One village after another has disappeared. They are called – or better: called – Garzweiler, Belmen, Otzenrath, Borschemich, Pesch, Immerath. Small beetles, as there are many in North Rhine-Westphalia, so many and so small that many people have probably never heard of them.
Ingo Bajerke knew them all. He had friends there, played there as a little boy because the area is his home. Sometimes he’s not so sure if the villages really ever existed. They only live on in memory. It does something to you, he says, when whole villages keep disappearing around you. Just like that, zack and away. He was always afraid that he himself would soon be expelled, says Bajerke. The 49-year-old, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a cap, grew up in the Rhineland, and you can’t ignore that. Instead of “church” he says “cherry” and instead of “gone” he says “wech”.
Ingo Bajerke knows what it’s like when villages keep disappearing around you.
(Photo: Paulina Würminghausen)
And now Lützerath, its neighboring village, will soon be flattened too, simply: get rid of it. For the opencast mine, for the lignite under the ground, for the energy company RWE. The federal government, North Rhine-Westphalia and RWE announced this a few days ago. So that there is enough energy in times of crisis, the coal under Lützerath is needed. Many such decisions could still be made in order to ensure Germany’s energy supply, but politicians have also decided to phase out coal prematurely. And by 2030, RWE is to completely withdraw from lignite-fired power generation, eight years earlier than originally planned.
Most have long since moved away from Lützerath
How does this all come together? When asked, RWE said that the claim was necessary “to ensure a secure supply in the middle of the energy crisis and to save gas in the electricity supply”. To put it bluntly: if the village stays, the people will have to freeze. And nobody wants that, right?
The town of Lützerath at the Garzweiler II lignite opencast mine – a place that hardly anyone knew until now. Most have moved away from here today.
(Photo: Jochen Tack/Imago)
Most have long since moved away from Lützerath. Bajerke no longer had the village on his radar anyway, it’s so small. “The location doesn’t really matter to us here.” He was afraid that RWE would say: Come on, if they fight, we’ll just “rip everything off”. His village too, only a few kilometers away from Lützerath. “Lützerath has become a symbol,” he says. A symbol for climate protection, or as some say: the new Hambach Forest, the new symbol of the resistance of the anti-coal power movement.
And so this place, which many people in the area have long since written off, has become a nationwide political issue.
About 150 activists occupied the now-abandoned village. They occupied the abandoned houses, built tree houses, set up small huts and a tent camp. There’s a large communal kitchen in a vacant shed, homemade dixi toilets, climbing ropes up in the trees, even a bicycle repair shop. “This is my home now,” says a young woman. She has wrapped a green scarf around her head, covering part of her face. She doesn’t want to say her name, too dangerous for her as a full-time activist.
She’s just having breakfast with coffee, cigarettes and a view of the opencast mine. A huge hole gapes just a few meters from her, an excavator in the distance. Why is she here? She points to the flattened area in front of her. “If you look around here, the reason is probably obvious,” she says. It’s not about the village itself. It’s about what’s underneath. The coal. “I’ll stay until the bitter end,” she says.
Around 150 activists have set up a tent camp, built a hut and Dixis and opened a bicycle workshop.
(Photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP)
Other activists also announced resistance immediately after the decision. Nearly ten thousand people signed up to stand up to the diggers on “Day X.” The spokesman for the district of Heinsberg believe that Lützerath will be evacuated in the coming weeks. The Rhenish lignite mining area is threatened with another major police operation – similar to 2018 in the Hambach Forest.
energy crisis? Anyway “bullshit”;
A lot comes together in Lützerath. The energy transition that is too slow, the hesitant grid expansion, the dependence on Russian natural gas. Using the energy crisis as the reason for the demolition is “bullshit” anyway, says one of the activists at the breakfast table in Lützerath. It just fuels people’s fears. Even Ingo Bajerke from the rescued village next door does not believe that the coal under Lützerath is absolutely necessary to get through the winter. “Of course that plays into their hands,” he says, and by “them” means politics, above all Economics Minister Robert Habeck and his North Rhine-Westphalian colleague Mona Neubaur, both of whom are from the Greens.
