We are eight in all, careening in an unventilated box along dirt roads above the Geiseltalsee, the Hostage Valley Lake, a former brown coal mine and Germany’s largest artificial body of water. Our tour guide, Herr Hossfeld, whom I call Hoss, would suggest we go swimming in the 423 million cubic meters of cool water below were it not still illegal to do so. Even then, we would have to scramble over two fences and cross a rocky beach. Trouble is, the Hostage Valley Lake is behind schedule.

Hoss is too busy fielding questions from the group on this very theme to comment on the wonders of a new solar farm, or on the expansive man-made levee we are crossing that separates the polluted lobe of the mine from the massive, flooded, unpolluted area.

…I wonder: shouldn’t such precision reassure, not frighten? If one can measure a problem, can one not solve it?

“What about underwater landslides?” one woman asks. “What about subsidence?”

“No, no,” Hoss says. “It is safe.” He is standing facing us, bobbing with the rocking of the truck. “Gottes willen,” he whispers, wiping his forehead dry. God forbid.

“Is it true the lake may never fill because of seepage and evaporation?” The question lingers as billions of euros of engineered earth and a stranded marina pass by outside the truck’s windows. “Yes,” he says calmly, surfing with the truck’s movements.

We arrive at our first stop: this is the pumping station. It is nearing half past two in the afternoon, 100 degrees, and one tour member opens a bottle of red wine and distributes white plastic cups. I pass up the wine and inspect a high-tech lock system built between the shore of the lake and a lush creek bed where the Geisel stream trickles away toward sleepy villages. The creek is vestigial, what little remains of the admittedly modest Geisel river before it was erased to mine brown coal, huge amounts of brown coal, discovered here in 1698. The locks are there to someday feed the Geisel its water once more. But as Hoss goes on, it begins to seem like the locks will never be opened.

“At a recent meeting,” he says, drawing his free hand back through matted gray hair, “it was pointed out that the ongoing heat wave had already taken one centimeter off the lake.” Losing one centimeter might not seem like much, but when that loss is from 11.5 square miles of water that are supposed to be rising, it is unsettling. One woman in the group actually gasps. At the same time, I wonder: shouldn’t such precision reassure, not frighten? If one can measure a problem, can one not solve it?

Faded, laminated photographs are distributed by the tour driver, Herr Steinfelder. They depict the initial moments when water began being pumped in from the Saale river. The old mine was vast and dry and looked like the Sonoran Desert with a huge mushroom of pure water erupting inside. There is something almost lurid about the water against the tawny dirt, something panicky and vulnerable about the gushing captured on film.

Now, with the lake nearly filled, it is clear what would happen if they stopped the pumping. It is a hydrological necessity if the beaches and two marinas and nature preserve and tourist economy are to take root, from scratch, as planned, in this old brown coal mine. Because of seepage, pumping will continue for at least twenty years. People are beginning to worry the unavoidable state of this man-made valley might be more like the faded picture of the desert than a water wonderland.

“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.

Following the long tradition of converting incomprehensible numbers into slightly less incomprehensible scenarios, one brochure states that the brown coal mined here would form a girdle twenty-nine feet high and thirty-three feet wide around the Earth’s equator. Include the overburden moved to get to the coal and the quantity doubles. It was an unusual 1:1 ratio in this valley: 1.4 billion cubic meters of pure coal to 1.4 billion cubic meters of pure overburden. “A lot,” as a friend commented flatly.

The mine saw the German Empire fall, World War I and Hitler’s thousand-year-empire come and go; it produced a peak output of 41.1 million tons per year in 1957 during the long half-century division of Germany. It had consumed sixteen whole villages and parts of two more towns forcing the relocation of 12,500 people. The mine had lived a full life, in other words. But the story of all mining is the story of finitude, and on June 30, 1993, mining officially ended in the Hostage Valley. With the coal, support industries, ancillary chemical production, and much of everything here except farming ended or nearly ended. What was left was an enormous barren hole — a man-made valley — much too large to fill back in with dirt. Thus, The Hostage Valley Lake, begun June 30, 2003, exactly ten years after the end of mining. Dozens of small mines have been filled with water and left for bathing and recreation in the Middle German Coal District, but the Hostage is by far the biggest, covering eleven and a half square miles to a maximum depth of 260 feet. As deep as that sounds, lot of people are banking on just a few more feet.

