The Grube Dr. Geier above Waldalgesheim is not a ruin in the picturesque sense. It is an abandoned baroque palace that happened to be a manganese mine, and I spent this afternoon walking around it. Two symmetrical wings, a gate house, a court of honour, an octagonal basin in front of the machine hall that was really a cooling pond. Weeds in the joints, a burnt-out section from a fire in 2003, corrugated iron over windows. What is most conspicuous is what is missing: the 50-metre steel headframe that stood at the centre of every photograph of this place until January 2014.
The Darmstadt firm Markwort & Seibert laid the complex out from 1916 onwards - in the middle of the First World War, while bread was rationed - with the buildings arranged almost axially around the courtyard, the director's house and the hostel flanking the entrance. The most elaborate building held a dining hall with a stage. Miners here ate above ground, in a room with a theatre in it. I know of no other German ore mine that decided that was a priority.
Much of what I know about what this place did to the village did not come out of an archive. Outside Waldalgesheim there are small lakes where people fish, and on the bench there you can find ladies from the care home "Carpe Diem", which opened on Neustraße a few years ago. They are in their eighties and nineties. Their fathers and grandfathers worked this hill. Where something in what follows has no document behind it, it usually has one of them.
The man on the gate is harder to see clearly than the buildings. Heinrich Claudius Geier, born in Mainz in 1834, son of a builder, Corps student in Darmstadt, Catholic, married, architect and entrepreneur by trade. Between 1881 and 1887 he sat in the Second Chamber of the Grand Duchy of Hesse for the National Liberals - the party of industry, railways and tariffs. On 15 March 1883, while still a sitting deputy, he received the mining concession. Two years later he was drilling on the Amalienhöhe, and at about eighteen metres he hit ore. Where the "Dr." in front of his name came from I could not establish; the biographical record calls him an architect. Nor could I find out who Amalie was, or Elise, whose name is on the neighbouring field the company later bought. He died in 1896 (or 1898), and his heirs turned the family firm into a "Gewerkschaft Braunsteinbergwerke Doktor Geier", divided into a thousand shares. That is roughly the whole man as the archives have kept him: a well-connected liberal with an eye for a seam and, on the evidence of the courtyard, a taste for architecture that outlived him by a century.
What made the hill valuable was steel. Manganese binds sulphur and oxygen; without it the Thomas process does not give you good steel, and without good steel you do not get rails, ships or guns. In August 1914 Germany was cut off from foreign ore in a single stroke, and a modest Hunsrück mine became a strategic asset. Work stopped briefly and resumed by October. Russian prisoners of war were put to work here. The Reich paid half the cost of sinking the new shaft on the Stöckert from 1916. In 1917 the mine produced around 240,000 tons — its record, never matched again.
The logistics are the part I find most beautiful, in the engineer's sense of the word. Waldalgesheim sits some six kilometres from the Rhine with a forested ridge in between, which is a nuisance if you are moving heavy rock. So in 1912 they strung a 7.6-kilometre aerial ropeway through the Binger Wald down to a loading point at the river near Trechtingshausen, good for sixty tons an hour. Buckets of ore floating over the treetops, all day, until 1967. From 1914 they also drove a tunnel - the Rheinstollen, 3,300 metres, finished only in 1924 because of the war - which drained the workings and carried ore out towards Bingerbrück. That puts the mouth of the works almost exactly at the stretch of river I wrote about earlier this summer, the choke point below the Binger Loch. The same few hundred metres of water that decide today whether a chemical plant gets its feedstock decided a century ago whether a blast furnace got its manganese. The Rhine does not change its role. Only the cargo does.
The price was paid by the village. From 1908 the damage was unmistakable: cracks, sinking streets, hollows filling with rainwater. Nobody here talks about earthquakes in the geological sense, and I found no seismic record - but people talk about the ground moving. A settlement of a few centimetres does not announce itself politely; when a roof falls in a chamber two hundred metres down, the house above it feels a jolt, plaster lets go, a door stops closing. One of the ladies described a house that was sound on the Tuesday and condemned by the Friday. Another said her grandfather had a field where one of the fishing lakes is now, and said it without drama, the way you would mention a road that got widened. From around 1910 the company built 124 replacement houses south of the old core, and roughly sixty more between 1916 and 1920, by the same architects who were building the palace on the hill. Whole streets were given up. Both churches had to go. The Protestant congregation closed its old church in June 1937 and consecrated a new one on 27 March 1938, carrying the organ and the spire across to the new site like relatives moving a grave.
