SAY THIS for Gelsenkirchen: no one is whitewashing its problems. It was once a mining and steel powerhouse that fuelled Germany’s postwar recovery. Now, the best days of this city of 270,000 souls in the post-industrial Ruhr area are long gone. Gelsenkirchen is weighed down by debt and has long had Germany’s highest unemployment rate. A walk down the Bahnhofstrasse, its once-thriving heart, reveals emptying shop fronts, an armada of mobility scooters and a babble of foreign languages. Further out are neighbourhoods blighted by Schrottimmobilien, the dilapidated housing often occupied by Romanians and Bulgarians who since the end of eu free-movement restrictions in 2014 have swollen the city’s welfare rolls. Yet things were hardly better before then, says a local. “The city was already a shithole.”