“What if it doesn’t work?” the woman asks, flexing and relaxing an empty plastic cup between her fingertips.

“It has to work,” Hoss says.

“It has to work?” her husband asks.

“Yes,” Hoss says.

If the Hostage Valley has itself been freed from the legacy of pollution, there would be monumental irony in the people here being held hostage by two meters too few of water.

I was living in Weimar, Germany, when architecture and urbanism students at the Bauhaus University introduced me to this place in 2006. It was a moonscape with very little water back then, more or less exactly what one sees by searching for Geiseltalsee with “Google Maps” (although now, depending on the scale one zooms in to view, the lake is variously empty and filled, like a time lapse reduced to just two frames). The students were tasked with conceptualizing a lakefront concession, bathers’ park, and amphitheater. Although none of the proposals were chosen, the scope and complexity of this place has kept me coming back. On this most recent visit, I came to see the lake filled, as promised, the buildings up, and to celebrate the wonders of environmental disaster zones being converted to family friendly yachting opportunities in the landlocked heart of Europe. Only it isn’t filled. So now I am here for a whole series of other reasons, like to find out why not, and what happens if it never is. Whole ministries’ full of people presume a pristine valley can travel through the coal industry only to be engineered as a clean and perfect lake, on schedule and within a few centimeters of accuracy. If the Hostage Valley has itself been freed from the legacy of pollution, there would be monumental irony in the people here being held hostage by two meters too few of water. The chance that the project might fail adds a level of exhilaration.

The group takes one last look around before mounting the tour truck, a lumbering Mercedes 917 cab and chassis carrying a custom-welded steel box with white vinyl bench seats inside. It looks like a moon rover imagined in futures past. We wobble and bob from side to side in unison, sweating on the vinyl, watching the water shimmer behind no trespassing signs.

The Hostage Valley brown coal mine was part of the middle German coal district, one of three such districts in Germany. Unlike the Garzweiler and Hambach mines, part of a much more famous district near Cologne in the west, the middle district is largely spent. But two million years ago, it was just coming into being. Retreating glaciers stalled in northern Germany allowing huge amounts of pulverized glacial till to dust up and travel south on the wind to the present-day Saxony-Anhalt, where it settled, covering some 50 million years’ worth of compressed peat moorland with what would become a particularly fertile and attractive kind of soil. Farmers like fertile soil, and farmers dig. Around the year 1700 they dug and found peat, the product of that long-covered moorland. Because of the peat, they dug more, deeper than elsewhere, and after a while they found something harder than peat that burned a whole lot hotter. What they had found was lignite, brown coal; lots of it; 270 uninterrupted feet of it spread under their fields and villages for twelve square miles.

There was, for a while at least, such a thing as a cottage brown coal industry here. Local villagers found the coal easy to dig. It was filthy, burned dirty, but complimented income from sugar beet farming and shepherding. That changed in 1886 with the arrival of railroad tracks, steam engine boilers, and vastly expanded markets. After this time, the villages and fertile valley would never be the same. In fact, they would cease to exist. From 1907 to 1913, seven colossal briquette stamping factories were built, more than one per year, to handle the output of nine mines. By 1923 almost 15,000 miners were employed here. Rotary shovel excavators revolutionized everything. The ES 250 of 1928 was the first truly diabolical looking bucket-chain excavator, black and complicated with all the romantic, insectile features native to early machines. It was as though formal bio-mimicry, even of such brutal detail, would protect the creator from the created. The ES 250 would be followed by inspired monsters like the SRs series. The SRs 6300, for example, was capable of grinding 14,000 tons a day from the deposits of solid coal for delivery to briquette factories by way of integrated conveyor belts laid like writhing sleepless snakes upon the land. These machines were designed to author environmental catastrophe, and they were well designed.

The briquette factory at Grosskayna was as big as the village of Grosskayna, which the Rheinlander mine erased. That was common here. Excavators were showing up at other villages, at the edge off still-planted fields, chewing up to and through the stone foundations of homes and schools and churches. There is an expected symmetry to upheavals of this historic scale: for these mines slowly ate into one another, destroying the quaint individuality of mines with names like Good Hope, Cecilie, and Elise II to become one unified mine bearing the name of the stream and valley it replaced: Das Geiseltal, the Hostage Valley.