Once, Forst in Lusatia dressed half of Germany in fine cloth; today, colorful yarn lies rotting on factory floors like offerings in an industrial grave. Between crumbling brick palaces, mosaicked halls and the last chimney of the “German Manchester,” only ruins remember the thousands of women who wove for the world.
Now, start-ups, a museum and a “Founders’ Dream Factory” move into the empty giants, while lost-places photographers hunt for the beauty in decay. This article follows the rise and abrupt end of the GDR cloth factories – and asks what remains when an entire industry disappears overnight.
The story of a century
For a century, the textile industry, alongside lignite mining, was the backbone of Lusatia. With the collapse of the GDR, the history of the VEB Tuchfabriken Forst (Forst Cloth Factories) came to an end. Three decades later, only ruins remain to remind us of its former grandeur.
The move must have been carried out with the utmost haste. After more than a hundred years of weaving cloth in the large brick buildings of the factories owned by Adolf Noack and Hermann Bergami in the town of Forst in Lusatia, everything collapsed very quickly. What remained of the "German Manchester," as Lower Lusatia had long been known, was simply left behind.
An empty factory
Like the proverbial "shroud" from Gerhard Hauptmann's poem "The Weaver," remnants of fabric still cover the floor of the empty factories. Tens of thousands of spindles of colorful yarn have defied the wind and weather in this tomb, the winds blowing in through the broken windows.
A pallet jack stands nearby, along with machines and enigmatic devices. That's all that remains of a globally successful industry, 30 years after its demise.
A century of industrial history is contained within the crumbling walls that rise like a monument to lost industrial power in this town of 17,000 inhabitants on the Neisse River. From small cloth factories, which resourceful entrepreneurs had established here as early as 1840, a textile empire emerged with industrialization at the end of the 19th century, one that also included the companies of Noack and Bergami.
200 spinning mills
Nearly 200 weaving mills, spinning mills, sewing factories, and dye works supplied Germany and the world at that time. In 1927, a book by the Association for Local Politics described Forst as a "forest of chimneys with long plumes of smoke, factory after factory, covering entire districts in every part of town."
Everywhere was "the whoosh of the weaver's shuttle, the clatter of the chairs; steam puffs out, coal dust swirls around." Day and night, the steam boilers ran, and the "Black Jule" light rail brought coal from the Lusatian open-cast mines to the central power plant.
The textile capital
At that time, one in five Germans wore a suit made of Lusatian fabric. Forst was Germany's undisputed textile capital: in 1938, half of its 38,000 inhabitants worked in one of the 450 local textile factories, where a quarter of a million spindles whirred away.
In the five-story brick building of the Bergami company, listed in the 1928 German Reich Directory as a manufacturer of napped woolen fabrics called "cloths and buckskins," thousands of spindles now lie scattered haphazardly on the floor.
The last Chimney
The last chimney of the Lusatian textile industry stands right next to the Sleeping Beauty castle of the former production buildings. Also left behind in the vast, bright halls is the board on which the spinning department planned its machine schedules; rolling pallets and the wooden storage units of the administration remain.
The building is not a ruin, despite the missing windows and the young trees growing here and there from floorboards that are slowly turning to earth. The walls are still standing, and the floor in the former factory halls, which the textile manufacturers had decorated with mosaics in the style of princely palaces, shows hardly any signs of final destruction.
The home of Wehrmacht uniforms
The buildings, which during the Second World War primarily supplied fabric for Wehrmacht uniforms and blankets, are impressive.
The collapse at the end was total. The last offensive of the Soviet Army directly overran Forst. Most of the factories were destroyed. And no sooner had reconstruction been achieved than expropriation and consolidation followed, first into the VEB Modetuch (state-owned fashion textile company), later into the VEB Tuchfabriken (state-owned textile factories), where thousands of women wove, spun, and dyed for export to the West.
The Always Liqueur
With reunification, this final chapter of the history of the German Manchester also came to an end. The textile factories, run into the ground, were no longer competitive and were liquidated faster than they could be emptied. The second set of buildings is still far too big.
The city administration moved into one building, another now houses the Textile Museum, and a third is home to the start-up company "ImmerLikör" (Always Liqueur).
The enormous complex of the Noack and Bergami buildings, however, has for some time now belonged to a young entrepreneur who runs her "Founders' Dream Factory" here, offering photo tours for "lost places" enthusiasts.