Before I took the official tour with Hoss, I toured the lake myself, continued interviewing people, tried to grasp what I saw. Signs of change were everywhere, literally: signs all along the elevated shore road advertised hiking trails and a marina and camping grounds. I wondered how much of that existed yet.

I walked from the silent village of Mücheln, through a corrugated steel tunnel under the main road, past a spray painted mural of a filled lake and happy waterfront community, and into the actual valley, remarkably green, boldly panoramic, promising. A sparkling expanse of water spread out far below, and an uncompleted landscape kept me from getting to it. This descent was an area unto itself, one with the quality many have come to know from marginal new subdivisions, that eroded, rutted-and-trenched landscape of partially germinated grass, desiccated bushes, exposed PVC drain pipes and retention mesh.

Two new buildings and a 15 x 20 mobile stage with orange nylon tarpaulin stood near water’s edge. Both buildings were predictably, almost maddeningly modern German: humble and rectilinear; putty gray and same-same. One appeared to draw some influence from a tower, be it lighthouse or something else, it wasn’t clear. Past this stood the concession, gray and low with a large shaded area dotted by sturdy tables and chairs. Both buildings suggested a conceptual austerity intending not to distract from the panoramic view beyond. But they failed because they are the only visible structures. That is, except a wooden watchtower poking ominously above the trees across the water.

At the waterfront, looking down the face of the rusting steel retainer wall, I saw an industrial looking shoreline with retarded plant growth, brown water lilies, and a bottle floating on its side. It seemed the water still had twenty feet to rise before the massive boat crane to my left would be needed. Looking up — looking out — across the wind-chapped lake to the chemical plants on the horizon, I couldn’t help but feel that twenty feet won’t ever be enough to make this place blossom with ruddy-cheeked tourists. At the same time, it was hard to imagine that, since they had built it, no one would come.

In fact, they already had come. Kind of.

A few older tourists moved from window to window as if to wonder what and where and when and why. I watched their confusion with interest, waiting for an opportunity to approach and interview them without worsening their disorientation. Long haul cyclists glided in silently from across the promenade. They parked their bikes and strolled bandy-legged in cleats to the railing to look out at the water. After a while, an articulated, six-wheeled peddle vehicle approached, swerving millipede-like, and parked by the stage. It was low like a go-kart, made of red tubular steel, and peddled by four driver-slash-passengers: one of the two older couples paused momentarily from a running disagreement of some sort. The women tucked errant strands of hair back under her hat before being the first to stand up. “Wo willst du denn hin, Ulf?” she asked her husband. “Sag’s mir! Wo willst du denn hin? Where do you want to go, then, Ulf? Tell me, where?

I had been hoping to find some folks under twenty-five down here with whom I might discuss the potential of the coming tourist economy or tourist experience. It is a rather huge change to your hometown, after all. But there was no one, not even working in the kitchen of the concession or malingering in the empty wind-swept parking lot, under forty-five to be found.

One by one, pair by pair, the cyclists and millipede drivers ordered food from the concession window and took seats. Bratwurst and Kartoffelsalat and Bier appeared, and slowly the scene began to order itself around the rigid yet slumberous orthodoxies of German domestic tourism. Thus was the nascent and humble promise of this place perhaps revealed, at least in part.

A woman sunning herself outside the bike rental office seemed surprised to see me. She seemed surprised when I asked where the campground was. “It’s not done yet,” she said. “Sorry.” Finally she seemed surprised when I asked if I could pay for the bike with a debit card. “We don’t even have phones yet.” She gave me a brief overview of the shore trails I should and shouldn’t ride. I asked about the island just off the peninsula in the middle of the lake. Much of that area was circumscribed by yellow lines on this map.

“It is a nature reserve,” she said. I asked what was there for me to see. “Not much.” She apologized again. “But go look, you know. There isn’t that much else.”

I heard the wind, looked
at the island, the almost
preposterous blue of the sky, and, for a moment, I began to feel like I got it, like I understood.

