“This shaft that we open today shall be the gate through which we descend, through which nature’s deep-lying gifts shall be brought up to the light of day.” - Goethe, Opening of the Ilmenau silver mine, 1784
“I searched for hidden golden treasure and drew forth only gruesome coal.” - Mephistopheles, Faust II
During its peak productivity, more than 6,000 men worked shifts together in the deep shafts of the Zollverein coal mine in the Ruhr industrial area of northwest Germany. 6,000 men, and the horses who lived their entire lives underground in the subterranean passages until, worn out by years of work, they were butchered and made into Sauerbraten.
When I visited the Zollverein in September 2022, our guide told us that he used to work an average of 36 eight-hour shifts a month. For 26 years, he helped the mine bring 25,000 two-tonne carts of coal to the surface each day. By the time they shut it down, they had burrowed so deeply that the shafts, cooked by the subterranean heat, reached 56° C (132° F).
In 1986, after 135 years of operation, the mine ceased production. An enormous amount of coal is still there, but it would be too expensive to cool the shafts enough for people to bring it up.
Besides, Germany is moving off of coal, at least in theory. In 2000, Germany declared an Energiewende or “energy transition,” and embarked on one of the world’s most ambitious plans to decarbonize its electrical grid. Since then, the country has spent nearly half a trillion dollars, but it still relies heavily on coal, which provides about a quarter of Germany’s massive energy needs. In my home city of Berlin, we have coal-burning municipal power plants, including one in the middle of the city near the canal where my wife and I run on weekends. This is one reason why Germany has persistent, unusual air-quality problems.
Germany’s continued heavy reliance on coal stems in part from its decision to pivot hard off of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. Nuclear has long been deeply unpopular in Germany, but the choice to phase it out ahead of coal is controversial, as coal is far more polluting than nuclear. In a 2013 study, Pushker Kharecha and Makiko Sato found that if Germany and Japan had prioritized transitioning off of fossil fuels instead of nuclear power, they could have saved 28,000 lives and prevented 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions in the period between 2011 and 2017.
As we so often find with energy policy, Germany’s relationship with coal is fraught with contradictions, as it is driven by competing pressures. Its largest coal provider, RWE, has agreed to phase out coal by 2030, eight years earlier than planned, but it is also planning to restart brown coal plants that were already shut down to help get Germany through the looming winter without Russian natural gas.
But the long arc of Germany’s development bends towards decarbonization, and as it moves off of coal, the Ruhr is having an identity crisis. The area is a historical icon of German industrialization, having long been a major center of industrial, military, and energy production. You may remember from your history classes that the French occupied the Ruhr after World War I to force the Germans to make harsh reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, or that a decade later, Hitler re-armed the region in brazen violation of that same treaty.
When I traveled through the region, I found it to be a crowded collection of mid-sized cities, such as Essen, Duisburg, and Bochum. It lies in the populous northern state of North Rhine-Westphalia, not far from Cologne and Bonn, the former capital of West Germany. The horizon is cluttered with signs of industry from Germany’s past and future, with numerous windmills competing for space with smokestacks and cooling towers. It takes about an hour to drive across.
As the times change, the region seeks to change with them. In 2010, the Ruhr was selected as a Cultural Capital of the EU, and spent the next year broadcasting its ambitious plans to reinvent itself as a Mecca of museums, theaters, and festivals to the rest of the continent. The Zollverein is an important part of this reinvention - its buildings are striking examples of the “form follows function” Bauhaus architectural style, and it has been called “the prettiest mine in the world.” Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a popular tourist attraction.
The mine has been preserved in immaculate condition as a historical monument, and the sprawling complex has been converted into a multi-use cultural and educational center, hosting festivals and events such as a summer outdoor film festival.
And it houses an extensive modern museum on coal mining and the Ruhr, which takes the visitor on a fascinating tour of the region and its history, beginning 300 million years ago, when northern Germany was a lush, swampy forest, thick with clubmoss trees and ferns. Over the millennia, as the land folded itself into itself through a geological process called subsidence, ever-growing layers of plant debris were covered over with mud and gravel, compressed by the earth above and baked by the heat of the Earth below to form the rich coal deposits that the region is famous for. And all of those megatons of ancient plants once pulled carbon dioxide from the prehistoric atmosphere, locking it into the very fabric of their being, where it waits for combustion to release it back into the sky from which it came.
The extensive mining museum covers coal from every conceivable angle, but I could not find a single mention of “carbon dioxide” or “climate change.” Museum employees explained to me that this is because the museum only covers the period when the mine operated, but global warming was first scientifically described in 1895, and the National Academy of Sciences issued its first major report on global warming in 1979. And they found room for an entire display on different types of animal feces they have turned up in their digging.
Certainly, the consequences of climate change are not unknown to the Ruhr, which has experienced brutal droughts and heat waves in recent years. In 2014, a severe storm called the “Pfingststurm,” or the “Whitsun Storm,” ripped up tens of thousands of trees and caused millions of euros of damage. In Essen alone, 19,000 trees were torn out of the ground during that single storm - between 10 and 15% of the total tree population of the city.
Other than this sin of omission, the museum is terrific. What most impressed me was its wonderful collection of fossils. Thinking back to the Carboniferous Era, when the organic precursors to coal were first laid down, back when Germany was, incredibly, near the equator, I found myself thinking about the many lives of coal, and of the region, and how much it’s all still in flux. And exploring the beautiful complex, I found myself thinking about the afterlife of coal, and what happens to the forms of life that have grown up around it, as Europe pushes past its dependency on fossil fuels. Will coal continue to animate the region, or will it haunt it instead, like a ghost?
Forms of life can have an incredible tenacity. I think of a passage from the memoirs of the Chinese martial arts (wushu) expert and novelist Mark Salzman, who recalls being told by one of his teachers:
‘You don’t have to be a fighter to enjoy wushu. If you were really training for combat, you wouldn’t practice wushu. You would become a soldier.’ He pointed to the spear I was holding. ‘Look at this thing. Do you really think it has any practical use in this century? Can you carry it with you in case of attack and still feel like a respectable man? It is a cultural artifact now, not a weapon. But should we throw away all our spears and all the skills developed for them? I don’t think so. It would seem like a waste to me.’ (from Salzman’s Iron and Silk)
At the mine, our guide spoke freely about the hardships of his many years - the long, dangerous, dirty, difficult work that made many people sick. But when the Zollverein closed, he moved on to another mine and worked for several years more, and when he was done with that work, he came back to tell as many people as he could about his life and experiences hundreds of meters below the sunlight. And he told us that even though the coal is no longer needed, it’s a shame that the way of life is being lost.
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