Could a village be instrumentalised for the energy crisis? Phone call to Catharina Rieve from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) Berlin. “There is no reason for me why Lützerath has to be excavated,” says the scientist – at least not based on the consideration of the amount of coal. She has been sitting at her desk with her team for a few days, calculating everything. Over and over again. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia and RWE published fairly non-transparent figures. One thing is already certain: The stocks stored in the Lützerath mining field exceed a climate target-oriented CO₂ budget many times over. Realistically, such large quantities can neither be extracted nor burned in the next eight years. That is why Lützerath is not a short-term solution to the energy crisis.
“Not necessary in terms of energy and not justifiable in terms of climate policy”
Against the background of the current energy crisis, DIW Berlin, together with the European University of Flensburg and the Technical University of Berlin, had already determined in August: Claiming Lützerath was “not necessary in terms of energy management and cannot be justified in terms of climate policy”. It is simply “more economical” for the opencast mine operator to go via Lützerath, says Rieve. The premature phase-out of coal is also “extremely comfortable” for RWE, and the group was no longer interested in producing electricity from lignite after 2030 anyway. A win-win situation, so to speak.
Some here also don’t like that the activists in Lützerath are protesting
It is said that the village of Ingo Bajerke, Keyenberg, and four others could be saved in contrast to Lützerath. Still, a lot of people aren’t happy about it. Some have resisted leaving for years – and some have eventually given up.
Ingo Bajerke and many other villagers sold their houses to RWE with a heavy heart and moved to a new development nearby. Now they see that it was all in vain: the old village remains. “This is my house, where I’ve put so much heart and soul into it, where I’ve experienced so much. I had to give it up and now others might be moving in there,” says Bajerke.
Many are disappointed or angry because they went under the wrong assumptions. Some also don’t think it’s good that the activists in Lützerath are protesting. You don’t feel represented by them. “In the climate movement, they don’t speak the language of the villages,” says Barbara Riemann-Oberherr, 62, a former neighbor of Bajerke. In contrast to Bajerke, however, she has stayed and feels that the relocation is unfair.
Barbara Riemann-Oberherr thinks it’s right that Lützerath is “sacrificed” – but she stayed.
(Photo: Paulina Würminghausen)
Her mother died at the age of 86, her life spoke of nothing other than her fear of being resettled. But still: In their eyes, the rescued villages and farms are more important than Lützerath, this place where nobody lives anymore anyway. It is correct that this symbol is “sacrificed”.
Bajerke constantly reels off the memories of his homeland
Ingo Bajerke is only now realizing how much it hurts him to leave his old homeland. Would he like to briefly show his old house, which is only a few meters away? Better not, he says. too many memories He’s still fresh out of the move, he’s only spent a few nights in the new house. “I didn’t sleep a night,” he says. He constantly had to think about the old stories, he constantly unwinds the memories of his homeland and the surrounding villages.
He points to a restaurant behind him, where the shutters are down: “We played bowling there in the evening,” he says, but the restaurant is long gone. And over there he used to play table tennis with his buddy, but the shutters are down there too, the apartment is empty. Many of the old neighboring villages have died out, and Lützerath has long since died out anyway. Some people no longer see any prospects in the old villages. “It’s like putting your dead grandfather on the couch and thinking: at some point he’ll live again,” says Bajerke. That’s why he decided at some point not to fight for his homeland anymore.
“I am very disappointed in politics”
Eckhard Heukamp, 58, on the other hand, did not go voluntarily. The farmer with the big hands and long gray hair was the last inhabitant of Lützerath. Now he must clear his yard, and quickly. “I’m very disappointed in politics,” says Heukamp. And you don’t even need the village for the winter. Who still heats with coal? He’s just standing in the yard trying to get an overview of the chaos. There is stuff lying around everywhere, there are tools on the shelves, there are large agricultural machines in the shed.
The farmer Eckard Heukamp was the last resident of Lützerath, now he has to go too.
(Photo: Paulina Würminghausen)
He has only known for a few days that he has to leave his own farm for good. He doesn’t even live here anymore, he just came here to pack. For a long time, Heukamp was the reason why RWE didn’t flatten the village much earlier. “I didn’t want to let everything get to me, I was fed up,” says Heukamp. He didn’t want to leave his homeland. Now he has to build a new one, somehow. Just like Ingo Bajerke and many other villagers.