The hills surrounding the lake were irregularly grown in early succession forest of birch and Scots pine and hawthorn, a junky and flammable-looking forest. Some areas of pine were planted in rows of homogenous age, while others seemed to have come back from seed. I followed the paved bike path on its wending course high along the hill. The view had potential, but just then it let on to lower gravel service roads, grass like bad hair plugs, and various zones of fencing. “No Trespassing” signs dotted the way.

I sat on the stones under a steel overhang, ate, and looked through my brochure. It contained a cutaway view of the valley which helped one more easily visualize what it looks like when 2.8 billion cubic meters or earth are moved or removed, 1.4 billion cubic meters irregularly replaced, and almost 450 million cubic meters flooded. The entire geological record had been reordered back to about 190 million years ago, roughly the extreme end of the Triassic. The Tertiary lay, at one time, above the Triassic and contained all the brown coal in the area, as well as a thick burden of silt, gravel, and clay. Above that, comprising glacial till and topsoil up to about 250,000 years old, lay the Quaternary. Notice the past tense. For the foreseeable future, 250,000 year old dirt and gravel will lay under seven million year old coal remnants and under fifty million year old silt and clay. In other words, The Quaternary lies where the Tertiary was because the Tertiary was removed, half of it burned or made into plastics and chemicals, and the other half mounded for storage before being returned to the mine pit.

I coasted down the hill, out of the young forest, to a wide barren shore zone. There was a deeply eroded brown and red island to my right, a heap of pink granite to my left, and before me, a caterpillar-tread-scoured beach into which was driven a metal angle iron leading via anchor chain to a small rusted pontoon barge. I drew in the anchor line and jumped aboard the pontoon. I stood there, floating on the water, savoring the near absolute silence, a thing of great value in Western Europe. I heard the wind, looked at the island, the almost preposterous blue of the sky, and, for a moment, I began to feel like I got it, like I understood. I am on the Baja, alone, on a beautiful day.

Then I got the rest of it: the barren sandy island and promontory to my right were part of the nature preserve — were the nature preserve: wind-scoured, water-gullied, practically lifeless. That signage can precede the signified is somehow unsurprising for something like a campground or even a marina. But for a nature preserve? “Coming Soon”?

Several people suggested that Frau Stadler of the Development Association could help me learn more about the project’s structure and official standing. I traveled to Braunsbedra on the southern shore to see her.

From the moment I entered her office, she began loading me up with pamphlets, books, whole drawers full of brochures and maps as in some grand and well-rehearsed gesture of dismissiveness. I asked if I might come back at a better time. She said no, sat down finally, and said she was glad to help.

What it was was an inability for one person to hold all the aspects of a large economic renewal project in her head at one time. The brochures were like an admission of a volatile mix of excellent preparation, insufficient staffing, an organizational model based on hope, and plain old clerical chaos. I excavated to The Lake Catalog: 2010, which outlines and promotes all the area’s flooded coal mines, from its smallest, to the Hostage Valley, by far the largest. I laughed at the very name Lake Catalog, and she huffed a laugh, too.

“Admittedly, it is strange.”

I asked her, if people can get to the North Sea coast in three hours, and can book flights to Crete and the Canary Islands for 150 euros, then why would they would come here, with the chemical refineries out on the horizon? Her gaze bounced off the table, the brochures, and settled on mine.

“We don’t know. Over forty tourism studies were conducted by area universities and institutions, and the answer is we don’t know.”

“You don’t know who your audience is?”

“That is correct.”

I admired her honesty, but had to ask, “Would you come here?”

“I’m from here. My father was a miner. You came here.”

“I came to research how this all might not succeed.”

“It is challenging, I admit.”

She clarified that a whole development scheme was at stake. National and European Union funds had kicked off the project, had paid for re-engineering shorelines and ensuring no landslides would occur under expensive shore front homes to come. Private funds should have been — should be — close to follow. The whole lake, from artificial horizon to sandy beach, had become aimed at attracting further investment in shore front homes. Those homes would anchor a more stable and luxurious tourism economy. “So how’s that going?” I asked.

