An ugly hole in history and the ground

July 11, 2023

ROHRSHEIM - Nobody would ever call East Germany a success. Instead of a paradise of equality, it became everything that it never intended - to the extent of walling in people who didn't care to have equality ineptly forced upon them.

It also got off to a bad start. It didn't have the industry of the West, it didn't have the money of Marshall Aid or the occupying armies or of the international companies that put themselves there. It also didn't have the coal that was essential at the time to light houses and power factories.

What it had instead was lignite, soft brown coal that burned with little heat but enormous clouds of thick, yellow smoke. Today we stopped at a mine that produced it.

No mining is pretty; open-cast mining is especially ugly. And this mine, difficult to take in by eye let alone through a camera, extends deep and wide. To take it in demands turning your head as far as it will go in one direction and then back as far as you can in the other.

Lignite mining: more than the eye or a camera can take in.

It is a very big hole. And many people must look every morning and wonder what to do with it.

It takes a big ugly machine to dig a big ugly hole...

...and big ugly trains to cart the stuff away

What with the border crossing this morning, and the mine now, this has been a day of looking and wondering at the folly of politics. Yet there was more. Because this same afternoon we found what may be the longest stretch of the old border, now not a fence but a wall.

Innocent now and with much of its installations removed, stretches of the old border still remain

Small and harmless? Hardly. It's a landmine

Tonight we are in a bed-and-breakfast in a village where we are curious enough a sight for people to pause and look at us before walking on in the hope that we hadn't noticed. And I'm not surprised they looked; we have been sitting in the square for an hour, picking and scraping at our tyres.

Why? Because we took a chance on a closed road and, too late, whizzing downhill, we realised we were on a freshly covered surface. The anger of the road-makers will have passed: our tyre tracks will take rather longer.

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