Bespoke translation by yours truly. Original article [A] by Danisch
It's rare that this city makes it into my writings.
Ludwigshafen at the Rhine is a place I know - but there isn't much to talk about on that place. In terms of content, nothing at all, and beside that, pretty much nothing too. Without the BASF [the largest chemical producer in the world, headquartered in Ludwigshafen] and the military train yard, there actually isn't anything there.
But now they have something: MRN-News - Security situation in Ludwigshafen is escalating - citizens are scared
I've been in Ludwigshafen for the last 3 years of my time in high school.
I want to put it this way: Ludwigshafen has never been a pretty and upscale place. There are no sights, not only is there nothing that you need to go and see - there isn't even anything that you could see if you wanted to - other than the BASF and other industrial spots. The BASF is worth seeing, in an industrial sense, but the BASF is actually not Ludwigshafen, but merely in Ludwigshafen. Right now. They are scaling down and pissing off to abroad. And only because, back then, [the city of] Mannheim did not want to have the BASF, otherwise Ludwigshafen wouldn't exist the way it does, this is just an incorporation of several smaller former villages without any cultural important background like a castle or an electoral prince or such. I can still recall having seen the ruins of the old train station, bombed in the war, when I was a very small kid, where they then instead built an incredibly ugly and also uncreative "city hall center". Which was also noteworthy at the time because they had to replace the lights in the bathrooms with blue lights so that not so many junkies loiter inside. They can't find their veins under blue light. The Ludwigshafen blue light district.
Ludwigshafen has always been lower class in some way, "proletariat", keyword Hemshof.
But: During my school time, it was not dangerous. Vagrants and maybe a fistfight, but nothing seriously dangerous. Even though I might have had a misleading perspective, because I was in the upper class classical school, but heard that the other schools had different degrees of roughness. I have not been in Ludwigshafen since then. Nothing about the city interests or excites me. Nothing at all. Even though I have heard peripherally that they are having a severe hardship because the bridges to Mannheim are ailing and something had to be blocked off. And the ugly city hall center is being torn down apparently.
Ugliness and rot of Ludwigshafen are based on something that I have seen when I was a small child:
Ludwigshafen has no cultural center in a proper sense. As an industrial city, Ludwigshafen has been heavily bombarded during the World War, and there were plenty of bombed homes, or homes with visible bombing damages. In the first 20 years up to the end of the 60s, there wasn't much rebuilding going on, and then they fell into this brutalism architectural style of the 60s/70s/80s, where they built a lot in that style. City hall, train station, bridges, parking garage houses. Undecorative, smooth, ugly, concrete. And the stuff has got the disadvantage that, not only is it completely ugly and looks worn, rancid, but it's completely rotten after 50 years. And they are neither financially, nor intellectually or competently able to build something new there. So it simply expires.
And there you can see what's going to become of Germany, a practical example.
The same thing is going to happen to many other places too. Because the symptom I described doesn't just exist there. Germany full of World War damage, and in the 60s to the 80s, they rapidly spammed it with concrete to finally have a city again and no longer live in ruins, as I have seen and witnessed it when I was a small child (and how it basically repeated at the end of the GDR, but there they were fortunate that the concrete horror was over already). And all this crap is now rotting at the same time nationwide. That is why we have so many broken bridges. The recently collapsed Carola bridge was suffering from the same effect, because this concrete era also existed in the GDR.
I don't believe that they will be able to save Ludwigshafen. In the actually better sister city Mannheim, the situation is a catastrophe already. And because the BASF is moving out in the meantime, the jobs and corporate taxes are leaving, which Ludwigshafen previously lived off.
Ludwigshafen is escalating
It's rare that this city makes it into my writings.
Ludwigshafen at the Rhine is a place I know - but there isn't much to talk about on that place. In terms of content, nothing at all, and beside that, pretty much nothing too. Without the BASF [the largest chemical producer in the world, headquartered in Ludwigshafen] and the military train yard, there actually isn't anything there.
But now they have something: MRN-News - Security situation in Ludwigshafen is escalating - citizens are scared
It's not just in the past weeks that the number of severe crimes in Ludwigshafen has raised by an extreme margin. Robberies, violence, and battery have become daily affairs. Especially in traffic hubs like Berliner Platz, Ludwigshafen center, but also in other places in the inner city, the situation is visibly escalating.
