Qualla: Erkelenz

Erkelenz: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinz Rade, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pesch was the first to empty. The easternmost village in the Erkelenz borough, founded centuries ago like every other place around here, lost its last inhabitants in 2010. They had not chosen to leave. They had been bought out and resettled, along with the residents of nine other villages, because the ground their houses stood on was needed for a hole. The hole is Garzweiler II, an open-cast brown-coal mine operated by RWE Power that is scheduled to keep grinding westward toward Erkelenz until 2045. Over five thousand people have moved so far. New villages with names like Immerath (neu) and Borschemich (neu) have been built on the western side of town for the displaced. This is a town more than a thousand years old. What is being done to it is one of the largest legal evictions in postwar Germany.

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Image: Heinz Rade | CC BY-SA 3.0

Erkelenz: A Roman Estate, Probably

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leander Schiefer LeSch, CC BY-SA 3.0. Erkelenz first appears in the documentary record on 17 January 966, when St. Mary's Abbey in Aachen received the settlement - then spelled 'herclinze' - in an exchange with the Lotharingian Count Immo, confirmed by Emperor Otto the Great at an imperial assembly in Aachen. The dom...

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Image: Leander Schiefer LeSch | CC BY-SA 3.0

Erkelenz: A Town of Guelders

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bodoklecksel, Public domain. Erkelenz received town rights from Count Reginald II of Guelders in 1326, or perhaps over a longer process that did not have a single fixed date. By 1331 there was a jury seal, and by 1343 the town was attending the Guelders urban diet. Built within the town walls before they wer...

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Image: Bodoklecksel | Public domain

Erkelenz: Industry, Pins, Weavers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jacob van Deventer, Public domain. The Industrial Revolution arrived modestly. Andreas Polke from Ratibor founded a pin factory here around 1825 - by 1841 he employed 73 workers, of whom 36 were children under fourteen. Pins were made in Erkelenz until about 1870. In 1852 the town was connected to the Aachen-Monch...

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Image: Jacob van Deventer | Public domain

Erkelenz: Garzweiler II

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Wolf (Der Wolf im Wald), CC BY-SA 3.0. And then, in the twenty-first century, the eastern half of the borough started to disappear. The Garzweiler II open-cast brown-coal mine, operated by RWE Power, was approved in 1995. Beginning in 2006 the eastern parts of the Erkelenz borough were cleared so the pit could expand ...

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Image: Thomas Wolf (Der Wolf im Wald) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Erkelenz: What Stays, What Goes

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Tonkonog and Ksenia Fedosova, CC BY-SA 3.0. The town of Erkelenz proper is still here, with more than 44,000 inhabitants, the old market square preserved, the original street grid largely intact. The coat of arms still shows the gold lion of Guelders above a red medlar - the rose of Geldern - the symbols of a town that too...

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Image: Dmitry Tonkonog and Ksenia Fedosova | CC BY-SA 3.0