Where once rollers roared, the smell of iron and grease was in the air and the air shimmered with heat in the days of the Alfred smelter and the hot rolling mill, today you will find the kulturWERKwissen. 3000 people worked in their "WERK", the affectionate name of the workers who came in factory buses from all over the Westerwald and along the Sieg. Today, bricks and concrete form the backdrop for events organised by Wissen's eigenART, the voluntary cultural working group. Mines, smelters and rolling mills provided work and bread in the Sieg town for more than a century. Iron ore was mined in the region's pits and transported to Wissen by means of an ingenious cableway system and mine railways. This is recalled, for example, by the famous photos taken by the well-known photographer Peter Weller, who captured the Siegerland ore mining industry, of which Wissen was a part, in pictures. In 1911, the rolling mill was built in Wissen. Highly modern, complex rolling mills later made the thick, hot "slabs" small. In the beginning this was still done by hand and with the machine in duet: "Schnapper" and "Doppler" (job titles at the time) took the slabs out of the pusher furnace by hand and placed them in the roller. Sheets were sometimes folded with the feet (clogs). In the mid-60s, this hard work was replaced by modern rolling mills. They turned steel coils into the finest, wafer-thin sheet metal. The best-known product is the tin can. Today's kulturWERKwissen hall (opened in 2009) was approved in 1933 as the "training and repair workshop of the Alfredhütte blast furnace works", an important part of the Wissen rolling mill. The smelter with its distinctive hot blast stoves existed from 1873 to 1945. The "sand mountain" of black smelter sand and slag still exists today. It is the only sign of the former mining site in Wissen that is still visible from afar. The last pits were closed in the early 1960s, the blast furnace plant was demolished after the war and the rolling mill has no longer existed since 1995. The people of Wissen have done it: with a lot of commitment and help from the municipality of Wissen and the Förderverein kulturWERKwissen - they "pay" for it - something new was created on historic ground: a modern hall of industrial culture with 40,000 visitors a year (2019). A place with charisma, where thousands of young people were once trained as locksmiths and blacksmiths for the metal industry and some of whom now run medium-sized companies in the Westerwald-Sieg region. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The event hall in the former rolling mill, centrally located in the Siegtal, with the charm of industrial culture and the coal and steel industry of days gone by - a look inside the hall during office hours (please register if possible) is free of charge
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Contact and directions
Walzwerkstraße 22
57537 Wissen