In Bergisch Gladbach

Rtn. Christopher Bluemel visited the Rotary Club of Bergisch Gladbach in November. Bergisch Gladbach is a city in western Germany and might not be known to many. The most famous person born and raised in Bergisch Gladbach is Heidi Klum, a German model and business woman.

The city of Bergisch Gladbach was born in 1975 when the namesake town and Bensberg merged during a territorial reform in North Rhine-Westphalia. Now, it’s a rural, low-key kind of place just across the Rhine from Cologne.

Historically, one of the big employers in Bergisch Gladbach was papermaking. There’s still a functioning paper mill in the city, and its name, Zanders, has more than two centuries of papermaking heritage.

Bergisch Gladbach’s main art museum is in a 19th-century villa built for Maria Zanders, a paper industrialist’s wife who had a love for Romantic art. There’s no mystery where the pulp for papermaking came from because if you head out in any direction from Bergisch Gladbach, you’ll find yourself in dense deciduous forest

And much before that, there is a rich history of several thousand years.

The Romans already understood the strategic relevance of the area and mined ore and zinc there, crucial raw material for their weapons and shields to support their territorial desires.

Many tens of million years before that and long before the Mediterranean Sea came into existence, it was in the same area where the tectonic plates of Africa and Europe collided. Recently-found tropical plants tell a story of a completely different era, long before various ice ages shaped the current hilly landscape (bergisches land), a name that the region still goes by.

The Rotary Club of Bergisch Gladbach meets on Monday evenings and in their social projects focusses strongly on education of the underprivileged and environment.