I saw black clouds cast6/1/2023 “Yes,” he says, although I suspect a part of him misses the machines. I ask Bernhard if it’s nice to see the landscape recover. Looking at the vines and listening to the birds singing, it’s hard to conceive that this was once part of an open-cast mine. On the horizon, wind turbines rotate in the breeze.Ī short walk from the Wolkenberg memorial, the vineyard occupies a sunny, 15-acre plot. Grassy meadows, windswept hedges and young coppices hide the scars of industry. There’s no lake at Wolkenberg instead, the pit was filled with earth and turned into a rural landscape. Today, a stone memorial sits on the site of the old church: ‘Wolkenberg 1503-1991’, it reads. So, in 1991, when coal still dominated the energy mix, they tore old Wolkenberg down and the bucket-wheel excavators moved in, plundering the land and erasing over 500 years of history. The trouble was it sat above large amounts of lignite, which was deemed more valuable than the village. Meaning ‘cloud hill’ in German, the original Wolkenberg was built in the 16th century and was, by all accounts, an ordinary, tight-knit Lusatian village, complete with modest homes and a church. One such vineyard is Wolkenberg - named after a village that no longer exists. Lake shores, meanwhile, have been beautified with beaches, forests and cycle paths, which wend their way between old mining towns, industrial heritage sites and even vineyards. Some lakes have been linked by canals, too, meaning it’s possible to sail between them. Work will continue into the next decade, but with 15 of the 25 largest pits now flooded, the project has now passed the halfway mark. Approximately 120 abandoned pits will have been flooded once the project is complete, creating a water surface of around 85sq miles. Millions of gallons of the stuff, which are being pumped into Lusatia’s empty pits as part of an estimated €10bn (£8.8bn) regeneration project that’s already transformed the region into the largest artificial lake district in Europe. So, what’s filling the void? The answer: water. As, eventually, did the emergence of new sources of energy. The GDR had guaranteed all citizens employment, which inflated the workforce, but the reunification of Germany and prevailing Western ideology - with its market-driven efficiencies - soon put paid to that. “After the Wall came down there were just 8,000.” “Around 70,000 people used to work in the industry,” sighs Bernhard. Straddling the German states of Brandenburg and Saxony - and a corner of western Poland - Lusatia’s lignite mines have been in decline since the fall of the Berlin Wall. “This was all part of the pit,” explains Bernhard. The perfectly spaced trees, the neatly sculpted slopes these aren’t the hallmarks of Mother Nature, but the telltale signs of ever-meddling man. I feel relieved to be back in the natural environment.Įxcept I’m not. Road signs warn drivers to look out for deer, and kestrels hover overhead. Leaving the dystopian landscape behind, we drive through mud and onto a quiet public highway that meanders through forests and grasslands. Now retired, Bernhard likes to show visitors where he used to work - but that’s not all there is to this area. They’re digging for lignite, poor man’s coal, which will eventually be fed into power stations, stoking the fires that help Germany keep the lights on. I watch as the machines responsible for the sprawling pit devour the land one mouthful at a time. A dying breed now, they were the engine room of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), and in Lusatia - this area, 80 miles south of Berlin and 40 north of Dresden - tens of thousands of people were once employed in mining. This’ll be the pit, then: Welzow-Süd.īernhard, my guide, has spent much of his working life as a pit planner in mines like this. Very little colour, mostly black and shades of grey. I jump out of the van and into a scene of carnage an open wound in the earth as big as a city and darker than hell.
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