Miner la vie: Une région allemande d’extraction du charbon

Since 2015 Ende Gelände has become the slogan of a growing anti-coal movement in Germany, which has united around protests against the continued expansion of lignite mining in the country. The slogan plays on the double of meaning of “an area coming to an end” and “a practice in an area being ended”, pinpointing in this way both the main problem with mining and its possible solution. In this essay we visually convey the landscapes of destruction in a German brown coal region, and argue that the massive destruction of the landscape works as a synecdoche for the apocalypse. Local villagers’ experiences of having their form of life ended owing to open-cast mining, and radical environmental activists’ ongoing preparations for a Day X and an ensuing post-apocalyptic scenario, entail a substitution of the area (gelände) for the whole world.