Klingenhalle

The Klingenhalle is not a cathedral of sport. It opened on August 18, 1973. For half a century it has done its job.

The structure is defined by its dual purpose. The 25-meter teaching pool, fitted with a movable floor during the major expansion between 2010 and 2011, sits alongside the hard court where handball players run until their lungs burn. The renovation, funded by the German government’s economic stimulus package II, cost €6.8 million and added a glazed extension for the larger pool, though it could not completely silence the complaints about the hall’s aging bones. In 2013, minor upgrades added 200 seats for €60,000, a sum intended to make the venue suitable for top-tier handball, yet the Bergischer HC eventually left for the Uni-Halle in Wuppertal when the hall’s standards no longer matched the ambition of the Bundesliga.

Before that departure, the hall hosted the club from 2011 until the 2023/24 season. Prior to that, SG Solingen played there from 2000 to 2002. The capacity varies depending on who is watching and what rules apply; for Handball-Bundesliga matches it was capped at 2,491 seats, a number that feels small for a city of this size. On October 2022, 1,184 spectators packed into the stands to watch Bergischer HC defeat Frisch Auf Göppingen 32–26, a result that mattered more to the local press than the architecture surrounding them.

The building is named after the Klingen district, a name given a few months after its birth. It does not pretend to be anything grander. It is a place where people swim and shoot balls against walls, indifferent to the fact that the roof leaks or that the heating system is old. Things came to a head recently when a DHB-Pokal match had to be moved to Wuppertal due to urgent renovation needs, but the hall remains, stubborn and functional, waiting for the next season to begin.