In Germany and Poland, defunct coal mines are being converted into tourist attractions.
On a rainy summer afternoon, I went into a defunct coal mine in Zabrze, Upper Silesia, Poland, with Barbara Palowicz. She shares her name with Saint Barbara—the patron saint of miners, sailors, lightning, and workplace accidents—who guides and protects people with dangerous jobs. Every year on December 4, Saint Barbara’s feast day, the miners, all old now, gather a band, sing mining songs, and march down the snowy streets of Katowice. In the Zabrze mine, an etching of Saint Barbara holds a sword, the words below her: Szczesc bolze, God be with you. We descended.
Barbara, the person, not the saint, leads tours down the dark tunnels, which are ventilated, she said, so that visitors no longer breathe methane gas or die in an explosion of firedamp. “You’re not Bruce Willis. You can’t outrun it,” she said. She darted around the mine like a sprite, pulling on the machines and making them grind and clash to life. “THIS IS WHY ALL THE MINERS WERE DEAF!” she shouted. She’s hoping to get a Ph.D. in coal heritage, she said, excitedly scrolling through pictures I showed her of mining museums in Appalachia, from whence I’d come to understand how her home region is grappling with the cultural and physical imprint of coal.
The Barbaras are part of a burgeoning mine tourism industry that stretches between the coalfields of Lusatia in eastern Germany and Silesia in western Poland. These former socialist republics have had their landscapes and memories shaped by industry, war, and energy. Coal here is culture, so much so that kohle in German has two meanings: coal, and money. But now, as the European Union is pushing for coal-free economies of the future, the landscapes and livelihoods here, once and a million times transformed, are asked to transform again; that’s the word used here, transformation, rather than transition, as we say here stateside.
I traveled here with a personal history I couldn’t disentangle from the region, descended as I am from an evaporated community of southern Polish Jews. In central Europe, memory culture echoes with horror and nostalgia, which, in Germany, mostly refers to the memorialization of the Holocaust. But as East German poet Wolfgang Hilbig often wrote, sites of war and sites of industry are equally haunted; rebuilding from war requires even further upheaval of the Earth and of the people living on it.
In Katowice, Silesia, on top of a former coal site, sits Katowice Culture Zone, which now hosts a symphony, a conference center, and the Silesian Museum, all tribute to Silesian history and art. In the latter, the artists of Katowice’s past depict history: coal miners dancing on feast days; bloody wartime scenes; Saint Barbara as the Pieta, holding a coal miner who sleeps in her arms.
When the city hosted COP24, the U.N. climate change conference, attendees were distressed by the elevated presence of coal industry representatives at the event, even as protesters gathered outside the doors. All around, protester Alicja Zdziechiewicz told me at a roadside cafe, a familiar sight: coal miners who came in “cursing and throwing fireworks.” A coal company once proposed to dig 590 feet beneath Zdziechiewicz’s home village of Imielin. Her organization, Green Imielin, stopped the mine, avoiding the fate of nearby Bytom, whose houses and streets are cracking apart and sinking into the ground thanks to the mining beneath it.
As Zdziechiewicz’s group celebrated, Poland voted out its far-right wing government, and its economy, long the butt of jokes all over Europe, began to chug forwards. From Katowice’s cavernous halls on top of old coal mines, the European Commission chair declared, “Poland is back.”
Back in Zabrze, I went up in the clanking elevator with Barbara Palowicz, light and shadow passing over her face as she called to me to hold steady, and we emerged from the hole into a soft rain. I walked half a mile down the street to meet the mine’s old foreman. Pawel, 95 years old, welcomed me into his white-walled apartment as his family set out coffee and strawberry cake. He missed the old times, he said. Back then, worker safety was paramount, unions were strong, and job loss was rare. East Germans call this ostalgie, this nostalgia for the communist old days. Some say it is misplaced, looking back towards better times that never were, when poor families dug coal out of the ground with their bare hands in the winter. Others point to unemployment, to homelessness, and ask: What’s better now?
Power emerges from the hole in the ground, the dead wreak havoc on the living.
The coal in Silesia powered Auschwitz, where I did not go. I did not go to Tomaszow, my great-grandmother’s home, even though it was not far away. The thought of going to either place filled me with dread. There’s nothing to see in Tomaszow anyway, my grandmother told me. She visited in the 1970s, while cataloging pre-war Jewish cemeteries. The place by the river where her mother was born had been bulldozed, along with the Jewish neighborhood, with new apartments in its place, and though monuments to the Jews of Europe are still maintained, graveyards, like one I visited in Katowice, are locked and crumbling, red poppies growing tall by the stones.
Over fields of red poppies—the Polish national flower and symbol of death in war—speed trains carry Ukrainian refugees towards green, futuristic Europe, for whom the fighting is only a border or two away. I sped from Poland to Germany over those fields too, considering how war itself has necessitated a temporary return to extraction for Germany, which, having shut down its nuclear plants, returned to coal in lieu of Russian natural gas.
You can dip your toes in a decommissioned coal mine in eastern Germany’s Lusatia. In the ‘50s, the socialist German Democratic Republic, desperate for energy, dug dozens of coal mines here. When German unification reduced the need for so many mines, many were closed, the plains pocked with open pits. Unemployment and depopulation left ghost towns in the wake of capitalism. The Lusatian Lakeland, as it’s called today, is now dotted with 300-foot-deep open-cast mines, many of which sit on the remains of bulldozed villages. The pits are slowly filling with water, on timescales of decades to 100 years. Around them, towns are building for tourists: lakeside dining, bike trails, vacation rentals.
As I wandered the lake district for the next few days, I came upon the villages’ gravestones, placed by the new lakeshores. Like, Scado. Birthdate, 1452, date of death, 1968. Jews, for that matter, mourn the dead with rocks on their grave instead of flowers, to keep restless souls down.