And here the two halves of the story meet. In April 1938 - within weeks of that consecration - the Oberbergamt moved the "Sicherheitspfeiler" further south. The safety pillar is the block of rock a mine is forbidden to touch because a village stands on it. It was moved because Hermann Göring's Four-Year Plan wanted the ore, and it was moved again in 1941. Landowners who refused to sign were brought round by pressure from the state and the church, and by the threat of expropriation. That is what rearmament looked like at parish scale: not a rally, but a line on a mine surveyor's map shifted a few hundred metres, and a community agreeing, under duress and with compensation, to let the ground beneath its new houses be taken as well. Output reached about 160,000 tons in 1944, the highest since the first war. Work stopped in March 1945.
It stopped because the Americans arrived. The Hunsrück was not defended in any meaningful sense. Through mid-March, exhausted German columns of fifteen or twenty men trudged east through Bingen towards a Rhine whose bridges their own engineers were blowing up behind them — the Hindenburg bridge on 15/16 March, others in the days after, one detonation strong enough to take out windows across the town. American infantry was in Bingerbrück on the afternoon of 18 March. Once the party officials had gone, white sheets went out of the windows. There is an account from a village up on the plateau of teenagers finding a store of Panzerfäuste and tipping the ammunition into a water hole in the meadows before the soldiers came, with their parents running down into the valley to fetch them home. That is the Hunsrück's version of the end of the war: not resistance, not liberation in any triumphal sense, but enormous relief at not being fought over, mixed with how quickly the flags changed colour. On the night of 22 March, thirty kilometres upstream at Nierstein, Patton put a few hundred men across the Rhine in rubber boats without a preliminary bombardment, a day before Montgomery's set-piece crossing at Wesel, and the river stopped being a front. Of the three ladies, one did not talk about the war at all, which is also a way of talking about it.
The mine outlived the regime by twenty-six years and was killed by metallurgy. When no significant manganese reserves could be opened up after about 1952, the company switched to dolomite, first delivered in 1959, peaking at some 350,000 tons in 1969. Then the steelworks moved from the Siemens-Martin furnace to the LD converter, which did not need it. Demand collapsed. On 31 December 1971 the last shift came up - sixty-three men underground, seventy-seven above, thirty-two in the offices. The deepest shaft had reached 267 metres. One of the ladies remembered her father coming up filthy and singing, which is the only detail anyone offered me that sounded like nostalgia.
After that, the long undignified afterlife: a visitor mine for three years, then tenants, then the 2003 fire, then owners with plans and no money. The headframe rusted until it was condemned. In December 2013 the water tank and roof came off and the frame began to lean towards the houses. In January 2014 they put a steel cable on it and pulled it down deliberately; it fell into the ore bunker and the machine hall and hurt nobody. Since 2002 the whole ensemble has been a protected monument inside the UNESCO Upper Middle Rhine Valley - a World Heritage site with its landmark lying on the ground.
Mining places are always three things at once. Hope: a man drills a hole in a hill in 1885 and a village gets wages, a theatre and 184 new houses. Despair: the same village watches its church crack and signs away the rock under its feet because a Reichsmarschall wants more steel. Tragedy: the tonnages that mattered most were dug in 1917 and 1944, and everyone knew what they were for.
Standing in the courtyard, what strikes you is how little of this the buildings admit to. They were designed to look like a residence, and they still do. The most durable thing the mine produced is not in the courtyard at all. It is the shape of the ground: eight million tons taken out, the surface let down onto the void, and a set of lakes that nobody planned and that now hold protected wetland and a fishing club. The hill also gave up a Celtic princess in gold, dug out of the same ground by a farmer in 1869 and important enough that a whole style of European art is named after this village. Two extractions, two thousand years apart, and only one of them left a hole.