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Witten sits in the southern Ruhr, where the valley is narrower and more wooded than the industrial flatlands to the north, and where the river still feels like a river rather than a managed drain. The city's first recorded mention is 1214, but it became itself when mining began in 1578. For four centuries coal shaped everything here: the land, the architecture, the social rhythms, and the particular mix of pride and pragmatism that Ruhr cities carry.

In 1906 a Roburit dynamite explosion killed 41 miners in one of the region's deadlier disasters.

Roburit was a coal-mine explosive used across Europe; Witten happened to be where one batch went wrong. The Route der Industriekultur now threads through the region, and Witten's Hebezeug-Museum, a crane and hoist museum, is one of its stops. These are not nostalgic places. They document a working history that shaped the continent.