The Archive of Vanished Places, built in 2006 in resettled New Horno, holds the history of these lost villages. You, visitor, can stand on the map of the towns, marked in red. The possessions of the villages’ inhabitants are behind glass cases. I walked over the towns in a pair of special archival slippers, as TV screens on the walls played videos of the blasting. The museum director and I communicated via Google Translate. “At the request of the citizens of Horno, a memorial was to be built, not only for Horno, but for all places in the Lusatian lignite district that were demolished,” she wrote. “The relocation of more than 29,000 people took place.”
At Großräschen, a town in lower Lusatia, I sat with Kathleen Hofmann, the communications director of LMBV, the Lusatian and Central German Mining Management Company. LMBV is responsible for the remediation of mine sites in Germany. Of 39 opencast mines active in the 1990s in Germany, LMBV closed 32 of them. Großräschen, once 70,000 souls, lost over half its population over the years.
Hofmann, the daughter of a laid-off coal miner, used the job as a way to return home. I sat with her at the marina, which was not yet open, overlooking Lake Großräschen, a former lignite mine. It felt like an architectural sketch of a place. Kathleen told me a parable of the transformation, a laid-off miner with a fortuitous name, Zeman. “He was a miner called Seaman,” she said. “And now he’s a sailor.” Lake water washed in and out of the boatless marina; on the distant shore, light broke open across the spires of a wind farm, on land also owned by LMBV. “And then he had to transition in his mind. And he said, Okay, I have to do something, I can’t do without work. And I want to stay here. And now he’s carrying tourists with this ship.”
Not everyone is optimistic about the lakes. Local activists are concerned about the groundwater drainage and the calcium carbonate, which could leach into the drinking water. So much effort for few jobs and little benefit to the bereft rural east German communities. But Kathleen says something will return.
“Usually the lakes are there at first, and then the towns and cities grow next to it,” she told me.
They wait until the flooding is complete, and then they come in with an excavator to clear away the trees, so the lake looks perfect, undisturbed, its past gone and hauled away.
“After at least a hundred years of lignite mining,” Kathleen said. “So everything comes slowly back to normal. This is what we struggle with. But it’s a chance as well. This transformation.”
While visiting Germany this summer, in an uncharacteristically bad economy, the nation elected a new government in the European Union elections. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won more votes than expected, taking the plurality of ballots in five German states. The party leans far right, and many of the Germans I spoke to called them neo-Nazis. They promise a return to the never-were good old days of strong free Germans, abundant coal, and closed borders. East Germany, particularly its youth, leaned AfD. One day I saw a 12-year-old Palestinian boy arrested before my eyes over nothing; the crackdowns on Palestinian and Arab immigrants had worsened because the German government wanted the world to know it was on the right side of history, an onlooker said.
I drove the next day in flat afternoon light along the shores of Lake Großräschen with Soren, a son of east German coal industry workers who now drives a tour bus for the IBA, the Internationale Bauausstellungen, builders who were tasked with rehabilitating the old coal infrastructure of the former German Democratic Republic.
In the past, IBA projects have included not only architecture and landscaping, but the arts. Soren recalled one such performance, in which a theater director painted the old roads of a disappeared village near the lignite pit that swallowed it and had the former inhabitants stand on the map where their houses would have been. “You could go there on an evening and talk to the people who lived there,” Soren said. “It was a project to first let the people who come there hear the stories of people who lived there and had to move away.” We drove by one of the still-operating opencast mines, its undulating dunes of sand and striations of coal like another dimension torn into this one. Just beyond it, in the greenery, Soren told me, an abandoned Jewish glass factory and deteriorating homes around it.
By Lake Senftenberg, Soren pointed to the causeway, a little canal in a tunnel with a pedestrian passageway into which a group of cyclists had just disappeared. It, and others like it, connected ten lakes together. When the water is too low, as often in the summers these days, it will flood from other lakes; when the water is too high, as often in recent winters, it will flow the other way. “There is always a compromise,” he said.
“The task is for the LMBV to put everything back to that, to the natural state. Of course it never will be because we do so much to the landscape. Unreachable goal, in the end.”
- Soren, a tour bus driver for Internationale Bauaustellungen
Lake Senftenberg began to flood in 1967; patiently, it filled over the course of partition and reunification, and now, it is nearly topped off. Soon, the private land by the shore will go for sale—a new era of rich man’s waterfront property. LMBV fills the lake with calcium carbonate to counter the lake’s acidity, creating, they hope, the conditions for new life.
We drove to another lake, which was more complete, softer and greener. “You cannot imagine how different the area looked,” he said.”It’s almost 30 years ago, but it was so, so, so dirty.” Above us families hiked up a tower overlooking the lake. Somehow it felt like a Biblical tower, the kind that’s forbidden to climb—tall, thin, and sharp. Its nickname is the Rusty Nail.
“The task is for the LMBV to put everything back to that,” Soren said, “to the natural state. Of course it never will be because we do so much to the landscape.” He said, “Unreachable goal, in the end.”
The IBA does recognize the quixotic nature of its task. The tower, for instance, looks out of place on purpose, because the IBA wants the world to know that there is nothing natural about this landscape, that what’s done can’t be undone, only changed again.
I climbed the tower, among a throng of tourists. From the top, breathing hard from the steep ascent, in the air and sun, I squinted out on the lake. Where once it was a churning pit of sand and lignite, its surface is now a dazzling mirror in the hot afternoon sun. In 20, 100 years, trees will grow tall, new flowers will bloom, the water will soften into a new ecology for the future. The names of the bulldozed villages and banished families will weather in the wind. I wondered if there ever were good old days, and if so, when they would have been.
This article was originally published by Atmos on August 19, 2024. This article does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC.