Wikipedia Deep Dive

Lützerath

8 min read

In January 2023, a Franciscan friar in a traditional brown habit stood in the mud, blocking police officers from advancing into a German village. The internet dubbed him the "mud wizard." He would later be sentenced to 140 days in prison. The village he was trying to protect no longer exists.

Lützerath was a hamlet—not even a proper village, really—nestled between Aachen and Düsseldorf in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It had existed since at least 1168, when records first mention it under the name Lutzelenrode. For over five hundred years, from 1265 until Napoleon's reorganization of Europe in 1802, Cistercian monks from Duisburg ran one of its farms. Generations of families tended the land, raised livestock, and lived out their lives in this quiet corner of western Germany.

Then came the coal.

What Lies Beneath

Beneath Lützerath and the surrounding region sits an estimated 1.3 billion tons of lignite, sometimes called brown coal. Lignite is the youngest and least energy-dense form of coal—it's essentially the fossil fuel world's teenager, geologically speaking. It formed from peat deposits only 60 million years ago, whereas the black coal that powered the Industrial Revolution is typically 300 million years old.

This geological youth makes lignite problematic. Because it contains more water and less carbon than mature coal, you need to burn significantly more of it to generate the same amount of electricity. This means more carbon dioxide per unit of energy, making lignite one of the dirtiest fuels on Earth. Germany, somewhat awkwardly for a nation that prides itself on environmental consciousness, is the world's largest producer of lignite.

The energy company RWE, one of Europe's largest power utilities, operates the Garzweiler mine in this region. It's what's called an opencast or surface mine—rather than digging tunnels underground, the company simply removes everything on top of the coal. The topsoil. The subsoil. The buildings. The villages. The churches. The graveyards. All of it gets scraped away to reach the brown seams below.

RWE planned to extract over 600 million tons of lignite from the area known as Garzweiler II. The math was simple and brutal: the coal was there, the market wanted it, and the villages were in the way.

The Last Farmer

By 2021, Lützerath had become a ghost hamlet. The displacement had been underway since 2005, with residents accepting buyouts and relocating to newly built settlements nearby. In 2018 alone, 900 people from the broader area were resettled. Churches were demolished. In the nearby town of Erkelenz, wind turbines—those symbols of Germany's renewable energy transition—were torn down to make way for the coal excavators.

But one man refused to leave.

Eckart Heukamp owned the last remaining farm in Lützerath. While his neighbors packed up and moved on, Heukamp dug in. He lodged legal complaints. He fought through the courts in Aachen, lost, and appealed to the higher administrative court in Münster—the Oberverwaltungsgericht für das Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, if you want the full German mouthful. RWE, perhaps sensing the public relations value of appearing reasonable, promised to wait for the court's decision before demolishing anything.

On March 28, 2022, the court ruled against Heukamp. RWE could proceed. The farmer left his land.

But by then, his farm had become something more than a farm.

The Occupation

Climate activists had discovered Lützerath. They had cut their teeth at Hambach Forest—"Hambi," as they affectionately called it—a nearby ancient woodland threatened by the same mine expansion. Those protests, which began in 2012, had turned Hambach into an international symbol of resistance against fossil fuel extraction. Activists built elaborate treehouses and lived in them for years, forming a community that blended environmental activism with something approaching a commune.

When Hambach became too well-defended by police for easy access, many of the same activists migrated to Lützerath. They dubbed it "Lützi."

At first, they came as tenants, renting the abandoned properties. As RWE acquired the land and the legal tenancies ended, they stayed anyway, becoming squatters. By late 2022, around 80 people lived in the hamlet, though the number swelled and shrank with the seasons—more in summer when living in tents and treehouses was bearable, fewer when German winter set in.

They built barricades. They constructed platforms in trees. They declared the area to be "ZAD Rhineland," borrowing a concept from French activists. ZAD stands for Zone à Défendre—Zone to Defend—a tactic pioneered in France where protesters physically occupy land threatened by development projects, most famously at Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes, where activists successfully prevented the construction of a new airport.

A campaign called "Lützerath lebt"—Lützerath lives—coordinated the resistance. In one surreal moment, a climate activist won 50,000 euros on a television game show and pledged to spend it all buying up land in the village, attempting to block the mine through property rights.

The Compromise That Wasn't

In October 2022, an announcement seemed to offer hope. The federal government, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and RWE reached a deal: coal mining in the region would end by 2030, eight years earlier than previously planned. RWE agreed to leave 280 million tons of lignite in the ground—nearly half of what it had intended to extract.

Five villages would be saved: Berverath, Keyenberg, Kuckum, Oberwestrich, and Unterwestrich.

Lützerath was not on the list.

The activists were furious. To them, the deal looked like political theater—a way for the government to claim environmental progress while still sacrificing Lützerath to the excavators. Climate scientists pointed out that burning the coal beneath Lützerath was incompatible with Germany's commitments under the Paris Agreement. Luisa Neubauer, the prominent German climate activist often described as her country's Greta Thunberg, condemned the decision. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the world's leading climate science centers, warned that the eviction was a mistake.

The government proceeded anyway.

The Final Days

On January 10, 2023, the Heinsberg county administration issued an eviction order. Anyone entering Lützerath was now breaking the law.

The activists did not leave.

What followed was a confrontation that captured international attention. An estimated 2,000 protesters gathered to resist the eviction. They pushed back against police lines. They chained themselves to structures. They climbed into trees and refused to come down.

German public broadcaster ZDF covered the standoff extensively. Images circulated of activists covered in mud, of police using water cannons in freezing January temperatures, of the Franciscan friar—Loïc Schneider—placing his body between officers and the protesters he was trying to protect.

On January 17, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg arrived. Within hours, she was detained by German police, her arrest captured in photographs that rocketed around the world: Thunberg, smiling almost serenely, being carried away by two officers.

By January 21, it was over. The eviction was complete. The buildings came down. The trees were cut. The excavators moved in.

What Remains

Lützerath no longer exists. Where the hamlet stood for over 850 years, there is now an expanding pit. Eventually, according to RWE's plans, this pit will fill with water and become a lake—the standard rehabilitation for exhausted surface mines across Germany's coal country. Former mining sites become recreational areas, their industrial past literally submerged.

The activists scattered to other causes, other camps. Some moved to Keyenberg, one of the villages saved by the October deal, where they established a new base of operations. The larger movement—Ende Gelände, which translates roughly to "Here and No Further"—continues to organize mass actions against fossil fuel infrastructure across Germany.

Farmer Eckart Heukamp was compensated for his land and relocated. His family's centuries-long connection to that particular patch of earth ended not with a death or a bankruptcy, but with a court ruling and a check.

The broader questions raised by Lützerath remain unresolved. How do democratic societies balance energy needs against climate commitments? What obligations do wealthy nations have to leave fossil fuels in the ground? When does civil disobedience become justified, and when does it become futile? Who decides which villages are expendable?

Germany, for its part, continues to be the world's largest lignite producer. It also continues to be one of Europe's leaders in renewable energy deployment. These two facts coexist uneasily, as they have for years, as they likely will for years to come.

The coal beneath Lützerath is now being extracted, loaded onto conveyor belts, and fed into power plants that generate electricity for German homes and businesses. Some of it may be powering the device you're using to read this essay. The carbon that was safely locked underground for 60 million years is now in the atmosphere, where it will remain for centuries.