The landscape of a living mine, with its violence and cataclysm, risk and reward, is anything but ordinary. In fact, it is exciting and novel and dangerous.

“There is, unfortunately, no central institution that leads efforts to make the area successful. Investors from Holland left, quickly. Too bureaucratic for them, their money. And, okay, with no central organization.” I thought, if the Dutch are bailing out on a project involving water and massive landscape re-engineering, shouldn’t people be worried? “Investors from China and Japan said the same thing. It is too difficult for investors.”

Billions of euros had been spent on remediation, building, and studies. She could not find the exact number. I did not want the exact number, to be quite honest. I was scared for her to learn the exact number. “What will come of all this, then? What if the water doesn’t rise to the marina and beaches?”

“We’re being patient.”

“Patience runs out.”

“I see my job as ensuring the lake stays accessible to the public, and letting people know that the mining history was, and is important.” She settled her hands, having no more brochures to give me. “There is a little choo-choo along the lake shore, you know.” She handed me yet another brochure, this time for a driving tour around the lake. There was the blue moon rover, Herr Hossfeld, and their offer to “Drive you out of the past and into the future.”

The landscape of a living mine, with its violence and cataclysm, risk and reward, is anything but ordinary. In fact, it is exciting and novel and dangerous. Anything can happen from explosions, environmental protests, fossil discoveries. The idea of this lake, by contrast, with boxy waterfront homes, parking lots, and bike rentals, dies in miasmic predictability. It seems limited to the well-trodden rut of vacation themed romantic comedies, or at its edgiest, the delineated naughtiness of American beer commercials. Except, maybe the promise being sold here is not to be exciting or novel, but to be predictable, family-friendly and wealth-friendly: it will be opposite a mine, in other words.

As I left her office, a friend called and suggested he would stop on his way north to have a look around the area with me. We decided to drive to the nearby Goseck circle before dark, and we loaded up and raced there through fields of drying rapeseed. It wasn’t more than ten miles away, but in that time the air cooled and thunderheads gathered. These were magical moments to arrive at a Neolithic double-henge made of raw pine trunks mounted vertically into the ground.

The circle came fully into view; I saw that this 7,000 year-old wonder was being reconstructed once again so that people can come and ponder the weird first moments when hunter-gatherers became settled farmers compiling knowledge about equinoxes, the sun and stars. What was it like to settle and establish futures linked to just one place? Based on our use of land and resources, I’m not sure we fully grasp that idea even now. The Hostage Valley comes to seem like one close call among many. Imagine if the coal had spread under 180, or 1,800 square miles, instead of eighteen. If other coal districts are any measure, people with machines would still be gouging the earth, farther and farther, moving anything that got in their way.

Reenter Hoss, pointing out across the water at a portion of the peninsula’s bare dirt landscape that looks exactly like a well-made marble cake. “Dead Earth,” he says. “That’s it there, with the whorls of coal dust.” The question just begs clarification, and someone asks before I can. “It’s not toxic, just dead. It will sit until it grows naturally,” Hoss answers.

“How long has it sat?” I ask.

“Since 1982.”

“That’s a pretty long time.”

He tips his head off and juts out his lower lip, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “It is an experiment.” He calls it the UFO landing site because some of the chocolaty coal swirls wind into one circular node, not unlike a weird landing site from outer space, though the whole idea feels like a euphemism, a little personal psychic softening of the very notion of Dead Earth, something he had contributed greatly toward creating.

Hoss was qualified to drive all manner and size of excavator and did so for thirty-seven years. “The bigger, the better.” He begins telling me about the bucket lifter and excavators brought from Leipzig and as far away as Russia. “They were huge, took two men to start. You’d go up a set of stairs, then over catwalks to a control room with a leather chair in the middle. A leather chair,” he repeats. “There was basically nothing else in this room. It had two joysticks. Those controls did so much.” Hoss’s inventory of SRs and ES models and cubic meters per hour powers on with the slow and unstoppable torque of an excavator and I loose him. We all listen to him talk for a while, a long while as the twinkle in his eyes comes alive. Hoss is indeed that guy whose vocation and values and historical moment aligned. He can look at an enormous barren pile of dirt and feel pride for having helped create it. He looks up after a minute and says, “I don’t know what it was I wanted to say now.” Someone says it is fine, that we enjoyed listening all the same.

