Coal production in Germany: an insight into the last Chapter

"...In the West - say the Germans - because it smells of soot, and money, to the hut and coal dust, in accordance with the waste gases of coke ovens, the chemical Vapors and it smells like Power." As the later Nobel literature prize laureate Heinrich Böll, this 1957 wrote a photo report about the area, cooked the pot the highest temperatures. Almost half a Million people worked in the Ruhr mining - as many as never before and never again after that. The Ruhr area provided the energy and the steel for the German economic miracle.

60 years later, hardly anyone is likely to bring the urban landscape between Duisburg and Dortmund with Power and money. The sky over the Ruhr is already blue again and not sooty. At the end of this year, layer on the last of the once-around 150 Mines in the area for always in the shaft.

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Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier will on 21. December come to the Prosper-Haniel mine belonging to Bottrop, if there is a symbol of the last conveyor car of coal to the light of day. It is a historic Moment, because after more than 150 years of industrial coal mining disappears a tradition of industry in Germany. A destiny that has the brown coal, its future is being wrestled fiercely before.

The coal – the black Gold of the "economic miracle"

the reminder is Marked on the coal of her time in the young Federal Republic. "You can say that our image is determined by the mining industry mainly due to the successful period of the 1950s. At the time he received the positive, Marsbahis partly heroic Image of him until today," says Heinrich Theodor Grütter. He is head of the Ruhr Museum on the world heritage ascended Zeche Zollverein in Essen. Grütter Laundry is on the roof of the former coal and shows with a wide sweeping gesture across the vast grounds of the colliery, which once stood as the most powerful mine in the world.

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This miner works in one of the last active Mines in the Ruhr area

©Oliver Berg, DPA

"The coal hunger was immense, workers, miners earned top wages as they are today at VW or Daimler," describes Grütter the time, as the coal was black Gold. Up to 8000 people once worked at the Zollverein. The number of active miners has shrunk to a manageable group. At Prosper-Haniel and the second to the end of the year, the coal mine in Ibbenbüren in münsterland, around 3500 mountain people close to work.

Hot, loud, and wet – Hauer Stieglans hard work in front of the coal,

Andreas Stieglan one of them. Who wants to have a job, you must travel with the conveyor basket 1260 meters deep into the earth. Twelve meters per second, the basket of rushes down the shaft. Of an underground station, it comes with the diesel cat, a hanging rail, kilometres into the mountain. It smells of damp earth and soot. Many of the workers cannot be seen any more. The journey ends at a huge slicer, which cuts the coal from the Rock. Stieglan has worked on the Behemoth for many years as a Supervisory Hauer. He was for the operations in his shift to be responsible.

The plane had been in use since the summer break. The amount of Coal that the mining industry receives subsidies, was promoted. Approximately 1.8 million tons have been mined the miners to Prosper-Haniel in this year, in the 1950s there were in the entire Ruhr area more than 100 Times as much. The decline in consumption of coal-fired power plants and steel plants in Germany, the domestic coal has been hardly of any importance. In the previous year, around 90 percent of the burned coal came from abroad.

Date Of Update: 05 December 2018, 20:03