An Industrial Nightmare from Saar

From the 1920s to 1950s, there were a lot of stamps showing factories with huge plumes of pollution.  This was most pronounced from Eastern Europe and Russia after WWII, where the workers were stylized and turned into icons, and industry was rampant.

Here is a stamp from Saar (Scott #98) which is depressing every time I see it.

The catalog says this is the Burbach Steelworks in Dillingen, Germany. 

This stamp is high on my mental list of the ugliest stamps ever printed.  It's dark, low contrast, and badly over-inked.  The design is so bad, in fact, that you can't even read the printed value of 25c at the bottom, and it was almost immediately surcharged "5 FRANKEN". I was also wondering if those were dollar signs in the lower corners.

The underlying stamp (#83) is the high value of a long set of blurry, smudgy grey/brown/black images of towns.  Here are some stamps from that set.  These usually have heavy, smudgy postmarks.  As someone who enjoys finding cancels from small towns, that's fine with me -- I have picked through thousands of these.  But it makes it hard to appreciate the underlying design.

The design of #98 was cleaned up for Saar #116, and they went with a brighter color: still brown, but at least it doesn't look like actual smoke.

Wow.  Look at how crisp and clear the design could have been.    Yes, those are dollar signs, or some combination of lines that look that way.  It's still an oppressive scene to me.  Could you breathe the air in that town, or did everyone just get sick and not notice?

We were celebrating the power of industry in those days, and didn't seem to realize how ugly and destructive it could be.  Since the 1970s we have taken huge strides in reducing pollution, but the amount of production of millions of different products and chemicals is mind-boggling.

Now I am wondering about the factory itself.  It appears again on Saar #135:

From what I can tell on Wikipedia and other searches, the plant is still there.

To my great surprise, one of these industrial behemoths -- the one in Völklingen -- has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.  The site has the history and a selection of photos.  I could not find that location portrayed on a stamp from Saar, though the town was definitely in the territory, but the 30c from up above is described as "Slag pile at Völklingen."   Heritage site.

Industrial history is full of lessons, the rise and fall of fortunes, and the struggles of millions of workers.  Here are some of those workers, on Saar #215 and #216:

It can be an interesting trip when you take the time to look at some stamps and follow the clues about what was going on in the images.