What is worse, English is the language of indignant environmentalism; America the home of both parochial Arcadianism and the crime of mountain top removal.

In contrast to Dead Earth is the vineyard. We stop for a tasting. At the moment it is not much of anything except a ridiculously steep hill planted in overjoyed grape vines. Far below, a heard of organic beef cattle sleep in the shadeless paddock. Hoss has been talking with the vintner and cattle man about feed. There seems to be some disagreement. The cattleman says that he has to drive through the snow to feed them every two days in winter, otherwise they will smell the feed of the local swine mills and break the electric fence and go off on their own. “Keep them happy,” he says, “or else.” I see a lesson in this.

Hoss pulls me aside. He is telling me about an unusual technique of mining conducted here for a period of three years. Right under our feet. “It was incredibly dangerous,” he said, “but much more cost effective than pit mining here. We had stacked up too much overburden atop this coal.” They cut under the hill with excavators and went some hundreds of yards laterally under the hill without shoring or bracing the ceiling. “People came from Poland, Czechoslovakia, all over, just to see what we were doing.” Gently, I asked why. “Because it was amazing, what we did.” When the seam was exhausted they just let the hill collapse. “It was a life’s work. It was amazing.”

I ask Hoss what chances he gives the lake. “100%,” he says, repeating himself a few times. “It has to.” I call him out finally on this, his favorite rhetorical imperative. “Why does it have to work? I doesn’t have to work at all. And it isn’t. Right?”

“You have to imagine.” He looked out over the hole he had created and at the water about which he seemed so magnanimously confident. “Wine.” He gestured at our feet. He listed activities as if to convince me through some glorious, spectral gestalt. “Nature preserve. Sun. Boats. Swimming. People will love this. Give it time.”

“Was it a mistake promising 2010 exactly?”

“2011, then.”

“Do you think people will come abroad to stay here?”

“We don’t need all that. But sure. Give it time.”

When I went about researching and interviewing around this topic, I thought, This is the age of Dubai and Three Gorges; even now in Germany whole villages are being razed, their residents resettled for the Garzweiler and Hambacher mines. Why write such a piece? What is worse, English is the language of indignant environmentalism; America the home of both parochial Arcadianism and the crime of mountain top removal. The Hostage Valley not only exemplifies banal twentieth-century extraction projects of a somewhat more common immensity than Three Gorges, it also suggests projects that try to liberate and redeem a place from what was at times an awful history. Germany is roughly the size of Montana, but with eighty-two instead of only one million people. As Hoss would himself say, they have to reuse the land, and it has to work. Limits, in other words, have not only been recognized but actively exploited. Given that this area is not Germany’s richest, those who find their own vacation options limited will certainly develop a relationship to the Hostage Valley. But whether or not a great deal of income is generated for local businesses is, in this light, almost beside the fact. An environmental catastrophe has been recognized and systematically redressed. Habitat is and continues to be rehabilitated for fish and waterfowl. Foresight and the always complex and often ineffective mechanisms of government, regulation and private investment got this far. Why not further?

We round the lake on our way to the Harbor Days celebration, the one-time climax of my planned visit to a filled and flourishing Hostage Valley Lake. By now it is raining pretty hard and there are very few people in sight. At least the heat has broken. The tour group agrees to retire to a local bar for supper and beer, but I have to be going. In the large blue box, they deliver me directly to the door of the Braunsbedra train station. Twenty abandoned tracks, once dedicated to coal trains running on standing times around the clock, stretch out to a scrubby tree line. The station itself is like no other I have seen in Germany. It is in severe disrepair, crumbling in fact, with no clock, no ticket machine. Some youth, nameless to me as the first person to put a spade tip into coal 300 years ago, has spray painted ZUKUMFT on the back of the crumbling train station. The word for future is “Zukunft,” with an “n”. “Zukumft” is not a word and it never will be. Though anyone who comes to see this, anyone who understands Germany’s often particular provincial ways, will know what he meant. Six out of seven letters isn’t too bad.