Lost places in Lusatia: The “Blaues Wunder” bucket wheel excavator near Senftenberg

It was once considered the “Blue Wonder”, the name for the super excavator, which has been clearing away neither earth nor lignite for two decades. There is nothing left of the once blue paint job. Today, the grate dominates the steel skeleton, which weighs almost 4000 tons.

The bucket wheel excavator 1473 represents a stark contrast to the area with the several hundred kilometers long photovoltaic modules on the neighboring area, a technical monster as an obvious remnant of another era, when in the German Democratic Republic the electrical energy was mainly obtained from brown coal.

The excavator manufactured in 1964 by VEB Schwermaschinenbau Lauchhammerwerk breaks all dimensions: it is 50 meters high and 171 meters long, the bucket wheel boom alone measures 67 meters. The ten shovels at the tip of its boom could remove up to 5130 cubic meters of soil per hour.

But there is a lobby of former miners and history buffs who see the 1473 bucket wheel excavator as an important industrial monument rather than an object to be scrapped. The Blue Wonder has now been entered as a monument for the Oberspreewald-Lausitz district on the list of the Brandenburg State Office for the Preservation of Monuments.

“It is a device that is important for Lusatia from a technical point of view, from an urban planning point of view, from a socio-historical point of view,” said Brandenburg’s state curator Thomas Drachenberg in 2019 to the RBB. “It is also the case that a conversion of Lusatia into a high-technology center away from lignite can actually only happen if the relics from the lignite era that are still there are taken into the future.”

Check out more Lost Places photo spreads:

– Lost Places: No congregation prays in these places of worship anymore

– Discarded and Abandoned: These are the most fascinating wrecks in the world

– Ghost places: In the middle of downtown Frankfurt, the old police headquarters is falling apart

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