Wuppertal audiotours

Wuppertal was formed in 1929 by merging the industrial cities of Barmen and Elberfeld along with several smaller communities in the Bergisches Land hills of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Wupper River runs through the valley between steep green slopes, and the city's geography forced its architects into creative solutions. The most creative was the Schwebebahn, the suspension railway that has followed the river's course since 1901 on a steel monorail elevated above the water and the streets. It carries 25 million passengers a year, runs at 27 kilometres per hour, and looks exactly like something that should not work but does. In 1950, a young Indian elephant named Tuffi was being ridden along the Schwebebahn for a publicity stunt when she panicked and jumped through the window into the river below. She survived. The incident is still commemorated with murals.

Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen in 1820, in a house on what is now Engelsstrasse.

The city where capitalism's great critic grew up was itself one of the earliest and most concentrated examples of German industrialisation, its valleys choked with textile mills through the 19th century. Bayer AG patented Aspirin in Barmen in 1897. Pina Bausch, the choreographer who redefined contemporary dance through her Tanztheater Wuppertal, spent most of her working life here. The film director Tom Tykwer, who made Run Lola Run, is from Wuppertal too.