. "It is interesting to see that [the steel crisis] is the moment when the narrative that the steel industry epitomises the country's wealth becomes particularly prevalent. This narrative has been used by Arbed itself to justify spending so much public money on modernisation and restructuring. This is basically the first time that this narrative has really been consciously instrumentalised, " says Arendt. "And the workers themselves are also actively using this argument. That they are the ones who have driven the economy forward. And that's why they deserve support now – from everyone. Because without them, none of this would have been possible. In a way, this is the first culmination of this whole narrative of the 'wealth of the country' that is emerging at this time."