A town on the Rhine, at the edge of the coalfield

01 · Place

Walsum

Bärbel Bas was born on 3 May 1968 in Walsum, then an independent town on the right bank of the Rhine, north of Duisburg.1 Walsum was a place of industry in a literal sense: its colliery shafts and its power station on the riverbank shaped the skyline and much of local employment. On 1 January 1975 the North Rhine-Westphalian municipal reform merged Walsum into the city of Duisburg, where it now forms one of the city’s seven districts.2

Duisburg itself was, and remains, one of the largest steel locations in Europe and home to the world’s largest inland port. In the years of Bas’s childhood the region was entering the long structural crisis of coal and steel that would define Ruhr politics for decades — mine closures, steel restructuring and the search for new work.

02 · School

The Hauptschule route

Bas attended the Hauptschule, the most practically oriented of the three secondary-school tracks in the West German system of the time. She left in 1984 with the Hauptschulabschluss and the Fachoberschulreife, a qualification that permitted entry into a technical upper-secondary school.3

The detail matters for understanding her later profile. In the 1980s the Hauptschule led most of its pupils into the dual system of vocational training — an apprenticeship in a company combined with part-time vocational school — rather than towards university. Her subsequent professional qualifications were all earned in that tradition: alongside work, in evening courses and through employer-linked training.

03 · First job

Apprenticeship at the transport company

In 1985, aged seventeen, she began an apprenticeship as a Bürogehilfin — an office clerk — at the Duisburger Verkehrsgesellschaft (DVG), the city’s public bus and tram company. She qualified in 1987 and stayed on as a clerk.3

Within a year of starting, she was elected to the company’s Jugend- und Auszubildendenvertretung, the statutory representative body for young employees and trainees. It was the first of the elected positions that would eventually lead her to Parliament.