Police clear out German village for coal mining
LÜTZERATH, Germany — The fight for Lützerath was long, but the end, when it finally came, was quick.
In a matter of days this past week, more than 1,000 police officers cleared out the hundreds of climate activists who had sworn to protect the small village, once home to 90 people but no church, which was scheduled to be razed as part of a sprawling open-pit coal mine in western Germany.
The relatively fast demise added to the host of contradictions surrounding Lützerath and how a tiny, now uninhabited, village had taken on an improbable, outsize place in Germany’s debate over how to wean itself off coal.
For years, environmental activists had hoped to forestall the fate of Lützerath — possibly the last of hundreds of villages in Germany to fall to open-pit mining since World War II. For a while, it seemed that the activists would succeed.
But this year, the political winds and public sentiment shifted against them. Europe’s energy crisis, ushered in by the war in Ukraine and the end of cheap Russia gas, made coal too hard to quit for now. Even a government that includes the environmentalist-minded Green party turned its back on them.
The activists nonetheless prepared themselves to defend the half-dozen houses and farmyards with their bodies. They barricaded themselves in a complex of barns and other structures. They erected and occupied tall watchtowers. They carved out a tunnel network. They nested in the branches of 100-year-old trees.
But the clearing, which started Wednesday, proved to be less dramatic than some had feared. A few firecrackers were heard, and some stones and bits of food were thrown (it turned out that activists had stockpiled too much). But for the most part, the standoff ended peacefully, almost businesslike. By Friday, the bulk of the activists were gone, some leaving of their own accord, some carried out by police officers, with just a few stragglers left in a few hard-to-reach places.
Still, the German news media covered the events live, and climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, staged a march that attracted thousands to the area Saturday, even though by then the village was virtually empty and many of its trees already felled. Thunberg also visited the village Friday afternoon.
Considering the last farmer moved out of the village months ago, and courts had reaffirmed the right of the regional power utility to eject the activists, Lützerath’s role as a national symbol was as surprising as the speed with which the village fell.
Lützerath’s fate was sealed last fall, when Robert Habeck, the country’s business, energy, and climate minister, and Mona Neubaur, state minister for the environment and energy, announced a deal to continue mining coal in the region until 2030.
What climate activists and others considered to be the betrayal of Lützerath became a source of controversy for Habeck, an otherwise-popular Green leader whom critics accuse of compromising the party’s environmental principles now that it is in power. He nonetheless defended the decision to extend the use of coal.
“I also believe that climate protection and protest need symbols,” Habeck said this past week at a news conference in Berlin. “But the empty settlement Lützerath, where no one lives anymore, is in my view the wrong symbol.”
The regional power supplier, RWE, had already bought the land from farmers to expand its mining for brown coal, which the protesters pointed out is an especially polluting fuel.
Moritz Lahaye, 37, would quibble with Habeck’s assertion that Lützerath was uninhabited. Among the hundreds of activists who had made Lützerath their home, he was acting as its unofficial mayor. At first, he lived in an apartment rented from a farmer, and in the last days, he squatted in the neighboring house, where he waited for police to enter.
“I’m happy to leave here with my head held high, knowing we managed to stay here this long,” Lahaye said about an hour before armored police officers swarmed the house he was occupying. “We used to count our time here in weeks, and we ended up staying for 2½ years.”
Lahaye used to support the Greens but now says he does not believe conventional politics can solve the climate crisis.
Franziska Werthmann, 58, who first took part in an environmental protest when she was 16, took a week off work to join the protesters in the village.
Even though she believes there are other legitimate avenues of protest, she said Lützerath was an important place to make a stand. “It’s simple,” she said. “If they dig up the coal below this village, Germany will miss its . . . emission targets,” she said, referring to emissions targets set at the global climate conference in Paris in 2015.
“Even if the village is gone,” said Saskia Meyer, 36, a nutritionist who spent months commuting between Lützrath and Berlin, “it will live on in our hearts.”