There are encounters that you don’t forget as a reporter, and last year I had a particularly large number of them. In Dernau, Sinzig, Schuld, in a region in western Germany that until July 14, 2021 was at best known for its Pinot Noir. Then the tide came.
as Southgerman newspaper we reported immediately from the affected areas in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, as state correspondent I was often out and about in the Ahr Valley. I spoke to people who were standing in front of the floor slabs of their houses, gravel, gravel, concrete, that’s all the Ahr had left. A man said he thought he would die in the night so he prayed Our father in Heaven. Actually he is not religious. A woman cried for her daughter, who was with the fire brigade and drowned in the night. How do you comfort that?
Another encounter that I often think of happened weeks later. The nights were getting cooler, I wanted to write about how people prepare for winter. How do you heat when the heaters are ripped out? How do you keep heat when there are tarpaulins hanging in the window frames?
A woman invited me into her house and we sat on camping chairs in an empty room. She rolled up a cable drum, plugged in a heater and began to talk. Only from the evening of the flood, how the water ran into the garden, washed away the tomato plants, how it broke through the windows, how she fled to the first floor, the second, under the roof, how the water followed her, like… The woman faltered.
“But we wanted to talk about heating,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said.
I couldn’t find a good transition, flipped through my notes. Then I asked about their supply of wood.
“One has to hold this together,” said the woman, also a victim of the flood disaster
Later, at the front door, she came back to the tide of her own accord. In the house across the way, she said, a family lived, father, mother, child, all drowned. There, she pointed up the street, an older man lived. His house was also destroyed, he killed himself. A man lives back there who is already drinking alcohol in the morning, and her boyfriend is also drinking too much for her, on the village square, where there is beer and schnapps and enough reasons to suppress memories. “If it gets too much, I hook him up so he knows we’re going home.” Break. “One has to hold this together.”
When I think of the woman, I think of how calmly she pointed to the houses, how calmly she said she was worried about her boyfriend, and how much a person could endure.
More than a year has passed since the flood disaster, a year at the beginning of which even the New York Times counted the dead, 184 people in total, 134 of them in the Ahr Valley, where the then Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to and the Bundestag decided 30 billion euros for reconstruction, a historically high sum in which Armin Laschet did not become Chancellor because he didn’t look chancellorable in the catastrophe because he smirked, #laschetlacht. What happened this year? What should have happened? And how are the people?
In addition to these questions, which our texts (hopefully) answer, there are questions that I have asked myself as a journalist. A doctor specializing in psychiatry and psychotherapy had estimated that around 4,000 men, women and children were traumatized in the Ahr Valley. What’s the best way to address them? How do you find words for a destruction that can hardly be described in words? I still remember how I owed it to the Ahr, the ground was mud, the mud stank of oil, and for a moment I thought about finding a shovel instead of looking for words. On the other hand, there were also those affected who said, “Please report”.
Last year the Southgerman newspaper numerous stories researched, reports, analyses, interviews, and over the weeks and months the stories have changed. While the summer was still about destruction – for example in Mayschoß, where people spent ten days asphalting a road out of town – by autumn it was about reconstruction, about political responsibility.
As a reporter, you could only shake your head at some of the statements
The investigative committee met in the Mainz state parliament, MPs from all factions questioned witnesses, and sometimes you could only shake your head upstairs in the press seats. About the day that State Secretary Erwin Manz (Greens) came from the Ministry of the Environment. At 10:24 p.m. on the evening of the flood, he tried to reach then Minister Anne Spiegel. He went to sleep around 11 p.m. Before that, he may have watched the news and had “a beer”. A beer?
Or when the then District Administrator Jürgen Pföhler (CDU) came. He could have had the emergency declared long before 11:09 p.m. Pföhler said nothing about it, the Koblenz public prosecutor is investigating against him. But a neighbor said that someone had moved the Pföhlers’ red Porsche in the evening. He’s actually the only one who drives it.
While the committee is still questioning witnesses – the Rhineland-Palatinate Interior Minister Roger Lewentz (SPD) only had to explain again at the end of September what he knew about the situation on site that evening – the answers were hardly anything that the seemed to interest people in the Ahr Valley. They were waiting for construction workers, craftsmen, material, and so the past year was often an attempt to mediate.
When environmental researchers pointed out in autumn that such “extreme weather events” will become more frequent and that it is therefore not advisable to rebuild every house. Many people in the Ahr Valley said: But this is our home.
When in winter employees of the investment and structural bank of Rhineland-Palatinate explained that certain forms had to be filled out in order to receive aid. In the Ahr Valley, many asked: Hadn’t Prime Minister Malu Dreyer (SPD) promised “quick and unbureaucratic help”?
When in the spring many politicians and editors no longer came as regularly and many people in the Ahr Valley said: Yes, the war in the Ukraine is bad, but we are still here.
Weren’t they right too?
More than a year after the flood disaster, the Ahr Valley is still far from being rebuilt. Roads are not paved, cables are not laid. The woman who wanted to talk about the heating decided to stay in the house, partly because she and her boyfriend think the region is so beautiful. She means the vineyards, on which long rays of sunshine fall, and she also means the Ahr, that small river that carried so little water this summer that weeds could grow between the stones in its bed.