Presentation short abstract

Nowhere in Germany is open-pit lignite mining as invasive as in Łužyca. Majority-Sorbian villages have been eradicated or teeter on the edge of open pit mines, with destruction supported by the hegemony of extraction. Sorbian-language literature provides strong counter-claims.

Presentation long abstract

Nowhere in Germany is open-pit lignite (or brown coal) mining as invasive as it is in Lusatia (Łužyca in the indigenous and marginalized Lower Sorbian language of the region). Up to 7 cubic meters of overburden have to be moved for every ton of lignite extracted. This ‘overburden’ is, of course, soil teeming with human and more-than-human life. The result is an extractive landscape in which even some of the biggest extractive equipment in the world seems tiny, with villages – insofar as they still exist given the expansion of the open pits – teetering on the crumbling edges.

This paper examines the hegemonic discourse that positions lignite mining in Łužyca as ‘natural’ or unavoidable and beneficial to the region and its people, juxtaposing this particular narrative with both the socio-metabolic data on energy returns on energy investment in lignite mining and, centrally, with the literary confrontations and counter-claims from within the Sorbian communities. The villages that have been eradicated and those that are in danger were and are some of the last remaining majority-Sorbian settlements, and it is not just geological but also more recent history that goes up in smoke when lignite is combusted.

The title of this paper is a nod to Sorbian writer Jurij Koch’s diary-like documentation, entitled Gruben Rand Notizen (Pit Edge Notes) of the destruction of the village Horno for the sake of lignite mining in the 1990s.