The big white giant

1970s behemoths + Merz in America + sexy statues

Dear Reader,

A part of the country that I’ve still never made it to is the Ruhrpott. Marked by shuttered coal mines, industrial harbours and smelting works, it was once the engine room of the German economy.

But like post-industrial regions elsewhere it is now associated with unemployment, poverty and crime. Duisburg, a city of half a million at the intersection of the Ruhr and the Rhine, is perhaps most closely associated with this social decline.

Symbolic are the Weiße Riesen, six enormous tower blocks built in the 1970s to house the city’s burgeoning workforce, whose neglected facades have long since turned grey.

One particular White Giant, which contains 320 flats over 20 storeys, has become the focus of national attention in recent months over the conditions inside it.

A TV crew that visited the building last summer found scenes that barely seem imaginable in modern-day Germany. “When I go to bed in the evening, I smell bird shit,” one resident told them, showing pictures of the inter…