The Ludwigshafen police increasingly reports on thefts, grand theft, extortion under threat of force, or violent robberies. More and more citizens are scared of being about in their city. How is that supposed to go on?
In our Facebook Community, Ludwigshafen residents voice extreme concerns regarding being present in certain parts of the city. "I am scared in our city", a [female] Facebook user says. "I bet the police just brought the perpetrator to the station, then he was released again", another user says on a post which is about a violent extortion under threat of force in Ludwigshafen.
The police seems swamped by now. In hotspots where severe crimes happen frequently, police presence is in short supply. The police only comes on call. By that point, perpetrators have often fled the scene and left the victims to their fate.
Not just at daytime, but especially at night, many people no longer dare move in the city without fear. Every day, violent crimes happen. The perp profiles are again and again the same. Badly integrated persons with a migration background, youth groups without a perspective in life, criminal drug dealers and blackmailers run amok. Thefts are the smallest evil that can happen to you on the streets of Ludwigshafen.
Crime in Ludwigshafen is completely getting out of control.
I've been in Ludwigshafen for the last 3 years of my time in high school.
I want to put it this way: Ludwigshafen has never been a pretty and upscale place. There are no sights, not only is there nothing that you need to go and see - there isn't even anything that you could see if you wanted to - other than the BASF and other industrial spots. The BASF is worth seeing, in an industrial sense, but the BASF is actually not Ludwigshafen, but merely in Ludwigshafen. Right now. They are scaling down and pissing off to abroad. And only because, back then, [the city of] Mannheim did not want to have the BASF, otherwise Ludwigshafen wouldn't exist the way it does, this is just an incorporation of several smaller former villages without any cultural important background like a castle or an electoral prince or such. I can still recall having seen the ruins of the old train station, bombed in the war, when I was a very small kid, where they then instead built an incredibly ugly and also uncreative "city hall center". Which was also noteworthy at the time because they had to replace the lights in the bathrooms with blue lights so that not so many junkies loiter inside. They can't find their veins under blue light. The Ludwigshafen blue light district.
Ludwigshafen has always been lower class in some way, "proletariat", keyword Hemshof.
But: During my school time, it was not dangerous. Vagrants and maybe a fistfight, but nothing seriously dangerous. Even though I might have had a misleading perspective, because I was in the upper class classical school, but heard that the other schools had different degrees of roughness. I have not been in Ludwigshafen since then. Nothing about the city interests or excites me. Nothing at all. Even though I have heard peripherally that they are having a severe hardship because the bridges to Mannheim are ailing and something had to be blocked off. And the ugly city hall center is being torn down apparently.
Ugliness and rot of Ludwigshafen are based on something that I have seen when I was a small child:
Ludwigshafen has no cultural center in a proper sense. As an industrial city, Ludwigshafen has been heavily bombarded during the World War, and there were plenty of bombed homes, or homes with visible bombing damages. In the first 20 years up to the end of the 60s, there wasn't much rebuilding going on, and then they fell into this brutalism architectural style of the 60s/70s/80s, where they built a lot in that style. City hall, train station, bridges, parking garage houses. Undecorative, smooth, ugly, concrete. And the stuff has got the disadvantage that, not only is it completely ugly and looks worn, rancid, but it's completely rotten after 50 years. And they are neither financially, nor intellectually or competently able to build something new there. So it simply expires.
And there you can see what's going to become of Germany, a practical example.
The same thing is going to happen to many other places too. Because the symptom I described doesn't just exist there. Germany full of World War damage, and in the 60s to the 80s, they rapidly spammed it with concrete to finally have a city again and no longer live in ruins, as I have seen and witnessed it when I was a small child (and how it basically repeated at the end of the GDR, but there they were fortunate that the concrete horror was over already). And all this crap is now rotting at the same time nationwide. That is why we have so many broken bridges. The recently collapsed Carola bridge was suffering from the same effect, because this concrete era also existed in the GDR.
I don't believe that they will be able to save Ludwigshafen. In the actually better sister city Mannheim, the situation is a catastrophe already. And because the BASF is moving out in the meantime, the jobs and corporate taxes are leaving, which Ludwigshafen previously lived off.
