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German Village at Center of a Fight Over Coal and Climate Is Cleared Out [1]

['Christopher F. Schuetze']

Date: 2023-01-14  

Moritz Lahaye, 37, would quibble with Mr. 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 the police to enter.

“I’m happy to leave here with my head held high, knowing we managed to stay here this long,” Mr. 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 two and a half years.”

Mr. 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 — and had to move the dates forward because the eviction went so quickly.

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 1.5-degree emission targets,” she said, referring to emissions targets set at the global climate conference in Paris in 2015.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/world/europe/germany-village-coal-activists.html

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