Red clinker brick buildings are still typical of the landscape and cities of northern Germany. In Drochtersen, a small town on the Elbe, a family business has been producing bricks in a traditional ring kiln for four generations.
Are there gloves??Matthias Rusch hears this question (34) by two employees in quick succession on this rainy summer day. The junior manager of the Rusch clinker factory knows, that a supply of robust work gloves is vital for the smooth functioning of his brick factory. Because: Hands stack the blanks in the gondolas of the conveyor belt and then in the wooden frames of the drying shed, which is several hundred meters long. Hands place the stones in several layers in the ring kiln and remove them again after firing. Hands place the rough and sharp-edged bricks individually on a narrow conveyor belt and from there sorted by color and quality onto pallets. Each brick is picked up about ten times. That is a weight of almost three kilos each time. No wonder, that new gloves are due every few days. Consumption is included 500 couple per year.
With fifteen employees, Matthias and his parents Johann and Walthild Rusch produce over two million clay bricks every year. "The raw material is available on the Lower Elbe from Hamburg to Wischhafen", explains senior manager Johann Rusch (61). A machine kneads the “dough”, which is then pressed through a rectangular mold and cut to size by a steel string. In eternally long scales dry up to 400 000 blanks for four to six weeks. "East wind dries best", says Matthew Rusch, “But for some time now there have been unfavorable south-west winds more and more frequently.” The Ruschs are all too familiar with freak weather, because until the dike is built in the year 1978 the company had to survive numerous storm surges.
THE FIRE has traveled through the kiln and released the finished bricks (top left). Today as before 100 Years ago, the bricks were cleared by hand and taken out with small carts (bottom left). The clinker blanks must release excess water before firing, To do this, they are stored for four to six weeks on wooden shelves in the two-kilometre-long drying shed. Today they are transported in gondolas (top right), formerly by small horse-drawn wagons on tracks. Depending on the firing status, the kiln entrances are resealed or broken open.
In the Rusch clinker factory, an environmentally friendly raw material is used for bricking up: Silt from the Elbe on the doorstep – always available and easier to work with than mortar. Each door opening is double locked, finally first, when the pre-fire is regulated.
A ring kiln from the end of the 19. century
“The whole area, including the oven, is under water, Thousands of blanks ruined – I do not know, where we always found the strength to start again", says Walthild Rusch (55), whose energy, however, still suffices to do office work today. She is the good soul of the company and, thanks to her cell phone, the omnipresent contact person.
A lot of manual work goes into the quality clinkers from Drochtersen, However, the firing process in the ring kiln requires a very special instinct. Similar to the transformation from a dirty gray chick into a magnificent swan are the less than attractive ones, greyish-beige blanks to pretty colorful clinker bricks. The hard coal firing is the real secret of their colorful coloring. Because the fire does not burn to the same extent everywhere and charcoal residues are deposited differently, every stone is unique. "In no other kiln in the world are the clinker bricks as colorful as in the coal-fired ring kiln", says Matthias Rusch, not without pride.
The huge, oval furnace fills the factory hall impressively. operated without interruption, Its "wandering" fire enables several work processes to be carried out at the same time. While the men in a chamber bring out the finished bricks, colleagues next door are already putting on blanks again. The entire firing process takes fourteen days on average. Of the once more than hundred brick factories along the Elbe, only the Rusch clinker factory still produces the colorful bricks in the traditional way in the ring kiln. What once revolutionized brick production and made mass production possible for the first time, is now under monument protection, and the Elbklinker bricks, which are made by hand, are anything but mass-produced.